Resting Heartrate

Don't ask Scansy, he seems a tad bit confused......

I have a question....My HR seems higher today than usual...58.. I'm very tired and did not sleep very well last night. Do you ever notice a correlation between how you feel and your HR? I sure do! Just curious.

Your poll needs more options. There are some swimmers with resting heartrates as low as the mid 30's to low 40's.

Originally posted by Karlene Your poll needs more options. There are some swimmers with resting heartrates as low as the mid 30's to low 40's. Good point. Probably quite a few!

There are a few who say theirs is below 55 and some who say it's right around 60. It was my thought that most master swimmers' rates would be around 55 to 59 and 50-55 when we first awaken.

I have thyroid disease and ever since I got it, my rhr has been elevated. It was over 120 when I was diagnosed but is now down to the 80's with medication.

Originally posted by dorothyrde Don't ask Scansy, he seems a tad bit confused...... I am not confused. Its just that my resting heart rate and IQ run about the same.;)

A few quick notes here. 1) some elite athletes have indeed had very low resting heart rates. Bjorn Borg's was once measured at 29; I know this will sound crazy, but there was a female marathoner whose resting h.r. was 18 or 19. 2) The latter example nothwithstanding, women tend, on average, to have higher heart rates than men--I think I've seen ranges akin to 60-80 for males; 70-90 for females (untrained.). These ranges aren't resting in the sense described below (i.e., upon first awakening, without getting out of bed.) 3) Aerobic training enlarges the inner volume of your heart's pumping chambers, allowing a single beat to move more blood--hence the training effect of lowering heart rates as you get in better shape. (You also begin to produce more plasma, so your blood volume increases--again, a slower but larger stroke volume circulates the blood you need.) 4) Anerobic training (heavy wt. lifting in particular) enlarges the thickness of the walls of the heart--an adaptation to the sometimes frighteningly high (albeit very short lived) blood pressures generated during maximal resistance exertion. One cardiac researcher told me that a world class wt. lifter had had his bp measured mid lift, and it was close to 500/300--amazing he didn't explode. (Note: bp also climbs significantly during hard aerobic exercise, but not nearly so much as with lifting. The rise is temporary and doesn't pose a health problem for otherwise healthy people--in fact, regular exercise can slightly lower resting and other non-exercising bp.) Finally, I think a lot of this stuff has a strong genetic component. My father was in pretty good shape, but he was by no means an elite athlete--tennis a couple times a week, and that was about it. His resting heart rate was in the low 40s. My own heart rate p.r. was 38--but I got excited about breaking the record, and I think it sped up a few beats towards the end of the minute I recorded it! I concur about measuring this first thing upon awakening, before you stand up or begin in any way to stress yourself out with the demands of the day. I don't have brachycardia, I am pretty sure!

Not sure if this is completely kosher, but here's a snippet on resting heart rates from the Runners World (UK) site: www.runnersworld.co.uk/.../article.asp Q I have an unusually low resting heart rate – with beats per minute in the mid-30s – and my doctor is a bit concerned about it. What is the normal range of resting heart rates for runners? And are there any problems associated with a low resting heart rate? A First, because endurance athletes have strong hearts, they generally have low heart rates. As an analogy, consider a bricklayer lifting bricks. If his arm muscles are strong from lifting lots of bricks, he can move 10 bricks with each lift rather than just two or three. Similarly, if your heart muscle is strong thanks to running, it has a higher stroke volume, which means that it can pump more blood with each beat than an untrained heart. It can also pump the same amount of blood in a minute using fewer beats. The average resting heart rate of endurance athletes is around 50-60 beats per minute. I’ve seen one report, though, of a healthy athlete whose resting pulse was only 25 beats per minute. Doctors who are familiar with athletes only get worried – and follow up accordingly – when a resting heart rate is lower than 30. But even this can be completely normal (and usually is) if the athlete is otherwise healthy. The slow heart rate indicates a strong heart, but this alone does not make you a better runner. There are too many other factors involved in running performance. Are there any problems associated with your low heart rate? Perhaps one. It does make you more vulnerable to anything that reduces the blood flow back to the heart, such as coughing or choking on food. This occurs because the reduced blood flow causes the heart to slow down even more, to allow more time for blood to enter the heart. And that can set off an involuntary nervous response that leads to fainting. Apart from this, provided that you have no other symptoms or complaints, your resting pulse should not concern you, or your doctor, unduly. —Paul Thompson, cardiologist

I'm way high today. My normal range is high 60s, low 70s, but today I'm in the 80s. I have no clue why. I did receive a cortisone shot in my knee today, so I'm going to look up side effects. (Bear in mind I haven't exercised properly in some time due to injury).