Do you check your pulse? It’s not something I do very often… but it may actually be a useful way to keep an eye out for heart disease!
Your pulse is your heart rate — how many times your heart beats in a minute. Everyone’s heart rate is different, but the average pulse at rest for children (between six and fifteen) is 70-100 beats per minute. The average pulse for adults (ages eighteen and up) is 60-100 beats per minute. (Information provided by the Cleveland Clinic.)
When you exercise, your pulse increases — this is so your body can provide more oxygen to the working parts. Taking your pulse while exercising is a good way to see if you’re near your target heart rate. This is the place where your body gets the most benefit from exercise with the least risk of strain on your ticker.
Checking your pulse while at rest can tell you something about the workings of your heart. Often, a resting heart rate for an adult is between sixty and eighty beats per minute. Athletic folks generally have a lower resting heart rate — sometimes as low as forty beats per minute! That gives you a pretty wide range of “normal” heart rates: as low as forty beats per minute and as high as ninety beats per minute.
Anything outside that range while resting should prompt a talk with your doctor. A resting pulse that is too fast, too slow, or irregular can indicate heart disease, low or high blood pressure, irregular heart function, or high stress levels. None of those are really things you want to let go for too long without talking to a health care professional.
Call your doctor ASAP if you have a problem with your resting pulse with dizziness, anxiety, or lightheadedness. These symptoms combined with a pulse that is too fast, too slow, or erratic can indicate a serious problem.
So how do you do it? Taking your pulse is easy as long as you can count and have a minute to spare. Experts suggest using a clock with a second hand to keep time — this makes it easy to know exactly when to start and stop. And here’s a tip from the American Academy of Family Physicians: the pulse on your left wrist tends to be stronger (and easier to find) than the pulse on the right wrist. Just count the beats for a full sixty seconds and you’re done. If you want to be really good about it, keep a diary of your monthly pulse checks.