What Is a Good Heart Rate?

Your heart rate offers a real-time snap of how your heart muscles operate. And you would be hard-pressed to find any metrics as intrinsically linked to your wellness as your heartbeat while gauging your body functions. 

Whether you are in off-piste skiing, underwater diving, or need to follow up on your body stats to level up your fitness, regular heart rate monitoring can help jumpstart your workout regimen by keeping your ticker in check.

But what is a good heart rate? To unpack everything essential you should know about your heart rate and optimising your fitness level with ease, read on. 

What is Heart Rate?

Heart rate is the pace of your heartbeat calculated based on  how many times your heart contracts over a minute (bpm). 

There are two stages to the heart pumping cycle: 

• Systole: The heart contracts, and the right atrium and right ventricle, two right chambers, pump deoxygenated blood to the lungs for purification through veins.
• Diastole: The span between two subsequent contractions when the myocardium (heart muscle) relaxes and the left atrium and left ventricle, two left chambers, receive incoming oxygen-rich blood from the lungs to pump it to the body through arteries. 

The healthier the heart is, the more efficiently and at the exact rate it can pump and make blood reach each body part through the circulatory system.

How many times your heart beats over a minute is a factor of several variants:

• your physical requirements
• the rate your body consumes oxygen and excretes carbon dioxide at
• genetic state
• fitness level
• health issues, more specifically, cardiovascular illness, and more. 

Usually, your HR is proximal to your pulse reading if monitored at a peripheral point. 

Types of Heart Rate

Resting Heart Rate

The resting heart rate (RHR)/normal heart rate denotes the number your heart has to contract over a minute to pump the minimum quantity of blood that your body requires as you’re relaxed. Based on studies conducted by the AHA (American Heart Association), the standard RHR for an adult of 15 years and above can range anywhere between 60 and 100 bpm. 

If bradycardia (HR lower than 60 bpm) or tachycardia (heartbeat faster than 100 bpm/high heart rate) couples with drowsiness, exhaustion, etc., it may be an indication of underlying illness. However, having RHR below 60 bpm is also normal for some people. For instance, the RHR reading for runners may be as low as 40bpm.

Again, women’s RHR reading can be 2-7 bpm more than men’s RHR.

The factors that influence your RHR are:

• Exposure to extreme temperatures can result in an upsurge in your RHR.
• While medicines like beta-blockers can significantly slow down your heart rate, consuming antithyroid drugs and levothyroxine can speed it up.  
• Being too stressed or anxious can surge your RHR.
• Higher RHR is common in individuals with obesity as their hearts have to exert more to pump oxygen to the entire body.
•  Regular consumption of caffeine and tobacco can raise RHR.

Maximum Heart Rate 

Your MRH is the peak of beats your heart can reach. Though it’s tricky to assess your MHR and requires endurance athletes to undergo the electrocardiogram process to evaluate their MHR precisely, it can inform you how hard you can push yourself during aerobic training. 

Target Heart Rate

Your THR/target heart rate is the pulse rate you can sustain during moderate-intensity activities to boost your health and is estimated to range between 50% and 70% of your MRH. While undergoing vigorous training, it can go as high as 75-85% of your MHR. 

A quality heart rate monitor can help specify your THR and ensure you can start out steadily, safely, and at a rhythmic speed and hit your heart rate zone target without overexerting yourself.

Before getting in any exercise, make sure you consult a physician, particularly if you have any cardiovascular issue. Plus, ensure warming up and cooling down before and after working out to evade muscle injury and save your heart from letting up or speeding up at a quick pace.

What is a Good Heart Rate?

Let’s have a quick look into the normal rate based on age:

Age	HR (bpm)
Newborn	100-160
0-5 months	90-150
6-12 months	80-140
1-3 years	80-130
3-5 years	80-120
6-10 years	70-110
11-14 years	60-105
15 to above	60-100

Why Is Heart Rate Monitoring Critical?

Your heart rate value translates into a whole host of health information – pulmonary function, cardiovascular system, muscular function and more. Plus, it helps you better track your workout intensity to streamline your exercise routine and understand whether you are pushing your body too hard or should push it harder to reach the fitness level you are striving for.

According to studies, your RHR directly correlates with your fitness – the higher your RHR is, the more you are prone to cardiovascular diseases that can result in early death. Cardiologists found out that an RHR of 90+ bpm indicates underlying heart issues and can increase the death rate caused by heart diseases (doubled in males and tripled in females!).

Hence, regular heart rate tracking should be a critical component of your workout regime.

How Do Heart Rate Monitors Help?

Though you have a handful of manual processes to measure your HR, tracking it using a high-end HRM is always recommended, especially if you are:

• an endurance athlete
• runner, walker, or jogger
• cyclist
• Weight-loss aspirant
• triathlete
• skier, hiker, or climber
• suffering from cardiac injury
• injury-rehabilitation patient

Helps Optimise Your Fitness Level

HRMs aren’t fads – they are a must-have fitness tracking device that can offer data-driven feedback specific to your training intensity and body stats. Plus, you get customised exercise ideas and schedules tailored to your present fitness status. 

An HRM indicates the HR zone you work out in, how long you can sustain it by avoiding overexertion, and how to reach your THR zone safely and steadily. 

Thanks to HRMs that operate based on PPG or ECG technology and are more precise in providing your heart work-rate data than manual HR measuring systems. 

Workout Safely and Efficiently

Using an HRM helps define the training intensity and energy you exploit while working out. Thus you can optimise your energy output and cardiovascular activity schedule and ensure optimised caloric expenditure and balanced carbohydrate and fat burning. For instance, a higher heart rate during exercise indicates that your body uses the deposited carbohydrates as an energy source instead of fat – your body cannot burn fat as fast as it can burn carbohydrates. 

Put the Fire Back in Your Workout Regimen

You might have partied hard for weeks and stuffed your face with tempting food. But as your HRM screen shows you how hard you’re grafting right on your wrist and sends alerts like ‘workout a bit more’ or ‘incomplete exercise week,’ you may feel motivated to push yourself a little hard at the gym. HR monitoring is essential to ease back with your workout by blending cardio and strength precisely. 

How to Choose an HRM?

A quality HRM is your pacer, notifying you when to slow down or speed up your activity intensity to meet your set goals. 

With the market booming with tons of HRMs with bells and whistles, choosing the best one that can seamlessly suit your requirements and lifestyle may seem overwhelming. 

Unpack your precise guide to buying the best HRM:

HRM Type

You have two types of HRMs to choose from:

• Chest-strap HRM
• Wrist-based HRM

A chest-strap HRM operates based on electrocardiography technology and houses a spot-on transmitter and electrode pad as the sensor that sits snugly against your chest. 

On the flip side, a wrist-based HRM works based on photoplethysmography/PPG technology and shines lights of various wavelengths onto your wrist skin and tracks heart rate based on the data collected by the refracting/reflecting light. 

When it comes to point-to-point precision, chest straps are more exact than wrist-based optical sensors.

Target Heart Rate Zone Functionality

Unless you’re a pro cyclist, triathlete, or runner, investing in an HRM with no target heart rate functionality is a big fat NO. With THR zone functionality, you can program your HRM to notify you if your heart rate, while working out, goes beyond your set level. 

Seamless Data Transfer

Whether you go for an entry-level HR or a top-end one, make sure it’s dual-band – one that comes with both ANT+ and Bluetooth connectivity so the device can seamlessly sync with a whole host of third-party smartwatches and sports apps for effortless data transfer. 

Price 

Invest in an HRM that comes with a bright, bigger, and crisp display with clear texts, quality contrast and number, a responsive monitor, and offers the best bang for the buck.