Heart Rate Recovery

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

7/10 confidence.

About Heart Rate Recovery

Stop exercising and your pulse falls - fast at first, then more slowly. How fast it falls in that first minute is one of the simplest fitness measures there is, and it mostly reflects how quickly the calming branch of the nervous system takes back control. SCN10A makes a sodium channel active in the nerves that supply the heart, which is a sensible place for differences in that switchover to come from. Training improves recovery far more than any variant does.

Good to know: How fast the pulse falls after exercise is one of the simplest fitness measures there is. It responds strongly to training, so this describes a starting point. The measured genetic difference is small next to fitness itself.

Fun fact: Heart rate recovery is measured over just the first minute after stopping, because that is when the calming branch of the nervous system does most of its work.

Discovery: Heart rate recovery was mapped in large exercise-testing cohorts.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: SCN10A

Variant (rsID): rs6795970

Location: Chr 3:38,725,184

dbSNP rs6795970

Other lifestyle traits

Muscle Composition: Whether your fast-twitch muscle fibers make alpha-actinin-3 - a protein tied to power and sprint performance.

Muscle Enzyme Baseline: Two positions that each raise how much creatine kinase sits in your blood at rest, which is one reason healthy people differ from each other on this test.

Endurance Wiring: A change in the master switch for building new mitochondria, the process that underlies aerobic endurance and the response to endurance training.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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