Health: Resting Heart Rate (RHR)

The heart at Rest.

My resting heart rate this morning was measured at 39 bpm. This is maintained without any endurance or prolonged stressful activities too.  You don't have to do endless steady-starte cardio workouts to improve cardiovascular health.

Why is this relevant? Well your resting heart rate is one indication of aerobic fitness. Exercise makes your heart stronger and more efficient, each contraction pumps relatively more blood and needs fewer beats per minute to do its work.

Consider perhaps the most important muscle in the body, not just the muscles you can see in the mirror.

Read more about heart health:

Heart Rate monitor for your smart phone:

Review: Instant Heart Rate App (iPhone)

 My resting heart rate during testing

There are a few apps for the iPhone that promise to read and display your heart rate.  None of these seem to work very well - if at all.  However I have found a gem of an app that actually works and is very accurate.

What is more phenomenal is how it does this.  It uses the camera flash on the iPhone 4 to measure the change in colour as blood flow increases and decreases with your pulse, taking around 30 seconds to read.  This is a functional as well as a very impressive app, and the cheapest heart rate monitor I have come across.  

It's free (with ads and limited functionality) - or 0.59p (UK) for a fully featured version.

Note: Resting heart rate (RHR) - is the number of heart beats per minute when we are at rest; the average is usually between 60 and 80/min.  The resting heart rate can be one indication of your basic fitness level, in most cases the lower the better.   The better trained your body, the less effort and fewer beats per minute it takes your heart to pump blood to your body whilst at rest.

Update on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 7:48 by Darryl Edwards

This is also available for Android devices at the Android Marketplace