A great little routine to start in the new year is to take your morning resting heart rate. Yes, it can be a bit annoying to reach out from under those warm blankets and put the cold plastic monitor to your chest, but the benefits to knowing what that number should be are worth it. A cozier option is to have your partner snuggle up to your chest and count the beats for you!
The end of your off-season or after a rest week, while healthy (no colds or injuries kicking around) is the best time to establish some starting numbers. From there, you can monitor any irregularities and hopefully avoid the pitfalls of over-training or fighting through a training session when your body is trying to fight off a cold.
Typically, an increase of 10% or more from your base value would be a sign that something is not right. For example, if you regularly see a morning heart rate of 45, but you wake up one day with a HR of 50 or more you’ll want to be careful about how you approach your upcoming training day. If you know it’s not stemming from poor recovery from the previous training day or a horrible nights sleep, then perhaps you’ll want to watch for signs of sickness. Quite often when your body is trying to recover from hard training sessions you’ll open yourself up to a depressed immune system – your resting heart can be the first indicator something is not right.
An added benefit of monitoring your resting HR is that you may also be able to track some improvement in fitness. However, this doesn’t always work as it should! If a fit person jumps into a period of inactivity they can actually see a decrease in resting HR simply because their hematocrit (ratio of red blood cells to overall blood volume) levels will rise, thus carrying more oxygen to the muscles. But, as a whole, any decrease in your normal resting HR can be interpreted as a good thing – so long as you don’t go down to the 20 BPM range – then it is time to make a trip to the doctor! I’ve heard of low 30’s and even a couple 29 beat per minute hearts, but those are rare and often attributed to abnormally large hearts.
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What would be considered to be an "average" resting heart rate? Would a HR in low 70s be considered to be unhealthy?
Hi Andy,
We posed the question to a doctor so that we can give you a more thorough response on what an unhealthy resting heart rate would be. We’ll post that when I hear back.
From our point of view, we wouldn’t say that 70 BPM is unhealthy unless that number is vastly different than other day to day numbers you’ve seen. If that is the case it could be the onset of a cold or some overtraining issues. However, if 70 is a resting heart rate you see on a daily basis, that’s probably a sign that endurance sport is relatively new to your body -which does not mean you’re unhealthy . It will come down with time, as the efficiency of your cardiovascular system improves.
With respect to knowing what an average persons resting HR is, we are pretty sure between 60 and 80 is normal (We’ll post for sure when we get a response – but if you can trust the internet that seems about right). But, if you look at that average resting HR of folks who have been involved in endurance sport for a couple years, I would bet that average looks more like 50-65 (I have no evidence to support this, just an educated guess). At the Elite end of things, more like 40-55.
Of course, so many things can actually affect that number outside of actual health or fitness -gender, size of your body, size of your heart, and much more.
You may want to consider monitoring your recovery rate as a means for tracking fitness gains, as well as tracking the resting heart rate. Recovery rate is quite simply how quickly your heart drops after exercise. A good measure of time is 1 minute, note your HR immediately after you stop running, then note the HR 1 minute later. The larger the drop, the better your recovery rate.
On another note, I like your website, really well done – very cool logo! Best of luck on your journey to Ironman.
An official doctors response…paraphrased.
The “normal” RHR is about 60 – 80; it varies with age and sex as well as fitness. In general it would be investigated if RHR is lower than 50 (outside of an elite athlete)and the person is symptomatic (dizzy, lightheaded, fainting, chest pain etc..) It’s quite normal for a trained athlete to have a low RHR. If the RHR is consistently higher than 80 – 90 – it might also mean there is something going on like a hypermetabolic state, hyperthyroidism, infection, drugs, fever, cardiac problems etc.