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Week 1 · Heart, breath and effort

Day 3 · Resting pulse and recovery

Your resting pulse is 60 and your maximum is 173. A coach asks for a session at seventy percent. Seventy percent of what, and what does your pulse do in the minute after you stop?

Resting pulse and recovery

Your resting pulse is 60 and your maximum is 173. A coach asks for a session at seventy percent. Seventy percent of what, and what does your pulse do in the minute after you stop?

The gap between the two is the useful number. Maximum less resting is your heart-rate reserve, 113 beats here, and it is the range your heart actually works across. Karvonen's method, from 1957, takes a percentage of that reserve and adds the resting rate back: seventy percent is 60 plus 0.7 of 113, about 139. Straight percentage of maximum would have said 121. The two methods give different numbers for the same zone name, which is why a training plan should say which one it means.

The knowhow

Resting pulse itself is worth tracking, taken the same way each time, sitting or lying before getting up. It falls with endurance training, often by five to ten beats over a season, because a stronger heart moves more blood per beat. A resting pulse that is up five or more for a few days in a row usually means something else is going on: poor sleep, a coming illness, heat, or too much training.

And so

The minute after you stop is the other free reading. Heart rate drops quickly as the nervous system switches back, and the size of that drop is a fitness and a health signal: in a large clinical study a fall of twelve beats or fewer in the first minute after exercise marked a group with a markedly higher death rate over six years. Fit people commonly drop twenty to forty. It is a check worth doing occasionally rather than a number to chase.

Keep this

Reserve is maximum less resting; Karvonen adds the resting rate back; a one-minute drop over 12 is reassuring.

Now try it with your own numbers. Enter your maximum and your resting pulse, then the two readings from a session: the highest you saw, and your pulse one minute after stopping.

Karvonen MJ, Kentala E, Mustala O. The effects of training on heart rate: a longitudinal study. Ann Med Exp Biol Fenn 1957;35(3):307-315. | Cole CR, Blackstone EH, Pashkow FJ, Snader CE, Lauer MS. Heart-rate recovery immediately after exercise as a predictor of mortality. N Engl J Med 1999;341(18):1351-1357. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199910283411804

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🧮 Try it with your own numbers

Enter your maximum and your resting pulse, then the two readings from a session: the highest you saw, and your pulse one minute after stopping.

Check your answer

Maximum 173 and resting 60 give a reserve of 113 and a seventy percent target of 139. Dropping from 165 to 145 is a fall of 20 in the first minute.

✍️ My note

My tries: every time you save, your numbers, what they came to, and your note are kept here so you can compare later.

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