Resting Heart Rate Wrong

[Jasondemeter]

Why does Fitbit calculate resting heart rate? This is a health metric that is measured and should not require any calculation. According to the American Heart Association resting heart rate is "the number of times your heart beats per minute while it's at rest" and they recommend measuring it first thing in the morning. This is typically the lowest HR of the day. Fitbit should simply record the lowest HR of the night while you sleep. If no sleep is detected it should be the lowest HR over 1 min during the day.

I have seen posts saying that it's some kind of secret formula, but I do not understand why it's calculated at all.

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Encyclopedia/Heart-Encyclopedia_UCM_445084_ContentIndex.jsp?title=rest...

[bbarrera]

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@Jasondemeterwrote:

Why does Fitbit calculate resting heart rate? This is a health metric that is measured and should not require any calculation. According to the American Heart Association resting heart rate is "the number of times your heart beats per minute while it's at rest" and they recommend measuring it first thing in the morning.

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Coaches also recommend measuring RHR first thing in the morning, after waking up.

Its a mystery why Fitbit reinvented RHR, and made it inconsistent with standard practice. Similar mystery with the simplified HR zones and no ability to define true custom zones. Its also not possible to set HRmax and threshold.

[WavyDavey]

I don't think resting heart rate is typically measured as either the low of the night or the day  It makes sense to measure it once per day in the morning when done manually. But with a 24/7 HR monitor, it makes sense to look at the larger trend and use averages. 

As @bbarrera noted, it can get confusing when trying to compare the term to how others describe resting heart rate.

I consider resting heart rate to be valuable in the relative sense of the trend, but not in an absolute sense. Whichever method we use to measure RHR, as long as there is consistency in that method, it can be useful.

[bbarrera]

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@WavyDaveywrote:

It makes sense to measure it once per day in the morning when done manually. But with a 24/7 HR monitor, it makes sense to look at the larger trend and use averages. 

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@WavyDavey With 24x7 HR I think it makes sense to report daily HR for various times throughout the day:

- RHR (de facto definition) after waking up

- average sleeping HR

- average waking-at-rest HR (without workouts, or actively moving around)

- average workout HR

The HeartWatch app on my phone is a good example of how to provide better insights into the different averages. While Fitbit graphs are prettier, I'd sure like to see Fitbit expand beyond simplified HR zones and provide more details into HR averages for different activities (sleeping average HR, awake-at-rest average HR, RHR-defacto-definition, etc).

I find it confusing when Fitbit or any other vendor takes a de facto term like RHR, and changes the definition. It would be so much better for everyone if these vendors created new terms, for example "average HR while awake at rest" to avoid confusion.

One issue I found with Fitbit-RHR is that I often do high intensity intervals in the morning, which leads to EPOC and higher HR while at rest during the day. That makes Fitbit-RHR somewhat useless for monitoring impact of training from previous day(s), which is one reason RHR is measured upon waking up. I know a hard 3 day training block will drive up RHR, but Fitbit confuses matters by calculating RHR from data throughout the day, including data that can skew RHR-Fitbit higher than actual RHR-defacto-definition.

[MartinJRE]

I agree with you on this. DC Rainmaker also brouht this up in his test of the Ionic, so in all fairness to Fitbit I knew this prior to the purchase. However, I had a sleeping heart rate of 56 last night. Fitbit says my resting heart rate is 66. A 10 point difference is to me simply inaccurate - no matter how they calculate it. Resting heart rate is exactly that - your lowest heart rate while resting during a 24 hour period. It just seems a little typical for lagre tech companies to be nonchalant in their software (and hardware) choices. (Like Apple and their always new «standards» that no one else follow).

[Colinm39]

Since I had a reaction to some medicine I have kept the graphs and looked at night time sleeping temperatures in my suburb in Melbourne.. It took me nearly 2 months to eliminate a medicine from my system. I had a spike in blood pressure, my doctor was away on leave,and I thought a 2nd opinion would do no harm. This doctor put me on a calcium blocker.. Symptoms headaches, tingling down both arms and when I went for a walk my calf muscles locked up within 70 steps.. I was taken off that after 10 days and now everything is OK.. Cardiologist all clear.. The image below reflects sleep ave HR and RHR using the Ionic

Also when I had a hip replacement in 2015, no cartilage in the Left Hip. My RHR went up to 74 and took about 3 months to settle down.  I also had to warn the nursing staff that my HR gets down to 43-44 when asleep.. even with the high RHR.. that set the alarms going because the night nurse wasn't warned..  Today my RHR is 52 and Cardio Score is 43-46.

I have found the RHR accurate and a precursor to colds etc..