Heart rate never completely recovers after exercise, until I sleep.

[lookitsadam]

About 2-3 months ago I really started to get into gear about getting in shape when I realized my mean heartrate throughout the day was about 90 when I was just sitting around, and sometimes spiked to 120 for no reason at all.

Now, I'm down about 20 lbs, my new resting heartrate while awake and relaxed is around 75, with brief moments that it dips down to 65, or up to 85. However, whenever I work out, my heartrate never returns to that, it always hovers around 90 +/- 5 for so, until I fall asleep that night.

Example: 
It's never really affected me the next day, only the 4+ hours I have left after the workout.  I always stretch, and I do a good bit of cooldown after the workout. I don't feel like I've overworked myself and have enough energy to cook/clean/hobbies/etc....

I've not seen anyone touch on this specific pattern before, does anyone else experience this?

[Dominique]

It is to be expected IMO your daytime lowest HR is going to be higher than HR during your sleep. This is why, btw, the algorithm used by Fitbit to determine RHR never shows the absolute lowest number reached during your sleep.

Instead of looking at the numbers, how do you actually feel after exercising?

Looking at your graph, I would focus on getting more "peaks" (orange/red) during the course of the day, rather than worrying about the baseline not going low enough (in your opinion).

[lookitsadam]

I'm not talking about heartrate during sleep, I'm well aware of the normal difference there. I'm talking about heartrate during the day before exercise, vs heartrate after exercise. It's a little subtle in the picture, but notice how much closer the 'baseline' is to that 100bpm line after that peak.

Unfortunately, this is all my schedule allows. I can't just take off in the middle of the day for an hour or come back to work all sweaty. 

[WavyDavey]

What you're talking about @lookitsadam  is heart rate recovery. It's the amount of time it takes for your heart rate to return to what is normal for you after exercise.

It's really common at the beginning of a fitness journey for a good workout to increase the heart rate for hours. The good news is all that extra time in the fat burn zone will add to the calories burned for that day.

Later, as fitness level improves, the HR recovery time takes less and less, so there's less calorie burn happening after the workout. So we have to work a little bit harder as we become fitter.

For now, enjoy your period of HR recovery and its added calorie burned bonus.

P.S. What is fitbit reporting as your RHR (resting heart rate)?

[lookitsadam]

Every source I've seen about heart rate recovery is talking about the first handful of minutes after activity stops. In that regard, I'm doing fine. My typical exercise is interval patterns on a stationary bike. Over the course of two minutes, my heart rate bobs between 135 and 170. It recovers down to 135 even with moderate effort in that timespan. When I'm done and cooling down, it drops to ~110 within a few minutes as well.

This is much, much longer term. It drops down to 100 almost immediately, but it takes the next 30 minutes to get to 90, and it doesn't go down to my normal resting heart rate for 6+ hours after that.

For the first couple months fitbit reported my resting heart rate as all over the place, from 62 to 79 despite it being relatively stable from my personal observations. It's settled down in the meantime, and reports as 70 +/- 2