This Number Can Say A Lot About Your Health. Do You Know What It Is?

First thing–figure out what your resting heart rate (RHR) is today: Pick a time when you feel relaxed (so not right after a tense meeting) and haven’t had caffeine within an hour or exercised within two hours, because both can leave your heart rate elevated. Then, find a pulse point on your neck or wrist, count the beats for 10 seconds and multiply the number of beats by 6. If you got between 50 and 60 beats per minute, “that’s a very good range,” says Gordon Blackburn, MD, head of cardiac rehabilitation at the Cleveland Clinic. For every 10 beats it goes up, your risk of coronary artery disease rises by 12 percent, stroke by 5 percent and non-cardiovascular disease by 16 percent, according to a meta-analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Once you’re over 80 beats per minute, the risk of those problems rises pretty dramatically. Another study in Heart followed 3,000 men for 16 years and found that having a resting heart rate between 81 and 90 doubled subjects’ chances of dying during the study, while a RHR of more than 90 tripled it; maybe not surprisingly, higher RHRs were linked to poor physical fitness, higher weight and blood pressure and more unhealthy fats in the blood. It’s important to note that these studies show a link between high RHR and health problems, not a direct cause-and-effect relationship, but, says Blackburn, “there’s a consistent correlation.” Think of it this way: A high RH...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news