What is Lance Armstrong's resting pulse rate?

Answer 1

His heart is stronger as well as being significantly larger. Per pump (stroke, beat), his trained heart can output a greater volume of blood than an untrained person (let's called the untrained person Joe Normal). So at rest, both Armstrong and Joe need to move the same volume of blood around per minute to keep everything oxygenated. Each beat of Armstrong's heart is going to move twice as much blood as a beat from Joe's. As a result, Armstrong's heart only needs to beat half as often to keep things oxygenated. How did this happen? Lots and lots of cardiovascular training. As the heart gets trained, it gets stronger and larger - it is a muscle, just like your biceps grow after multiple bicep curls in the gym. When Lance is sprinting as fast as he can, his heart is not pumping much more often than when a non-athlete is sprinting - but it's pumping out more blood per beat so he can go further and faster since his muscles can remain better oxygenation, produce less lactic acid and take longer to fatigue.

Answer 2

This is a resting heart rate measurement for Lance. Generally these are taken when the person is either lying prone or sitting motionless, more than often in the morning after waking. More importantly, it is because he is a well trained and conditioned athlete. A highly trained endurance athlete often has a larger heart that is like an enlarged muscle. The training and the fitness level leads to a slow resting heart rate. A rate of 32-38 is extremely common for Olympic calibre athletes and Tour De France athletes.

Answer 3

Low resting heart rate for athletes is very common because their heart has become very efficient in pumping blood. Efficiency in emptying out the ventricles more fully could be why his heart rate is lower. If he can pump more blood in one beat than an untrained person that means he would have to pump less times per minute to get the same amount of blood through out the systemic circulation. Another possibility, though i'm not sure about this one, his body may be better at substance exchange at the capillary network in the systemic circulation or at the level of the alveoli in the pulmonary ciruculation.

Answer 4

I have seen that his resting pulse is abnormally low, around 32-34