HRV baselines seem out of whack

The problem is that your HRV was quite high during the initial learning phase, and hence the baseline was set accordingly rather high too. Since that time your HRV continues to drop. The fact that the baseline adapts very slowly is completely intentional and needed. It would make no sense if it copied your averages, since it would then just always tell you that your HRV is within the optimal range, which is completely against the purpose of the whole thing.

You can try the master reset of the watch to the defaults, if you are impatient. Or just wait a few weeks more.

From HRV Status on Compatible Garmin Watches | Garmin Customer Support

NOTE: Resetting a watch will require you to re-establish a new HRV Status by wearing your watch to bed for another three weeks.

Same for me, started high in August (work free month, less training cause of traveling), back in my work and training cycle it dropped and has been mostly right outside the "good zone" since then. 

I get that it doesn't want to move the range too fast or too much, but 10 initial days at an average of 54 doesn't seem to merit an initial range of 47-67. Again, during the 19-day learning phase, my single highest night was 66, and I had 7 days below 47! It clearly should have learned from the beginning that I was going to be below 47 a lot. And there have been over 80 readings since then, which seems like plenty to assume that I'm not stressed every single day. Just look at the last 1.5 photos - it's given me 6 points in 6 weeks that weren't orange or red.

Reading more about the physiology of this (and I am a physician), it says that your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) is always trying to slow your HR, and your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is trying to raise your HR, and when these are balanced, that's what pulls your HR up and down by tens of milliseconds constantly, giving you a higher HRV. The assumption is that if your sympathetic system is ramped up from stress, your HRV will be lower because one system is dominant (and presumably, excess sympathetic tone would lead to a higher HR as well?)

But, my resting HR is 43 and I drop to the high 30's at sleep! I wonder if it's possible that a low HRV could be because the systems aren't balanced, and it's the PARASYMPATHETIC system that's dominant?

tbartman1 said:

10 initial days at an average of 54 doesn't seem to merit an initial range of 47-67

Well, if you know better than the authors of the algorithm (probably Firstbeat Analytics), just contact Garmin, and send them your proposal, and the theoretic papers backing your own algorithms.

The problem is not how high or low your HRV (and/or your RHR) is, but the fact that it is continuously dropping since the beginning. Do not look at the absolute numbers, but at the trends. And the trend in your case is continuously decreasing HRV since July. Would it stay stable, you'd be in the 'green'.

No need to be snippy here. For some reason, I thought maybe Garmin folks would be on here and would be interested in my case, but we all know that Garmin created these forums so customers can support each other because actual Garmin customer support is non-existent (or useless when it is present).

And even though I don't have my own, independent research, I don't think that means that the data I've provided is invalid. If YOU were Firstbeat, wouldn't YOU want to know that their algorithm over-weighted the first 7 days of my data and is using that to negate about 80 days of data after that? Do you think it is impossible that they have no room to improve? Or at least consider me a physiologic anomaly that is worthy of further consideration?

I'm sorry if asking a question on here wasted all of your valuable time.