Finally, a comprehensive list of wearables that track your HRV
Your heart is the most incredible muscle in your body and beats about 100,000 times to send 3,600 gallons of blood through 75,000 miles of blood vessels each day. Since it's so important to our ability to move, to exercise, and ultimately, to live, we must make sure we take care of it.
Given this, wearable devices that track your heart's performance are extremely popular today and whilst there are many smart watches designed to track your heart rate, they do this at different frequencies known as the ‘sampling frequency'.
In a lot of cases, a high sampling frequency is not needed. If you're watching TV, at work, or going for a walk, you don't need to have your heart rate updated very often, once every few minutes is more than enough - for example the Apple Watch default updates every 5 minutes is sufficient.
However, if you're doing strenuous exercise in short bursts e.g. sprinting or weightlifting then it becomes extremely useful to have your heart rate updated very frequently, in order to give you the best results.
For example, if you're doing a bench press and want to know how hard you're exerting yourself with each push, it would be extremely useful to have your heart rate sampled multiple times per second. This would give you the most accurate heart recordings and allow you to see how your body responds to the stress of different weights, allowing you to optimise your training.
Some smartwatches, such as the Garmin smartwatch, are designed to sample your heart rate multiple times per second and can record how much variance there is in the time between each beat of your heart, or your heart rate variability (HRV).
This variation is controlled by the autonomic nervous system and automatically regulates our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion among other key tasks. If you're relaxed your HRV tends to be higher and if you're stressed it goes the other way.
Your heart is a great indication of how hard you're exerting yourself, and so paying attention to it will allow you to maximise your benefit from each workout and to ensure that you can keep yourself in great shape. HRV is found to be lower in people who suffer from certain diseases including heart diseases, lung diseases, and psychiatric diseases whilst maintaining active lifestyles and a high level of fitness has been shown to increase HRV.
So keep healthy, and take care of your heart.
Through the Terra API, we provide connections to a range of different devices so that your users can track their HRV.
Below is the list of the wearables that track users' HRV data today:
- Oura Ring
- Whoop Band
- Apple Watch
- Garmin: Fenix 7 & Epix (other Garmin devices measure Stress Level which is derived from HRV)
- Fitbit: Charge 3, Charge 4, Charge 5, Inspire series, Versa series, Sense, Luxe devices
- Samsung: Samsung Galaxy Watch 4
- Polar: Polar Vantage V2, Polar Grit X Pro, Polar Ignite, Polar H10
- EliteHRV: CorSense
- Rhythm24: Scosche Armband Waterproof Heart Rate Monitor
- Biostrap
- VIITA: VIITA Race HRV
- Wahoo: Wahoo TICKR X
- Suunto: Smart Belt
If I'm missing any wearables, please let me know!
