blueduckxx

what is your resting heart rate?
did it lower as you improved with cycling?

also, what is your max heart rate?

Crash716

Doesn't matter

yes…

depends.

eugenek

There was a very long thread on that somewhere in the archives.

Mine went down to 56-58 from the lower 70's since I got serious about aerobic exercise a few months ago.

Forza

This. Heart rate is affected by many things...sleep, stress, diet, etc...it should/will vary from day to day.

lazerzxr

high 40s in the afternoon, low 40s first thing in the morning
yes
depends

bored117 

54 was last time I bothered to look.
Yes... I think it was in upper 70s.
Max on bike I saw was 209. Haven't seen that number for QUITE some time. (that was when I started cycling 1.7 years ago) I haven't had any effort as of late that went beyond 200. My leg tends to give out before my aerobic system does.

I <3 Robots

Checked a couple days ago with an Android app and my rhr was 58. Don't know my max.

JimF22003

I don't think this is necessarily a function of fitness. I've always had a very low heart rate. I just checked mine, and it was 46 BPM. It's even lower when I first get up in the morning.

I've been in the hospital hooked up to a heart rate monitor before, and they kept checking it to be sure it was hooked up right

TheHen

A few years back my husband volunteered at the local medical school as a fake patient for second year medical students. A student took his pulse, then turned to his instructor and said, "Could it be 36?" The instructor looked at my husband, asked if he worked out regularly, and then assured the student that he had taken the pulse correctly.

My own pulse dropped from 60 bpm to 50 bpm when I temporarily gave up coffee. There is a lot more to pulse rates than fitness.

chasm54

Other posters are correct that these figures won't tell you much. Some people have higher HRs, both resting and maximum, than others. However, for most people their resting HR will fall with regular exercise. Mine was in the fifties before I got back on the bike after a longish break, and is now in the low forties. This means the new me is fitter than the old me. It does not mean that I am fitter than another person who does as much or more exercise than me but has a higher resting HR - we're just different.

NathanC

I checked yesterday. 53 and I had a Red Bull twenty minutes earlier, fwiw.

Perp

Lowest I've seen from my Garmin before a ride was 43. Highest I've hit so far was 191

LeeRoySD

51 BPM

yes - by about 15 BPM but I was REALLY out of shape

189 Max

I agree with the others above in that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from this. The control system of the heart is rather complex and can be influenced by many factors, only one of which is general fitness.

Even though your RHR will most likely decrease by some amount as you become more fit, I think that you will be better served in your training by using some form of ouput/time as a measuring stick of fitness gains rather than RHR.

datlas 

Don't worry about others' numbers.

Just go by your own.

Debusama

Your heart rate is specific to your body, and although you can compare your current heart rate to different times of the year or times in your life to gauge relative fitness, comparing heart rates from person to person is not particularly useful. I’ll answer the question anyway though:


45
I was an avid distance runner prior to cycling, so not really.
192

ColinL

age 36 male, my resting HR is 65. I'm positive I'm not in as good shape as others here, but I'm in far better shape than I was 3 years ago when I got off the couch. blood pressure probably tells a more interesting story at rest.

observed max HR is 194, jogging. when cycling I've not exceeded 185 and the most recent time I hit that, 2 weeks ago, I felt like I had more to give but my legs didn't agree. typical ride I peak around 175-179.

vautrain

Docs generally tell you max heart rate = 220 - your age. But that's just a generalization.

Commodus

I have no idea what my heart rate is at any time, but I remember my girlfriend took my pulse one time and said it was unusually low. She's a nurse.

I remember watching "Stars and Water Carriers" and they said it was normal for endurance athletes to have a low resting heart rate...

generalkdi

Max : around 190 I guess.
lowest before : around 70
Avg now : around 60

ddimick

I'm 40 and my max heart rate is 195. I asked my doctor and he said they don't give it a second thought unless you're 15% outside the calculation above.

Looigi

The calc means little. It's only used to estimate max heart rate if you don't know what yours is for the purpose of determining workout zones. Hitting your actual max is very difficult and for me takes closely spaced max effort intervals. At 60 years old mine is 182 with a true resting rate in the upper 40s.

eugenek

Just a month ago I was surprised to find that my resting heart rate was down to 56-58. Today it's 46. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

DropDeadFred

you're supposed to check it right before you go to sleep for several days to find the average.

resting 60ish
max reached 203

fishymamba

I'm 16

Resting: 53 BPM
Don't know
Max: Around 220 BPM Blacked out at this point, it was the first time I went on a "fast" ride about a year and a half ago.

ancker

Resting: 45
Max: 207 (Highest I've seen anyway)
Age: 29

Definitely improved when I started riding.