How Does Your Resting Heart Rate Reflect Your Health?

Every organ in the body plays a role in your health, but none is quite as essential as your heart. The heart is constantly at work keeping blood circulating, nutrients flowing, and the immune system functioning, so keeping it in good condition is absolutely critical.

How do you know what your heart health is? Check your resting heart rate. Your resting heart rate is like a snapshot of your health, and while it can't give you a complete picture of your body, it's a good indicator of whether or not you should try to make progress in diet, exercise, or other health factors.

What is a Resting Heart Rate?

First, let's briefly define what a resting heart rate is. Fortunately, it's quite simple: your resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats in 60 seconds while you're at rest. That means when you've otherwise not been doing anything, no exercise, no stair climbing, no eating, nothing. Your heart's BPM when you're at rest is an indicator of your overall health.

The best time to check your resting heart rate is when you wake up in the morning, before you get up and go about your morning routine, eat food, or drink anything, especially anything with caffeine. This is generally the lowest your heart rate will be throughout the day and gives you a good idea of what your baseline is.

How to check your resting heart rate.

The simplest way to check your heart rate is to find your pulse on your neck or your wrist – whichever is easier for you to accurately feel – and count how many beats you feel in 30 seconds, and multiply by two. You can also count for a full minute if you prefer. Either way, use a clock or a stopwatch of some kind – your phone likely has one built in – to accurately keep track of the time.

This guide from Mayo Clinic has a couple of illustrations that can help, as well as some basic instructions.

If you have trouble finding your pulse, you can also use a fitness tracker. There are many different brands of fitness trackers, ranging from rings to watches to armbands. The advanced data they can give you can be very helpful – though you should evaluate the accuracy of that brand's tracking before you buy – but pulse is always easy enough to monitor that it's going to be accurate enough to monitor.

What is a Good Resting Heart Rate?

It's one thing to know what your own resting heart rate is and another to know whether or not it's in a "good" range.

The generally accepted range for a good resting heart rate is anything between 60 bpm and 100 bpm. In broad strokes, the healthier you are, the lower your heart rate is. Very fit and healthy individuals can have a resting heart rate of 50-55 bpm, and sometimes as low as 40.

While the normal range stretches as high as 100 bpm, that doesn't necessarily mean it's completely healthy. A meta-analysis of 46 studies encompassing over 1.2 million patients found that health outcomes, all-cause mortality, and the risk of cardiovascular problems increase the higher the resting heart rate and that anything over 85-90 is worse than 60-80. In addition, while every 5 bpm higher than 45 showed worse health outcomes at a linear rate, anything over 90 showed a substantial increase in risk.

What Impacts Your Resting Heart Rate?

It's one thing to say that your resting heart rate is a reflection of your "health," but what does that mean more specifically?

Your heart rate is simply how hard your heart has to work to keep your blood flowing. Any health factors that can make this more difficult, from age-related stress to vasoconstriction to high cholesterol and more, can affect this.

These potential factors include:

• Age. The older you get, the lower your resting heart rate is likely to be, all else being equal. This can impact your heart rate by as much as 5 bpm between your 20s and your 70s.
• Ambient temperature. The warmer it is around you, the faster your heart is likely to beat.
• Pain and stress. When you're in pain or under stress, your resting heart rate will be higher.
• Emotions. When you're excited, angry, or otherwise emotionally heightened, your heart rate increases.
• Body weight. The heavier you are, the harder your heart has to work to circulate your blood, increasing your heart rate.
• Bodily diseases. Anemia causes your heart to beat faster, as do some endocrine and hormonal imbalances. This isn't always an increase, however; hypothyroidism can cause a lower resting heart rate.
• Smoking. Smokers generally have higher resting heart rates, to accompany the many other health issues caused by smoking.
• Cholesterol. High "bad" cholesterol can clog up arteries, forcing your heart to beat faster to keep blood flowing.
• Cardiorespiratory fitness. General aerobic exercise helps strengthen the heart and improve cardio fitness, lowering heart rate over time.
• Blood pressure. Related to several other factors above, blood pressure also impacts heart rate; a higher blood pressure generally means your heart is working harder to pump blood throughout your body.

On top of this, there are a variety of medications that will impact your resting heart rate. Some will increase – or decrease – your heart rate as a side effect of the medication, while others are meant specifically to reduce your heart rate or address other heart issues (such as beta blockers) and will do so effectively.

Critically, this means that if you're taking a medication that impacts heart rate, your heart rate alone may not be a viable picture of your overall health. You may be healthier than you think if a medication increases heart rate; conversely, you may not be quite as healthy as you think while taking a medication that reduces heart rate.

Resting heart rate is an important, easy-to-check metric that can give you a general idea of your health, but it's far from the whole picture, and you have to be aware of other factors that influence it. Consider the context.

What Does a Higher Resting Heart Rate Mean?

In broad terms, the higher your resting heart rate, the worse your overall health and the greater your risk of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular death. 

Your heart is absolutely critical, and if it has to work to the point of excess stress and eventual failure to keep you going, you're going to be at greater risk than if it doesn't have to work as hard.

If your resting heart rate is in the 50-80 range, you're likely doing fine. If it's between 80 and 100, you should consider some lifestyle adjustments to help bring it lower, but it's not an immediate cause for concern. If your resting heart rate is over 100, it's a good idea to talk to your doctor about cardiovascular health and consider a referral to a cardiologist. If your resting heart rate is over 100 and you have additional symptoms, like dizziness, shortness of breath, lightheadedness, or chest pain, seek medical attention.

How Can You Lower Your Resting Heart Rate?

The good news is that it's possible to improve your overall health in ways that are reflected in a lower resting heart rate. I phrase it this way because, as I've already mentioned, your resting heart rate is a snapshot of your health. Your goal is not to reduce your heart rate; it's to improve your health in ways that help your heart. Going into it with the goal of reducing your heart rate is the wrong perspective to have. Think of your resting heart rate as a grade in a class; it is important, but the actual goal is the knowledge you learn.

So, what can you do to help improve your health and lower your resting heart rate? As you might expect, it all goes back to the three core pillars of health: diet, exercise, and sleep. As far as heart health is concerned, the most important is exercise, but all three contribute to overall better health.

Add more exercise to your routine.

Moderate exercise in daily life is a critical component of a healthy lifestyle. Studies have shown that people engaged in vigorous sports, for example, have a 23% lower risk of death than those less active.

Engaging in physical activity can be difficult, and if you try to jump in at a level higher than you can handle, you risk injury. It's always better to start slow with something you can handle and grow from there. In my roadmap to health, I outline a series of beginner, intermediate, and advanced exercises you can incorporate into your daily life.

The beginner exercises include:

• Incorporate more walking into your day, such as parking further from destinations and walking to them.
• Kneeling push-ups. Full push-ups can be difficult, so start using your knees rather than your toes as the fulcrum point until you get used to the motion and effort.
• Squats. Squats require no additional equipment and can be done anywhere. Make sure to assume the proper form for the best results.
• Lunges. Stepping forward and lowering your body until your knees are bent at 90-degree angles, followed by stepping back up and repeating, is a great simple exercise for strength and balance. As you progress, you can add weights by holding heavy things as you do it.
• Arm circles. Extend your arms to the sides at shoulder height and move them in circles about a foot in diameter. Do this for 30 seconds, then reverse direction for another 30.
• Running. You don't have to start with a full sprint; just a brisk walk each day is a good beginning point. Over time, you can incorporate jogging for a minute at a time, and increase. There are many different routines for starting to run, including the "couch to 5K" program.

This is all just a starting point; my guide goes into greater detail and provides more options, as well.

Additionally, it's important to incorporate both resistance exercises (using resistance bands or weights) with aerobic exercise. Keeping both kinds of exercise in balance is best for overall health.

Incorporate "exercise snacks" into your daily life.

An "exercise snack" is a short, brief burst of exercise that doesn't require a whole dedicated session at the gym or blocking out part of your day to work out. Even something as simple as performing calf raises or squats while waiting for something can be effective over time.

It's also easier to maintain when you incorporate a few exercises here and there rather than trying to warp your whole schedule around the activity.

Build healthy habits.

Many people don't really enjoy exercise, which makes it hard to find the motivation to work out, even if you know your health is on the line. What I find most effective is to work on building small habits you can sustain. This goes along with the "exercise snack" concept; by incorporating small, habitual exercises over time, you can build a healthier lifestyle without dedicating hours to the gym or to working out. Even the smallest amount of exercise is better than nothing, and taking it one step at a time is the road to improvement.

All of this is merely scratching the surface. There are a lot of other things you can do to help improve your health and resting heart rate, including:

• Adjusting your diet to be healthier, moving away from cholesterol-raising foods.
• Quit smoking if you currently smoke.
• Take steps to improve your sleep quality.

Health is a life-long journey, so make sure to take the time to build healthy habits; don't think of it as a quick fix.

Sources:

1. Mayo Clinic – How to take your pulse: https://www.mayoclinic.org/how-to-take-pulse/art-20482581
2. Mayo Clinic – What's a normal resting heart rate? https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/expert-answers/heart-rate/faq-20057979
3. Resting heart rate and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the general population: a meta-analysis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26598376/
4. American Heart Association - All About Heart Rate: https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/the-facts-about-high-blood-pressure/all-about-heart-rate-pulse
5. Does Pain Lead to Tachycardia? Revisiting the Association Between Self-reported Pain and Heart Rate in a National Sample of Urgent Emergency Department Visits: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4943867/
6. The association of changes in physical activity level and other lifestyle characteristics with mortality among men: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8426621/