How to raise your resting heart rate

For my birthday this year, Andy kindly gave me a Garmin watch.

For those unfamiliar with it, this device is a watch (unsurprisingly) which also measures the number of steps that I take each day.

Since March 2020, I have tried to cover at least 5 miles per day, and since I have been using the watch to measure my walks more accurately, I have discovered that I am walking up to 8 miles per day.

The watch also measures my resting and active heart rate. I am blessed with a low resting heart rate of just 49 beats per minute which I attribute to regular exercise.

For the first time since lockdown, I have travelled a long distance by car.

On Tuesday, Andy Bodman (known as Bods to everyone at Informed Choice to distinguish him from Andy Bamford) drove us to meet with our clients Tony & Bea in Northampton. We were interviewing them for the next edition of Informed Magazine due out in September.

They told us their life story over a lunch of fish & chips at a local pub.

Bods was under strict instructions to get me home by 5 pm because Tuesday was the Euro match day for England v Germany. Everyone knows how obsessive I am about football, and the journey home through rain and heavy traffic on the M1 and M25 was quite fraught!

Bods, who could have a second career as an Uber driver, got me home just two minutes after kick-off!! Fortunately, England Manager Gareth Southgate took my advice and bought on Jack Grealish, resulting in a well-deserved 2-0 victory to England

However, when I checked my watch the following day, I discovered that my resting heart rate for Tuesday had climbed to a peak of 65 beats per minute.

There is a debate between Bods and me; he thinks the increase was due to the football, whereas I am confident it was because of his driving.

We may never know the real reason!