Best way to decrease resting HR?

Go for long, moderate intensity bike rides. Aim for 75 miles per week.

40 to 60, your quite the athlete... it should be 60 to 100. hmm., I am around 57 to 60, when I drink any alcohol, goes up higher., sleep is a big one. you should get around 7 hours to keep it pretty good, and yes, its all about your movement, I go all day long, the longer you sit all day. the higher it will be. stress, caffeine. oh, so many factors!, I have a fitbit. message me. and I will add you.

I haven't used a fitbit in quite a while, but I was under the impression that their HR monitors were pretty inaccurate. In anycase OP, your HR will fluctuate throughout the day. Even with that variance most people are still within the "normal" range (which you fall into).

Most often the way to decrease it is by exercising. I do minimal cardio (none) and I was Sinus Brady during my last 2 EKGs (<60). Despite the fact that i only lift, it still increases my HR (squatting the most if I had to guess).
I couldn't actually tell you WHEN my RHR started to decrease, as I've never tracked it.

Keep in mind that genetics play a role. Some people just have higher resting HRs than others.

Weight loss and exercise will lower your HR but no need for intense exercise. Easy cardiovascular work will do (HR below 80% of max, fully conversational during effort, barely breathing hard). This can be as simple as walking at a brisker pace than normal or doing a very light jog.

The great thing about easy CV work is that it's truly easy and you can actually do as much of it as you want. I used to be a believer that all exercise had to be at 'ugly' efforts but once I discovered how to work out easy, I found that I actually wanted to and could work out more frequently.

With little to no intense exercise, I dropped my resting HR from the low 70's to the mid-50's in just under four months. I mainly did easy runs with some elliptical thrown in on bad weather days. About 30 minutes per day 5 days per week. I should also note that I lost about 40 pounds over the same period (diet did most of the work, but easy effort exercises burn just about the same amount of calories as tough effort exercises).

I still do some intensity work if I'm training for a race or just want to mix things up but for the most part 80%-85% of my exercise is at easy effort.

My resting HR was 48 last time I checked.....as other have said, lose weight & lots of low to medium intensity cardio but it takes time.

This mornings run was a fairly relaxed 5 miles, my avg HR was 135......the same run a few years ago would have had me in the 150s. Patience and consistency are your friends.

DX2JX2 wrote: »

jemhh wrote: »

I've long read that an RHR between 60 and 100 is fine. Lately, however, I seem to be getting the impression that many think that even the 70s is not low enough. I'm coming up empty when I try to find something indicating that though. Does anybody have research on this? My RHR is generally 72, which I've thought was fine but now I'm wondering.

A RHR in the 70's is fine. It's not something you have to worry about.

I'm guessing that most of us didn't target to specifically reduce our RHRs when we started losing weight/exercising. It just came with the package. I can say that after moving from the low 70's to below 60 I can actually feel the difference. I feel much more relaxed overall and it seems like I'm carrying significantly less tension in my body. Of course, this could also be related to my weight loss and improved CV conditioning but I'll take it either way.

I really have no idea what my RHR was before I started exercising and lost 50 pounds. I'm assuming it went down but I can't pinpoint it as having made me feel any different since I was losing weight, becoming more fit in general, etc. all at the same time. It's interesting that you can feel the difference now that yours has reduced more. I guess it's something I'll wait to see if I ever notice.

alexsuffell wrote: »

Otherwise, long steady-state exercise is anecdotally best for reducing resting heart-rate, although I've not looked for studies to prove it.

When I was in the ER, the alarm on the ECG they had me hooked up to kept going off every time my HR feel below 50 (?) bpm. After a few times, the nurse said something about it, I told him I'm a cyclist, and he disabled the alarm. Cyclists have strong hearts, large stroke volume.

Cycling is as far as you can get from a steady state though.

See http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Endurance_Adaptations.

In F. Scharhag-Rosenberger, et al, Time course of changes in endurance capacity: a 1-yr training study, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19346973, they found that resting HR decreased by a total of 9 +/- 6 min(-1) after 3 to 6 months in eighteen previously untrained subjects after completing a 12-month jogging/walking program on 3 d x wk(-1) 45 min per session with a constant HR prescription of 60% HR reserve.

It took me about 3 years to drop my resting HR from high 70s to low 40s. Cycling is my primary sport with weekday lunch walks. Over that period I dropped 40 pounds. I went from 146 hours in 2014, 410 hours in 2015, 413 hours in 2016, and only 203 hours this year due to an injury at end of 2016 and other distractions (cycling, don't track my walks as religiously). Millage-wise, 2261 miles in 2014, 7012 miles in 2015, 6378 miles in 2016 (through mid November), and 2689 miles so far this year. I do a great deal of training indoors so take the yearly mileage with a grain of salt.