Zack Kelly is a performance coach and psychophysiologist who completed his master’s research in heart rate variability. He breaks down what HRV actually measures, why wearable devices often get the interpretation wrong, and how to use fitness tracker data without letting it control your training or stress you out.
Zack explains why high HRV isn’t always good (it can signal your body fighting off illness), how blunted HRV responses show up in clinical populations from depression to eating disorders, and why movement in your HRV scores matters more than the absolute number. He covers force plate testing for injury prevention and asymmetry detection, the danger of overthinking recovery scores, and why one client won a tennis match despite a tanked Whoop score after being up all night with a newborn. This episode reveals how performance coaches actually interpret wearable data, why focusing on one variable at a time beats tracking everything, and how to build a healthy relationship with metrics without becoming obsessive.
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