[axljjn]

Very informative. I got an Oura ring on the way because someone else recommended it here, so I should be able to get some data points soon. I was thinking about the relationship between stress and performance on my walk today. Isn't stress necessary to get better performance/results? For example, the stress of beating your mile time by one second. Is there good and bad stress? I'm seeing some hits on google, but I'm wondering if you have any insights on this. I took the week off like others have suggested and that has definitely helped with the stress, but I feel that being this relaxed is making it difficult to get into the zone.

[rojeee]

no worries dude. Ah great, I'm sure you'll find the Oura ring really useful to lead a balanced lifestyle. You are right, _managed_ stress - or, exercise - is necessary to improve fitness and resilience. I guess the trick is to stress your body enough to elicit improvements but not too much so that you end up in a chronic stress situation through over-training. E.g. I over trained last week and my HRV crashed the start of this week. I need to rest for 3-4 days, to get it back to baseline. If I continued to train I'd veer further into over-training territory and be more susceptible to illness, injury, become more irritable, less patient, etc.

If you want to learn more about HRV, the Whoop Blog [1] and Whoop podcasts [2] are great resources.

[1] https://www.whoop.com/thelocker/

[2] https://www.whoop.com/thelocker/whoop-podcast-all-episodes/