Your resting heart rate is one of the simplest numbers your fitness watch records. On its own, it tells you relatively little. Track how it changes, though, and it becomes far more interesting.
Your Resting Heart Rate Is Personal
Open Garmin, COROS or almost any modern fitness watch and you'll find a resting heart rate number waiting for you.
It's easy to treat it like a score. Lower means fitter. Higher means something is wrong.
That's not particularly useful.
Resting heart rate (RHR) is how many times your heart beats per minute when you're at rest. Genetics, age, fitness, medications and lifestyle factors can all influence it, so comparing your RHR with someone else's tells you relatively little.
What's more useful is comparing it with your own baseline.
Endurance training tends to lower resting and submaximal heart rate over time as the cardiovascular system adapts. But RHR also fluctuates from day to day.
And those fluctuations can tell you something too.
Why Is My Resting Heart Rate Higher Today?
A higher RHR doesn't mean you've suddenly lost fitness.
Heart rate is influenced by the autonomic nervous system and the demands being placed on your body. Hard training is one factor, but sleep, illness, psychological stress and environmental conditions can all influence cardiovascular measurements.
A review by Buchheit on monitoring training status found that heart-rate measures can provide useful information, but should be interpreted alongside training load, wellness and performance rather than in isolation.
That's why the trend matters more than a single number.
If your normal RHR is around 52 bpm and you wake up at 57 one morning, it may mean very little. If it remains elevated for several mornings while your sleep is poor, your legs feel heavy and your usual training pace feels harder, the combination becomes more interesting.
It's not a diagnosis.
It's another piece of information.
RHR, HRV and Heart Rate Recovery Aren't the Same Thing
Wearables have introduced several heart-related metrics into everyday training, and they're easily confused.
Resting heart rate (RHR) measures how frequently your heart beats while at rest.
Heart rate variability (HRV) measures variation in the time between successive heartbeats. This variation is influenced by the autonomic nervous system, which is why HRV is increasingly used to monitor physiological stress and adaptation.
Heart rate recovery (HRR) measures how quickly your heart rate falls after exercise.
They tell us different things.
A review by Esco et al. emphasised that trends such as weekly averages are more useful for athlete monitoring than isolated HRV readings. Research has even found cases where both increases and decreases in HRV accompanied negative training adaptations.
HRR has its own nuances. A systematic review by Daanen et al. found that heart rate recovery has potential for monitoring changes in training status, but factors including exercise intensity, temperature, age and testing protocol can influence it.
So there isn't a universally "good" HRV, RHR or HRR number.
Your normal is the useful reference point.
Can Resting Heart Rate Tell You If You've Recovered?
Not by itself.
A higher-than-normal RHR can accompany fatigue or physiological stress, but there isn't a universal threshold that tells every athlete whether they should train.
The same applies to HRV.
That's worth remembering when your Garmin or COROS gives you a recovery score, training readiness score or similar recommendation.
These scores aren't direct measurements of recovery. They're algorithms interpreting selected data.
Different platforms also use different inputs. COROS, for example, states that its Recovery metric currently relies largely on Base Fitness and Training Load and does not incorporate sleep, HRV, daily stress or muscular fatigue into that specific calculation.
That doesn't make the score useless.
It makes context important.
How did you sleep? How demanding has your recent training been? Do your legs feel unusually heavy? Does your normal pace or weight feel harder than usual? Are you getting sick?
A wearable can add information to that picture. It shouldn't replace the picture.
Your Watch Knows More About You Than It Used To
One reason RHR and HRV have become more useful is simple: we're collecting far more data than we used to.
A single resting heart rate measurement isn't particularly revealing.
Months of measurements are different.
Wearables can establish an individual baseline and show how your cardiovascular signals respond to hard training blocks, recovery weeks, travel, poor sleep or changes in fitness.
Garmin, for example, calculates daily resting heart rate using the lowest 30-minute average during a 24-hour period and can display a seven-day average. COROS also incorporates heart-rate data throughout its training ecosystem.
The algorithms differ, but the advantage is similar:
You aren't comparing yourself with a population average. You're building a dataset of yourself.
That's arguably where wearable data becomes most useful.
But Don't Outsource Your Recovery to Your Watch
Modern watches can collect impressive amounts of physiological data. They're still not measuring everything.
Wrist-based optical heart-rate sensors use photoplethysmography (PPG), which estimates heart rate through changes in blood flow beneath the skin. Movement, fit and sensor contact can affect readings, particularly during exercise.
More importantly, even perfectly measured heart rate doesn't capture muscular soreness, motivation, joint discomfort or every other factor affecting your readiness to train.
So rather than asking your watch:
"Am I recovered?"
A better question might be:
"Does the data agree with how I feel and perform?"
When RHR is elevated, HRV has shifted, sleep has been poor and training feels unusually difficult, you have several signals pointing in the same direction.
When one metric looks unusual but everything else feels normal, there may be less reason to react.
That's a much better use of the technology than allowing one number to dictate the day's training.
The Takeaway
Resting heart rate is appealing because it's simple.
Recovery isn't.
RHR can provide useful information about cardiovascular fitness and physiological strain. HRV adds another view of autonomic regulation. Heart rate recovery tells you something different again about what happens after exercise.
But none of them tells the entire story.
The value isn't in chasing the "best" number. It's in learning what your numbers normally look like—and recognising when the pattern changes.
So use the data.
Just don't hand it the final vote.
Your watch knows your heart rate. You still have to know your body.
References
1. Buchheit M. (2014). Monitoring training status with HR measures: do all roads lead to Rome? Frontiers in Physiology. Study reference
2. Daanen HAM, Lamberts RP, Kallen VL, Jin A, Van Meeteren NLU. (2012). A systematic review on heart-rate recovery to monitor changes in training status in athletes. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. Study reference
3. Esco MR, et al. (2025). Monitoring Training Adaptation and Recovery Status in Athletes Using Heart Rate Variability via Mobile Devices: A Narrative Review. Sensors. Study reference
4. Plews DJ, et al. (2013). Training adaptation and heart rate variability in elite endurance athletes: opening the door to effective monitoring. Sports Medicine. Study reference
5. Bellenger CR, et al. (2021). Monitoring and adapting endurance training on the basis of heart rate variability monitored by wearable technologies: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. Study reference
