Understanding Your Heart Rate Data with Gyroscope
To start tracking and gaining insights about your heart rate data, download the Gyroscope iPhone app and use invite code lowerbpm to sign up!
The heart is your most important muscle, pumping 5.6 liters of oxygenated and nutrient-rich blood through your body every 20 seconds. In other words, the state of your heart is a critical indicator of your overall health, but how is it relevant to you?
Thankfully, tracking and understanding this data is easier than ever. We recommend purchasing a wearable device to automatically monitor your heart rate, wearing it as often as possible, including while you sleep. Gyroscope integrates well with the Apple Watch and Fitbit devices, and places this data in context with related stats like your steps, sleep, and weight. You can also track it manually with an iPhone app, but since heart rate varies throughout the day, wearing your device continuously will allow you to obtain a true average.
Let’s run through all the things you can do with your heart rate data to improve your well-being, prevent disease, and prolong your life.
Lower your resting heart rate
Resting heart rate is a strong indicator of cardiac health, and a stat that could improve easily with a healthy diet and regular exercise. The average range is between 60–100 beats per minute (bpm), but the range for a healthy individual at rest will tend to fall within 50–70 bpm. For every 10 bpm increase in resting heart rate, risk of dying rises by 9%. That turns out to matter a lot — in the U.S. alone 610,000 people die each year from heart-related illnesses, or approximately one in four deaths.
Yet resting heart rate varies widely from person to person, depending on a variety of factors such as age (max bpm decreases with age), gender (females have a higher pulse than males), and fitness level (endurance athletes can be as low as 40–50 bpm). To lower your resting heart rate, exercise regularly, eat healthy, reduce stress, and stop smoking.
Using Gyroscope’s weekly, monthly, and annual reports (exclusive Pro feature), you can see how your diet and exercise, among other factors, are impacting your heart rate — making you feel good about your healthy habits. Using the iPhone app, you’ll even get a daily reminder about your heart rate range from the previous day.
Understand and improve your fitness
Aerobic exercise (“cardio”) is the best way to get and stay heart-healthy. You should aim to exercise throughout the week for at least 30 minutes per session, with at most 2–3 days off. Some studies have shown that even 7 minutes of high-intensity exercise a few times per week can make a big difference.
Cardio exercises like running, biking, rowing, swimming, and group sports like basketball or volleyball can be fun and easy to build a habit around. That’s even truer when you connect Strava or RunKeeper to Gyroscope and use our Running and Cycling apps to capture and share your sessions with beautiful share cards.
To obtain the most accurate data, be sure to set your wearable to workout mode each time you exercise. This will take more frequent samples of your heart rate, helping you achieve your specific workout goals — whether it’s fat loss, strength, or cardiovascular fitness. Warm-ups/cool-downs tend to be 80–105 bpm, and a good workout will typically be 125–165 bpm.
While wearables do the job most of the time, chest strap devices are the most accurate trackers during exercise (but uncomfortable to wear). Thanks to manufacturers like Polar that now feed data into Apple HealthKit, Gyroscope can also receive data from chest straps.
Keep a watchful eye on your heart
Sometimes, despite doing your best to stay healthy, you could still encounter heart problems. While it’s true that diagnosing certain heart conditions requires more sophisticated hardware such as an electrocardiogram (EKG), these devices are often unable to monitor your heart on a continual basis. In contrast, wearable devices can be worn all the time and provide a much larger window into your health.
We’re not suggesting you diagnose yourself based on your heart rate data, but we think collecting data is better than not. Gyroscope lets you spot connections between the many things that could affect your heart rate: alcohol, caffeine, medications, dietary supplements, and more. For example, if you visited a coffee shop and your heart rate wasn’t elevated afterward, or you were still able to get a good night’s rest, then maybe you’re better at metabolizing caffeine than you would’ve thought (or vice versa).
There are even a few stories about how personal heart rate tracking has saved peoples’ lives. A 73 year-old man’s Fitbit saved his life when it showed a heart rate that fluctuated between extremes of 47 and 218 bpm. Doctors implanted a defibrillator to stop the condition. In another case, a teenager’s life was saved when his Apple Watch indicated a highly abnormal heart rate, leading doctors to quickly diagnose and treat him.
Get better sleep
Your heart rate is tightly correlated with your circadian rhythm and the quality of your sleep. To better understand and improve your overall health, you should monitor your sleep each night. Our post on making the most of your Apple Watch has some useful tips if you own that device.
In general, your heart rate during sleep is lowered (around 40–50 bpm) because your body is not active. Going to bed later than usual is correlated with higher resting heart rate the next morning, even if the amount of sleep is higher than normal. This might be explained by correlates like alcohol and caffeine consumption, but it’s still important to realize. Sleeping at a regular time for 7–8 hours will ensure your resting heart rate is low, and will improve your sleep, too.
Get started
We finally live in an age where it’s possible to track our heart rate through every moment of our lives, revealing insights that can make us healthier and happier. We want Gyroscope to be the way to collect and share every important part of your life, with heart rate being just one component of that.
Download the Gyroscope iPhone app and use invite code lowerbpm to sign up!
