Resting heart rate is one of the most powerful markers you can track. As you improve your cardiovascular health, it will drop over time, but likewise, it can rise with illness, fatigue, or declining fitness.
In this guide, we explain five ways to lower your resting heart rate.
Learn: Sleeping heart rate vs resting heart rate – what’s the difference
Key takeaways
- Resting heart rate drops over time as cardiovascular fitness improves
- It can also rise as fitness declines
- Look beyond the noise of day-to-day data and track it over weeks and months and look for trends.
1. Run, ride or swim three times a week
Across 191 studies , people who trained finished about 3.3 beats a minute below people who did not. The programs that managed it mostly ran three sessions a week for twelve weeks.
Aerobic training makes your heart a stronger pump, so it moves more blood with every beat. Fewer beats are then needed to supply the body, and the resting number settles lower.
You are changing the muscle itself, which is why this takes months and nothing quicker works.
2. Keep your nights the same length
Ultrahuman looked at a year of nights from 103,217 Ring members . The members whose sleep length swung most from one night to the next ran 5.6 to 7.1 bpm higher than the steadiest, in every age group.
Bedtime mattered less than you would think. Compare members whose bedtimes were equally steady, and the sleep-length gap was still there, in all nine groups tested.
This is member data rather than an experiment, so it cannot tell you what happens when you fix your own sleep. The one experiment that can is small. Sixteen adults kept a set schedule for twelve nights; their sleep length varied by 31 minutes instead of 57, and their resting heart rate fell from 65 to 62 bpm .
So watch your wake time as closely as your bedtime. An early alarm after a long lie-in changes the length of the night and leaves the bedtime alone.
3. Add yoga – but don’t expect strength work to move the needle
Of those 191 studies, 21 were yoga trials. Yoga and endurance training were the only two kinds of exercise that lowered resting heart rate in both men and women. Yoga was worth around a 5bpm reduction.
However, if you’re strength training in the gym, don’t expect a change in resting heart rate. Strength training on its own has tons of benefits for longevity and health – but when it comes to resting heart rate, it doesn’t have a discernible effect.
4. Look out for short-term factors
There are plenty of factors that increase resting heart rate, and sometimes, this can take days to fully come back to baseline:
- Evening alcohol: the most reliable single-night cause there is.
- Late hard training: an intense session near bedtime keeps your heart rate up for hours.
- A warm bedroom: common and easy to miss.
- Illness, a heavy late meal, a rough day: usually clears in 24-48 hours.
5. Think long term
Working on your resting heart rate takes time – and a meaningful effect shows up after about three months of training three times a week.
How much you get depends on where you start. The fall was bigger the higher someone’s resting heart rate was beforehand, and smaller the older they were. The people with most to gain are the ones furthest from where they want to be, which is the opposite of how most fitness advice works.
It also means the number stops eventually. A well-trained heart has nowhere left to go, and healthy adults sit anywhere from around 40 to over 100, so there is no single figure to chase.
What will not move your baseline
Breathing exercises, cold showers, cold plunges and one good night’s sleep all work on tomorrow’s reading. They can take the edge off a stressful evening, and that is worth having.
What none of them do is change how much blood your heart moves per beat, and that is the only thing your baseline answers to.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to lower your resting heart rate?
About three months, training three times a week. If your number drops overnight, something temporary was pushing the previous reading up.
Does strength training lower resting heart rate?
Not on its own. Endurance training and yoga were the two kinds that lowered it in both men and women across 191 studies.
Why has my resting heart rate stopped falling?
You have probably reached your floor. The biggest falls came from the people who started highest, so a well-trained heart has less room left.
Do breathing exercises lower resting heart rate?
They can settle a stressful evening, which may show up in that night’s reading. They will not move your baseline.
Reviewed by Mukul Mittal, MD.
THE AUTHOR
