When puffing and panting at the gym, my personal trainer suggested my heart was out of shape. Being a fan of statistics, and measuring and charting things, I vowed to measure my resting heart rate the next morning upon waking. I went home and found a myriad of heart rate monitoring apps, none of which required any hardware.
The one I settled on is cheap as chips – less than a dollar, and I am very pleased that I have another figure to obsess about. Why was it 62 BPM yesterday and 65 BPM this morning? I love neurotic obsessions.
My wife thought it was a bogus measurement – like a “test your love” meter at a carnival. But if you lie still and listen to your heart beat, you can see it mirrored in real time on the screen. What I like about it: it’s not supposed to work well on an iPhone 3GS like mine, but it does, as long as I’m in strong light and I stay still. Because I’m careful, I have been checking it by different methods – stopwatch and pulse – and it seems bang on every time.
So if you’re looking for a cheap way to monitor your resting heart rate, and you have an iPhone, get instant heart rate. I’m sure that someone will make a social game out of it – see how low you can get your heartrate in a competitive setting. I’d like that. Like competitive yoga – completely paradoxical.