quote:<HR>Originally posted by brianfie:
sounds OK. Resting HR is not a good indicator of fitness for running, thought it will drop in the beginning of training.

-b<HR>

It doesn't mean everything, but I believe that a low resting pulse rate is an indicator of fitness. Mine is always lower when I am in my best shape, and I think it's the same for most people. Anything under 50 is considered low, although most distance runners who have been at it very long have one in the 40's, and sometimes even in 30's. Average for the general population is around 70.

One example of resting HR not being a good example of fitness level is Jim Ryun (first HSer to break 4 minute mile). His resting HR I believe was in the 60s.

"First, because endurance athletes have strong hearts, they generally have low heart rates. As an analogy, consider a bricklayer lifting bricks. If his arm muscles are strong from lifting lots of bricks, he can move 10 bricks with each lift rather than just two or three. Similarly, if your heart muscle is strong thanks to running, it has a higher stroke volume, which means that it can pump more blood with each beat than an untrained heart. It can also pump the same amount of blood in a minute using fewer beats. The average resting heart rate of endurance athletes is around 50-60 beats per minute. I've seen one report, though, of a healthy athlete whose resting pulse was only 25 beats per minute.

Doctors who are familiar with athletes only get worried - and follow up accordingly - when a resting heart rate is lower than 30. But even this can be completely normal (and usually is) if the athlete is otherwise healthy. The slow heart rate indicates a strong heart, but this alone does not make you a better runner. There are too many other factors involved in running performance.

Are there any problems associated with your low heart rate? Perhaps one. It does make you more vulnerable to anything that reduces the blood flow back to the heart, such as coughing or choking on food. This occurs because the reduced blood flow causes the heart to slow down even more, to allow more time for blood to enter the heart.

And that can set off an involuntary nervous response that leads to fainting. Apart from this, provided that you have no other symptoms or complaints, your resting pulse should not concern you unduly."

**this info attributed to http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/news/article.asp?UAN=1539[/URL" target="_blank">

Low resting heart rates can also be a sign of overtraining. Don't think "lower is better."

Also, no one number means much unless you're keeping track of it, e.g., unless you have enough data over a period of time.

My best friend in high school had an abnormally low resting HR. One day in biology class, we took our pulses (it was a topic of study). His was, I kid you not, 36 beat per minute. I felt his pulse with my own fingers and timed it for an entire minute. 36. He wasn't in aerobic condition at all. His HR was just low.

There are those whose resting HRs match those of Lance Armstrong and Dean Karnazes yet whose fitness doesn't match theirs.

I don't put a lot of stock in low resting HR.

if you keep a daily log of your resting pulse it will give you an indicator of changes in your system. If there is an abrupt change either up or down look for something going wrong - illness, infection, injury, overtraining, undertraining - something is causing the change and is a cause for thought.

Mine is 46, down from 62 before I started working out.