For those of you who do a lot of exercise, If you don’t do it already, you should constantly monitor your heart rate. Your resting heart rate is the amount of times your heart beats per minute. I have been measuring my heart rate for about a month now and since I have been working out more, my resting heart rate has gone from 73bpm to 67bpm. My target is to hit 60bpm in the next two months. The resting heart rate is used as an indicator of your level of fitness and compared against the table below you can know for your age group what level of fitness you have.

Measuring your resting heart rate

The best time to measure your resting heart rate, is in the morning when you wake up so that no physical activity would have bumped it up before you measured it. Measurement is done by finding the pulse on your wrist and counting the number beats for 15 seconds. You then multiply that number by four and you have your resting heart rate. To be more precise, measure your heart rate like three days in a row and then divide the total of the three to get your average resting heart rate. If you want more accuracy you can count it for a full minute.

If you wansn’t a more accurate figure, then i’d recommend that you get yourself a heart rate monitor. It’s like a watch that you wear and once fitted correctly it will give you the most accurate figure possible. They are cheap and easy to find. You even get normal wristwatches that can give you your heart rate as well.

Getting Fitter

As you get fitter your heart becomes more efficient at pumping blood and you will notice that your resting heart rate will get lower and lower and you should constantly monitor it to see how much your fitness is improving.

There are other factors that you can look to such as your maximum heart rate and your recovery heart rate, I’ll write about those in a later post. Till then if you haven’t been monitoring, i suggest you start looking at your resting heart rate to measure your overall fitness level.

The table below will show you where your resting heart rate should be for your age group and for what kind of fitness level you should or want to have.

RESTING HEART RATE – MEN
AGE	18 -25	26 -35	36 -45	46 – 55	56 -65	65+
ATHLETE	49-55	49-54	50-56	50-57	51-56	50-55
EXCEL’T	56-61	55-61	57-62	58-63	57-61	56-61
GOOD	62-65	62-65	63-66	64-67	62-67	62-65
ABOVE AV	66-69	66-70	67-70	68-71	68-71	66-69
AVERAGE	70-73	71-74	71-75	72-76	72-75	70-73
BELOW AV	74-81	75-81	76-82	77-83	76-81	74-79
POOR	82+	82+	83+	84+	82+	80+

RESTING HEART RATE – WOMEN
AGE	18 -25	26 -35	36 -45	46 – 55	56 -65	65+
ATHLETE	54-60	54-59	54-59	54-60	54-59	54-59
EXCEL’T	61-65	60-64	60-64	61-65	60-64	60-64
GOOD	66-69	65-68	65-69	66-69	65-68	65-68
ABOVE AV	70-73	69-72	70-73	70-73	69-73	69-72
AVERAGE	74-78	73-76	74-78	74-77	74-77	73-76
BELOW AV	79-84	77-82	79-84	78-83	78-83	77-84
POOR	85+	83+	85+	84+	84+	84+

Tagged as: Fat Loss, Resting Heart Rate