Resting heart rate (RHR) is an important, but delayed health metric. It is measured in beats per minute (BPM) and most wearables companies engineer this feature into its devices. Heart rate data today are very accessible. In my experience, RHR takes several months to change, but when it changes, the outcomes are life-changing.

Targeted Heart Rate Zones

If you search for a resting heart rate table like the one above, the ideal resting heart rate ranges follow a similar pattern from best to worst:

Less than 60 BPM (BEST)
60-69 BPM
70-79 BPM
More than 80 BPM (WORST)

While individual RHR patterns vary among individuals, these ranges are sufficient guidelines to follow when analyzing your heart rate data.

If your RHR hangs out around close the mid-60’s you should be fine?

Pushing 80 BPM? There’s some work to do…

What Does The Research Say About Resting Heart Rate?

Decreased Risk of Dying From All Causes

Resting heart rate decreases the risk (hazard ratio—y-axis) of mortality (Fox et al., 2007). As RHR increased, so did overall mortality and cardiovascular mortality.

You can see the similar pattern with another data set provided by Saxena et al. (2013):

As you move away from higher BPMs, the risk of death goes down.

Lower Heart Rate Increases Performance on Fitness Tests

With a lower RHR (on the y-axis), fitness performance improves — as measured by VO2 Max (Jensen 2013).

(VO2 Max measures how much oxygen your body consumes. Higher values mean that your body can handle A LOT of exercise that requires A LOT of oxygen, like that bike in the picture).

In this study, participants completed a bicycle ergometer test. They pedaled and pedaled as researches increased the resistance on the bike. They kept going until they could not pedal anymore. Those more “fit” could pedal longer than everyone else.

So, those individuals with a BPM in the 50s and 60s were more “fit” and had higher VO2 Max values than those with a BPM above 70.

What Is Your Resting Heart Rate?

When you lower your resting heart rate, you decrease your risk of dying from any causes…and particularly heart disease. Oh, and you can perform better at general fitness tasks too.

Connecting behavior change in the here and now to long-term measures like RHR provides an opportunity objectively improve your health and fitness.

Where can you start? Start measuring step counts, intensity or exercise minutes, and aligning those results to your heart rate data.

Now go!

References

Fox, K., Borer, J. S., Camm, A. J., Danchin, N., Ferrari, R., Lopez Sendon, J. L., … & Heart Rate Working Group. (2007). Resting heart rate in cardiovascular disease. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 50(9), 823-830.

Jensen, M. T., Suadicani, P., Hein, H. O., & Gyntelberg, F. (2013). Elevated resting heart rate, physical fitness and all-cause mortality: a 16-year follow-up in the Copenhagen Male Study. Heart, 99(12), 882-887.

Saxena, A., Minton, D., Lee, D. C., Sui, X., Fayad, R., Lavie, C. J., & Blair, S. N. (2013, December). Protective role of resting heart rate on all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality. In Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Vol. 88, No. 12, pp. 1420-1426). Elsevier.