How low is your Resting Heart Rate?

Here is a fun way of comparing power for endurance athletes, posted by Grant Lerdahl:

Ok, If you aren’t some sort of endurance junkie then you might not appreciate the significance of a low resting heart rate. Resting heart rate can be as exciting to endurance athletes as the bench press max and the 40 yard dash times are to pro football players. Its really exciting to see if you have a lower than normal resting heart rate because that means each time your heart beats it pumps more blood than an “untrained heart” would. According to Wikipedia the average RHR for health adults is between 60-80 BPM (beats per minute).

To illustrate how important this stuff is to us read the following story. One of my closest friends had his checked at the doctors office and it was 45. Since it was so low he made the doctor print it off on an official looking form and sign it. He has it framed at home right now. This makes perfect sense to me and I think its a great idea too. Of course this might sound silly but 45 BPM is wicked good especially for a 45ish year old man. If you check the fitness equivalency chart that is like bench pressing 375-400lbs (don’t look that it up its a made up chart but sounds cool).

I checked my RHR last night and it came out at 37 and 38 a couple times. I got pretty excited about my new/wicked low resting heart rate. I decided to check it for two minutes straight and it came out to be 77 or 38.5 per minute. I’m pretty pumped about it.

In order to spoil my little parade I decided to check Wikepedia for what the lowest RHR’s were. Turns out some guy no one has ever heard of, Lance Armstrong, has or had a RHR of 32. I should have just stopped there but two other great Tour De France winners Miguel Idurain and Alberto Contador have reported RHR’s of 28. Well I don’t feel as much like the man as I did 8 hours ago but I’m still pretty excited my new local bragging rights. Isn’t that what sports is all about anyways?