What Is a Good HRV? 5 People Who Tracked How to Improve HRV and Lower Resting Heart Rate

"What is a good HRV?" is one of the most searched questions from people who just bought a fitness tracker. The honest answer is that heart rate variability is very individual — age, fitness, and genetics all shift it — so the most useful comparison is usually against your own baseline. That's exactly what the five people below did: they changed one or two habits and tracked HRV or resting heart rate for weeks or months.

How to improve HRV with exercise: keep easy runs easy

A 50-year-old runner in London stopped pacing his recovery runs by feel and capped them at 125 bpm instead. Between March and July his Oura ring HRV rose from 33–34ms to consistently in the 40s — and his pace at that same heart rate improved from a 14-minute mile to an 11-minute mile.

A Whoop user started from a weekly average of 32ms — his source put the typical range for his age at 55–75ms. He added meditation, an earlier dinner, reading instead of late-night TV, and five or six runs a week. Seven weeks later his weekly average was 53ms. He credits consistency over any single tactic, with running as the biggest driver. It's one of the clearest examples of how to increase HRV naturally, without supplements or gadgets.

How to lower resting heart rate: what quitting alcohol did

Two people quit drinking and tracked it. A chemist who had been having one or two drinks a day plus weekend binges watched his sleeping heart rate fall from 65 to 56 bpm and his HRV rise from 55ms to 67ms over five months on an Apple Watch. A writer who quit at the end of December saw her Oura resting heart rate drop from 59 to an average of 52 bpm by February, alongside a five-year-high sleep score of 93.

The experiment that barely moved: quitting caffeine

Not every change shows up on a tracker. A sleep blogger went from several strong coffees a day to zero caffeine over nine months. He felt much less anxious — but his total sleep rose only five minutes and his Fitbit sleep score went from 81 to 83. It's a useful counterweight: some benefits are real without being dramatic in the data.

These are personal tracking results, not medical advice, and consumer wearables estimate HRV differently from one another — so compare your numbers to your own trend on the same device. If your resting heart rate or HRV changes suddenly, it's worth raising with a doctor.