To count your pulse, place the pads of your index and middle fingers on the inside of your wrist, just below the base of your thumb, and count the beats you feel over 60 seconds. A normal resting heart rate for adults falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute. The technique takes less than two minutes once you know where to press, and it can tell you useful things about your heart health that a quick glance at a fitness tracker might miss.
Where to Find Your Pulse
The two easiest spots are your wrist and your neck. Most people start with the wrist because it’s comfortable and hard to do incorrectly.
Wrist (radial pulse): Turn one hand palm-up. Place the pads of your index and middle fingers on the inner wrist, just below the base of your thumb. You’re feeling for the radial artery, which runs close to the surface right in that groove between the bone and the tendon. Press gently until you feel a steady tapping against your fingernails.
Neck (carotid pulse): Place the tips of your index and middle fingers in the soft groove next to your windpipe, on one side of your neck. This pulse is stronger and easier to detect when you’re exercising or having trouble finding the wrist pulse. A few safety points: never press on both sides of the neck at the same time, because that can make you dizzy or faint. Press lightly so you feel each beat without blocking blood flow. And skip this method entirely if you’ve been told you have plaque buildup in your neck arteries.
For both locations, use your index and middle fingers only. Your thumb has its own pulse, which can interfere with the count and give you a falsely high number.
Checking a Baby’s Pulse
Infants have small wrists and a lot of baby fat, making the radial pulse hard to find. The best spot is the inside of the upper arm, called the brachial pulse. Lay your baby on their back with one arm bent so the hand is up near the ear. Gently press two fingers (again, not your thumb) on the inner arm, between the shoulder and the elbow, until you feel a beat. You may need to adjust your position slightly and press a bit more firmly than you’d expect, but avoid pressing hard enough to compress the artery completely.
How to Count the Beats
Once you’ve found the pulse, watch a clock or set a timer. The gold standard is counting beats for a full 60 seconds. This gives you the most accurate reading, especially if your rhythm feels uneven.
If you’re in a hurry, you can count for 30 seconds and multiply by two, or count for 15 seconds and multiply by four. The tradeoff is accuracy. A shorter counting window magnifies any miscount. If you miss one beat in a 15-second window, your final number is off by four. Over 60 seconds, a single missed beat barely matters. For routine checks when your heart feels regular, the 30-second method is a reasonable shortcut. If you notice anything unusual in the rhythm, switch to the full 60 seconds.
Getting an Accurate Resting Reading
Your resting heart rate is the number that matters most for tracking fitness and heart health over time, but it’s easy to measure it wrong. The key is actually being at rest when you take it. Research on measurement protocols found that pulse readings stabilize after a minimum of five minutes of sitting quietly. If you walk across the room, sit down, and immediately check your pulse, you’re likely measuring a slightly elevated rate.
For the most consistent results, sit comfortably for at least five minutes before measuring. First thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, is ideal. Caffeine, stress, heat, and recent physical activity all push your heart rate up temporarily. If you’re tracking your pulse over days or weeks to spot trends, try to measure at the same time of day under similar conditions.
What the Numbers Mean
A normal resting heart rate for adults is 60 to 100 beats per minute. Well-trained endurance athletes often sit closer to 40 beats per minute, which reflects a heart that pumps more blood per beat and doesn’t need to work as hard at rest. A resting rate consistently below 60 is called bradycardia, while a rate above 100 is called tachycardia. Neither is automatically dangerous. A fit person with a rate of 55 may be perfectly healthy, and someone who just climbed stairs will naturally be above 100. The numbers matter most in context: what’s normal for you, how you feel, and whether the rate is changing over time without an obvious explanation.
What an Irregular Rhythm Feels Like
Beyond counting speed, pay attention to the pattern of the beats. A healthy pulse feels like a metronome: evenly spaced taps, one after another. An irregular pulse might feel like a beat comes early, then there’s a longer pause before the next one. This is often a premature heartbeat, and it can feel like your heart “skipped” a beat.
Other irregularities include beats that seem to come in clusters, a rhythm that speeds up and slows down unpredictably, or a pattern that feels chaotic with no steady spacing at all. You might also notice a fluttering or racing sensation in your chest that matches what you feel under your fingers. Occasional skipped beats are common and usually harmless, but a pulse that’s persistently irregular, unusually fast at rest, or unusually slow is worth mentioning at your next medical appointment.
Manual Pulse vs. Fitness Trackers
Wrist-worn fitness trackers use light sensors rather than direct pressure, and they work well for most people in most situations. But their accuracy drops during movement, with motion-related errors reaching up to 30% in some studies. Factors like obesity, larger wrist circumference, arrhythmias, and even forearm hair density can reduce reliability, though the average error in clinical testing stayed under five beats per minute for most devices.
The advantage of checking your pulse manually is that you feel the rhythm directly. A tracker gives you a number, but it won’t tell you that your beats are irregularly spaced or that there’s a pause every few seconds. Spending 60 seconds with your fingers on your wrist once in a while gives you information no wearable can fully replicate.