Your pulse and your heart rate are closely related but not technically the same thing. Most of the time, they produce the same number, which is why people use the terms interchangeably. But they measure different events in your body, and in certain medical conditions, the two numbers can actually diverge.
What Each One Actually Measures
Your heart rate is the number of times your heart squeezes per minute. Each squeeze is triggered by an electrical impulse that travels through your heart muscle, forcing blood out into your arteries. An electrocardiogram (EKG) measures these electrical signals directly.
Your pulse is something different. It’s the number of times your arteries expand and contract per minute in response to that blood flow. When your heart pumps blood into the aorta (your largest artery), a pressure wave ripples outward through your arterial system. That wave briefly widens each artery it passes through, and that widening is what you feel when you press your fingers against your wrist or neck. So the “beats” you feel aren’t your heart itself. They’re your arteries stretching to accommodate each surge of blood.
In a healthy person at rest, these two numbers match perfectly. Every heartbeat produces a pressure wave strong enough to reach your peripheral arteries, so counting your pulse gives you an accurate heart rate. This is why, for everyday purposes, treating your pulse as your heart rate works just fine.
When Pulse and Heart Rate Don’t Match
There are situations where your heart squeezes but the contraction is too weak or too early to push enough blood into your arteries to create a detectable pulse. When this happens, you get what’s called a pulse deficit: your heart rate (counted by listening directly to the heart or reading an EKG) is higher than the pulse you’d feel at your wrist.
Atrial fibrillation is the most common cause. During this irregular heart rhythm, some beats fire so quickly after the previous one that the heart hasn’t had time to fill with enough blood. The squeeze still happens, but it doesn’t generate a meaningful pressure wave. Other situations that can cause a pulse deficit include premature heartbeats, severe low blood pressure, and significant blood loss. In these cases, relying on a wrist pulse alone could undercount your actual heart rate by a meaningful margin.
Normal Resting Heart Rate by Age
For adults 18 and older, a normal resting heart rate falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Well-trained athletes often have resting rates in the 40s or 50s because their hearts pump more blood per beat, so fewer beats are needed. Children run considerably faster:
- Newborns (up 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
A resting rate below 60 bpm is generally classified as bradycardia, and above 100 bpm as tachycardia. Neither is automatically a problem. Context matters: a fit runner at 52 bpm is healthy, while someone at 52 bpm who feels dizzy and lightheaded is not.
How to Check Your Pulse
The two easiest places to feel your pulse are your wrist and your neck. At the wrist, place the tips of your index and middle fingers on the thumb side, in the soft groove between the bone and the tendon. At the neck, find the artery on one side near your windpipe. Don’t use your thumb to check, since it has its own pulse that can interfere with the count.
Count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four, or count for a full 60 seconds if your rhythm feels irregular. An irregular rhythm makes the 15-second shortcut less reliable because the spacing between beats varies.
Beyond the number itself, you can notice the strength of each beat. A pulse that feels weak and hard to find can reflect low blood volume or a heart that isn’t pumping forcefully. A pulse that feels unusually strong and bounding can signal high blood pressure, fluid overload, or simply that you just finished exercising. The rhythm matters too: a steady, even spacing between beats suggests a normal rhythm, while a noticeably irregular pattern is worth paying attention to.
What Your Wearable Is Actually Measuring
Most fitness trackers and smartwatches don’t measure your heart rate directly. They measure your pulse. The sensor on the back of the watch shines a small LED light into your skin. As blood flows through the tiny vessels in your wrist, it absorbs more of that light with each pulse wave. A detector picks up the changes in light absorption and converts the pattern into a number displayed as “heart rate.”
This optical technology is measuring the same arterial pressure wave you’d feel with your fingertips, just using light instead of touch. It works well for most people during normal activity. But because it’s reading blood flow rather than electrical signals, it can be less accurate during intense exercise (when motion artifacts confuse the sensor), with certain skin tones or tattoos that affect light absorption, and during irregular heart rhythms where some beats don’t generate a strong pulse wave.
A small number of consumer watches now include actual EKG sensors that detect your heart’s electrical activity through contact with your skin. These are the only wearable devices that measure true heart rate rather than pulse rate. For most everyday tracking, the difference is negligible. But if you have an irregular rhythm like atrial fibrillation, the distinction becomes clinically relevant, because an optical sensor could miss beats that an EKG would catch.