As wearables become ever-more ubiquitous and research on heart variability accumulates, more people are joining Kirillov in keeping this score, says Deepak Bhatt, director of the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital in New York City, US.
But do you actually need to track heart rate variability, and what can you learn if you do? Here’s what to know.
What is heart rate variability?
“You want a heart to beat more or less regularly,” Bhatt says. When the heart beats extremely irregularly, it’s classified as an arrhythmia, which in serious cases can result in complications such as stroke or heart failure.
But even a healthy heart has some variation in the time between its beats, Bhatt says. These variations are tiny, measured on the order of milliseconds (one millisecond is a thousandth of a second). And when looking at changes on this scale, “a higher variability, in general, is considered better” than a lower one, Bhatt says.
There’s no single ideal heart rate variability score, as it varies by age, fitness level, sex, tracking device and calculation method. But one wearable brand says the average score for its users, who tend to be active and health-conscious, is 65 milliseconds for men and 62 milliseconds for women. And there’s huge variation by age group: the average score for 25-year-olds is 78, compared to 44 for 55-year-olds.
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