Confused about resting heart rate

natijade

This is a bit random really and I'm not sure anyone can help but I'd really appreciate some opinions. I've taken my resting heart rate as I was interested on working to get it down. I currently have an overweight BMI of 27.2 and although I exercise regularly I wouldn't consider myself as training or exercising heavily or being very fit.

And yet taking my readings over 3 days as I read to do I got 65, 56 and 53! An average of 58! That seems really low for someone as unfit as I consider myself to be!? I took it with my Polar FT1 HRM, but I also got my sister to do it for me manually one of the days and she got 60.

I dunno, whenever I've had my blood pressure taken at the docs it's always been good, during my pregnancy etc. I just really expected it to be higher and I'm a bit stumped :-S

Can anyone shed any light on this for me? Am I missing something, is there another factor like max heart rate that I need to consider?

I want to make sure I get it right so I can use it to figure out calories burned!

Thanks!