Your heart rate while at rest is your lowest heart rate throughout the day. A resting heart rate isn't just a random function of the body. It serves a purpose and can vary from a low number of beats per minute to a high number of beats per minute and varies from person to person. Your resting heart rate can tell you if you are in good physical condition, and if you are not then you can improve your resting heart rate.
What Your Heart Rate Is
The number of times your heart beats in one minute is considered your heart rate. Your heart rate will change with varying levels of activity, excitement, and drug use and changes with age. Your resting heart rate is when your heart beats the least amount of times during healthy functioning.
Identifying a Healthy Heart
The resting heart rate of the average person ranges between 60 to 80 beats per minute. Healthy, endurance athletes generally have a heart rate lower than 60 beats per minute. It is not unusual to find an athlete's resting heart beating only 40 to 50 times per minute.
Significance
While at rest the average heart pumps out five liters of blood per minute. If your heart can do less work to pump the required amount of blood, your heart will be healthy longer. Imagine if your heart beat 10 less times per minute at rest for the rest of your life. You would have saved your heart from beating millions of times more than it needs to.
Measuring
A true resting heart rate is determined while sleeping or laying down for a long period of time. If you want a fairly accurate measure of your resting heart rate, lie down for five minutes and then measure your heart rate from your pulse for one minute. You can find your pulse in your wrist or neck, the most easily. Count each beat for one minute and you will have your resting heart rate. Avoid caffeine before measuring your resting heart rate. Also, you can get an electrocardiogram, or EKG, by a doctor for an accurate measure of your heart rate.
Improving
Improving your resting heart rate is possible. The method to improve it is aerobic exercise. As you get into better aerobic conditioning your resting heart rate will get lower. Aerobic exercise should be performed an average of five days a week. The American Heart Association suggests 30 minutes a day of moderate intensity activity, but if you work at a high intensity you can achieve heart benefits in as little as 20 minutes a day and train less days per week.
Performing aerobic exercise reduces your resting heart rate a number of ways. With aerobic conditioning your blood vessels expand, blood flow resistance decreases and the amount of blood forced out of the heart with each beat increases, just to name a few.
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