My Resting Heart Rate Was 88 — That's When I Knew Something Was Wrong
The Tightness I Kept Calling "Stress"
It started sometime in my early fifties. After a long day at the office and the inevitable dinner with clients — soju, grilled pork belly, more soju — I'd climb the subway stairs and feel it. A tightness across my chest, like someone had wrapped a belt around my ribs and pulled it one notch too tight.
It lasted maybe thirty seconds. Then it was gone.
So I did what most men my age do. I blamed it on stress. On the food. On being tired. I loosened my tie, took a deep breath, and kept walking.
I did this for three years.
Three years of ignoring a signal my body was sending every week, sometimes twice a week. I never told my wife. I never told my doctor. I just kept telling myself the same lie: "It's nothing. I'm fine."
I was not fine.
What's Actually Happening to Your Heart After 50
Here's what nobody explains to you in your forties: your heart is already changing. The walls of your arteries are getting stiffer. Plaque — built up over decades of sodium, alcohol, stress, and sitting — is narrowing the pathways your blood needs to flow through. Your heart has to pump harder to push the same amount of blood, and over time, it gets tired.
According to the CDC, heart disease is the number one killer of men in the United States. Not cancer. Not accidents. Your heart. And the risk rises sharply after 45, with the steepest climb happening between 50 and 65 — exactly where most of us are when we finally start paying attention.
One number that should concern you more than it probably does: your resting heart rate. A healthy resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 80 beats per minute. Athletes and very fit people often sit in the 50s. When I finally checked mine at age 55, it was 88.
That number alone told a story. My heart was working too hard just to keep me sitting in a chair. It was compensating for narrower arteries, higher blood pressure, and a body that was thirty pounds heavier than it should have been. Eighty-eight beats per minute, every minute, every hour, every day. My heart was exhausted and I didn't even know it.
The Numbers That Scared Me
When I finally sat down with a doctor — not for the chest tightness, but for a routine checkup I'd been putting off — the results came back like a report card full of failing grades.
Resting heart rate: 88 bpm. Blood pressure: 145/95 mmHg. LDL cholesterol: 148 mg/dL. Triglycerides: 210 mg/dL. My hs-CRP — a marker for inflammation in your blood vessels — was elevated. My waist was 98 centimeters. I weighed 92 kilograms.
The doctor looked at me and said something I'll never forget: "If you don't change how you live, something is going to happen in the next five years. And it won't be small."
He wasn't dramatic about it. He was calm, almost matter-of-fact, which made it worse. He'd seen hundreds of men like me. Desk job for decades. Drank too much. Ate too late. Exercised too little. Slept too poorly. And now, in our mid-fifties, we were all arriving at his office with the same numbers and the same surprised expression.
I wasn't special. I was a statistic waiting to happen.
Heart Disease Risk Factors — I Had 6 Out of 8
There's a standard checklist that cardiologists use to assess cardiovascular risk. Eight major factors. I went through it with my doctor that day, and the result was humbling.
High blood pressure — yes, 145/95. High cholesterol — yes, LDL 148 and triglycerides 210. Obesity — yes, waist 98 cm, well above the 90 cm danger line for Asian men. Excessive alcohol — yes, three to four times a week for almost thirty years of work dinners and client entertainment. Physical inactivity — yes, unless you count walking from the parking lot to the elevator. Chronic stress — yes, decades of deadlines, restructurings, performance reviews, and office politics. Family history — borderline, my father has some cardiovascular issues but lived to 90. Smoking — no, this was the one box I could leave unchecked.
Six out of eight. And every single one of them — except genetics — was something I had built with my own choices over thirty years of working life. Nobody forced me to drink at every dinner. Nobody forced me to skip exercise. Nobody forced me to eat ramyeon at midnight. I did all of it willingly, telling myself I'd fix it later.
Later had arrived.
What I Changed — No Surgery, No Drama
I want to be honest about something: I didn't change overnight. There was no single dramatic moment where I threw out all the soju bottles and laced up running shoes. It was slower than that. Messier. I started, stopped, started again. But over about six months, a few habits stuck, and those habits changed everything.
Walking came first. Ten thousand steps a day, every day, no excuses. Rain or shine. I wrote about this in detail — my 90-day walking experiment — but what I didn't fully appreciate at the time was how much it was helping my heart specifically. Walking is the most underrated cardiovascular exercise that exists. It doesn't spike your heart rate dangerously, but it trains your heart to work more efficiently over time. Within three months, my resting heart rate had already dropped from 88 to 78.
Alcohol was next. I cut from three or four nights a week to once a week, maximum. This was harder than walking because drinking had been woven into my professional life for so long. But I'd already seen what alcohol did to my liver — I wrote about that too — and now I understood it was doing the same thing to my blood vessels. Alcohol raises blood pressure, increases triglycerides, and promotes inflammation. Every glass was making my heart's job harder.
Food changed gradually. Less sodium — which meant fewer soups, less kimchi jjigae, less processed food. More vegetables, more fish, more nuts. I didn't follow any specific diet. I just asked myself one question before eating: "Is this making my blood vessels softer or harder?" That simple filter eliminated about 40 percent of what I used to eat.
Supplements entered the picture. Omega-3 fish oil (2 grams daily) for triglycerides and inflammation. Magnesium glycinate (400 mg before bed) for blood pressure and sleep. And CoQ10, which I'll talk about separately because it deserves its own section.
Sleep was the last piece. I'd been averaging five to six hours for most of my working life. I forced myself to get seven. Fixing my sleep did more for my resting heart rate than almost anything else.
I want to show you what changed, because the numbers are more convincing than anything I could say.
| Marker | Age 55 | Age 59 | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resting Heart Rate | 88 bpm | 68 bpm | 60–80 bpm |
| Blood Pressure | 145/95 mmHg | 125/80 mmHg | <130/85 |
| LDL Cholesterol | 148 mg/dL | 112 mg/dL | <130 |
| Triglycerides | 210 mg/dL | 148 mg/dL | <150 |
| hs-CRP | Elevated | Normal | <1.0 mg/L |
| Weight | 92 kg | 82 kg | — |
| Waist | 98 cm | 88 cm | <90 cm |
My resting heart rate dropped twenty beats. Think about what that means. At 88 bpm, my heart was beating 126,720 times a day. At 68 bpm, it beats 97,920 times. That's almost 29,000 fewer heartbeats every single day. Over a year, that's more than 10 million beats my heart didn't have to make. Less wear. Less strain. More life in the engine.
I broke down all my checkup numbers in detail here — but the heart-related markers were the ones that moved the most dramatically.
The chest tightness? Gone. Completely. I climb four flights of stairs now without thinking about it. I walk 10,000 steps and my breathing stays steady. I sleep through the night without that vague heaviness I used to feel and never had a name for.
CoQ10 — The One Supplement I Wish I'd Started Earlier
I take several supplements, and I've written honestly about which ones I think are worth the money and which ones I wasted money on. But if I could go back to age 50 and start just one supplement, it would be CoQ10.
Coenzyme Q10 is something your body produces naturally. It lives inside your mitochondria — the energy factories in every cell — and your heart cells have more mitochondria than almost any other organ. Your heart never stops working, so it needs a constant supply of cellular energy. CoQ10 is a critical part of that supply chain.
The problem is that your body produces less CoQ10 as you age. By your fifties, levels can be significantly lower than they were in your thirties. If you're also taking a statin for cholesterol — and millions of men over 50 are — statins actively deplete CoQ10 further. This is why some people on statins report muscle fatigue, weakness, and that general "I have no energy" feeling.
I take 200 mg of ubiquinol (the active form of CoQ10) daily. I'm not going to make dramatic claims about what it did for me because I changed multiple things at once, and I can't isolate the effect of one supplement. What I can tell you is that the research supports CoQ10 for heart function, that cardiologists I've spoken with consider it reasonable for men over 50, and that I personally noticed improved energy and exercise tolerance after about six weeks of consistent use.
I sell supplements for a living now, so I want to be transparent: I'm not trying to sell you CoQ10. I'm telling you what I take and why. Do your own research. Talk to your doctor. But at minimum, know that this molecule exists and that your body is making less of it every year.
Most standard health checkups measure blood pressure and basic cholesterol. That's a start, but it's not enough. If you're a man over 50, there are three tests I think you should specifically ask for.
First, know your resting heart rate. You don't even need a doctor for this. Sit quietly for five minutes in the morning before coffee, then count your pulse for sixty seconds. Do this three days in a row and average the number. If it's consistently above 80, your heart is working harder than it should. A smartwatch or fitness band can track this automatically, but your two fingers on your wrist work just as well.
Second, ask for a hs-CRP test. This stands for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, and it measures inflammation in your blood vessels. Standard cholesterol panels don't capture this. You can have "okay" cholesterol numbers and still have inflamed, damaged arteries. A hs-CRP above 3.0 mg/L means high cardiovascular risk. Mine was elevated at 55 and normal by 59. This test costs very little and most labs can add it to a routine blood draw.
Third, consider a coronary artery calcium (CAC) score. This is a quick CT scan that measures how much calcium has built up in the arteries around your heart. A score of zero means very low risk. A score above 100 means plaque is present and you should be working with a cardiologist. It's not part of standard checkups in most countries, but you can request it. In the US, it typically costs between $75 and $200 out of pocket. In Korea, many university hospitals offer it as part of comprehensive checkup packages.
These three things — resting heart rate, hs-CRP, and CAC score — give you a much clearer picture of your actual cardiovascular risk than blood pressure and cholesterol alone.
Your heart has been working nonstop for fifty-plus years. It never took a vacation. It never called in sick. The least you can do is find out how it's doing — and give it a reason to keep going.
I spent thirty years of working life pretending my heart would figure it out on its own. It almost didn't. Don't wait for the tightness in your chest to become something a doctor can't fix.
Start with a walk. Start with a blood test. Start with putting down the glass one night this week. Your heart doesn't need a miracle. It just needs you to stop ignoring it.
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