Dr. Andy Galpin

So it's not a metric that we should be overly concerned about of, you know, where is your maximum heart rate?

It is relevant to, again, your stroke volume, but the heart rate itself is not going to tell you that much.

So not something to be concerned about.

Your resting heart rate, though, or your heart rate at any given intensity is very important.

So if you're going to be running, say, at a standard pace, say, seven miles per hour, and your heart rate at seven miles per hour was 150 beats per minute,

And now a couple of months later, your heart rate at the exact same speed is now 115 beats per minute.

That would represent a significant improvement in cardiovascular fitness.

Stroke volume would be much higher.

And because of that, that allows your heart rate to come down.

Resting heart rate is a similar story.

Give you a little bit of context here.

And the reason this is top of mind is because there's a hummingbird that lives in my backyard and my wife and kids look at it every single day and they get so excited.

They call her mom's little helper.

They named it squirt actually.

And so they get really excited when this little hummingbird is flying back there because it's super fast.

Hummingbirds have a resting heart rate of something like 1200 beats per minute.

It's absolutely insane.

So you're talking about putting an order of magnitude on top of almost a human maximum heart rate.

You contrast that to a larger animal like a giraffe, an elephant, or a blue whale, and you're talking about a heart rate of something like 5 to 6 beats per minute.

And so humans, of course, are somewhere in between.