What Is BodyCheck™: Understanding Your Training and Recovery
When it comes to workout, you may be doing all the right things: you sweat, you squat and you sprint your heart out on the treadmill, but that doesn't mean you're always going to get an effective workout. In fact, soldiering through the same exercise routines will lead to plateau in workout performance and results… not to mention you'll get bored and lose motivation.
Sounds familiar? Then it’s time to put strategy back in your workout to make your progress go even further.
Meet BodyCheck™
BodyCheck™ is a bespoke algorithm built into the Prevayl App, which empowers you to monitor how well your body adapts to your exercise routine, enabling you to balance between your training and recovery and smash every workout.
But first, we need to talk about heart rate variability (HRV)
In order to fully understand the benefits of BodyCheck™, we must first explain what HRV is, how it’s measured and why it matters.
Generally regarded as one of the best objective metrics for measuring your body’s readiness to perform, HRV is the variation in time between heartbeats.
Unlike measuring heart rate, which is about the average number of heart beats per minute, the measurement of HRV focuses on the small fluctuations of the heartbeat. These fluctuations can be affected by various factors, including but not limited to your exercise intensity, age, gender, diet, etc.
A low HRV (a small variability between heart beats) usually means that the body is under stress from exercise, whereas a higher HRV indicates that the body has a strong ability to tolerate stress or is strongly recovering from prior accumulated stress, which makes it favourable.
Such advanced levels of performance insights were once reserved for professional athletes; but now, thanks to modern technology, they’re available on demand, at your fingertips – in the form of BodyCheck™.
What Is BodyCheck™
BodyCheck™ is more than just a HRV tracker; it’s the most detailed full body analysis distilled into the simplest training advice. It analyses more biophysical data than any other wearables on the market (including those that monitor your sleep) to guide your training every day.
By combining your HRV with your orthostatic heart rate, standing heart rate, electrocardiogram and personal baseline, BodyCheck™ calculates your daily recovery to determine your readiness for training.
The recommendation is then delivered through a minimalistic user interface, breaking a decision tree of over 63,000 branches down to one actionable step.
How BodyCheck™ Compares to Other HRV Tests
Many fitness trackers on the market offer HRV tests. However, they tend to only measure your resting HR and HRV in one position, which limits the amount of insight that they can obtain. Prevayl's BodyCheck™, on the other hand, measures your resting HR and HRV both lying down and standing up, which enables us to identify signs of both under recovery and over-training more accurately.
How to Use BodyCheck™
We recommend that you perform a BodyCheck™ every morning, preferably at the same time each day and under the same conditions, e.g. shortly after you wake up and before your first meal or morning coffee.. It takes only three minutes, and doing it consistently will help establish your personal baseline and improve your insight accuracy.
Follow these steps to perform a BodyCheck™:
- Put on your SmartWear™ garment
- Connect your app to the Sensor
- Tap Start BodyCheck
- Follow the instructions as shown in app
Based on the outcome, you’ll be presented with one of three recommendations: train, rest or progress, to guide your approach to training that day. So you’ll know exactly when to push yourself and when to take it easy to get the most out of your training regime.
We recommend you do a BodyCheck™ at least three times a week, as this will help us maintain your personal baseline which we can then use to compare your daily metrics against.