Resting Heart Rate Fitness Rating Calculator

About this calculator

Resting heart rate — beats per minute while fully at rest — is one of the simplest available fitness indicators, because a well-conditioned cardiovascular system pumps more blood per beat (higher stroke volume), so it needs fewer beats per minute to circulate the same amount of blood. Reference charts rate resting heart rate against age and sex brackets, typically ranging from "athlete" (below roughly 60 bpm, common in endurance-trained individuals and sometimes as low as the 40s) through "excellent," "good," "average," and "below average" or "poor" (above roughly 90-100 bpm in most adult ranges).

Fitness trackers, coaches, and people monitoring their own cardiovascular health use these charts to contextualize a wearable's resting-heart-rate reading, since the number by itself doesn't mean much without knowing what's typical for someone's age and sex — a 58 bpm resting rate is unremarkable for a 25-year-old male but notably good for a 60-year-old. It's also used to track fitness improvement over months of training, since resting heart rate tends to drop as cardiovascular fitness improves.

This calculator takes your resting heart rate, age and sex and returns your fitness rating against the reference chart.