Resting heart rate is not always equal to performance
Monitoring your resting heart rate is a good discipline to integrate in your daily procedures since it can give you some important information about your fitness. When you have registered your resting heart rate in the morning for a period of time (months) you will start to see a pattern. There are days with low resting heart rates and there are days with high values.
Notice long term changes in resting heart rate
The most important observation for you will be that there is some but not a total correlation between resting heart rate and cycling performance. Small differences in the same week has nothing to do with improved performance but is a lot more a question about level of recovery, sleep pattern, physical and psychological stress level etc. Differences observed over a longer period (months) might very likely be seen because of a central adaptation. Due to a better relaxation (regulated by autonomic nerve system) there is a better filling of the heart in the diastole and thus a larger stroke volume in the systole.
Don’t compare heart rate values…
As I have mentioned a couple of times before: It doesn’t make sense to compare absolute heart rate values with others because we all have a different anatomy. As an example, I have registered a low resting heart rate of 36bpm in a period with a very small amount of cardiovascular training. I wonder how many of you hard training individuals who have the same value? That doesn’t matter! You are probably stronger than I was at that time anyway…
As you can see from the many comments (currently more than 136 comments) to my article ‘What is Your Lowest Heart Rate ever?‘ there are many people around in the world with low resting heart rates. Many of the comments illustrate that resting heart rate in it self is a good but not really good predictor of performance.
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