All About Heart Rate Variability

At Network Wellness Center, we’re dedicated to providing patients with the best possible care. At times, that includes using technology to support your goals in health, and one of the ways we do that in the practice is through heart rate variability testing, also known as HRV.

What Is It?

Simply put, HRV testing allows us to measure the time between heartbeats to better monitor stress response in your body. The testing is extremely specific–allowing us to get down to the millisecond of your heartbeat! HRV is a crucial insight into our health and wellness that is often overlooked. Sometimes, even the fittest athletes uncover unknown stress that wasn’t found in common health tests like cholesterol levels, pulse and BMI.

What Does it Mean?

The communication between your nervous system and heart is central to your wellbeing…in fact, we see the heart as a second brain, as it has more than 40,000 neurons that help to keep it functioning.

This test reveals how adaptive your body and heart are to stress. When beats are inconsistent or out of rhythm, it can be indicative of a problem in either the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems.

After identifying HRV, we can then dive deeper to uncover the root cause of the issue in your nervous system before developing a custom care plan for restoring balance and self-healing to your body.