What is the Recovery Heart Rate? – Improving Your Recovery Heart Rate

When you are performing a very intense exercise, your heart rate will naturally increase to a certain level and after you stop working out your heart rate will gradually decrease and eventually come to a normal rate. The rate at which your pulse comes back to the normal position is called the recovery heart rate. Many athletes immediately check the recovery heart rate after they finish exercising because it is considered as one of the best ways to estimate a person’s fitness level.

Meaning of recovery heart rate

In easy terms, recovery heart rate can be defined as your pulse rate after a session of exercise. This rate is also called the post-exercise heart rate. There are many reasons for people to measure their recovery heart rate after the session of exercise and one of them is the overall fitness level of a person and another one is the health of the heart.

What is a good recovery heart rate?

This is a rule of thumb is that lower your recovery heart rate is after a vigorous exercise, better the position is. A person who is measuring your recovery heart rate would consider it best if your heart rate falls under a hundred beats per minute within the first three minutes after you have completed your exercise.

There are specific recovery heart rate charts that you can look for to measure whether your heart rate of recovery is appropriate or not. You need to keep in mind that recovery heart rate is more than just the numbers because you have to look over the circumstances before concluding. As mentioned earlier, there can be a serious number of reasons that may have a toll on your results and you need to consider them to come at a conclusion that is much more accurate.

How to improve your post-exercise heart rate?

After finding out if your recovery heart rate is good or not, you can work on improving it. Before looking for ways to improve the rate, you need to assess the reason for this bad result and if it is your overall health and not that like if you had more than enough caffeine during that day or if you are not properly hydrated during exercise. If your recovery heart rate is lower because of those reasons you can just wait a few days and it can be fixed. But in the other cases, you can go to a trainer who will tell you about some specific exercises that you can do which will ultimately reduce your recovery heart rate and bring it at an appropriate level.

In extreme cases, you can even consider talking to a doctor because he will provide you with all the over-the-counter products which will help you in this particular issue. The very famous technique is to follow the polar running program which is the entire program developed by a company to bring the recovery heart rate at an appropriate level, you can look that up.