I think a mixed approach to swimming has lowered my resting heart rate a bit over the years. We don't do exclusively H.I.T. style workouts, but tend to do distance sets on Monday, strokes/IM on Wednesday, and sprint on Friday. On the off days (I try to swim once or twice a week on my own), I tend to do what the great James Kegley, formerly of Indiana, calls "il garbagio"--long swims that are like fitness swimming, with perhaps a bit more effort.
I did manage to get my heart rate down to a PR of 33 one morning upon first arising, but I grew so excited at the pending record that it sped up a bit at the end.
I still hope to reach Bjorn Borg's 29 at some point, perhaps on my deathbed, though this, I suspect, will require timing things exactly right.
All of the above notwithstanding, I suspect there is a genetic component at play here as well. My dad had a very low resting heart rate, and he never swam or jogged. He did play doubles tennis once or twice a week throughout his adult life. Not sure if this is the "fitness swimming" equivalent of tennis, but it certainly wasn't Nadal v Djokovich singles by any stretch.
Bottom line: like most things, I suspect resting heart rate is largely dictated by genes, which gives you a basic range. Within this range, exercise can lower it significantly in some, though perhaps not all, people, whereas sedentary living is likely to keep it on the higher end of the range. You need to do enough exercise to increase the interior volume of your heart's pumping chambers plus increase the overall amount of plasma in your blood stream. Thus Lance Armstrong has 50 percent more blood than most of us, and each beat of his ventricles circulates a lot more blood (and oxygen and nutrients) than a normal mortal's heart can.
Wt lifting, by the way, doesn't increase stroke volume, but it thickens the walls of the heart's pumping chambers, which must get used to the (temporarily) skyrocketing blood pressures that heavy lifting creates, especially during the valsalva maneuver.
There was no option for "35-40" and that's where my pulse fluctuates.
I run more than swim, but lately doing more swimming b/c of a knee injury.
One problem I've found with swimming is that my weight stays low more easily when I run predominantly than when I swim predominantly.
Doesn't seem to make a difference w/ resting pulse.
When I was hospitalized for an unfortunate snake encounter (3 strikes after stepping on one) they wired me up to a cardio machine with this annoying low HR alarm. My resting HR is already low like any other swimmer, but one of the side effects of the venom, in addition to intense pain, is cardiovascular depression. Every time I started to rest the dang machine would start beeping. They had to continually reset it. The entire night was spent providing samples and hearing the annoying torturous beep.
The second night there I finally got to sleep and they thought I was dead.
I don't do no breathers anymore. I've had reactions to holding my breath where my heart goes in to this weird mode. It would beat hard once or twice fast, then pause for 2 seconds and continue cycling in that mode for several minutes.
Mine has always run faster than it should for my conditioning.My EKG is "unusual". After the whole battery of tests in my 20s they decided it wasn't really a problem just"unusual." My resting rate now is about 60,but sometimes 70.
Mine's been in the low/sub 40 range for several years for as long as I've been smart enough to be aware of it's significance (i.e. when I started to care about getting in shape, though I never used it as a workout tool/determinant. Just curiosity).
But for me too, my running is much more extensive than swimming.
I would LOVE to see peer-reviewed research on how swim training affects the cardiovascular system, ventalitory (sp?) rate/capacity, etc. in comparison with swimming. I feel like the implicit breathing control could induce some type of specific training effect?
I'm supposed to do this in the morning right after I wake up, right?
Cuz doing it right now, I'm at about 60.
edit: I apparently have horrible reading comprehension, because it says right in the OP, "upon waking up in the morning."
Be back tomorrow morning! Peace!
