Resting heart rate

Like a lot of mere mortals, I currently register around 60 bpm. My father, who
is 48 and does inline racing, consistently reads at 40 bpm. He's clearly in
much better shape than I am. Is resting heart rate really that telling of an
indicator of fitness, though? I heard the average out of the TdF riders was
about 50. OTOH, I've been told that at his peak, Miguel Indurain's resting
heart rate was 29 bpm. That's the same as the resting heart rate of a
full-grown elephant.

-Sonarrat.

"Sonarrat" wrote in message
...
Like a lot of mere mortals, I currently register around 60 bpm. My father,
who
is 48 and does inline racing, consistently reads at 40 bpm. He's clearly
in
much better shape than I am. Is resting heart rate really that telling of
an
indicator of fitness, though?






Dumbass -


No.


I am at 42 and am pure Masters Fattie.

BTW, the max is lower too.

I heard the average out of the TdF riders was
about 50. OTOH, I've been told that at his peak, Miguel Indurain's
resting
heart rate was 29 bpm.

My resting is 37 bpm, and I'm 15 pounds overweight, and can barely run
around the block. I don't know what it indicates, I would be interested in
the answer also. If it indicates nothing, then why do people talk about it?
Why does it impress the nurse at the yearly physical?

Sonarrat wrote:
Is resting heart rate really that telling of an indicator of
fitness, though?



Hi there,

Well, yes and no. The absolute value isn't really a good indicator as it
has a lot o do with genetic predisposition.

It's a good indication though when following your resting heart rate
over time. When your training and improving your condition you'll find
that your individual resting heart rate will go down over time,
indicating conditional improvement.

So to go short: the only real comparison is to your own previous values.

Cheers and happy training,

Grouse



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In article . net,
"Callistus Valerius" wrote:

I heard the average out of the TdF riders was
about 50. OTOH, I've been told that at his peak, Miguel Indurain's
resting
heart rate was 29 bpm.

My resting is 37 bpm, and I'm 15 pounds overweight, and can barely run
around the block. I don't know what it indicates, I would be interested in
the answer also. If it indicates nothing, then why do people talk about it?
Why does it impress the nurse at the yearly physical?

The simplest of a rest HR is that it is a coarse indicator of the size
and strength of your heart. If you have a low rest HR, it suggests that
when you are exerting yourself, your heart will be able to flow much
more blood (because there tends to be much less variance between max HRs
among people; rest HRs are mostly about 35-80 bpm in average humans,
which is a big variance. Peak HRs tend to vary from 170-200 bpm, a
lesser range both proportionally and absolutely).

Okay, but that's all very person-dependent. My father and I have similar
rest HRs, but his max HR is notably lower than mine, much more so than
the age difference would suggest. It's a genetic thing.

The best training use of rest HR is to track it regularly, noting
instances when it is above what you usually read. This is a typical
indicator of overtraining, so that's when you know you need to back off
for a few days.

Other than that, your rest HR tends to go down as fitness increases,
since you're training your heart to do more work for more time, which
naturally makes it bigger and stronger, and thus able to flow more blood
per stroke. Since exercise doesn't make you use appreciably more blood
when at rest, this means your heart needs to do less work, and so it
pumps less often.

--
Ryan Cousineau, http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club

Ryan Cousineau wrote:
Other than that, your rest HR tends to go down as fitness increases,
since you're training your heart to do more work for more time, which
naturally makes it bigger and stronger, and thus able to flow more blood
per stroke. Since exercise doesn't make you use appreciably more blood
when at rest, this means your heart needs to do less work, and so it
pumps less often.

"Tends to" go down?

I've been thinking of preaching the wisdom of tracking resting HR to my
general-population exercise class attendees, but want to relay correct
info. Under what conditions does declining RHR NOT indicate better
fitness (besides over-trained situations - and death)?

--
--
Lynn Wallace http://www.xmission.com/~lawall
"I'm not proud. We really haven't done everything we could to protect
our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security."
--Microsoft VP in charge of Windows OS Development, Brian Valentine.

"Raptor" wrote in message ...
Ryan Cousineau wrote:
Other than that, your rest HR tends to go down as fitness increases,
since you're training your heart to do more work for more time, which
naturally makes it bigger and stronger, and thus able to flow more blood
per stroke. Since exercise doesn't make you use appreciably more blood
when at rest, this means your heart needs to do less work, and so it
pumps less often.

"Tends to" go down?

I've been thinking of preaching the wisdom of tracking resting HR to my
general-population exercise class attendees, but want to relay correct
info. Under what conditions does declining RHR NOT indicate better
fitness (besides over-trained situations - and death)?



When it comes to health, blood pressure is a better indicator.

In article , Raptor wrote:

Ryan Cousineau wrote:
Other than that, your rest HR tends to go down as fitness increases,
since you're training your heart to do more work for more time, which
naturally makes it bigger and stronger, and thus able to flow more blood
per stroke. Since exercise doesn't make you use appreciably more blood
when at rest, this means your heart needs to do less work, and so it
pumps less often.

"Tends to" go down?

Bad Ryan. Nassty weasel-words....

I've been thinking of preaching the wisdom of tracking resting HR to my
general-population exercise class attendees, but want to relay correct
info. Under what conditions does declining RHR NOT indicate better
fitness (besides over-trained situations - and death)?

I'm not an expert in sport science or physiology (but you got a computer
problem, I'm your guy). Some people have a naturally low RHR. I have no
idea what happens to them when they exercise a lot. It's also possible
for a low RHR to indicate an abnormally enlarged heart, I think.

That said, I'm not aware of any formula that you can use to correlate
RHR declines with fitness levels. As always, the best metric of that is
a performance test against what you're training: 20k TT, number of
push-ups to failure, pitching speed, whatever. RHR reduction is an
interesting side-effect and a fun locker-room brag-number, but little
more.

--
Ryan Cousineau, http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club

"Raptor" wrote in message
...
Ryan Cousineau wrote:
Other than that, your rest HR tends to go down as fitness increases,
since you're training your heart to do more work for more time,
which
naturally makes it bigger and stronger, and thus able to flow more
blood
per stroke. Since exercise doesn't make you use appreciably more
blood
when at rest, this means your heart needs to do less work, and so it
pumps less often.

"Tends to" go down?

I've been thinking of preaching the wisdom of tracking resting HR to
my
general-population exercise class attendees, but want to relay correct
info. Under what conditions does declining RHR NOT indicate better
fitness (besides over-trained situations - and death)?

Look up Bradycardia and Chronotropic Incompetence. Both of these can be
indicators of serious heart conditions.

Phil Holman

The other thing that makes it hard to make any sense of is that it
appears to be somewhat variable with age as to how quickly it responds
to the exercise (has anyone looked into this?)

As an 18 year old, I trained (for swimming) between 25 and 30 hours a
week, which included lots of pool work, a bit of running and gym
time. My resting heart rate then was low 50's - I think about 53 or
so from memory.

Time went by, got an office job, put on a heap of weight etc, RHR goes
up to 65 or so.

Six months ago decided I was sick of being fat, started putting in 30
minutes of high intensity exercise per day (avg 160+ or so for the half
hour). Dropped 30 pounds, but more interestingly, RHR dropped to 42. But
I'm nowhere near as fit (overall) as I was when swimming, as I'm doing 3
hours a week of exercise instead of ten times that! Maybe something to
do with the fact that the 3 hours was all high intensity, where
obviously not all of the 30 was?



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