So I have a really slow heart rate. It's always been slow, at least, as long as I've paid it any attention. When we learnt at school how to take a pulse my fellow students were puzzled. The people on my first aid course thought I must be amazingly chilled out because my heart went so slowly. When taking my blood pressure the doctor got concerned about how slow my pulse is and ordered a suite of tests to check nothing was wrong. It's supposed to be a sign of fitness, which is odd, because I'm really not particularly fit, but there's apparantly nothing wrong, I'm just weird that way.
When I say slow, I really do mean slow. An average resting heart rate is 70-100 beats per minute. Mine is in the forties - the slowest I've ever seen it was 43bpm, but it's usually around 48.
What I want to know, though, is what my maximum safe heart rate should be. It's generally calculated as something like 220 minus your age. But for an average 35 year old that's somewhere around 2.5 times their resting heart rate. For me that's more like four times my resting rate - so is that still a suitable figure to use if doing something intensive like running?
it does, by the way, make it a lot harder to get fit or to lose weight. I can get strong, but not fit and my weight is considerably more than most medics assume.
Just out of interest, did your GP arrange any ECG testing (most particularly a 24 hour ECG monitor)? sometimes slow heart rates are an indication of problems with the "electric circuits" in the heart. /disengage cardiologist setting