Resting heart rate
How many times your heart beats a minute when you're properly at rest. Apple Watch estimates it each day from calm moments.
Resting heart rate is your heartbeat when you're calm and still. A lower number usually means your heart doesn't have to work as hard to keep a steady beat.
Apple Watch doesn't wait for you to sit perfectly still. It looks at heart rate readings from quiet moments across the day and estimates your lowest resting value, refining it as the day goes on. So today's number can shift a little before bedtime.
It moves with daily life. Hot weather and stress nudge it up, and so can alcohol or a week of shorter nights. For many people, wearable data shows it rising over the second half of the menstrual cycle. Regular endurance exercise and yoga bring it down over weeks, and some medicines slow it too.
Pajdo compares each day with your own usual from the previous four weeks and only speaks up when it has stayed higher for at least two days in a row, by a clear margin. With cycle awareness on, he compares it with the same days of your recent cycles once he has enough of them.
What tends to push it up
- Hot, humid weather
- Stress or strong emotions
- Alcohol the evening before
- Shorter sleep than usual
- The days before a period
What tends to pull it down
- Regular endurance exercise or yoga over weeks
- Some medicines that slow the heart
Worth a try
Keep up regular endurance exercise
A meta-analysis of 191 studies in healthy people found that exercise lowered resting heart rate. Endurance training and yoga showed the clearest effect in both men and women.
It's a slow change, and plenty of things nudge daily readings around, so look at the trend rather than one morning.
Try it: pick an endurance activity you like, such as brisk walking, cycling or swimming, and do it on most days for a couple of months. Then check the resting heart rate trend from Apple Watch in Pajdo.
Keep reading
Sources
- HKQuantityTypeIdentifier.restingHeartRate, Apple Developer Documentation
- All About Heart Rate, American Heart Association
- Effects of exercise on the resting heart rate: a systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies (Reimers et al., 2018), Journal of Clinical Medicine
- Acute effect of alcohol intake on cardiovascular autonomic regulation during the first hours of sleep (Pietilä et al., 2018, 4,098 employees), JMIR Mental Health
- The menstrual cycle through the lens of a wearable device (Gonzalez et al., 2026, 2,596 people), npj Digital Medicine
- Effects of exercise on the resting heart rate: a systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies (Reimers, Knapp and Reimers 2018), Journal of Clinical Medicine
Checked against these sources on September 15, 2026.
This is general wellness information, not medical advice. If a number worries you, or stays away from your usual for a while, talk to a doctor.