#38

Your Heart Is Telling You Something. Are You Listening?

How I used Apple Health, ChatGPT and a few lifestyle changes to improve one of the most important health metrics.

Reader

I’ve been training for the majority of my life. Football, athletics, and now the gym. Being physically active has always been a big part of who I am. Like most men who train regularly, I’ve spent years tracking my progress. How much I can bench, how fast I can run, how much muscle I’m carrying, and whether I can still keep up with the younger lads on the football pitch. But recently, I’ve become obsessed with a different number.

My resting heart rate.

For context, my resting heart rate sits below 50 beats per minute (BPM). For someone with my athletic background, that’s generally a positive sign of cardiovascular conditioning. But what caught my attention wasn’t necessarily the number itself. It was the fact that over the past three months, my resting heart rate had been steadily declining.

And the interesting part? I’d started using ChatGPT alongside the data from my Apple Health to better understand what was happening inside my body. Now, before you think I’ve become one of those guys who asks ChatGPT whether he should drink water, hear me out.

I think most men are sitting on a goldmine of information about their health and have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Let me explain.

Your heart is keeping score, even when you’re not

First, let’s get the science out of the way. Your resting heart rate is simply the number of times your heart beats per minute when your body is at rest. For most adults, a normal resting heart rate falls between 60 and 100 BPM. However, athletes and highly active individuals can have resting heart rates as low as 40 BPM.

Why?

Because consistent cardiovascular training can make your heart more efficient at pumping blood around your body.

Think of it like this.

Two men are sitting on the sofa watching football. One has a resting heart rate of 80 BPM, the other 50 BPM. The second man’s heart is beating 30 fewer times every minute. In a well-trained individual, this can reflect a heart that pumps more blood with each beat. That’s not a bad return on investment for years spent running around a football pitch.

But here’s where things get interesting. A meta-analysis involving over 1.2 million participants found that every 10 BPM increase in resting heart rate was associated with a 9% increase in all-cause mortality risk and an 8% increase in cardiovascular mortality risk.

Read that again.

This doesn’t mean lowering your resting heart rate by 10 BPM automatically makes you 9% less likely to die. The research shows an association, not a guaranteed cause-and-effect relationship. But it does highlight why this number deserves more attention.

We spend so much time worrying about how our bodies look that we forget to pay attention to how well they’re actually functioning. And resting heart rate is one useful window into that.

How I started using AI to understand my heart

Like many of you, I wear an Apple Watch. For years, I was collecting thousands of data points without doing much with them.

Steps. Sleep. Heart rate. Calories. Workouts. You name it.

I’d occasionally open Apple Health, look at a few graphs, think “interesting”, and then get on with my day.

Does this sound familiar?

But I started thinking: what’s the point of collecting all this information if I’m not using it to make better decisions?

That’s when I started experimenting with ChatGPT. Rather than simply looking at my resting heart rate in isolation, I began using the data from Apple Health to ask better questions. What has changed over the past three months? Is my resting heart rate trending down consistently? Could my training, sleep or recovery be influencing it? And more importantly, what practical changes could I make to support my cardiovascular health?

This is where AI became useful

Not because ChatGPT magically knew what was happening inside my heart. But because it could help me organise information, identify patterns worth investigating, and turn complicated health concepts into something I could actually understand. I could look at my resting heart rate alongside my sleep patterns, activity levels and training schedule, rather than treating every metric as a separate number.

The biggest shift was moving from collecting data to actually learning from it.

The changes that can move the needle

One thing I’ve learned is that improving your cardiovascular health isn’t necessarily about training harder. Sometimes it’s about training smarter and recovering better. There are a few areas worth paying particular attention to.

1. Stop neglecting your cardiovascular fitness

I love lifting weights. But being able to bench 100kg doesn’t automatically mean you’ve got great cardiovascular fitness. Your heart needs training too.

Consistent aerobic exercise, including running, cycling, swimming and brisk walking, can improve cardiovascular efficiency over time. And no, every session doesn’t need to leave you on the floor questioning your life choices. A lot of your aerobic training can be performed at a conversational pace. You should be working, but still able to speak in sentences.

2. Take your sleep seriously

You can have the best training programme in the world, but if you’re sleeping four hours a night, you’re making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself. Poor sleep can affect your nervous system, recovery and resting heart rate. It’s also why I started paying more attention to my sleep data alongside my heart rate. A single bad night might not mean much. But repeated patterns can tell a different story.

3. Understand that recovery is part of training

This is something I’ve had to learn as I’ve got older. When you’re younger, you can sometimes get away with treating every workout like it’s the Champions League final. But your body eventually starts sending invoices. A sustained increase in resting heart rate relative to your normal baseline can sometimes be associated with illness, stress, poor recovery or excessive training load. The answer isn’t always another workout. Sometimes it’s rest.

4. Look at the bigger picture

Alcohol, hydration, stress, medication and illness can all influence resting heart rate. This is why obsessing over one number is pointless. A resting heart rate of 48 BPM doesn’t automatically make you healthier than someone sitting at 58 BPM. And a sudden unexplained drop isn’t necessarily a victory either. Your symptoms, personal baseline and overall health matter.

A very low resting heart rate can be normal in trained athletes, but if it comes with dizziness, fainting, unusual fatigue or breathlessness, it needs medical attention. The goal isn’t to see how low you can get the number. The goal is to build a healthier, more resilient body.

How you can use ChatGPT to understand your own health data

Now, this is the part I really want you to take away. You don’t need to be a data scientist to get more value from your health information. If you’ve got an Apple Watch, Garmin, Whoop or another fitness tracker, you’re probably already collecting more information than you realise.

Here’s a simple process you can try

Step 1: Find your baseline

Open Apple Health, navigate to Heart, select Resting Heart Rate and look at your trends over the past three to six months. Don’t get distracted by one unusually high or low reading. Look for the overall direction.

Step 2: Give ChatGPT some context

You can share a screenshot of your resting heart rate trend, manually enter your weekly averages, or export relevant data from Apple Health. Then tell ChatGPT a little about your training, sleep and lifestyle.

You could use a prompt like this:

“I’m a physically active man who trains regularly. Here is my resting heart rate data from the past three months, alongside my sleep and activity information. Help me identify trends, explain possible reasons for the changes, and suggest evidence-based habits that could support my cardiovascular fitness. Distinguish what the data shows from what is only a hypothesis, and flag anything I should discuss with a healthcare professional.”

Step 3: Turn insights into action

This is where most people fall short. Information is useless if you don’t do anything with it. Use what you’ve learned to build a realistic plan. Maybe that’s adding more aerobic training, improving sleep consistency or making more room for recovery. Change a few things, track what happens over the following weeks, and see whether the trends move in the direction you expected. Just remember that AI can help you interpret information, but it cannot diagnose heart conditions or prove which lifestyle change caused a particular result. Be selective about the health information you share, too.

The Man Daily Way

Your resting heart rate, blood pressure, cardiovascular fitness, sleep and recovery all deserve attention.

My challenge to you this week is simple. Open your health app and find your resting heart rate. Look at how it’s changed over the past three months. If you’ve got the data, use AI to help you make sense of it. Ask questions. Look for patterns. Make a plan.

Remember the ultimate flex isn’t just looking like you’re in shape. It’s actually being healthy enough to enjoy the life you’re working so hard to build.

Man Daily