Anyone who has ever sprinted, done kickboxing, or tried high intensity interval training knows the feeling: your heart beating so fast that it might actually just jump out of your chest. And it definitely takes a while until you feel okay again. Yet, professional athletes, fitness trainers, and regular gym-goers are extremely resilient to these increases in heart rate and can get their hearts back to their baseline rates very quickly.
One study has looked at how our genes are related to heart rate during exercise and found 16 gene loci that were independently and significantly associated with heart rate recovery. Of these, many genes were related to neurons, which are the building blocks of the nervous system. This may suggest that the nervous system, especially the autonomic nervous system (which is responsible for regulating vital organs in an unconscious, automatic manner), may be what is driving heart rate recovery. Check out the full study for details: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29497042
What do your genes say about your post-exercise heart rate recovery rate? Check Genomelink to find out.
