Your heart rate holds vital clues about your health and age – here’s what you need to listen to

While there are a wide range of metrics and tools that can measure more elements of your biology than you can imagine, your humble heart rate can tell you a lot about what’s going on under the hood.

2024 study in the journal Scientific reports He noted that heart rate “reflects the health of the cardiovascular system, metabolic rate, and activity of the autonomic nervous system” — three of the big things when it comes to overall health and fitness.

But which heart beats per minute (bpm) signals are worth listening to?

listen to your heart

“Your resting heart rate is loosely related to how long you live,” says consultant cardiologist Dr Mark Dyer. Historically, a resting heart rate between 60 and 100 beats per minute was considered normal, “but that’s a fairly outdated view,” he explains.

“We know that higher heart rates are associated with lower survival rates than lower heart rates, so something is probably wrong with someone with a resting heart rate of 100, whereas someone with a resting heart rate of 60 is probably fine,” he adds.

There is long-term scientific research that supports this assessment as well. The same article published in nature In 2024, it looked at data from three landmark studies and consistently found that people with a lower resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute had significantly longer lives than those with a resting heart rate of more than 90 beats per minute.

In one study of French men, this translated into an average difference of nine years, while another study based on American women showed a five-year increase in longevity.

“[That’s] “It’s a very long time in terms of life expectancy,” Dyer adds. “If you could increase your life expectancy by five years, that would make much more headlines than a pill that doubles your survival from six months to one year in pancreatic cancer.”

Low running

Athletes are known for having much lower resting heart rates. Five-time Tour de France champion Tade Pogacar has a heart rate of 37 beats per minute, while fellow Five-club member Miguel Indurin has a heart rate of 28 beats per minute.

“A lot of people have slow heart rates,” Dyer says. “Athletes tend to have lower heart rates, and lower heart rates tend to be associated with poorer survival.”

“Even though we say under 60 is abnormal, if you’re dealing with young, fit people – even those who go to parkrun – a lot of them will be in their 40s and 50s.”

The reason for these low readings is two-fold. Exercise training, especially endurance-based activities like cycling, increases vagus nerve strength – the primary activity of the vagus nerve, which is the physical brake on your nervous system and keeps the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system dominant over the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system and thus the heart rate down.

As with any muscle, the heart becomes larger and stronger with exercise stimulation, which means it can pump larger amounts of blood with each contraction. “When they’re resting, they’re temporarily active, so they don’t need to do as much work,” Dyer says.

A low resting heart rate can be an indicator of illness, however, if you are not an athlete and feel unwell; Other symptoms include shortness of breath, swollen ankles, or difficulty sleeping at night.

“The reason it’s concerning is that you can have what’s called heart block,” Dyer says. “In some people, not all the stimuli from the top of the heart (atria) reach the bottom of the heart (ventricle), and so the heart rate can slow.

“If none of the signals arrive, your heart rate can fall very slowly — in the 20s, although some have a higher heart rate in the 30s and 40s. This is called complete heart block, and after that you need pacemakers.”

Max is out

At the other end of the scale is your maximum heart rate. The physiological limit to your heart’s ability to pump blood around your body, when you reach that ceiling, you can’t sustain it for long is the ultimate anaerobic effort – causing your muscles to break down glucose without oxygen before they are eventually swamped into submission by the byproduct of lactic acid.

However, maximum heart rate alone cannot tell you much about your health and fitness compared to others. “Everyone is different, so there’s a lot of diversity,” Dyer says.

After it reaches its peak in early childhood (where the maximum heart rate can exceed 200 beats per minute), there is a natural and gradual decline that even the bogacar of this world cannot completely stop.

But Dyer adds that if you don’t exercise for a while and then start again, your maximum heart rate will often recover a little.

“When I returned to exercise in my mid-40s, my maximum heart rate was initially around 160bpm, and after a few years of proper exercise rather than just a little parkrun, it rose to around 170bpm, but it gradually dropped again over time.”

The key thing about maximum heart rate, Dyer points out, is how it’s calculated, with the “220 minus age” formula plastered everywhere by “a bunch of people in their 70s who scraped together some random data.”

He adds that it’s better to use a different formula, such as Fairbairn’s formula: 208 minus (0.8x age) for men; Minus 201 (0.63x your age) for women, or better yet, “go out and do a 5K – that will probably tell you what your maximum heart rate is.”

Keep it in reserve

The benefit of knowing your maximum heart rate is that it enables you to calculate your heart rate reserve (maximum heart rate – your resting heart rate).

This reserve can be used to create training zones based on heart rate reserve – a more accurate method that takes into account aerobic capacity rather than just departures from maximum heart rate.

“It’s important for determining your ability to exercise, but it’s complicated,” Dyer warns. “The amount of blood your heart pumps is your heart rate multiplied by the amount of blood your heart puts out each time it beats, so if you have a slightly larger heart, more blood will come out each time it beats.

“But it has to be pumped somewhere – it has to go to the muscle and be used by the muscle and everything else.

“You cannot assume that the heart by itself describes all of this, which is more important, it is the entire system.

“You have to have lungs to get oxygen to that volume of blood going through the system, and you have your brain on top of that, which may or may not hold you back, depending on who you think. There’s a whole series of demarcations and boundaries, and the heart is just one part of it.”

Quicksand

One measure that Dyer believes there are still question marks about its application among everyday athletes is Heart rate variability.

A measure of the marginal difference between each heartbeat, companies e.g whoop It has made entire products based on heart rate, with claims that it can show up when you are not at peak health and need to rest (low heart rate) or when you are fit and ready for a strenuous workout.

“It’s complicated because it’s based on really accurate measurements, so your heart rate from your watch or ring or Google Fitbit Air will give you a rough estimate,” Dyer says.

“The second thing is that it kind of depends on your resting heart rate. A 50 millisecond difference would be a lot as a percentage of a heart rate above 100, whereas if the heart rate is 40, it’s a much smaller percentage of that gap.”

“We’re not quite sure whether it should be adjusted to resting heart rate or not, we’re not quite sure what normal values ​​are, and there’s a lot of variation between people.”

He concludes that the best gauge for whether or not you should train is to look at your training history and see how you feel.

“If you rely on one metric, you’ll usually fail; relying solely on your heart rate to determine when you’re fit to train probably isn’t great.

“Use it wisely as part of your overall evaluation, remember that your evaluation is your own, do not compare it to other people, and learn how you and what you do differ before you pay too much attention to it.”

Get the measure

Requires knowledge of any measure of heart rate A a screen. Fortunately, these watches have never been more readily available or convenient to use, with most smartwatches having a built-in optical sensor to capture readings whether while resting or exercising.

But Dyer cautions against taking their findings with a pinch of salt. “Overnight resting heart rates are usually reasonably accurate if taken over a long period of time, but smartwatches can mis-, under- or over-read heart rates.

“It relies on shining bits of light and measuring reflections, and you can get a wrong reading if your watch isn’t working properly, you have tan skin, or you have a lot of hair on your arms among other things.

He recommends chest straps like the Polar H10 — “they’re very good and validated” — as a more accurate alternative.

And before you get too alarmed by any readings, he concludes, “If you feel okay, you probably are.”