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HRV Training for Strength

In this week’s episode of 8 Weeks Out University, Joel and Patrick cover how to develop national champion-caliber strength with HRV. Using Patrick’s training program that earned him the coveted national title, we’ll answer your questions on HRV training for strength.

HRV Training for Strength

On this episode of 8 Weeks Out University, we want to share how to use HRV to develop and improve your strength.

One of the questions we get asked a lot is: how do I use BioForce HRV training to improve my strength?

So we have Patrick Castelli here to talk about how we use BioForce HRV to really manage his program and help him win the National Championships.

We knew the competition was going to be extremely tough. The events were tricky, with two days of competition:

Day 1 events included:

  • Axle clean and press away
  • Keg carry/wheelbarrow carry medley
  • Car dead lift

Day 2 events involved:

  • Yoke carry/sled drag medley
  • Frame carry
  • Press medley
  • Atlas stones

Patrick had gone to Nationals last year with fairly serious damage to the common fibular nerve. This obviously held him back but in the long run, it seems to have worked out for Patrick.

This year, Patrick went into Nationals under the radar and took everybody by surprise…

Once we knew the events, we put together a program with massive training volume.

The closer we got to the competition, the more specific we wanted to make the training sessions.

Programming for the Competition

Once we knew the events, we had every reason to train the events as specifically as possible.

The keys to what made the program so effective were:

  • its specificity
  • lots and lots of volume
  • monitoring and making adjustments using BioForce HRV

The exercise split was simple, depending if the events were on day one or two. Then we just had to push Patrick with as much volume as he could handle.

As we got closer to the competition, training mimicked the order of events.

Patrick would train day one events, and the next day he’d do day two events, a day of active recovery, and then day one events, day two events, and then a day of active recovery again going into the Saturday sessions.

If we were doing day one really heavy, then the following day two we would back off the volume and intensity.

This followed along with the principles of the High/Low Training system we’ve covered before.

Using BioForce HRV to Manage the Program

The first way we used BioForce HRV was in managing overall volume.

So when we programmed a couple of two-a-days, if Patrick showed up with an amber BioForce HRV score, we cut the training sessions back to just one.

It was key to push the volume to the limits of recovery, and then back off just slightly to avoid overworking.

The simplest way to do this is to cut back the number of training sessions, especially when someone like Patrick has built up to 7-9 training sessions per week.

The first week of the program had about 5 training sessions per week. If Patrick had an amber BioForce reading, we would either taper off the volume, or taper off the volume and the intensity.

It’s simple, small adjustments that make BioForce HRV training so beneficial.

Based off of his HRV feedback, Patrick could move certain days of the week around as we needed to.

Just because you have days where you have a red reading doesn’t always mean that training day should be skipped.

We found ways to move the active recovery days around to best manage and recover from those red readings and still catch up on the work we were going to miss.

BioForce HRV and Recovery Strategies

Sometimes, no matter how much you manage things, changes in outside circumstances like sleep, travel, or getting sick, cause you to require recover strategies.

We also used HRV to help manage that recovery by picking the most effective strategy for Patrick.

So if he was red or amber, we used different strategies. We also didn’t want to use the same recovery strategies every time.

We did some work with electro-acupuncture when we wanted to help stimulate the parasympathetic recovery.

More generally, we just managed the use of specific recovery methods so we could get him back to the full training program as quickly as possible.

Results Don’t Lie

The results were fantastastic: Patrick came home with the overall win for the 175 pound weight class.

He earned his title as the new North American Strongman National Champion.

The previous year, Patrick placed somewhere between 14th and 18th…huge progress made in his performance.

Last year, Patrick wasn’t training as effectively as he could have been, and part of it happened with an unfortunate injury outside of training, and sometimes you just have to roll with that.

It also helped to be done with all his schooling at Western Washington University, where he was also a national wrestler in the 149 pound weight class.

Working and training here with Joel full time and using the BioForce HRV system were huge strides as well.

Competing against guys that were much bigger and incredibly strong athletes, Patrick scored higher overall by being consistent.

Never placing lower than 7th out of over 30 athletes in any one single event, it was his consistency that won him the National title.

What’s Next for Patrick?…the WORLD!

Next up: the World Championships held at the Arnold Classic on February 28 through March 2.

For Patrick, the key will be being training at that threshold of volume. If we didn’t use HRV training, we would have to do a lot of guesswork.

Guesswork in training programs tend to result in either:
A.) Doing too much and over training, or
B.) Not doing enough or getting less than optimal results.

These same principles can be applied to any strength training program for any strength athlete, whether you are a strongman, powerlifter, weight lifter, or competing in the highland games.


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