Heart Rate Recovery Calculator — educational

Measure your heart rate at the end of a hard effort and again after a short rest. The drop in beats per minute is your heart rate recovery (HRR) — a well-studied marker of cardiovascular fitness. Larger drops are better. Cole et al. 1999 (NEJM) defined the standard thresholds for the 60-second drop. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

The highest heart rate reached during the effort.
Measure after standing still, no talking.
Use a stopwatch or watch timer. 60 s is the standard reference.
Drop in heart rate
—bpm
Type a peak, post, and time to begin.
Fitness band (at your time)
—
—
Reference: Cole 1999 thresholds for HRR-1
Drop at 60 sBandNote
< 12 bpmBelow typicalDiscuss with a clinician if this is new
12 – 17Low-normalIntermediate fitness
18 – 24NormalHealthy adult range
≥ 25HighStrong cardiovascular fitness marker
Optional: derive a peak HR and Karvonen zones from age + resting HR

Useful if you do not know your measured peak. We use the Tanaka 2001 formula (HRmax ≈ 208 − 0.7·age) and the Karvonen method (HRrest + pct·(HRmax − HRrest)) for the five standard training zones.

Zone% HRRTarget bpm
Enter age and resting HR to see zones.
Bulk: paste multiple measurements (one per line)

Three columns: peak, post, time-seconds. Comma- or tab-separated. Empty lines are ignored. Each row gets a fitness band. Copy as TSV when done.