Designed to be worn all the time, a health tracker can provide a comprehensive view of a rider’s health, offering data on lifestyle and recovery metrics. They can be useful for everyone, but when it comes to female athletes, where your monthly hormone cycle and vital stats can play a key part in performance, using tracking technology to really get in touch with your health can be a training superpower, but there are limitations, too.
The most significant factors for female riders are heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), body temperature, and the menstrual cycle, many of which can be linked to hormonal fluctuations.
Training strain and pregnancy indicators
Let’s start with two commonly used health metrics which can illustrate strain, training readiness and spot signs of illness: HRV and resting heart rate. For female cyclists, HRV data can help indicate signs of pregnancy and hormonal fluctuations, making it particularly useful.
Research on how wearables could monitor hormonal changes in pregnancy has shown that health tracker data could help identify abnormalities, especially heart rate.
Scientists at Scripps Research found ‘compelling’ evidence that heart rate data from devices such as the Apple Watch, Garmin and Fitbit correlated with hormonal fluctuations.
The team concluded that these wearables could offer methods to monitor pregnancy-related physiological and behavioural changes and could also enable early risk assessment for adverse pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage and preterm birth.
I’ve also seen how a wearable can indicate the first signs of pregnancy: a friend was trying to conceive saw her HRV drop significantly into the red zone on her Garmin, tested and discovered she was pregnant.
Alongside hormonal fluctuations,…
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