HRV and recovery tanking on rapa day

Hi,

Great forum. I’ve been taking rapa aboit 6 months (8mg, once a week) and logged it on my whoop journal.

Whoop gives you a recovery score which is, mostly, driven by your morning HRV and RHR

It also has an insights tag (for n=1 experiments) where it basicslly runs a multivariate regression on this recovery score against behaviours (sleep, exercise, coffee, other logged behaviours like rapa ingestion).

Seems the day after taking rapa recovery is impacted more than heavy exercise…which means the body is getting stressed by it in some form.

Anyone else meausred or had the same experience with a wearable and logging?

My rapa day is logged against “weight loss medication”.

Cheers

Russ


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Hi, welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing the details of your experience.

We’ve had some discussions in the past about this phenomenon, and it happens for some people, but not others, and we really don’t know why it happens and what it represents (is it good or bad?)… hopefully some scientists look at it in greater depth.

We’ve discussed it in the past in these threads:

There was also a good Peter Attia podcast on HRV lately, and it doesn’t sound (from my understanding of their discussion) like HRV is something you want to concern yourself about a great deal… as long as you’re exercising regularly and your VO2Max is where you want it to be, or trending in the right direction.

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Thx,

Reading the previous - mostly seems it’s a thing - Rapa does something to Parasympathetic that shows up in an impacted RHR and HRV and more than poor sleep or lots of exercise according to my n=1.

Whether it’s good or bad over the long run, who knows - but appears to be causing some sort of stress. Similar to the negative affect on endurance athletes perhaps.

I’ll persist anyway at 7mg and see if the affect wears off as whoops multivariate regressions are for a rolling 90 days, I think.

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I made that last post as I was half way through that Peter Attia podcast on HRV. The first half seemed to make the case for more trusting of V02Max as the best measure of fitness vs. HRV which it seems we have less control over (more genetically determined).

But the second half really focuses on the areas where HRV is helpful… and I increasingly see the value in tracking it over time. I think I will buy a Morpheus system and start tracking it, primarily to help optimize my training time, but its also of interest to see the impact in the short and longer term of rapamycin.

I will post results. Please also post yours…

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I would recommend some fitness tracker that measures it automatically every day. Oura ring is good, maybe the galaxy ring will be better.

There are some great studies that have shown that low HRV can correlate and predict early onset of COVID (and other infections).
That actually happened to me several times, I woke up with low HRV but feeling seemingly OK. In the past I would just dismiss that and go about my work outs just to feel awfully sick by the evening. Now I know better especially after reading the literature.

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My experience with whoop lines up well with your covid experience.

I find a recovery score (rhr and hrv based) that is red for no reason (poor sleep, heacy exercise) almost always means i am kicking off a virus and so a rest day us needed.

That insights tab is really good, in my view, as by doing a multi variate regresaion it tries to control for the factors that are influential.

Also, if you resesarch, when you take the hrv reading is inportant to actually get meaningful results.

Each wearable is slightly different. Think whoop takes an average just after your last deep sleep stage. Not saying thats right, but worth understanding before pinning too much importance to it.

Note…coffee almost as important as sleep for my hrv and recovery, apparent. Ill run with that!

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I just got the Morpheus heart rate monitor and wanted to check my HRV. My earlier HRV test in the morning showed my HRV was 56 (Morpheus only allows a single morning test per day), then Early afternoon yesterday I took 10 mg of rapamycin. This morning my HRV was 58.

So - in this initial test my HRV has increased by two points about 18 hours after 10mg dose of rapamycin. I’ll continue to track this over the coming weeks. Anyone else see increases in their HRV during the 24 hours after dosing rapamycin?

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Wow, way to hit/exceed those training zone targets! 30 min in the red zone!?!?

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Mine goes down on average 1-2 days after taking rapa.

This is the ultimate 3 part guide i case you havent read it already.

Basically once per day at same time/physiological state or all night is the go. Whoop does like a morphed all night read where it tries to detect sleep stabes and measurea just after each deep sleep stage or something.like that.

Even doing it "right’ its a noisy data point but still.useful if you can look.at it.over the long term.

Cheers

Russ

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