A normal resting heart rate is a wide band, not a single number. The textbook adult range is 60 to 100 beats per minute (bpm), yet healthy people sit anywhere from the 40s to around 100, and trained runners usually sit low in that spread. What tells you most is your own number against your own usual, over days rather than one morning.
- 60–100beats per minute: the textbook adult rangeAmerican Heart Association
- 40–109bpm: personal averages across 92,457 wearable usersQuer et al. 2020
- ~3 bpmaverage day-to-day change in one person's resting rateQuer et al. 2020
Below: how Apple Watch arrives at the figure, what the ranges do and do not say, why runners read lower, what pushes it up, and when it is worth a call to a doctor.
How Apple Watch works out resting heart rate
Apple's HealthKit documentation describes resting heart rate as an estimate of your lowest heart rate during periods of rest. It is not simply a reading taken when you sit down, which after a workout can still run high. The system estimates it from the readings it takes while you are still, throughout the day, and may replace earlier values as the estimate improves. That is why today's number can shift by evening.
Resting heart rate is not the same as your heart rate while asleep, which usually runs lower still. That overnight figure has its own field note: what sleeping heart rate is.
What is a normal resting heart rate?
The American Heart Association gives 60 to 100 bpm as the normal range for most adults. That range is a convention rather than a measured norm. Spodick and colleagues (1992) argued that 50 to 90 bpm fits healthy adults better, and the gap shows how loose the edges are.
Wearable data makes the point sharper. Quer and colleagues (2020) looked at nearly 33 million days of resting heart rate from 92,457 adults wearing Fitbit trackers. The average was 65 bpm, but personal averages ran from about 40 to 109 bpm. One healthy person's normal could differ from another's by as much as 70 bpm, and age, sex, body mass and sleep together explained only a small part of that spread. Women read a few beats higher than men at every age.
So 52 or 78 is not good or bad on its own.
What is a good resting heart rate for a runner?
There is no target number, but the direction is well documented. A review of 191 exercise studies (Reimers and colleagues, 2018) found that training lowers resting heart rate, with endurance training showing a clear drop in both men and women. A fitter heart moves more blood per beat, so it can settle slower at rest. Work in mice (D'Souza and colleagues, 2014) suggests part of the slowing also comes from changes in the heart's own pacemaker, not only from calmer nerves.
A low resting heart rate is not a score to chase.
That is why trained runners often read in the 50s or below, and why a reading in the 40s is not unusual in healthy, fit people and is no worry on its own. A low number is not a score to chase. The useful sign is your own rate drifting down a few beats across a training block.
Why your own trend matters more
The same wearable study found that each person's resting heart rate is far steadier than the spread between people. Day to day it moved by about 3 bpm on average, and most people's weekly swings stayed under 10 bpm. There was also a small seasonal drift of about 2 bpm across the year, highest in early January (Quer and colleagues, 2020).
Wide between people, narrow within one
That is why your own usual is the reference that matters (more in why a watch should compare you to yourself). A rise of 5 beats over several days means more than any chart line. Still, resting heart rate is a fairly blunt training signal: Buchheit (2014) found it noisier than HRV for tracking fatigue, and in long-trained athletes heavy fatigue can even come with a lower rate. Read it alongside your Apple Watch HRV and how you feel.
What raises resting heart rate
If your number has gone up, the reason is usually recent and ordinary:
- Illness. In Altini and Plews (2021), resting heart rate was about 6% higher on days people reported being sick. Across about 200,000 Fitbit users, weeks with raised resting heart rates tracked flu-like illness in the population (Radin and colleagues, 2020).
- Alcohol. The same study saw about 6% higher resting heart rate after heavy drinking, and Pietilä and colleagues (2018) found heart rate in the first hours of sleep rose with the amount people drank.
- Training load. A hard day nudged resting heart rate up about 1% the next morning (Altini and Plews, 2021).
- Short sleep. In Quer's data, resting heart rate was lowest in people who slept about 7 to 7.5 hours a night.
- Heat and low fluids. Warm weather makes the heart work harder to shed heat (see why heat raises your heart rate), and being short of fluid makes heart rate climb more when you stand or exercise (Watso and Farquhar, 2019).
- Stress. A review of 37 studies (Kim and colleagues, 2018) found psychological stress tips the nervous system toward its alert side, and a tense stretch can lift your resting rate with it.
Patterns for a single high morning versus a run of them are covered in why is my resting heart rate up?
How accurate is the wrist?
At rest, the optical sensor does reasonably well. Against a chest strap, Apple Watch resting heart rate was off by about 3.7 bpm on average, with almost no overall bias (O'Grady and colleagues, 2024). Wrist sensors are least accurate during movement: error was about 30% higher during activity than at rest across several devices (Bent and colleagues, 2020). Treat a change of 1 or 2 beats as noise, and look for shifts that last.
When to see a doctor
- Resting heart rate that stays above 100 bpm.
- Resting heart rate below 50 bpm together with dizziness, fainting, unusual tiredness, chest pain or breathlessness. In a fit runner with no symptoms, a low rate is usually fitness.
- A rise well above your usual that lasts for days with no obvious cause such as illness, travel or drinking.
- Any symptoms that worry you, whatever the number. Apple Watch can also alert you if your heart rate stays above or below a level you choose while you have been inactive for 10 minutes. A watch reading is a wellness signal, not a diagnosis, and this page is general information, not medical advice.
How Aera does this
Resting heart rate in AeraThe tile holds the resting heart rate from Apple Health against your own last two weeks and says Typical, Above your usual or Notably high (or the same downward). With fewer than seven days of readings it says Building baseline.
Aera, for iPhone and Apple Watch
Aera reads the resting heart rate your Apple Watch saves to Apple Health and holds it against your own usual from the last two weeks. The Resting HR tile on Home then says Typical, Above your usual or Notably high (or the same downward), with a seven-day sparkline beside it. Until it has at least seven days of readings, it says Building baseline instead of guessing.
The Sleep screen does the same for your heart rate while asleep, against your last 28 nights, and says whether last night ran above, about or below your usual once it has two weeks of nights. Aera never grades your resting heart rate on a population chart. The tile links to a Field Guide section on what moves resting heart rate and when the reading is cleanest. There is no account, and health numbers are worked out on your iPhone. Your resting heart rate against your usual is free, as is the last 12 months of history.
Aera is not a medical device.
Quick answers
What is a normal resting heart rate on Apple Watch?
The usual adult range is quoted as 60 to 100 beats per minute, but healthy people spread much wider. In data from 92,457 wearable users, personal averages ran from about 40 to 109 bpm, with a mean of 65. A normal resting heart rate is one that sits steady inside your own usual range.
What is a good resting heart rate for a runner?
There is no target number. Endurance training tends to lower resting heart rate over weeks and months, so trained runners often read in the 50s or below, and values in the 40s are not unusual and need no worry without symptoms. The useful sign is your own number drifting down across a training block.
Why did my resting heart rate go up?
Usually something recent: an illness starting, alcohol, a hard training block, heat, a short night, dehydration or a stressful stretch. One high day is mostly noise. Several days above your usual, especially with feeling unwell, is the pattern worth noticing.
When should I see a doctor about my resting heart rate?
If your resting heart rate stays above 100, or sits below 50 and comes with dizziness, fainting, unusual tiredness, chest pain or breathlessness, talk to a doctor. Also if it rises well above your usual and stays there with no clear reason. A watch reading is not a diagnosis.
Related field notes: why is my resting heart rate up? · what sleeping heart rate is · why a watch should compare you to yourself · what a consumer watch cannot measure
Related guides: Apple Watch HRV: what is normal? · Should I run after a bad night's sleep?
Sources
- Apple Inc. restingHeartRate. HealthKit developer documentation. developer.apple.com, accessed October 2026.
- Apple Inc. Check your heart rate on Apple Watch. Apple Watch User Guide. support.apple.com, accessed October 2026.
- American Heart Association. All about heart rate (pulse). heart.org.
- Spodick DH, Raju P, Bishop RL, Rifkin RD. Operational definition of normal sinus heart rate. American Journal of Cardiology. 1992;69(14):1245-1246.
- Quer G, Gouda P, Galarnyk M, Topol EJ, Steinhubl SR. Inter- and intraindividual variability in daily resting heart rate and its associations with age, sex, sleep, BMI, and time of year: retrospective, longitudinal cohort study of 92,457 adults. PLOS ONE. 2020;15(2):e0227709.
- Reimers AK, Knapp G, Reimers CD. Effects of exercise on the resting heart rate: a systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2018;7(12):503.
- D'Souza A, Bucchi A, Johnsen AB, et al. Exercise training reduces resting heart rate via downregulation of the funny channel HCN4. Nature Communications. 2014;5:3775.
- Altini M, Plews D. What is behind changes in resting heart rate and heart rate variability? A large-scale analysis of longitudinal measurements acquired in free-living. Sensors. 2021;21(23):7932.
- Buchheit M. Monitoring training status with HR measures: do all roads lead to Rome? Frontiers in Physiology. 2014;5:73.
- Pietilä J, Helander E, Korhonen I, Myllymäki T, Kujala UM, Lindholm H. Acute effect of alcohol intake on cardiovascular autonomic regulation during the first hours of sleep in a large real-world sample of Finnish employees: observational study. JMIR Mental Health. 2018;5(1):e23.
- Radin JM, Wineinger NE, Topol EJ, Steinhubl SR. Harnessing wearable device data to improve state-level real-time surveillance of influenza-like illness in the USA: a population-based study. The Lancet Digital Health. 2020;2(2):e85-e93.
- Watso JC, Farquhar WB. Hydration status and cardiovascular function. Nutrients. 2019;11(8):1866.
- Kim HG, Cheon EJ, Bai DS, Lee YH, Koo BH. Stress and heart rate variability: a meta-analysis and review of the literature. Psychiatry Investigation. 2018;15(3):235-245.
- O'Grady B, Lambe R, Baldwin M, Acheson T, Doherty C. The validity of Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 for serial measurements of heart rate variability and resting heart rate. Sensors. 2024;24(19):6220.
- Bent B, Goldstein BA, Kibbe WA, Dunn JP. Investigating sources of inaccuracy in wearable optical heart rate sensors. npj Digital Medicine. 2020;3:18.