The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Since I’m spamming the wellness thread, has anyone had any success significantly changing their resting heart rate? If so, what did you do?
At the moment my RHR is ~58 at night, 75-85 in the day without recently eating or exercising. It’s my understanding this is significantly too high. Any advice?
Lift a lot and some hiit sessions on your rest days. I was able to lower mine to nearly 40s pretty easily in a few months, I used my smartphone for measurement, it may he off by a bit but having higher levels of muscle mass, lower fat percentage and something like bi weekly hiit sprints on a bike would help. I was doing mma 6 days a week when my rhr was the lowest.
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In addition to the responses below 2 other things to consider are reducing salt intake and making sure you are consuming a sufficient amount of magnesium every day. Neither may be applicable to you, but they could be a place to look if regular exercise isn't getting you the results you want.
Blood pressure might be another good data point to measure. I don't know enough to say more but I have experienced that blood pressure and heart rate can be related in a complex way (e.g. something can cause both RHR and blood pressure to increase, or RHR can increase to compensate for a drop in blood pressure).
Btw, I think 60-80 is a normal RHR when awake.
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When I don't have stimulants in my body, my RHR is around 39 at night. With stimulants, it's on average 44. I chalk it up to a large volume of cardio done at just below my lactate threshold.
Either get a lactate test or find the general range of your lactate threshold (whatever your cardio exercise of choice, do it for 60 minutes, drop the first 10 minutes, then use the average effort/HR as baseline), then do as much at that effort as you can fit in your day with preference to longer pieces. If you're struggling to recover afterwards, you're going too hard. You should start seeing results after a few weeks if you respond anything like I did.
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Cardiovascular fitness is certainly the simplest way. Having a powerful heart results in fewer strokes to move the same amount of blood volume. On days that I don't have any alcohol my heart rate drops into the low-40s while sleeping or while being mindfully restful. There is no shortcut here, but it's also not all that difficult - any decent amount of running, biking, or swimming will yield that result within a year or so.
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That's...not too high. The average is 60-100 bpm. Over 100 bpm at rest is tachycardia but what you're describing isn't high. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?
Thank you, that’s interesting to hear. I was under the impression that waking HRH for a man in early 30s is meant to be 60-70 but perhaps I’m wrong or have high expectations. I had surgery for tachycardia last year and very low physical energy in general so I’m self-conscious about it. But perhaps I’m overthinking.
75-85 is higher than average for a healthy adult, and I'd generally recommend cardio to try to improve it, but it's "worse than the median", not "infarction at any moment".
What was up with the tachycardia surgery, though? If you've had doctors looking at the problem before and recommending surgical (ablation?) treatment then you should probably ignore general recommendations and ask your GP or cardiologist about your specific situation. The answer might be "yeah, you're physically normal now, the general advice applies" or "yeah, exercise, but in your case it should be lower intensity for longer times", but there's a tiny chance of something like "oh, shit, we need to take another scan" that you'll never learn from a rando.
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Regular cardio exercise (at pretty high heart rates, not just the fat burning zone) should do the trick. At least 3x30m per week.
If you have trauma or other anxieties in your subconscious/body, dealing with that will improve your rhr and heart rate variability for sure. It did for me. I used to have a pretty pressurizing, fast rhr and now I'm much calmer. A more dynamic heart rate that can quickly and often switch gears according to situations is actually healthier, somewhat counterintuitively. A heart rate that's stuck in one gear most of the time is a sign of poor cardiovascular health and/or chronic stress.
Can you give more details about the second part? I'm a pretty fit endurance athlete, but my resting heart rate has been elevated above baseline for at least the last 3 months. It could be sickness, but I think there's a big element of anxiety there too.
Sure, but in order to speak on the subject in any real actionable detail, I'd have to ask you some questions that could feel personal. Might wanna take it to PM.
Or I could just write briefly and in more generalized form here.
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High heart rates being 150s/160s? I can do that in easy intervals (6x60run/120walk, for example). Was trying to do the couch to 5k before but stopped due to shin splints and worries about aggravating previous tachycardia.
Now trying again but a lower amount and slower rate of growth.
Sadly this isn’t me. My heart will go from 160 to 120s in a minute or so, but will be above 100 for three hours at least after a run.
This depends what your max heart rate is. Max heart rate is mostly set by genetics and age, it doesn't change much over any short period of time. If your max HR is 180, then 160s is high. If your max HR is 200, 160s is not that high - I'll spend a half marathon above that the entire time.
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High intensity interval training is supposed to be the most effective way to do cardio, but that assumes you've already got a good base fitness.
You estimate your personal max hr by subtracting your age from 220. Then multiply by desired percentage.
60-80% of personal max is a good level to be at for 30+ minutes.
Hm. That's a very long recovery!
Do you get enough water? Eat healthy? Enough (good quality) sleep? Low or no amounts of caffeine?
If you can answer yes to all of those, and still have very long recovery periods, I suggest sticking to non-interval training for a few weeks or months. Build your base fitness.
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