Resting heart rate
Your lowest sleeping heart rate, and the vital most scores lean on.
What goes in
- Sleeping resting heart rate
- The lowest 5-minute average heart rate during the main sleep, in bpm. Recovery, Strain and the Health Monitor use this.
- Google's daily resting heart rate
- Google Health's own daily value. Pulse Age uses this one, and Strain falls back to it when there is no sleeping value.
How it is weighted
- Recovery
- 20% of the score. Lower than your baseline counts in your favour.
- Strain
- Sets the bottom of your heart-rate reserve, the range Strain zones are measured in.
- Health Monitor
- Checked against your own normal range, at least about ±5 bpm wide.
- Pulse Age
- Against a reference of 60 bpm. 70 bpm with everything else at reference adds about 0.75 years.
What the bands mean
Day to day, Pulse reads resting heart rate against your own baseline: a few beats above it after a hard day, a late meal or alcohol is common. Over the long term, a lower resting heart rate goes with lower mortality in population studies (about 9% higher risk per 10 bpm in a 2016 meta-analysis), which is why it is one of Pulse Age's inputs.
Limits
A minimum over many 5-minute windows reads a little lower on long nights, and optical sensors can drop out. A band worn loosely or missing a night leaves gaps. A raised value is a prompt to notice, not a diagnosis.
Sources
- Zhang D, Shen X, Qi X. Resting heart rate and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the general population: a meta-analysis. CMAJ 2016;188(3):E53-63
- Altini M, Plews D. What is behind changes in resting heart rate and heart rate variability? Sensors 2021;21(23):7932
- noop: the open-source analytics engine Pulse's recovery, strain and sleep scoring is ported from