How to Lower Resting Heart Rate

Your resting heart rate is based on the amount of beats for each minute your heart is beating when you have been in a prone position and you haven’t moved for about 10 minutes or so. The lower the number you have, the healthier you are. The average beats per minute most adults have are from 60 to 100, but athletes have a lower range of 40 to 60 beats per minute.

How to Lower Resting Heart Rate

It is important to know what your resting heart rate is. If it is in the healthy range you have nothing to worry about. But if it is in the high range, you may want to check out the following tips to lower your resting heart rate.

1. Exercise Regularly and Vigorously

Running hard is effective in raising the amount of blood it pumps every time your heart beats. It is responsible for increasing the stroke volume of your heart by about 10 percent. Jogging or any other slower continual form of exercise does not have any effect on lowering your resting heart rate.

2. Get a Good Night’s Sleep

Loud noises that interfere with your sleep and wake you up out of the blue will raise your heart beat by around 13 bpm. Things like loud music and dogs barking will contribute to your heartbeat racing more than normal. So find a quit place or try to eliminate those noises and have a good night's sleep is good trick to lower resting heart rate.

3. Stop Smoking

How to lower resting heart rate? Do not smoke! Smoking already has many negative things attached to it and a higher resting heart rate is just one more thing to add. If you quit smoking, you can reduce your resting heart rate and improve the health of your heart at the same time.

4. Limit Caffeine Intake

People usually reach for a cup of coffee when they want to boost energy levels and get going. But caffeine is notorious for raising resting heart rates. If you already have a high heart rate, you should limit your coffee to two cups a day. Decaf coffee can be substituted and will help keep your caffeine levels low.

5. Quit Alcohol

Even if you don’t drink all the time, just remember that alcohol has been found to raise resting heart rates as well as regular heart rates. If you are trying to reduce your resting heart rate, keep your intake of alcohol to a minimum.

6. Cut Down on Stress

How to lower resting heart rate? Do not be stressed-out! Stress seems to be the basis for many medical conditions and it is the same way with your high resting heart rate. Adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine are the stress hormones that make your heart race when you become stressed or in danger. If you can reduce your stress levels, you can lower your resting heart rate. If you don’t know how to relax, there are a number of ways to chill out:

  • Take a soothing bath or listen to soothing music.
  • Meditate: use a guided CD if you don’t know how to start.
  • Watch a favorite movie that will take you away from your stress for a couple of hours.
  • A good massage can relax you within about an hour and massage regularly to bring a fast heartbeat down.

7. Maintain Healthy Weight

Losing weight is important but so is maintain that loss. Keeping your weight at a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 will help your heart to assume a healthy resting rate. When you are overweight your heart has to work harder to make sure that the blood supply and nutrients get to every part of your body. Lowering your weight means your heart doesn’t have to work as hard.

How to Measure Resting Heart Rate

Take your pulse to find out the rate at which your heart is beating at. Most of the time they call your pulse your heart rate which is actually how many times your heart beats every minute (BPM). Here is how you can find out what your heart rate is at rest.

How You Prepare

Preparation for finding your resting heart rate is easy. All you need is either a digital watch or one that has a second hand. Look for a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Taking your pulse causes no pain.

How to Take Your Pulse

The prerequisite of "How to lower resting heart rate" should be knowing your heart rate or pulse. There are a number of places where you can check your pulse: your wrist, neck, groin, top of your foot, behind your knee or in the temple area. You can also check it on our wrist below your thumb.

  • Put two fingers of your other hand on the artery. But do use your thumb for it has its own pulse which can be mistaken as your heart pulse.
  • Count how many bets you can feel for 30 seconds then double that number. That is the number of beats your heart is beating per minute.

If you have trouble finding your pulse this way you can pick up a pulse meter that will deliver the information automatically.

Know a demonstration on how to measure resting heart rate from the video below:

 
 
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