Why You Need To Measure Your Recovery
3 Ways To Test Your Stress Tolerance and Readiness To Perform
In a world of hustle culture where the need to constantly grind is crammed down our throats, it’s no wonder we question how to fit in any time for recovery.
When Zak came to me he was struggling with this exact issue. As a semi-pro footballer, he needed to know how to recover better. He was looking to move up his position on the team and stand out so that he’d be able to find another team to go to when his contract ended. He understood that rest was an important part of the equation to being ready to play his best.
These players would have practiced most days of the week and then typically play 3-4 games over the weekend from Thursday to Sunday. It is a lot to demand from the body.
Knowing how recovered he was at any given time would help Zak to make decisions that lead to better in-game performance and prevent injuries.
In the corporate world, the same questions about performance exist, but instead of worrying about in-game, the focus is on in-office performance and preventing burnout. The mental demands of high-output knowledge work require the same considerations of sports played at the professional level.
The problem is that most people have a very loose gauge of how they are doing in their recovery.
A strong sense of self-awareness and years of high-level competition - whether its chess, music, public speaking, or sports - are required to trust gut-level intuition on how recovered you are. Unless someone went out to the club until the early hours of the morning last night and comes into work feeling absolutely smashed, the indicators of readiness to perform are more subtle than that.
In other words, most people can’t tell if they’re ready to put it all on the line or if they’re under-recovered.
That’s where measuring your recovery comes in.
HRV - The Gold Standard
Anytime I’m working with a client on recovery we find a way to incorporate HRV tracking into their actions to get on track with.
HRV, or Heart Rate Variability, is a measurement of the tiny variations between each heartbeat.
What comes to mind when you think of a heartbeat?
Probably an EKG with those spikes and blips representing the heartbeat on screen. From a glance, it looks pretty consistent. If your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, you’d assume that the space between each beat is one second. But in reality, there’s variability between each heartbeat so it may be 93 milliseconds between the first two beats and then 104 milliseconds between the next two, and so on.
Why this matters and how it indicates our recovery is that HRV is closely connected to the state that our autonomic nervous system is in. The parasympathetic branch we call “rest and digest” is more active when our nervous system is supporting a recovered state. HRV will be higher when we are better able to enter this recovery mode. There will be more fluidity between those tiny variations in heartbeats.
In a chronically stressed state, the sympathetic “fight or flight” system is on more, and stress hormones are continually being flooded through our bodies. HRV is lower when the sympathetic nervous system is more active and because of this stress, whether low-grade or pushing the edge of burnout, our body is less primed to perform its best and is under-recovered.
Tracking With HRV
HRV tracking has become very accessible today. When I first started tracking recovery with HRV the only way to do it outside of a lab was to put on a chest strap heart rate monitor and sit very still for 1-2 minutes while matching your breathing pattern to the instructions that the app was guiding you to do.
Now, there are many options for wraps, bands, watches, and rings to track HRV and monitor recovery 24/7.
You don’t need to go to this extreme to have a good sense of your recovery with HRV though. Most devices still lean towards overnight HRV scores being the main predictor of how recovered you are and having a device that you wear during sleep is one of the most accessible and unobtrusive ways to look at your HRV trends.
If you’re looking to support your recovery and develop greater awareness of how you’re doing, one of these devices will do the trick:
Apple Watch
Oura Ring
Whoop Band
Fitbit
Morpheus HRV Chest Strap
We want to choose just one device and use it consistently to understand our own trends. A single HRV score on day 1 means very little. Several weeks of data means more and as you start to use it longer, you’ll get to see the big picture of what impacts your recovery.
How does that late-night trip to Dairy Queen affect your HRV and sleep?
What do those end-of-the-long work week Friday deadlines do to your stress levels?
How ready are you to perform your best on Monday after a restful weekend compared to where you are by the end of the week?
How often can you push through extreme challenges - physical or mental - before your HRV trend starts to decline as you overreach?
This becomes more powerful in saying not just whether you’ve been training too hard without a break or pushing at work for too long, but what foods impact your recovery, your timing of sleep, etc.
The renegades who are driven to push to the limits will find any edge they can get, including through recovering better than everyone else.
More Measurements You Can Count On
Now what if you don’t want to use HRV or get one of these devices to get a sense of your recovery?
While I think HRV is still the way to go to get the best sense of how your body is doing and to develop a greater sense of self-awareness around how recovery feels to you, there are more simple measurements you can do without any extra health trackers.
Morning Resting Heart Rate
While it won’t be as insightful as heart rate variability, when you wake up in the morning, sit at the side of your bed before getting up and use a stopwatch while you count your heart rate. Doing a 15-second count and multiplying by four should work fine. Your resting heart rate trend can also indicate when you are stressed. If it’s elevated from your normal RHR it’s a sign that you’re not fully recovered.
Know what your baseline looks like so that you can better understand where you are at.
The morning resting heart rate indicator is the best time for overall getting this sense but you can also pay attention to how little things throughout the day affect your heart rate compared to normal:
does it get more elevated from going for an easy walk? Or are you getting more out of breath when walking?
are you feeling your heart rate pounding harder even when sitting and working or when you stand up? Sometimes this can just be from having too much caffeine or acute stress in the moment but if you’re noticing it consistently without any other stressor being present, it can indicate a more chronic state of stress.
Morning CO2 tolerance
The other test you can do without having to use any fitness trackers is morning CO2 tolerance.
The carbon dioxide tolerance test will take under 3 minutes to complete. It’s a breath-hold test that Brian Mackenzie teaches that’s good for assessing stress tolerance and aerobic capacity.
Brain suggests doing this test about 15 minutes after waking to get a sense of morning stress levels and recovery status.
Once you’ve woken up, had some water, moved around a little bit, and gone to the bathroom, you can sit down and run this test:
The goal of the test is to measure the length of your exhale as slowly as you can.
Get a stopwatch or stopwatch app ready on your phone.
Take 3 full, relaxed breaths in and out. 3-5 second inhale, 5-10 second exhale. On your fourth inhale breathe all the way in as deep as you can. At the top of the breath start the timer at the same time you start breathing out as slowly as you can. When air stops moving out of your lungs, stop the timer.
Your score is best kept in comparison to your own baseline.
Here are the categories of results to see how your score matches up.
Results:
80 seconds: Elite
Advanced pulmonary adaptation, excellent breathing control, excellent stress control
60-80 seconds: Advanced
Healthy pulmonary system, good breathing control, relatively good stress control
40-60 seconds: Intermediate
Generally improves quickly with a focus on CO2 tolerance training
20-40 seconds: Average
Moderate to high stress/anxiety state, breathing mechanics need improvement
<20 seconds: Poor
Very high anxiety and stress sensitivity, mechanical restriction possible, poor pulmonary capacity
Summary:
Measuring your recovery is useful to know where your baseline is and how you match up depending on the stressors and work that you are facing.
Use a fitness tracker that can measure and monitor your HRV scores.
If you don’t want to have to use a fitness tracker, your morning resting heart rate can help you identify when you’re in a stressed state and not fully recovered.
CO2 tolerance is another way to test your stress tolerance that doesn’t cost anything and only takes a few minutes in the morning.
Regardless of what method you choose, measuring recovery is an important aspect of your Flow OS if you want to perform your best, feel your best, and keep moving forward without burning out when you’re pushing your limits.
Every week I guide renegades towards taking more action to find more flow and high performance in their lives.
Want to get direct feedback, accountability, worksheets, and action plans to stick to the FlowOS for your life?
Subscribe to this Substack to join the Renegades in the Finding Flow community.
When you upgrade to a paid membership you’ll also unlock access to:
✅ Weekly Action Guides for building your FlowOS in real-time and direct feedback from our community.
📚 The full archive and complete High Flow Lifestyle series
🧠 Optimal Brain States Challenge Week
I’ll be your coach for this 7-day challenge of the most useful tools and techniques to find your optimal brain state. Includes videos, action guides, and resources to help you enhance your mindset.
🧘 Unstressable ($150 Bonus Value)
Before you can reach your full potential you have to become Unstressable. This course teaches you how to use stress as a tool for your growth and prevent burnout for good. It’s recently been added to Finding Flow as a bonus for paid subs!
Take Action
This week’s Flow Coaching action prompts:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Finding Flow to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.