Tracking your daily steps is one great way to maintain your overall fitness. But there’s another number that may provide an even better sense of your overall heart health — and calculating it just takes some simple math (we promise).
According to a new paper, daily heart rate per step (DHRPS) is a better predictor of cardiovascular fitness than resting heart rate or daily steps. The study, which was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in March, followed nearly 7,000 people over five years. Each participant wore a Fitbit, which counted their steps, heart rate, and other biometric data.
The researchers found that people with a DHRPS in the top 25th percentile were about twice as likely to have Type 2 diabetes, 1.7 times as likely to have heart failure, 1.6 times as likely to have high blood pressure, and 1.4 times as likely to have plaque buildup in the heart’s arteries, compared to those with a lower DHRPS.
“It’s a more-meaningful metric because it gets at the core issue of capturing the heart’s capacity to adjust under stress as physical activity fluctuates throughout the day,” the study’s lead author, Zhanlin Chen, said.
Reed Gurchiek, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Clemson University, who is conducting similar physiological research, tells us that the sheer size of the study is a “major strength” of the research. And that “normalizing by number of steps taken is a good idea” to better understand cardiac fitness.
How to calculate DHRPS — and what is a good DHRPS?
As you may have gathered by now, it’s a simple ratio. All you have to do is check the data on your Fitbit, Apple Watch, or whichever wearable you use — and it’s best to track your averages across a week or month. If your average heart rate over that period is 75 and your step count is 5,000, that means your DRHPS is 75/5,000 — or 0.015.
In the study, a low DHRPS is 0.0081 or below, which is considered an ideal score — one that indicates your heart is doing its job efficiently. A medium score is between 0.0081 and 0.0147, while a high one is above 0.0147.
Should you start tracking your DHRPS?
There hasn’t been a lot of research supporting this metric, and, as Harvard Health notes, there are several limitations to the study. For one, most of the participants were women and more than 80 percent were white. Plus, the researchers did not compare how effective DHRPS was in gauging cardiac health compared to more established risk assessments.
But calculating your ratio is so simple, you might as well try to find yours. Having that number can be a great jumping-off point for a conversation with your doctor, and a better understanding of your own fitness.
