what is the absolute LOWEST resting heartrate that a runner can have?

I read in an old book (written around 1960) that 1932 Olympic 1500 champ Jack Lovelock of New Zealand had a resting rate of 32. That was the lowest the author was aware of.

How is this a pissing contest wrote:

I like how everyone is lieing through their teeth.

Maybe .1% of the population has a RHR under 40, yet 85% of this thread does?

Sure.

Shut up idiot. Lots of runners and cyclists have resting heart rates below 40 regardless of their race times.

WD40 wrote:

Instead of arguing whether RHR is relevant to performance, why not discuss something which really is relevant, i.e. 1-minute recovery rate. Elites typically recover 60-90 bpm a minute after finishing, say, an 800m rep. I find it depends on hydration, weather, how tapered I am and what I do during recovery phase.

BA BAM! couldn't agree more. And because of the many, many various factors affecting HR I do not advocate training with a monitor. I do however check RHR each morning to gage recovery and fatigue levels. I find fitness is related to recovery time required and not to HR. As someone said earlier, genetics play a major role. I've never checked as low as team mates and peers.

Chuck Norris has no heart he just beats.

Watching the Tour de France several years ago, I remember Phil Ligget mentioning that Laurent Lafevre (former Bouygues Telecom rider) had been measured at 23 bpm. Never been under 48 myself, as a high school kid doing 70 mpw or so.

How is this a pissing contest wrote:

I like how everyone is lieing through their teeth.

Maybe .1% of the population has a RHR under 40, yet 85% of this thread does?

Sure.

Much fewer than .1% of the population has a 5k PR of under 16. Yet would you be surprised if 50% of the posters on this thread did?

i've found that relative to myself, lower rhr averaged over some time period >7days equals greater fitness.

Strom jr. wrote:

Jim Ryun never had a resting heart rate lower than 45

I heard that Ryun's resting heart rate was 70.

You can't donate blood if your heart rate is below 50 per min. I've had trouble donating blood recently. The machine measured my hr at 45, but I told the nurse I was a runner, so shew took my pulse by hand and rounded it up to 50 to allow me to doante.

Chilpotletetel wrote:

The resting heart rate of a blue whale is about 10 bpm

That is amazing, especially for such a big animal. I wonder why that is?

I could often get my heart rate down to 34 at age 18 or 19, including one time in a biology lab, sitting in a chair with someone else taking my pulse. I was also practicing holding my breath a lot at that time, and found a correlation between them.

For example, when you breathe in it goes up, and when you breath out it goes down. Oxygen makes the heart rate go up. There are videos on youtube of people holding their breath (7 minutes or so) and showing their heart rate going down as they do. I always endeavor to breathe as little as possible when taking my heart rate.

A teammate of mine went to a routine apt. Her heartrate was so low that they immediately sent her to the hospital where she stayed for months! It was like 28 and she was a runner but severely anorexic!

My normal resting heart rate, when I'm not super-fit and don't have the flu or anything, is somewhere around 48 when I first wake up in the morning. At my all-time fittest (the year after I graduated from college) it would get down to about 36.

This is based on absolutely nothing, but I suspect the absolute lowest is probably in the low teens. I doubt anybody could get down to single digits under normal circumstances.

37 when I was doing marathon training; I thought that was very low until I started reading this thread.

A quick google search shows numerous websites reporting Indurain's 28 bpm as being either the lowest or one of the lowest ever recorded. Can't find one that definitely claims anything lower but didn't look long.

Anyway, the person who said there is not much correlation was right. My heart rate tends to run high, in the 50s when I am really fit (at night and in the 60s just sitting at my desk in the day). It is lower when I am fit than when I am out of shape, so it is a reliable indicator compared to "me" but not when compared to other people.

Here's an example of how the heart rate goes down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD30-iXDUV4

Some education:

Assuming normal electrical conduction through the heart, there are 3 pacemaker groups (cells that generate their own action potential, aka "beat," at a set rate without any outside input, juxtapose this to skeletal muscle cells which generally require neuronal activity to contract). These three groups are the sinoatrial (SA) node, the atrioventricular (AV) node, and the Purkinje fibers. The SA node beats about about 100 bpm, the AV at 60 bpm, and the Purkinje fibers at about 40 bpm.

That might seem confusing, 3 hear rates (arguably more but I'm trying to keep this simple)? How does the heart pick which one to beat with?

Overdrive suppression --> a faster beating pacemaker group will, "drive the bus." That means, in general the SA node is what gives us our heart rates.

So why is my heart rate below 100? This guy is full of crap. Also, how does my heart rate get above 100?!

Great questions, but the latter is definitely more intuitive and not the subject of this post.

How does your heart rate drop? Remember how I mentioned these are the BPM's without any neuronal input? Bingo! The autonomic nervous system can either increase or decrease the pacemaker activity of the SA, AV, and Purkinje fibers.

Given enough parasympathetic input from the vagus nerve, one can go into what is known as SA block, where the activity of the SA node has effectively been blocked and the AV node starts, "driving the bus." Well trained athletes have high vagal tone so resting heart rates are exceptionally low.

The heart rate can drop because Cardiac Output = Stroke Volume x Heart Rate. Well-trained endurance athletes undergo physiological hypertrophy in their hearts. This increases stroke volume. A good cardiac output can be maintained at a low heart rate. This saves the heart a lot of work.

So bottom line, low heart rates, below 45, 40 are quick possible for many of the users of this site. At rest.

The important thing about resting heart rate is that it is your resting heart rate. It can be used as a gauge, especially in the morning to know how you're doing. If your normal HR is 50 and you wake up with one of 70, for some reason your heart is working harder than it typically is. Take it easy.

Yes, I shaved a few corners in this explanation, but this stuff all checks out if you check a decent college level physiology text. Or wikiepedia

I've had mine at 32 right after waking up.

Mine was 32. No joke

The lowest I've ever got mine was 38 or so, at a time when I was running 50 mpw. I increased my mileage gradually to 75-80 during the summer but my heart rate didn't budge.