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Re: [RC] Resting Heart Rates - heidiI'm just posting this for the sake of the quiet newbies who are worrying because they've never caught their horse's pulse below 36. I've taken lots of pulses and can't think of one at a ride that was below 32 or so. 36 is fairly common. Kaboot always vetted in at 44 and was a pretty good horse. I might could have snuck up on him in the barn sleeping and caught him at 32. Merlyn had the fastest recoveries of any horse I ever rode...out recovering some world class horses, and his resting pulse was 32. Thanks, Angie, for mentioning this. And Frank is also right that a low resting HR isn't everything. Essentially, any resting HR below about the mid-40s is clinically normal. Fit athletes do tend to have slightly lower ones, but not necessarily phenomenally lower ones. Fit horses with resting rates in the 30s are probably the most common, and yes, some are in the 20s. The notion is that the lower the resting HR, the more "room" the horse has between his resting HR and the HR criterion--which would make sense if not for the fact that the horse is a much more complex critter than just a simple pump assembly. In some cases, the lower HR is somewhat indicative of a better stroke volume--ie a horse with a really poor stroke volume cannot have an extremely low resting HR. But that does not mean that a horse with a perfectly outstanding stroke volume cannot have a somewhat higher resting HR for other reasons--ie the way his own "pacemaker" is set, etc. The very best recovering horses that I've ever ridden did not have particularly low resting HRs--around 36 or so, for the most part. But they "ran" at between 100 and 120 on the trail, and could be ridden right up to the PR area and be below 60 by the time I could dismount and get a pulse person. If they stood for just a few minutes they would be in the low 40s, consistently. I'm riding one like that now--the one time I've judged him for BC he had a 44/44 CRI at ten minutes, and he is routinely 48-52 by the time I can get him to a pulse person. (I've caught him at 60 once--on an extremely hot day, when the pulse folks were literally right on top of him when I got off.) His resting rate? About 36... I do like to see prospects have a true resting rate of 40 or lower, even though "clinical normal" can be a bit higher--but I wouldn't get too bent out of shape selecting the horse with a resting 28 over a horse with a resting 36, for instance. One has to look at the whole package, and the ability to recover quickly is much more important than how low the horse starts out. Heidi =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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