I had an elevated RHR after recovering from COVID for nearly 3 months. My cardiologist said they’re seeing that a lot with endurance athletes who’ve had COVID but not with sedentary people, and they’re not sure why that is.
I asked my friend, who is a primary care doctor but does not exercise, if he could look into his heart rate history per-covid and post-covid. To his surprise, his RHR is over 20% higher than pre-COVID 6 months ago (he had gotten COVID 3 months ago) from 70bpm to 85bpm; his pre-COVID HR test was done as part of his annual physical at his office while the RHR test was done at home when he was lying in bed. The interesting thing is that he doesn’t “feel” any different than pre-COVID. To him, he recovered from COVID in about 10 days and has felt normal since then, but something is obviously not right for his RHR to be 20% higher than normal 3 months after infection.
While this is just one person’s experience, I can’t help but think about what my cardiologist said about endurance athletes suffering from higher RHR post-COVID. Maybe it’s that endurance athletes are so focused on performance that they’re willing to talk to their doctor’s about anything out of the ordinary while regular folks never even know something is wrong?
@AndyGajda are you back to your pre - COVID training routine yet? In my case a lower resting heart rate correlates with how fit i am. Detraining results in a higher RHR. I blame my higher RHR on the lack of training i had in the past weeks. This might be probably why non endurance athletes get back to their normal RHR post COVID. They only have the factor COVID, not the factor COVID plus no training.
I wasn’t inactive long enough for that degree of detraining to occur. My endurance persists, but I’m still lacking some of the top end, but that’s to be expected. The change in resting HR occurred within days, and persists in the same pattern, ie an erratic resting HR.
I don’t do any structured training, but am back to riding in the same way that I was pre-COVID. My hour on the bike are the same, and my HR exercise response has normalised. As a parallel, I had a much longer time off the bike a few years ago through injury and did begin to see some detraining effects, but not the changes in resting HR that I’ve seen post-COVID.
I wouldn’t be surprised if research were to eventually reveal that mild inflammation of the vascular endothelium is contributing to elevated RHR post-covid in some people. We may never learn the cause, but I suspect the elevated RHR may settle down over time if the body is allowed to recover without being subjected to stressful training for a period of time, while also focusing on reducing sources of inflammation to the body.
This was my experience. I wish I had pushed myself to ride sooner. 1st workout was an easy 20 mins and was tough. Second was a 60 min mid level ride. The following rides I could push hard but just felt zapped. within two weeks felt back to normal. From beginning to end, I was sick about 10 days. With a cough that would hung around for another 2 weeks. 1st workout was at about day 10.
I think it’s very personal and depending on a lot of factors (like vaccines, virus variant, how long ago, your immune system at the time of your infection, genetics, stress, environment, … etc.)
for myself… I picked it up end of november (2 vaccines, march and june) 2021, and just before the omicron hit the world.
suspected to be infected on tuesday, tested and did a long indoor endurance ride on wednesday
I was out on bed for 1-2 days (friday/saterday) and another easy ride 1 week after testing positive. 8-9 days after being in bed I was back in business. no drop in FTP, did notice a bit more discomfort while breathing hard, but no hit in performance
