Resting heart rateRHR
Your heart rate at complete rest, a simple fitness and recovery marker.
Resting heart rate is how many times your heart beats per minute when you are genuinely at rest, which in practice means measured on waking, before you sit up and well before coffee. Typical adult values run roughly 60 to 100 bpm, and trained endurance athletes are often far below that.
Fitness lowers it because a stronger heart moves more blood per beat, so fewer beats are needed for the same output. That is why watching your own resting rate fall over a few months of consistent training is one of the more satisfying signals available for free.
It carries information beyond fitness. In a large cohort study, each 10 bpm increase in resting heart rate was associated with a 6 to 11% higher risk of all cause mortality depending on smoking status, independent of the usual risk factors. It is an association rather than a lever, so lowering the number is not itself the goal, but it is not merely a fitness curiosity either.
The daily use is different from the population use. A sustained rise of several beats above your own baseline commonly precedes or accompanies illness, poor sleep, alcohol, heat, dehydration or accumulated training fatigue. Wearables surface this well because they measure the same way every night.
Compare it with yourself, not with other people. Between person variation is large and partly genetic, and a naturally low or high resting rate says little on its own. What is informative is a change against your own normal.
Some causes are medical rather than lifestyle. A persistently high rate at rest, a very low one with dizziness or fainting, or an irregular rhythm are reasons to see a GP rather than to train harder. Thyroid problems, anaemia and medication all move it.
In practice, take it the same way each morning, watch the weekly trend rather than any single reading, and use it alongside HRV in our recovery readiness index.