Recovery
HRV is the most personal number on your wrist and the one people most want to compare. Those two facts are in direct conflict, and the comparison is almost always the less useful half.
For a rough orientation: the middle half of 25-year-olds sit around 50 to 100 ms, and 45-year-olds around 35 to 60 ms, measured as RMSSD overnight. But healthy people of the same age differ several-fold, so there is no number you should be hitting. Your own baseline, and how far today sits from it, is the only reading that changes what you should do.
| Age | Men (middle 50%) | Women (middle 50%) |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | 50–100 ms | 45–90 ms |
| 35 | 40–80 ms | 38–75 ms |
| 45 | 35–60 ms | 30–55 ms |
| 55 | 25–50 ms | 25–45 ms |
| 65 | 20–40 ms | 20–40 ms |
Median HRV runs somewhere around 47 to 52 ms in the late twenties and falls into the low twenties by the sixties. Trained endurance athletes often sit at 90 to 100 and above. None of that makes a low number a problem or a high number a virtue.
Two healthy, equally fit 30-year-olds can differ by a factor of three. HRV depends on age, sex, genetics, resting heart rate, body position, breathing rate, what time the measurement was taken and which algorithm your device uses. A brand that measures during sleep will not agree with an app that measures a two-minute seated reading.
The practical consequence is blunt: comparing your HRV with someone else tells you nothing, and comparing it with a population chart tells you barely more. What carries information is the distance between today and your own 30 to 60 day baseline.
A single low morning is noise. A sustained depression below your baseline, especially alongside a resting heart rate that has crept up, is your autonomic nervous system reporting a load it has not yet absorbed. The usual causes, roughly in order of how often they are the answer:
Nothing here is exotic, and the list will look familiar: consistent sleep, a sensible training distribution with genuinely easy easy days, less alcohol, aerobic base work, and eating enough to support the training you are doing. Slow breathing practice raises HRV during the session reliably; whether it lifts your overnight baseline is less certain.
What will not work is chasing the number. HRV responds to the load you place on yourself and the recovery you allow, and it is a symptom rather than a lever.
There is no universal good score. As a rough orientation the middle half of 25-year-olds sit around 50 to 100 ms and 45-year-olds around 35 to 60 ms, measured overnight as RMSSD. Healthy people of the same age can differ several-fold, so your own baseline is the only meaningful reference.
Median HRV is roughly 47 to 52 ms in the late twenties and drops into the low twenties by the sixties. A 25-year-old might typically see 50 to 100 ms and a 45-year-old 35 to 60 ms. The decline with age is normal and is not something to correct.
Not necessarily. Thirty is unremarkable for someone in their fifties and would be low for a trained 25-year-old. What matters is whether 30 is normal for you: if it has been your baseline for months and you feel well, it is your number. If you were at 60 last month, that is worth understanding.
The usual causes are recent hard training, alcohol, short or poor sleep, illness coming on, psychological stress, dehydration and under-eating. A single low reading means nothing; several days below your baseline alongside a raised resting heart rate is the pattern worth acting on.
Sleep consistently, keep easy training genuinely easy, cut alcohol, build aerobic base, manage stress and eat enough for your training load. Slow breathing practice raises HRV during the session. Chasing the number itself does not work, because HRV reports your recovery rather than driving it.
HRV only becomes useful when the thing that moved it is on the same screen. NutriMacro keeps your HRV and resting heart rate next to the session you logged and the food you ate, so a suppressed week has a visible cause rather than being a number you worry about.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: What is a good sleep score? How much deep sleep do you need? Why am I always tired?
