What your morning HR is really telling you

Listen to this issue as a podcast

Every rider I work with checks their morning heart rate. Garmin, Whoop, Oura, the watch on the bedside table. We treat it as a fitness signal. A 4-beat drop after a rest week feels like a win. A spike after a hard block feels like a warning.

We are right to watch it. We are probably underrating what it actually means.

A 2016 meta-analysis in the CMAJ pulled together 46 prospective cohort studies, 1.2 million people, 78,000 deaths, follow-up between 3 and 40 years. The question was simple. Does resting heart rate predict how long you live?

The answer was unambiguous. For every 10 beats per minute higher your resting heart rate sits, your risk of dying from any cause goes up around 9 per cent. The relationship is linear from 45 beats per minute upward, with no point where lower stops being better.

Put in real numbers, a person sitting at 75 has roughly a 30 per cent higher risk of all-cause mortality than someone at 45. Above 80, the risk jumps to 45 per cent higher than the lowest category. This held up after adjusting for the usual suspects: blood pressure, smoking, body mass index, cholesterol, diabetes, physical activity. Resting heart rate is sending its own signal, independent of all of them.

Why. The current view is that resting heart rate is a window into the autonomic nervous system. A low number reflects strong parasympathetic tone, a large and efficient stroke volume, and a heart that is doing less work to do the same job. Those same adaptations are exactly what endurance training builds. The reason fit cyclists tend to have low resting heart rates is not coincidence. It is the cumulative signature of years of aerobic work on the heart itself.

That last part is the bit worth sitting with. The adaptations we build to ride well, a stronger stroke volume, better parasympathetic tone, a heart doing less work for the same output, are the same adaptations this data says predict a longer, healthier life. You are not just training for the next race or the next event. You are building the biology of longevity at the same time, whether that is the reason you ride or not.

What to do with this

If you race or do hard group rides: Your training already lowers resting heart rate as a by-product of building stroke volume and aerobic capacity. The action here is not to add anything. It is to stop treating a sub-50 number as a vanity stat and start treating it as a biomarker you actually care about year-round. If your morning number drifts up across an off-season or a stressful block of life, take it seriously. That drift comes back once training resumes, but only if you have protected the underlying base.

If you are a high-volume rider: You are likely already in the strongest position. Volume is the single biggest driver of low resting heart rate, because volume is what builds the cardiac and parasympathetic adaptations the study is describing. Keep the easy hours easy. Resist the temptation to turn aerobic rides into something they are not. The boring kilometres are doing the work that shows up in this data.

If you are time-capped: Six to eight hours a week is enough to move resting heart rate meaningfully if those hours are spent right. The trap is filling them with high-intensity work because time feels precious. That builds top-end without building the cardiac base that drops resting heart rate. Two zone-2 rides of an hour each, one harder session, and one longer weekend ride is a better structure for this outcome than four hard hours. Track your morning number across the next twelve weeks and watch what happens.

Zhang D, Shen X, Qi X. Resting heart rate and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the general population: a meta-analysis. CMAJ 2016;188(3):E53–E63. DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.150535

On my mindGuided is live

I've wanted to get this right for a long time, and it's finally live. It's called Guided, and it's a new way to work with us. I hope you don't mind if I indulge in some behind-the-scenes thinking here at SEMIPRO.

The simplest way to explain it: Guided is coaching where you get two coaches, not one.

Our new coach, Kabir, is in your corner every week. He reads your rides, makes the day-to-day calls, and adjusts your training when work, travel, sleep or life gets in the way. He raced elite as a teenager and races gravel across Europe now — but honestly, that's not why he coaches here. I don't pick coaches on racing pedigree or certifications. I pick them on how they think about cycling: whether they reason from physiology rather than reciting it, whether they're genuinely curious about how a body responds, and whether they can coach the person and not just the file. Kabir does all three. The racing experience is a bonus.

And I'm still there. Kabir and I sit down every week and go through athletes together — your training, your numbers, what's working and what isn't. He delivers your week-to-week inside how I coach, and I'm reading it alongside him in the background. Two sets of eyes on your training. Nothing slips through.

I want to be straight about it: Guided isn't direct 1:1 with me, and it's not meant to be. If that's what you want, PRO is the better fit. But Guided isn't a watered-down version of working with me either. For a lot of riders, it's actually the better setup — a coach who's fully present in your week, with my read and methodology behind it, without needing me in your inbox every single day.

Fourteen years in, this is still the whole job to me — work out what a rider needs next, build the work around it, then actually check whether it moved them. Guided is just that, made repeatable, with someone good in your corner every week and me still reading along.

It's live now if you want a look. I'd genuinely like to know what you think. Reply and tell me.

See Guided →

Damian