Your resting heart rate (RHR) is the number of times your heart beats per minute when you're awake, calm, and completely at rest.

For most healthy adults, a normal RHR falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute.A lower resting rate often means your heart is more efficient—it doesn’t need to work as hard to circulate blood. Very fit people or athletes can have a resting heart rate as low as 40-60 bpm.

Your RHR is a useful baseline for understanding your cardiovascular health, because it reflects how relaxed or strained your heart is in everyday life. This visualization uses your resting heart rate as the baseline for all other heartbeat states—showing how your heart naturally rises and falls throughout moments of activity, stress, and sleep.

When you’re moving—walking, jogging, doing daily chores—your heart rate rises into a “training zone” to meet your body’s increased demands. For many people, this means working at 50–85% of their maximum heart rate, depending on how hard they’re going.

In this zone, your heart is getting stronger. It’s efficient, sustainable, and a key part of building cardiovascular fitness. Experts like the American Heart Association recommend regularly exercising within this range for heart health.

How we estimate your active heart rate:

1. Estimate your max heart rate: ~220 − your age
• If you don’t provide an age, we use a standard estimated max of 200 beats per minute.
2. From that maximum, we estimate your active heart rate based on the activity level you choose:
• Low activity: ~55% of your maximum
• Moderate activity: ~65% of your maximum
• High activity: ~80% of your maximum

• These percentages are widely used in exercise science to represent different training intensity zones, and the result gives you a reasonable estimate of what your heart rate might be during activity.

When you experience psychological or physical stress, your body activates the “fight-or-flight” response. Stress hormones like adrenaline cause your heart to beat faster and your blood pressure to rise. This temporary increase in heart rate is normal and helps the body respond to challenging situations. Research shows that stress can raise heart rate similarly to light physical activity, though the exact change varies widely depending on age, fitness level, and overall health. Managing stress through breathing, rest, and movement can help your heart return to its resting rhythm.

How we estimate your stressed heart rate:

• Your stressed heart rate is calculated by increasing your resting heart rate (RHR) by 15%
• We use a 15% increase above your resting heart rate as an approximation of how the heart often responds to mild to moderate psychological stress. Studies show that everyday stressors like deadlines, emotional tension, or cognitive load typically raise heart rate by 10–20%, though the exact response varies widely between individuals.

During sleep, the body shifts into a recovery-focused state dominated by the parasympathetic nervous system. As a result, heart rate typically drops below daytime resting levels, often by about 10–20%, reflecting reduced metabolic demand and increased physiological restoration. A lower sleeping heart rate is generally associated with good cardiovascular health and effective overnight recovery, though individual values naturally vary based on age, fitness, stress, and sleep quality. Understanding your sleeping heart rate can provide insight into how well your body is resting and restoring itself.

How we estimate your stressed heart rate:

• Your sleeping heart rate is estimated as 85% of your resting heart rate.
• During healthy sleep, heart rate typically drops by 10–20% as the body shifts into a calmer, restorative state.