Resting Heart Rate
When you engage in a program of aerobic exercise, the muscles in your body become stronger. This includes your heart muscle. When the heart is stronger it can pump out more blood with each contraction. It, therefore, does not need to beat as quickly as before. The amount of blood coming out is referred to as the stroke volume. As your performance exercise becomes better and better, the resting pulse rate becomes lower and lower.
Competitive athletes often check their resting pulse to decide how well their training is progressing. Swimmer Michael Phelps had a resting pulse of 38. Sprinter Asain Bolt had a resting pulse 33. Bicyclist Lance Armstrong had a resting pulse of 32. Elite marathon runners often have a resting pulse between 30 and 40 with the lowest ever recorded being 28.
The best way to check your resting pulse is immediately when you wake up from sleep and feel totally relaxed lying on your back. It can also be checked later in the day, if it is more than two hours since exercise, eating a meal or taking caffeine. To do so, become totally relaxed and count the beats per minute. Trained athletes often find that when they are overtraining, their resting pulse goes up two or three beats. This is often taken as an indication that they should cut back slightly on their training effort. Although the best way to determine the effect of your training program is your race performance and your timed training episodes, another way is to look at your resting heart rate.
Unlike the resting heart rate, which is highly trainable, the maximum heart rate is not trainable. It is largely determined by genetics. The traditional formula often used is 220 minus your age. One can use this calculation to determine what training range they are in. If you are below 60 percent of your maximum range, this is considered a light or medium exercise effort. Above 80% is considered heavy exercise. When you are in the 90 plus percent, you are in the maximum range. Most people do not need to count their heartbeats during exercise, since you can get a very good estimate of your level of effort by your perceived exercise intensity. At the light exercise range, you can still carry on a conversation. When you can only say one or two words, you are in the heavy exercise range. When you are working at maximum effort, you can’t or don’t want to say a single word.
A study of 55-year-old individuals showed that one hour a week of high-intensity interval training (65% of maximum) lowered their resting heart rate much more than the same amount of time at low-intensity effort (33% of maximum). This indicates that heart muscle growth requires the heart be stressed at least slightly. Exercise that is too easy and doesn’t cause any strain on the body does not produce much or any improvement in heart function. Untrained average Americans have a resting rate between 60 and 100. Whereas athletic males are often between 50 and 55, while females are between 54 and 59.