Your heart beats fast when youre exercising hard, and slower when youre resting or sleeping.
Your Apple Watch is taking your pulse all day long, and wants to tell you allllll about it.
Theres a wide range of normal.
If youre at rest, the watch only measures occasionally.
Thats why your watch face may say 70 bpm, 9 min ago.
But when you initiate the heart rate app, it takes a fresh reading.
The heart rate sensorcan only detect readings between 30 and 210 beats per minute.
Whats normal?Normal depends on what youre doing when you take the reading.
If youre lying in bed, expect numbers similar to your resting heart rate.
If youre exercising, we discuss that below as well.
If youmusthave a number, and youre just sitting around not doing anything special,60 to 100 is typical.
Resting Heart Rate
This is your heart rate while resting.
The more athletic you are, the stronger your heart will be.
Really fit people tend to see lower numbers here than people who dont work out.
And as you get more fit, you may see your resting heart rate drop over time.
On the flip side, if your resting heart rate isincreasing, something may be wrong.
Whats normal?This number will be more than your resting heart rate, but not super high.
If you do a lot of brisk walking, 110 to 120 might be more typical.
(On iPhone, the appZonescan do this calculation for you and color-code your workouts by effort level.)
Anything up to and including your maximum heart rate is normal.
It takes a measurement one minute after the workout ends, and then another at two minutes.
The faster your heart rate returns to normal after exercise, the better.
More fit people will have larger decreases here, for example 30 instead of 20.
Whats normal?About a 20 beat decrease per minute is normal.
