You can check your heart rate in about 60 seconds using nothing but two fingers and a clock. Place the tips of your index and middle fingers on the inside of your wrist, just below the base of your thumb, and count the beats. A normal resting heart rate for adults falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute (bpm).
How to Check Your Pulse by Hand
The two easiest places to feel your pulse are your wrist (radial pulse) and the side of your neck (carotid pulse). For the wrist method, turn one hand palm-up and place the tips of your index and middle fingers from your other hand on the inner wrist, just below the thumb side. For the neck method, place those same two fingers in the soft groove beside your windpipe, just below the jawline.
Press lightly. You want just enough pressure to feel each beat. Pressing too hard can actually block blood flow and make the pulse harder to detect, or slow it down artificially. Never use your thumb, since it has its own pulse and can throw off your count.
Once you feel steady beats, count them for a full 60 seconds while watching a clock or timer. If you’re in a hurry, count for 15 seconds and multiply by four. The 60-second count is more accurate, especially if your rhythm feels uneven, because it captures irregularities that a short count can miss.
What Your Resting Heart Rate Should Be
For adults 18 and older, a normal resting heart rate is 60 to 100 bpm. “Resting” means you’re sitting or lying down, awake, and haven’t been exercising or drinking caffeine recently. Athletes and people with high cardiovascular fitness often have resting rates in the 40s or 50s, because their hearts pump more blood per beat and don’t need to work as hard.
Children’s hearts beat faster. Here’s what’s typical by age:
- Newborns (birth to 4 weeks): 100 to 205 bpm
- Infants (4 weeks to 1 year): 100 to 180 bpm
- Toddlers (1 to 3 years): 98 to 140 bpm
- Preschoolers (3 to 5 years): 80 to 120 bpm
- School-age children (5 to 12 years): 75 to 118 bpm
- Adolescents (13 to 17 years): 60 to 100 bpm
These ranges apply when your child is awake and calm. Heart rates naturally dip during sleep and climb during activity or stress.
Using a Smartwatch or Fitness Tracker
Most wrist-worn devices use optical sensors that shine a tiny light into your skin and detect changes in blood flow with each heartbeat. This works well for steady-state activities like walking, jogging, or sitting still. Chest strap monitors, by contrast, measure the actual electrical signals of your heart, similar to a hospital ECG. They tend to be more accurate across a wider range of activities.
Wrist-based sensors have some known limitations. Vigorous hand movements, tightly flexed wrist muscles, dark skin, and tattoos over the sensor area can all reduce accuracy. Fit matters too: wearing the band too loosely lets light leak in, and wearing it too tightly restricts blood flow. For casual daily tracking, a smartwatch gives you a reasonable estimate. For precise readings during intense or arm-heavy exercise like rowing or boxing, a chest strap is the better choice.
What Affects Your Reading
Your heart rate responds to almost everything happening in your body. Caffeine, stress, dehydration, fever, and poor sleep can all push it higher. Even standing up quickly causes a temporary spike. Several common medications also shift your baseline. Beta-blockers and certain blood pressure drugs slow the heart, while some antidepressants, antibiotics, and asthma medications can speed it up.
For the most consistent reading, check your pulse at the same time each day, ideally first thing in the morning before getting out of bed. This gives you a reliable baseline to track over weeks. A gradually lower resting heart rate over time generally reflects improving fitness. A sudden or sustained change in either direction, without an obvious cause like illness or a new medication, is worth paying attention to.
Target Heart Rate During Exercise
If you’re checking your heart rate to guide workouts, you need to know your estimated maximum heart rate. The simplest formula is 220 minus your age. A 40-year-old, for example, has an estimated max of 180 bpm. A slightly more refined formula takes 207 minus 0.7 times your age, which gives 179 for the same person.
Moderate-intensity exercise typically falls between 50% and 70% of your max. Vigorous exercise sits between 70% and 85%. For that 40-year-old with a max of 180, moderate exercise means keeping the heart rate between roughly 90 and 126 bpm, while vigorous exercise means 126 to 153 bpm. These are estimates, not hard limits. How you feel during exercise (your ability to hold a conversation, your breathing effort) is just as useful a guide.
Heart Rate Recovery as a Fitness Marker
How quickly your heart rate drops after exercise is one of the simplest measures of cardiovascular health. To check it, note your heart rate immediately after stopping vigorous exercise, then check again after one minute of rest. A drop of 18 beats or more in that first minute is considered a good recovery. Over time, as your fitness improves, you’ll typically see this number get larger, meaning your heart bounces back faster.
When Your Heart Rate Signals a Problem
A resting heart rate consistently below 60 bpm is called bradycardia. For athletes, this is normal and healthy. For everyone else, it can sometimes signal a problem with the heart’s electrical system. Symptoms to watch for include dizziness, unusual fatigue during physical activity, confusion, and fainting or near-fainting episodes.
On the other end, a resting heart rate that stays well above 100 bpm without an obvious cause like exercise, caffeine, or anxiety is called tachycardia. It can feel like a fluttering or pounding sensation in your chest.
The rhythm matters as much as the rate. When you check your pulse, pay attention to whether the beats feel evenly spaced or irregular. An occasional skipped beat is common and usually harmless. A persistently irregular rhythm is worth mentioning to a doctor, even if your rate falls within the normal range. Fainting, difficulty breathing, or chest pain lasting more than a few minutes calls for emergency medical attention.