You can check your heart in several ways right now, starting with a simple pulse check that takes 60 seconds. Beyond that, a combination of blood pressure readings, cholesterol tests, and knowing your personal risk factors gives you a much fuller picture of your heart health. Here’s how to do each one, what the numbers mean, and when it makes sense to go further.
How to Check Your Pulse at Home
Your resting heart rate is one of the easiest vital signs to measure on your own. A normal resting rate for adults falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute. If you’re physically active or athletic, yours may sit in the 40s or 50s, which is normal for a well-conditioned heart.
Before you start, sit down and rest quietly for a few minutes. You can check your pulse at your wrist or your neck.
At your wrist: Turn one hand palm-up. Find the spot between the wrist bone and the tendon on the thumb side. Place the tips of your index and middle fingers there and press lightly until you feel each beat. Don’t push too hard, since that can actually block blood flow and make the pulse harder to find.
At your neck: Place two fingertips in the groove next to your windpipe on one side of your neck. Press gently. Never press on both sides of your neck at the same time, as this can make you dizzy or cause you to faint.
Count the beats for a full 60 seconds, or count for 15 seconds and multiply by four. Along with the number, pay attention to the rhythm. Beats should feel steady and evenly spaced. If you notice frequent skipped beats or an irregular pattern, that’s worth mentioning to a doctor.
What Your Blood Pressure Numbers Mean
Blood pressure is one of the most important heart health measurements because high blood pressure rarely produces symptoms on its own. You can have dangerously elevated readings for years without feeling a thing, and all the while it’s increasing your risk of heart disease and stroke.
The 2025 guidelines from the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology define four categories:
- Normal: below 120/80 mm Hg
- Elevated: 120 to 129 systolic (the top number) with the bottom number still below 80
- Stage 1 hypertension: 130 to 139 systolic, or 80 to 89 diastolic
- Stage 2 hypertension: 140 or higher systolic, or 90 or higher diastolic
If your reading falls in two different categories (for instance, your top number is elevated but your bottom number is stage 1), you go by whichever category is higher. Home blood pressure monitors are widely available at pharmacies and online for $30 to $60, and they give you a reliable way to track trends over time. If your numbers are consistently normal, checking once a year is enough. Higher readings call for more frequent monitoring.
Key Screening Tests From Your Doctor
A handful of routine tests, most of them quick blood draws, form the foundation of medical heart screening.
Cholesterol panel: This blood test measures total cholesterol, LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, HDL (“good”) cholesterol, and triglycerides. It can be done fasting or non-fasting. For adults 20 and older with no known risk factors, the American Heart Association recommends repeating this test every four to six years. If your risk is elevated, your doctor will likely want it done more often.
Blood glucose: High blood sugar raises your cardiovascular risk even before it reaches the threshold for diabetes. If you’re 45 or older, or overweight with at least one additional risk factor at any age, a blood glucose test or an A1C measurement should happen at least every three years. An A1C level of 6.5% or higher indicates diabetes.
Body weight and BMI: Your doctor may also measure your waist circumference, since abdominal fat is a stronger predictor of heart risk than overall weight alone. These measurements are typically part of a routine checkup.
Know Your 10-Year Risk Score
Doctors use a calculator called the ASCVD Risk Estimator to predict your chance of having a heart attack or stroke over the next 10 years. It pulls together nine pieces of information: your age, sex, race, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, whether you take blood pressure medication, whether you have diabetes, and whether you smoke.
The result places you into a risk category. Low risk is below 5%, intermediate risk is 5% to 20%, and high risk is above 20%. This score is useful because individual numbers in isolation (a cholesterol reading, a blood pressure number) don’t tell the full story. Two people with the same cholesterol level can have very different overall risk depending on their other factors. If you already know your numbers, free versions of this calculator are available online through the American College of Cardiology.
For people who land in the intermediate range (5% to 20%), the next step is sometimes a coronary artery calcium scan. This is a quick, non-invasive CT scan that measures calcium buildup in the arteries feeding your heart. A score of zero is reassuring and may mean you can hold off on certain medications. A score of 100 or higher suggests more aggressive prevention is warranted. It’s most valuable for people in that gray zone where the right course of action isn’t obvious from standard tests alone.
Physical Signs Worth Paying Attention To
Your body sometimes shows visible clues that your heart isn’t working optimally. Swelling in your lower legs and ankles happens when a weakened heart can’t pump blood efficiently, causing fluid to pool in the tissues. Your legs may also feel cool to the touch or look pale compared to the rest of your body. Episodes of greyish skin color, especially paired with weakness, can signal poor circulation.
These signs tend to develop gradually, which makes them easy to dismiss. Swollen ankles after a long day of standing can be perfectly normal. But persistent swelling that doesn’t go away with rest, or that’s getting worse over weeks, points to something that needs evaluation.
What Smartwatches Can and Can’t Tell You
Consumer wearables like Apple Watches and Fitbits can now flag irregular heart rhythms, including atrial fibrillation. The technology works by tracking your pulse pattern and looking for irregularity. When a smartwatch detects a suspicious rhythm and then catches the same irregularity again during a follow-up check, its accuracy is impressively high, around 98% in one large Fitbit study.
The catch is in what happens before that confirmation step. In the same study of over 455,000 participants, only 1% received an irregular rhythm notification. Among those who then wore a medical-grade heart monitor, only 32% actually had atrial fibrillation. The rest were false alarms. This is a math problem inherent to screening for a condition that’s uncommon in the general population: even a highly accurate test produces more false positives than true positives when the condition is rare. A smartwatch notification is worth following up on, but it’s a starting point for a conversation with your doctor, not a diagnosis.
Emergency Symptoms That Need Immediate Attention
Heart attacks don’t always look like what you see in movies. The major symptoms, according to the CDC, include chest pain or discomfort (pressure, squeezing, or fullness) in the center or left side of the chest that lasts more than a few minutes or comes and goes. But a heart attack can also show up as pain in the jaw, neck, back, or one or both arms. Shortness of breath sometimes appears before any chest discomfort. Unusual fatigue, nausea, cold sweats, and lightheadedness round out the list.
Women are more likely than men to experience the less obvious symptoms, like jaw pain, nausea, or unexplained exhaustion, without the classic chest-clutching moment. If you or someone near you has these symptoms, call 911 immediately. Every minute of delay increases the damage to heart muscle.