Lower Your Resting Heart Rate (The Simple Science Most People Miss) | Dr. Andy Galpin 5 Minute Phys
In a Nutshell
Resting heart rate (RHR) reflects cardiovascular health, with ideal adult ranges of 60-80 bpm (elite athletes: 30s-40s bpm), determined by cardiac output = heart rate × stroke volume; lowering RHR requires increasing stroke volume via exercise to pump more blood per beat while keeping output fixed. Endurance training—high-intensity (boosts preload/stretch) or low-intensity steady-state (increases blood volume)—is most effective, supplemented by strength training; a 1-ounce stroke volume increase can drop RHR from 70 to 43 bpm. If RHR remains high despite exercise, check stress, sleep, breathing, or genetics.
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Whether you're a high performing athlete or just interested in general health and longevity, your resting heart rate is one of the most critical pieces of information you should pay attention to. There's a reason your doctor measures it every single time you go in for a visit. We measure it in our clients as often as possible. It gives great insights into overall health, cardiovascular fitness, whether you're training too much or too little, got sick, are experiencing bad sleep, and a number of other factors.
How do we make sure that our resting heart rate's in a great spot? We need to first start by understanding what a good resting heart rate even is. If you're like one of the hummingbirds that's currently outside of my window, you might be cruising around at 1,000 or even 1,200 beats per minute. If you're a whale or a large mammal, you might be at five or six. Human babies, surprisingly enough, are actually oftentimes 150 to even 200 beats per minute, and that's completely normal. But most average adults are going to be sitting in the 60 to 80 beats per minute range. High performing endurance athletes are really commonly in the low 30s or even 40s. I know personally many that I have coached are in the 32 to 35 range. There have been documented cases of endurance athletes being as low as the high 20s. There's one legendary story of an 80 plus year old man with a resting heart rate of 26 beats per minute, though I personally can't attest to the accuracy of that legend.
If your resting heart rate's a little bit higher than you'd like, we need to actually start by understanding why it's there in the first place. Your heart rate is determined by something called your cardiac output. We often express this in liters per minute, and it's basically how many liters of blood we're moving throughout our heart in a given minute. Cardiac output is generally fixed. At rest, while you're sitting here watching this video, you might have a cardiac output of 3 to 4, maybe up to 5 L per minute. Whether you got more or less fit may or may not change that. The demand for oxygen at rest is pretty much the same. How you get that demand though is variable.
Cardiac output is determined by two factors. It is your heart rate multiplied by your stroke volume. Your heart rate is how many times you're beating per minute. Your stroke volume is how much blood is pumping out of your heart per pump. If you were to increase your stroke volume, this would mean your resting heart rate can go down so that your cardiac output stays the same. That is the exact game we're playing.
Let's imagine at rest your stroke volume was 2 to 3 ounces. But when you started exercising that increased to 7 or 8 ounces and since you're doing that your heart rate is also elevated. For many people, your maximum heart rate is 180 beats per minute. At 180 beats per minute, you're actually beating 3 to 4 times per second. Every time you're doing that, you got about 25 to 30 ounces that are coming out. That's about a pound and a half to two pounds of blood coming out of your heart per pump. Because you're doing that for 60 seconds, you got to multiply that all by 60, which means you're kicking out about 85 pounds of blood in a given minute. That is a tremendous amount of work that your heart is doing.
If you were to put yourself through all that, your body would eventually adapt and it would start saying, "We have a high demand for cardiac output." It actually can't increase its maximal heart rate. One of the limiters that you see is if our heart rate gets too high, we don't have enough time to fill blood in the heart in between pumps to then push more blood back out. Maximum heart rate will stay the same. Our only option here is to increase our stroke volume. By doing that, even at rest, we have a higher stroke volume, which means we kick out more blood per pump, which allows our resting heart rate to come down when our cardiac output is fixed.
Let's just say that cardiac output is 3.8 L per minute. A very common number for an average adult. If your stroke volume was only 2 ounces, this would mean your resting heart rate has to be 70 beats per minute to give you that 3.8 L per minute total. But if you went and increase a stroke volume to 3 ounces, this would allow your resting heart rate to drop all the way to 43. The functional difference from going from a resting heart rate of 70 beats per minute to 43 beats per minute is simply giving yourself one more ounce per pump.
How do we get that done? The best thing you could possibly do is exercise. There is no magic recipe or protocol. The heart is responding to everything you're doing. Think about endurance exercise though as your first stop on this journey.
High-Intensity Exercise
High-intensity exercise is awesome. It is particularly effective at increasing what is called preload and stretching. This means the amount of blood that's being pumped into your heart. Your muscle and your heart works just like your muscles in the rest of your body. If it's stretched, it wants to contract really hard. If you send a bunch of blood flying into your heart really fast, your left ventricle, the bottom side, which is what kicks your blood actually into circulation, will get stretched really hard and really fast, causing it to contract really hard. This gets more blood out per pump because it's squeezing with more intensity.
Low-Intensity Steady State Exercise
Longer duration, low intensity, continuous, steady state stuff is also effective. You'll have additional benefits there of increasing total blood volume, which is one of the single most important adaptations to all endurance exercise. More blood, more preload, more stretch, higher stroke volume, lower resting heart rate.
You can do either one of these, only high intensity, only lower intensity, or you could do a combination. There is no current research that suggests one of them is fundamentally far better than the other one. Whatever fits your lifestyle and personal preferences will work.
Strength Training
A third thing you'd want to consider would be strength training or resistance exercise. Not nearly as effective as endurance exercise for stroke volume, but it does have benefits for the left ventricle. Can improve left ventricle size in the good way as well as that contractility or strength. I would probably do a combination of all three styles of exercise because we get different benefits there. A lot of overlap, and plus, we have all the other myriad of benefits we get from these forms of exercise.
If you've done all that and you still have a higher resting heart rate than you'd like, it could be related to things like stress, bad sleep, or even a clinical sleep disorder, or things like breathing mechanics. If you're struggling to breathe, you're going to have to breathe more frequently to get things moving through your system, and your heart rate will respond to that. If it's none of those things, then it could simply be genetic. You might not have anything to worry about. Push the pace and try to maximize your overall health and performance, but don't be freaked out by it and worry unnecessarily if you're doing all the big things right in your lifestyle and health and practice.
I hope that was informative and it helped. I'd love to hear any progress that you make. Thanks for checking out another episode of 5 Minute Physiology. If you enjoyed this and want to keep learning more about human health and performance, consider signing up for the Catalyst. That's my completely free newsletter where we share information about places I've learned from, great books, podcasts, social media people to follow, and other ways to stay up-to-date with the most recent evidence-informed approaches in this field.
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