Learn how to lower your resting heart rate to improve longevity and performance.
VO₂ max. Lactate threshold. These complex indicators of fitness, though helpful to track for some people, tend to steal the spotlight. But there’s value in keeping tabs on the seemingly “basic” metrics, too — including resting heart rate, says Evan Wood, a Precision Run Coach and RRCA Level II running coach in New York City.
“It's kind of like a puzzle piece — you take this puzzle piece and you take the VO₂ max puzzle piece, and maybe a couple of other puzzle pieces…you put them all together, and you get a larger picture of where your fitness is at and what it really means,” he explains.
Here, Wood unpacks what your resting heart rate (RHR) could mean for your health and how to use the metric to inform your training.
The Link Between Resting Heart Rate, Health, and Performance
Every time your heart beats, it’s pumping blood out of your ticker and into the body, helping to provide oxygen and other nutrients to your tissues and to remove waste products. It also pushes the blood that has passed through cells into the lungs to re-oxygenate. When your body is at rest (measured after lying in a quiet area for at least five minutes), heart rate — the number of times the heart beats per minute — is generally low. A “normal” RHR ranges from 60 to 100 beats per minute.
Usually, a lower RHR is an indication that your heart functions more efficiently, says Wood. That’s why it’s often tied to one's risk for certain health conditions. Higher RHRs are linked with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality, according to the findings of a 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis. Even a 10-beat-per-minute increase in RHR has been associated with an elevated risk for cardiovascular disease.
A lower RHR can give you an edge in terms of fitness, too. “You have a little bit more room in terms of how you can push yourself performance-wise,” Wood says. “So your performance ceiling gets higher because your baseline is lower.” With a lower RHR, activities that once felt vigorous might now feel moderate-intensity. The inverse can hold true: Lowering your RHR could unlock the ability to work more comfortably at higher intensities than before.
“Your heart is pumping whether you're exercising or not, so resting heart rate at the end of the day isn't just telling you something about your fitness — it's also just telling you something about how your body is working on a day-to-day basis,” says Wood.
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Understanding and Improving Resting Heart Rate
The type of exercise that will yield the greatest benefit for your heart and, in turn, RHR: aerobic (aka endurance) exercise, says Wood. Training your endurance three times a week could lower your RHR by up to 9 percent in as few as three months, according to the findings of a 2018 meta-analysis and systematic review published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. The higher your initial RHR, the more it could decrease due to exercise, according to the review.
Regular aerobic training causes the left ventricle of the heart (which pushes out newly oxygenated blood) to hypertrophy. This allows the heart to pump more blood per beat (aka stroke volume). Plasma volume also goes up, as does red blood cell count and capillary density within muscle fibers. “We can transport more red blood cells and oxygen to the individual muscle cells, and because of that, we can produce more ATP — we can produce more energy,” says Wood. “So because our output gets a lot better, that means that we don't have to pump things as quickly.” Even at rest.
The effort of your steady-state aerobic workouts should feel like a five or a six out of 10. “Any form of [endurance] exercise, I suppose, would do the trick — not just running, but rowing, swimming, cycling, cross-country skiing, jogging,” says Wood. “If we really want to get creative with it, it could be playing Nintendo Wii. Whatever it is, doing cardio is definitely going to be your best bang for your buck in my opinion.”
The best time to check how your RHR is progressing (or any other metric of the same vein) is not during the work phases of your periodized training cycle, even on dedicated rest days. It’s in between those work phases, amid a “deload” or “taper” period, says Wood.
“It's during that time when we've really given our bodies a chance to absorb all the stress that we've accumulated over the last few weeks, and right around the middle or the end of that recovery week, I would say you're going to get a good snapshot there of what your true resting heart rate is,” he adds. You might tune into your RHR as you rest after three or four weeks of tough training — the point at which you’re not “deep in the well of fatigue,” says Wood.
Generally, the fitter you are, the lower your RHR will be, says Wood. But overtraining syndrome — a condition caused by excessive physical activity without enough recovery — can elevate RHR, he adds. Overtraining syndrome may also lead to symptoms such as decreased power output and work capacity, permanent fatigue, and prolonged recovery periods, among others.
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Lifestyle, environment, mental health (e.g., stress levels), and other factors can further contribute to variations in your RHR.
“The general population that may or may not be exercising vigorously may notice fluctuations in their resting heart rate, just as a result of how hard they're working, how stressed out they are, how nervous they are, whether or not they got good quality sleep,” says Wood. “It could have to do with what's in their diet. It could have to do with hydration or dehydration. You know, you could wake up and feel really excited, and all of a sudden, your resting heart rate's really high. There are a lot of reasons why resting heart rate could go up and down just as a fact of life.”
As you measure and track your RHR over time, remember that it may not show the full scope of your health and fitness, says Wood. That’s why combining it with other metrics, whether it’s VO₂ max or some other stat, is so valuable. “If other aspects of our life are placing some sort of strain on us, physical or mental, it's also possible for that resting heart rate to move up and down, regardless of what we're doing fitness-wise,” he adds. “That's why it's one puzzle piece. It's part of a bigger picture.”