Around 7 years ago, I was a sub elite runner, and I did a lot of cycling as cross training. My resting heart rate got incredibly low during that time.
However, these days, even though I’m relatively unfit, my resting HR pretty much hasn’t come back up from where it was when I was an active athlete.
Has anyone else found something similar? It’s easy to find active athletes with low resting HR, but I don’t really see much discussion about what the long term change to HR is in ex athletes.
I’ve been through it all. First a stress fracture sidelined me. Then pneumonia. I tried to get back in to it then, but never really did. I was lucky if I ran once a month at that point, but I still did run and cycle sometimes.
Then I got pneumonia a second time, and that one flattened me. I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without being short of breath for over a year. And then covid hit with work from home, so even when I was keen to start cycling again, there was no work to cycle to. So after that second bout of pneumonia it was probably a two year break before I started to get active again (at the beginning of this year).
Now, I’m cycling and running a couple of times a week, but I’m 30gs heavier than I was at my peak, and my VO2Max is WAY down.
But through all of that, my RHR has only shifted slightly.
High 30s when I was super active. Low 40s when I’m mildly active. High 40s when I’m inactive.