In 2022, I stopped thinking of HRV and resting heart rate as coaching tools and started thinking of them as information I needed to get through the day. Iron toxicity from medical malpractice had left deposits in my liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach, lungs, and heart. My cardiovascular system was managing a load that showed up in the data every morning before I could feel it in my body. Some days, the numbers said push. Most days, they said stop. I learned to listen because the cost of ignoring them was real and immediate in a way that a fatigued training client rarely experiences. What I built from that period is a framework for reading the same signals in the people you coach, before the cost of ignoring them becomes real for them, too.
Reading physiological data is a coaching skill. Most coaches have access to more of it than they know what to do with. Wearables track HRV, resting heart rate, and recovery scores for a significant portion of the general population. The gap is in the interpretation and in the decision-making that should follow it.
This article gives you a practical framework for closing that gap. What each metric actually measures, what the data is telling you in a coaching context, where the scope of practice boundary sits, and how to use a three-decision framework to determine whether a given session should push, maintain, or pull back.
Read more in my Coach360 article here.
