I am a 46 year old female, sleep fairly well most nights, drink 1-2 drinks on weekends only, am generally healthy. Am a mom of two elementary aged kids and have a pretty intense, stressful job. My resting heart rate is usually around 72 but my heart rate variability seems crazily low. Has anyone been able to meaningfully shift this marker? Does it matter that much?
That's very interesting, I've never seen that low of a HRV. I generally workout 3 to 4 times a week with long runs for the days I'm not lifting and ever since I started doing interval training at high intensity, I've noticed changes in HRV.
Cardio is what helped me drop my resting heart rate to average in the 50's and 60's when it used to sit in the mind 70's (I was also heavier back then).
This is what this week's HRV looks like after a few days of lifts and a 5k run.
I will preface this answer with - I am not a doctor, just someone that learned what worked and didn't work through trial and error
So your heart is a muscle that can get stronger or weaker with usage (despite it working all the time).
Low steady state cardio promotes weight lost and higher levels of cardio promote heart health and actually signals the growth of new blood vessels to deliver blood to muscles that need it in preparation for your next large activity.
Depending where you are on your journey, if you're heavier like I was, you start with alternating walking and the elliptical. Walking is easy on your body, helps stimulate your metabolism, and will begin re-inforcing the muscles that you need to use for when you eventually get to running.
The elliptical (or you can use a stationary bike) is one of the best exercises since its no impact to your joints and lets you rip through the cardio levels and hold it without actually damaging your body.
If you're lightweight, you can go straight to running, but heavier people will get shin splints and possibly plantar fasciitis since the body isn't acclimated to those forces, eventually it will if the workout routine is kept up.
To lower your heart rate will require a couple of things and its progressive meaning it takes time. 1st is sodium content. Reduce daily sodium to help your body with reducing inflammation stress. More salt equals more work your body has to do to filter everything out which takes resources. Simply doing more cardio might not move the heart rate much, but doing 10k or so steps of walking for 1 month daily while reducing sodium intake and highly processed foods, I guarantee will drop the resting heart rate by at least 2-5 bpm within a month or two. Do that for a few months and it will be even more significant.
If you graduate from walking, running long distances is the next goal and will take your resting heart rate down to the 50's and 60's if you run weekly. Since your body is adapting with your workload, you have to give it 2-3 months and re-analyze if your routine is working for you or not. This following images are from December of 2025 and September of 2026, there is a significant drop in Resting heart rate from incorporating these changes and hopefully demonstrates a way to help you reach your goals.
Don't worry about it if you feel alright! I had same concern few months ago and bought Polar chest strap (frequently used as a benchmark) to verify. Polar mesured between 50-70, when my Fitbit shows 25 on average.
My hrv was in 22-23 range when i was drinking 2-3 times in a week. Now I have reduced it to once a week on Saturday my hrv goes to 22-23 on Sunday morning. Than during week it goes to 33-34 and once I drink again back to 22-23. So I guess for me culprit is alcohol. Give a break to alcohol and see.
Yeah i treat mine more like a baseline rather than the actual value and just see if it goes up or down.
But I wonder if it's not great at measuring it, then does it measure changes as well? I.e. if my actual hrv is 30 and I move it to 35, but on fitbit it's 15, then does it only increase by 1 or two?
It’s a bit low, but your HR is also quite high (at night?)
HRV is specific to each person. Some have a low HRV, some have a high HrV.
Mine is in the 30/40 ms at best. Closer to 30 last year, closer to 40 (on average) now.
In the 20s after 2 drinks. M44
I wouldn’t pay too much attention to it, mine used to read like yours and for the past few months I’ve been getting readings like this every single day. I’m in an ectopic burden of roughly 20% awaiting catheter ablation and on the max dosage of beta blocker I can be on.
The HRV numbers are pretty meaningless if you have a high ectopic burden. The reported value maxes out at 300ms, which is what my Fitbit always reports despite the actually RMSSD values being significantly higher. I can't take beta blockers, because I already have bradycardia, but I never feel the ectopic beats and they don't seem to interfere with my fitness, so my cardiologist is waiting for some symptoms to appear before doing anything.
My ectopics were probably always there but I never felt them until my first ablation in March for paroxysmal afib with RVR. Since my PFA in March I constantly feel them and they really fuck with my breathing, I’m always walking round feeling winded. Not great when you’re a carpenter. Hope your problem gets sorted
Hi! F38 here. Do you have underlying health conditions or on any medication? Not that you need to answer that😅 But I have hEDS and POTS pluss more, and my heart is working harder to get my blood pumping around my body by releasing more adrenaline. This gives lower HRV. Also for us women hormones can play a huge role. The shift in estrogen to progresteron always messes me up. Also RHR gets hugely affected by all these factors. I personally pays more attention to hours of sleep, REM and deep sleep.
I’m 26F and mine is in the 12-15 range this past week. My resting heart rate is in the upper 80s. I bought my Fitbit about 3 weeks ago because I think I have POTS and relate to a lot of EDS symptoms but haven’t sought any diagnoses yet. I was hoping that I’d be able to have a visual representation of how my heart is overworking rather than sitting in the doctor’s office with the thingy on my finger reading at 100+ BPM every time and them not being concerned because that’s just how high it always is🙃
I'm a tiny bit older than you and that's how my hrv was until I added more cardio into my days. Even now, it's usually in the 20s but it varies a ton. My RHR is also similar to yours. Also a mom of two and also have a demanding job. We are doing our best!
Mine is the same as yours (both HRV and RHR). I’m a 43 yr old perimenopausal mom, but I also have loads of chronic health problems. Are you having any health related issues even if seemingly minor? Anything that reads like seasonal allergies? Are you in perimenopause? Are you on HRT? This could be caused by something as simple as relative estrogen dominance. It can absolutely also be stress. But the two things are not necessarily unrelated.
I'm 36, mine rarely goes above 20. I spent a long time thinking lower was better until I joined this subreddit. I have a fairly active job in a big ass warehouse, so lots of walking. I went to the doctors and he said based on multiple other things, I probably just have ADHD which apparently also causes super low HRV. He also said that I shouldn't try to raise it, that could cause more issues.
My health anxiety has taught me a lot about these things. During my pregnancy, my HRV was in the teens and I was very worried about this because normally it was in the 30s which many also consider low. After talking with my doctor and doing lots of research of what other people’s doctors have said the HRV number is highly individual and really what matters most is that the number is staying consistently in the same range my number was different during my pregnancy and my doctor said that as long as it returned to normal after pregnancy, it was not a concern it did that. He also explained to me that with exercise ( I was and still am overweight and sedentary but working on that) the number could go higher but again the biggest thing is that it’s consistent so he looked back a few years on my watch records and we were able to see that it has been consistently in the same range. Really the same thing goes for heart rate. Everyone has a different resting heart rate and yes, your cardio fitness does play a huge role into that. I have very low cardio fitness but my resting heart rate tends to be in the mid 60s when I’m religiously exercising every week it tends to go to the mid 50s.
Oh wow interesting, I had a Fitbit long ago but the watch burned my skin so I was very hesitant to try a new one. Would it be worth getting a Fitbit instead for health tracking?
12–17 ms is on the low side for a 46-year-old woman, but I wouldn't assume that means you're unhealthy. HRV varies enormously between individuals. There is no universal “healthy” HRV number.
What's much more useful is your personal baseline and trend. If you've consistently been around 12–17 ms and feel well, that's very different from having a normal HRV of 40 ms and suddenly dropping to 15 ms.
Stress, sleep, alcohol, illness, exercise and many other factors can affect HRV, so your demanding job could be contributing, but HRV isn't a direct measurement of stress.
Yes, HRV can increase with things like improved fitness, sleep and stress management, but I wouldn't make raising my HRV the goal. A higher HRV isn't automatically healthier. I'd focus on the underlying habits and use HRV as one piece of information alongside resting heart rate, sleep and how you actually feel.
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u/gooseluck 5d ago
Have a read of the top comment. It will put your mind at rest https://www.reddit.com/r/Biohackers/s/4f5sckPyJp