Your pulse is the rhythmic expansion of your arteries each time your heart pumps blood. Every heartbeat sends a wave of pressure through your blood vessels, and that wave is what you feel when you press your fingers against the inside of your wrist or the side of your neck. For most adults, a normal resting pulse falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute (bpm).
How Your Pulse Works
When your heart contracts, it pushes a volume of blood (called the stroke volume) into your aorta and out through your arterial system. That surge of blood stretches the artery walls slightly, creating a pressure wave that travels outward from the heart. The “beat” you feel under your fingertips isn’t the heart itself. It’s the brief widening of an artery as that pressure wave passes through it.
The strength of each pulse depends on two things: how much blood your heart ejects with each beat and how flexible your arteries are. Stiffer arteries, which become more common with age, create a stronger pressure spike because they don’t absorb the wave as well. Flexible, compliant arteries cushion the wave, producing a smoother, softer pulse.
Pulse vs. Heart Rate
People use “pulse” and “heart rate” interchangeably, but they measure slightly different things. Your heart rate is the number of times your heart squeezes per minute, driven by electrical signals inside the heart. Your pulse is the number of times your arteries expand in response to those squeezes. In a healthy person, the two numbers match. But certain heart rhythm problems can cause the heart to contract without producing a strong enough wave to reach your wrist, so the pulse count comes in lower than the actual heart rate.
Most wearable fitness trackers read your pulse, not your heart rate directly. They detect pressure changes or blood flow in your skin. Only devices with EKG technology pick up the heart’s electrical signals themselves.
Normal Resting Pulse by Age
Resting pulse varies significantly across the lifespan. Newborns and infants have much faster rates because their hearts are smaller and need to pump more frequently to circulate blood.
- Newborn (0 to 1 month): 100 to 160 bpm
- Infant (1 to 12 months): 80 to 140 bpm
- Toddler (1 to 3 years): 80 to 130 bpm
- Preschool (3 to 5 years): 80 to 110 bpm
- School age (6 to 12 years): 70 to 100 bpm
- Adolescents and adults: 60 to 100 bpm
These ranges apply when you’re awake and at rest. During sleep, your pulse typically drops lower. During physical activity, it rises well above these numbers.
What Affects Your Resting Pulse
Your resting pulse isn’t a fixed number. It shifts throughout the day and from one week to the next depending on several factors. Caffeine, stress, and anxiety all push it higher. So does a fever: your pulse generally rises about 10 bpm for every degree of body temperature above normal. Dehydration has a similar effect because lower blood volume forces the heart to beat faster to maintain circulation.
Fitness level is one of the biggest influences. Endurance athletes often have resting pulses as low as 40 bpm, according to the American Heart Association. Their hearts are conditioned to pump more blood per beat, so fewer beats are needed each minute. A sedentary person with the same resting rate, on the other hand, might have a medical issue worth investigating.
When a Pulse Is Too Fast or Too Slow
A resting pulse above 100 bpm in an adult is called tachycardia. It can be caused by anything from too much coffee to an overactive thyroid, anemia, or an abnormal heart rhythm. Brief spikes during exercise or moments of stress are normal. A persistently elevated resting rate is a different story and often signals that something is making your heart work harder than it should.
A resting pulse below 60 bpm is called bradycardia. The traditional threshold is 60 bpm, though there’s a growing clinical consensus that rates down to 50 bpm are often perfectly normal, especially in fit or younger people. Bradycardia only becomes a concern when it causes symptoms like dizziness, fatigue, or fainting, which means the heart isn’t pumping enough blood to meet the body’s needs.
Where You Can Feel Your Pulse
You can detect a pulse anywhere an artery runs close to the skin’s surface. The two most commonly used locations are the radial artery on the inside of your wrist (thumb side) and the carotid artery on the side of your neck, just below the jawline. Other accessible spots include the inside of the elbow, behind the knee, on the top of the foot, and at the temple.
Each location can tell you something slightly different. Checking pulses at the wrist and foot, for example, helps gauge blood flow to the extremities. A weak or absent pulse in the foot compared to a strong one at the wrist can indicate a blockage in the arteries of the leg.
How to Check Your Own Pulse
The easiest place to check is your wrist. Turn one hand palm-up and place the middle three fingers of your other hand on the inner wrist, just below where your thumb connects. Press firmly but not so hard that you cut off flow. You should feel a steady, rhythmic tapping.
Count every beat you feel for 30 seconds using a clock or stopwatch, then double that number. If you counted 36 beats in 30 seconds, your pulse is 72 bpm. For the most accurate reading, sit quietly for at least five minutes before measuring, and avoid checking right after exercise, a meal, or a cup of coffee.
What Pulse Strength Tells You
Beyond the rate, the strength of your pulse carries useful information. A normal pulse feels easily detectable under your fingers without being forceful. A “bounding” pulse, one that feels unusually strong and almost seems to push your fingers up, can occur during exercise, fever, or conditions that increase blood flow like anemia or an overactive thyroid.
A weak or “thready” pulse, one you can barely detect, often means low blood volume or poor circulation. In extreme cases like severe dehydration or shock, peripheral pulses at the wrist or feet may disappear entirely while a pulse at the neck remains detectable, because the body redirects blood toward vital organs. If you notice your pulse at your wrist suddenly feels much weaker than usual or becomes hard to find, that’s worth paying attention to.