Fellow Zwifters, we need your help for a research study that may unlock automatic FTP detection by only wearing a heart rate monitor that records heart rate variability (HRV).
Help the Zwift community benefit from this research in the future by doing a few Zwift workouts from the comfort of your own home. That’s right, it’s a remote study—you don’t even have to visit a lab to help advance science!
What We are Studying
We are studying fractal properties of heart rate variability in relation to exercising power outputs measured by your smart trainer.
What are fractal properties: if you’ve ever sat through Disney’s Frozen or stared deeply into nature while procrastinating at work, chances are you’ve either heard of fractals or at least seen them—albeit, possibly without even knowing it.
Like Disney’s Elsa suggests, “frozen fractals” are seemingly never-ending patterns that can be seen in ice or snow. Similarly, these complex structures also exist in many living things, like a plant, where the shape of a branch may closely resemble the entire tree.
Although these patterns can be hard to spot, it appears that their presence seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
Within the human body, the rhythmic patterns of our heartbeat also exhibit fractal structures and investigation into these patterns, or HRV, may provide a unique opportunity to evaluate human performance!
For example, during exercise, the presence of these fractal structures has been associated with low exercise stress and intensity while the absence of these structures has been associated with the accumulation of fatigue and high exercise intensity.
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Getting Involved
Although this sounds exciting, there is a lot to learn before we can use this to guide exercise and evaluate performance. That’s why we need your help!
The University of Calgary is currently recruiting for a remote cycling exercise study! We are looking for 18–65 year old male and female Zwifters who have a training volume of at least 3 hours per week for the past 3 months.
Using Zwift, we can more readily collect cyclists’ data to accelerate our understanding of HRV in sport science. Specifically, this study will work to understand how fractal structures within HRV can be used to detect exercise thresholds, evaluate recovery and durability, and guide high-performance exercise training.
Participation in this study would require you to:
- Perform 4 separate exercise sessions remotely on your electronic cycling trainer including:
- One 4-min time trial
- Two 20-min time trials
- One Zwift race
- Complete short surveys about the exercise sessions and your cycling experience
- Each session will take ~45-75 minutes to complete for a total of ~4 hours of time
To participate you will need:
- An active Zwift account
- An active Garmin Connect, Suunto, or Polar account
- An electronic cycling trainer such as Wahoo Kickr, Tacx Neo, Saris H3, Elite Direto (for more trainers see zwiftinsider.com/smart-trainers-all)
- A compatible sport watch or cycling computer that allows for
- HRV “RR-interval” recording (for example Forerunner 620, 630, 645, 920, 235, 255, 735, 935, 945, 955; Fenix 3, 5, 6, 7; Edge 520, 530, 820, 830, 1000, 1030, 1040; all Suunto watches)
- And power output recording
- A Polar H10 heart rate monitor
*Using the Zwift platform, you would be requested to perform the exercise sessions, record both HRV RR-interval and Power Output using your device, and upload this information to your Garmin Connect, Polar, or Suunto account*
If you are interested in participating, please contact Cody van Rassel ([email protected]) to learn more.
This study is being conducted by Dr. Martin MacInnis and has been approved by the University of Calgary’s Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board (REB22-0159)
“A Polar H10 heart rate monitor”. My unqualified guess is that it will be a limiting factor.
I got the H10 but I am missing a device for HRV recording, Polar Grit X cant so this it seems. The H10 ist pretty common, though
As someone who has bought into the Garmin ecosystem I agree. Why would I have a Polar HRM when everything except my blood-pressure cuff is Garmin. My HRM Pro has memory for when I play hockey, and an accelerometer, and can connect to 3 devices concurrently. It also works with KubiosHRV which names Polar as the reference HRM.
I do have a Polar HRM (H4?, H10?, something bluetooth) in pieces somewhere after taking it apart to see if there was someway I could improve the dismal connectivity. Total waste of money in my opinion and looking for solutions online found many other similar complaints about poor connectivity.
There are things about Garmin that annoy me (a lot) but at least it works.
Even my BP cuff is Garmin.
This is discrimination. You’re only recruiting young people.
Being 69, I was thinking the same thing
69 also. ;(
You can’t call for discrimination. These are research methodology parameters. If you were right, we could say the same for the hardware requirements.
Indeed I’m 66. Been cycling over 30 years and Garmin estimates my VO2 max as 59 ml/kg/min. But I suppose they need to have inclusion/exclusion criteria and we just don’t like to be called too old. By an arbitrarily chosen chronological definition of old.
“upload this information to your Garmin Connect, Polar, or Suunto account”
What could be the point of this? Me uploading an activity to Connect isn’t giving them anything, I’d say they need access to the FIT file instead. (which doesn’t require an upload to any of these services)
Why the Polar HRM?
@Cody Ray van Rassel maybe worth mentioning WHOOP as an option for the HRV monitoring, unless that has some restriction on reporting etc that excludes it from being suitable.
Also, would you not need for participants to do the effort sessions on a day when their resting HRV in the morning indicated they were at a high recovery state? Or will part of the study survey take whatever their HRV was so that you get a range of people at differing levels of recovery completing the sessions? (Just curious)
Presumably you’ve seen the Powercal/PowerTap/CycleOps/whatever they’re called now approach to this.
I wasn’t aware that a Polar H10 could do HRV readings when connected to a Garmin..?
+ isn’t this Whoop’s specialty as well? Altho don’t know if u can hook that up to a Garmin.
Also not clear on the session – do you have to do the 4 prescribed exercises back to back on 4 separate occasions? 2x 20min time trials back to back then a race sounds painful 😀