For over 5 years, the team of Andrew Flatt & Mike Esco have been doing sports performance HRV studies in collegiate athletes. Their latest project involves monitoring HRV in collegiate football players during spring camp. Players in different positions have different levels of body mass, and fitness and therefore might be expected to show different responses to training.
The researchers were particularly interested in seeing the effects of training load on the day to day recovery of each positional group measured using HRV recorded using the ithlete Team system.
This study found a clear difference between the three positional groups in the ability to handle the high training loads imposed by the spring camp schedule, and they concluded that 60s pre-training HRV readings are both practical and offer useful information to coaches of elite American Football players to help optimise training loads for players in different positions.
Read a full summary of this research at SimpliFaster.com.