What's a Normal Resting Heart Rate, and What Makes It Change?

Resting heart rate is one of the simplest numbers you can track, and one of the most useful. It takes no equipment beyond a watch or your own fingers, it changes slowly enough to show real trends, and it moves with fitness, sleep, stress, and illness. Here’s what counts as normal, why your own normal matters most, and how to follow it well.

This article is general information, not medical advice.

What Counts as Normal

The American Heart Association describes a normal resting heart rate for adults as 60 to 100 beats per minute (bpm), measured while you’re sitting or lying down, calm and feeling well. Below 60 is called bradycardia and above 100 tachycardia, but neither is automatically a problem. A low rate is common in athletes, and the AHA notes that very active people may rest as low as 40 bpm. Medicines such as beta blockers lower it too, and it’s usually lower during sleep.

That 40-point range is wide on purpose. It describes what’s normal across many adults, not what’s normal for you.

Your Normal Is Narrower Than the Range

The clearest look at this comes from a 2020 study by Quer and colleagues at Scripps Research, who analysed nearly two years of daily resting heart rate from 92,457 adults wearing Fitbit trackers. They found:

• The average person’s daily resting heart rate was 65 bpm, but individual averages ranged from 40 to 109 bpm. One person’s normal could differ from another’s by up to 70 bpm.
• Average resting heart rate differed with age, sex, body mass index, and how long people usually slept.
• Within a person, it was much more stable. It drifted a little with the seasons, lowest around July and highest around January.
• Still, about one in five people had at least one week when it moved by 10 bpm or more.

So a resting heart rate of 72 isn’t high or low on its own. If yours is usually 58, a week at 72 is worth noticing. If it’s usually 72, it’s just a week.

What Moves It Up and Down

Many things change resting heart rate. Some act over months, others overnight:

• Fitness. Active people and athletes tend to have lower resting rates, as the AHA notes.
• Sleep. In the Scripps study, people who usually slept longer had different resting rates from those who slept less.
• Illness. Acute infections can raise resting heart rate. A second Scripps study used this to follow flu-like illness across US states from Fitbit data.
• Alcohol. In a study of 4,098 Finnish employees, drinking raised heart rate and lowered heart rate variability in the first hours of sleep, more with larger amounts, and even with small ones.
• Temperature, emotions, and posture. The AHA lists hot weather, stress and excitement, and body position (lying, sitting, or standing) among the things that change your heart rate.
• Medicines. Some, such as beta blockers, lower it.

Because so much affects it, one reading tells you little. A run of days does.

How to Measure It Consistently

• By hand: first thing in the morning, before you get out of bed or reach for coffee, count your pulse at your wrist or neck for a full 60 seconds. Do it in the same position each day.
• With a wearable: your watch or ring works out a resting heart rate from the times you’re still, and many do it overnight. Each brand has its own method, so keep to one device for your trend. See Why Your Devices Disagree.

Either way, follow the weekly average and compare it with your own last few months.

When to Talk to Someone

If your resting heart rate is often above 100, or below 60 and you’re not an athlete, or if you have symptoms such as dizziness, fainting, chest pain, a racing or irregular heartbeat, or shortness of breath, talk to a health professional. A trend in an app is a reason to ask, not an answer.

Following It in Kaizora

Resting Heart Rate is a metric on Kaizora’s Vitals page, and it’s averaged, not added up, so a week’s value is the average of its days.

1. Bring it in. Your Apple Watch’s resting heart rate comes in with your Apple Health export, alongside heart rate variability and sleep. See Importing From Apple Health. Or log your morning count on Vitals with Log.
2. Watch the trend. On Resting Heart Rate’s page, set the chart to a year and each point is a week’s average. The seasonal drift and any unusual weeks stand out.
3. Mark your own band. Add a reference range around your usual values, for example a mild band starting 10 bpm above your normal, so weeks outside it are flagged on the chart and on Home. Your band should be your own, or one your doctor gives you. See Reference Ranges.
4. Look for what goes with it. On Correlations, one of the suggested sets puts Time Asleep, Resting Heart Rate, and Heart Rate Variability (RMSSD) together. Add Dietary Alcohol or Exercise Time and see what lines up. See Comparing Metrics.
5. Check what happened. The Timeline shows a day as it happened: the night before, what you ate, the workout. A high morning often has an explanation the day before.

Resting heart rate and heart rate variability often move in opposite directions. If you track both, read What Is Heart Rate Variability?

The Short Version

• For adults, 60 to 100 bpm at rest is the usual range; athletes can be well below 60.
• Your own normal is much narrower, and changes from it matter more than the range.
• Sleep, illness, alcohol, heat, stress, fitness, and medicines all move it.
• Measure the same way every day and follow the weekly average.

You can follow your resting heart rate beside everything else for free: here’s what Kaizora does.

Sources

• American Heart Association, All About Heart Rate (Pulse) and Target Heart Rates Chart.
• Quer G, Gouda P, Galarnyk M, Topol EJ, Steinhubl SR, “Inter- and intraindividual variability in daily resting heart rate and its associations with age, sex, sleep, BMI, and time of year: retrospective, longitudinal cohort study of 92,457 adults,” PLOS ONE 15, no. 2 (2020): e0227709. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0227709
• Radin JM, Wineinger NE, Topol EJ, Steinhubl SR, “Harnessing wearable device data to improve state-level real-time surveillance of influenza-like illness in the USA: a population-based study,” Lancet Digital Health 2, no. 2 (2020): e85–e93. doi:10.1016/S2589-7500(19)30222-5
• Pietilä J et al., “Acute effect of alcohol intake on cardiovascular autonomic regulation during the first hours of sleep in a large real-world sample of Finnish employees: observational study,” JMIR Mental Health 5, no. 1 (2018): e23. doi:10.2196/mental.9519