What is a good HRV for my age? A realistic guide to the number everyone searches

It is one of the most searched questions in fitness, and it has an honest answer that fits in a sentence: a good HRV is one that is stable or rising against your own baseline. Here is how to get from that sentence to something you can use tomorrow morning.

Typical ranges, with the caveat

Most wearables report RMSSD in milliseconds. Large population datasets put the median somewhere around 60 to 70 ms in the twenties, drifting to roughly 30 to 40 ms by the fifties. The spread inside each age band is enormous: two healthy 40-year-olds can sit at 25 ms and 90 ms and both be fine. Fitness, genetics, alcohol, illness and the device itself all move the number more than a decade of age does.

So use the ranges only to sanity-check a device, never to grade yourself.

What a good reading actually looks like

Three things make a morning HRV useful: it was measured in the same conditions (on waking, before coffee, same position), it is compared with your own rolling baseline, and it is read as a trend over a week, not a verdict about a day. Under those rules, "good" means within your normal range or above it, and "watch out" means several days in a row under it, especially with a rising resting heart rate.

Things that push it around

• Alcohol the night before, reliably and for most people dramatically.
• A hard session the day before: expected, and not a reason to rest if you slept.
• Illness, often two days before you feel it.
• Heat, altitude, travel, and a late heavy meal.
• Breathing rate during the measurement, which is why devices insist on rest.

Reading it with a coach

PeakU shows HRV as a status against your baseline, balanced, low or high, rather than a naked number, and pairs it with resting heart rate, sleep and load before it says anything about training. If you want the one habit that makes the number worth having: measure at the same moment every morning, and look at the week.