A normal resting heart rate for adults falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute (bpm). That range applies when you’re sitting quietly or lying down, not during or right after physical activity. Your actual number within that range depends on your age, fitness level, medications, and even how warm or stressed you are at the moment.
Normal Resting Heart Rate by Age
Heart rate ranges shift dramatically from birth through adolescence, then stabilize in adulthood. Newborns have the fastest hearts, and the rate gradually slows as children grow.
- Newborn to 3 months: 85 to 205 bpm while awake, 80 to 160 bpm while sleeping
- 3 months to 2 years: 100 to 190 bpm awake, 75 to 160 bpm sleeping
- 2 to 10 years: 60 to 140 bpm awake, 60 to 90 bpm sleeping
- Over 10 years and adults: 60 to 100 bpm awake, 50 to 90 bpm sleeping
Children’s wider ranges reflect how active they are, whether they’re crying, and how quickly their smaller hearts need to pump to supply their growing bodies. By the time a child hits about 10, their resting range looks similar to an adult’s.
Why Athletes Have Lower Heart Rates
If you exercise regularly, your resting heart rate is likely on the lower end of normal, and that’s a good sign. Endurance athletes often sit around 40 to 50 bpm at rest, sometimes even slower during sleep. This happens because regular moderate-to-vigorous aerobic exercise makes the heart muscle stronger and more efficient. A stronger heart pumps more blood with each beat, so it simply doesn’t need to beat as often to keep up.
Exercise also increases activity of the vagus nerve, which acts as a brake on heart rate, and it slows down the heart’s natural pacemaker cells. Both of these changes pull the resting rate down over time. So a heart rate in the 40s or 50s in a fit person is normal, while the same number in someone who doesn’t exercise could signal a problem worth checking out.
What Your Heart Rate Should Be During Exercise
During a workout, your heart rate should climb well above your resting number. How high depends on the intensity you’re aiming for and your estimated maximum heart rate. The simplest way to estimate your maximum is to subtract your age from 220. A 40-year-old, for example, gets an estimated max of 180 bpm. A slightly more refined formula, developed by researcher Hirofumi Tanaka, uses 208 minus 0.7 times your age, which gives that same 40-year-old an estimate of 180 as well but tends to be more accurate at older ages.
Neither formula is perfect. Both can overestimate or underestimate your true max by several beats, so treat the number as a rough guide rather than a hard ceiling.
Once you have your estimated maximum, the American Heart Association breaks exercise intensity into two zones:
- Moderate intensity: 50 to 70% of your maximum heart rate. For a 40-year-old with an estimated max of 180, that’s roughly 90 to 126 bpm. This is the range for brisk walking, easy cycling, or a casual swim.
- Vigorous intensity: 70 to 85% of your maximum. For that same person, roughly 126 to 153 bpm. Think running, fast cycling, or a competitive sport.
Staying within these zones helps you gauge whether you’re pushing hard enough to build cardiovascular fitness without overdoing it.
What Affects Your Resting Heart Rate
Your heart rate isn’t a fixed number. It shifts throughout the day and can be nudged higher or lower by a variety of factors. Caffeine and nicotine both act as stimulants that temporarily raise your rate. Stress, anxiety, and pain do the same thing by triggering your body’s fight-or-flight response. Heat is another factor: when the temperature climbs, your heart works harder to cool you down, pushing the rate up.
Medications can move your heart rate in either direction. Blood pressure drugs like beta blockers are specifically designed to slow the heart, which is why people taking them often have resting rates well below 60. Stimulant medications, including those used for ADHD, can push the rate higher. Dehydration, illness, and fever all raise heart rate too, sometimes noticeably. If your rate seems unusually high on a given day, it’s worth considering whether one of these temporary factors is at play before worrying.
How to Check Your Heart Rate
The easiest place to find your pulse is at the wrist. Place the tips of your index and middle fingers on the inside of your wrist, just below the base of your thumb. Press lightly until you feel the blood pulsing beneath your fingers. Don’t use your thumb, which has its own pulse and can throw off your count.
Using a watch or phone timer, count the beats for a full 60 seconds for the most accurate reading. If you’re in a hurry, count for 15 seconds and multiply by four. For a true resting measurement, sit or lie down for at least five minutes first. Morning readings taken right after waking, before you get out of bed, tend to give the most consistent baseline number.
Wearable fitness trackers and smartwatches use optical sensors to estimate heart rate continuously. They’re generally reliable for resting measurements but can lose accuracy during high-intensity exercise or if the band is too loose.
When a Heart Rate Is Too High or Too Low
A resting heart rate consistently above 100 bpm is called tachycardia. It doesn’t always signal something dangerous, but it shouldn’t be ignored, especially if it comes with other symptoms. Get immediate help if a fast heart rate is accompanied by trouble breathing, chest pain, dizziness, feeling faint, or a pounding sensation in your chest. These combinations can indicate a heart rhythm problem that needs urgent attention.
On the other end, a resting rate consistently below 60 bpm in someone who isn’t physically active or taking heart-rate-lowering medication deserves a conversation with a healthcare provider. Some people naturally run a little low and feel perfectly fine. Others may notice fatigue, lightheadedness, or shortness of breath, which suggests the heart isn’t pumping enough blood to meet the body’s needs.
A single high or low reading usually means very little. What matters is the pattern over time and whether you feel symptoms alongside the number.