Lowest resting heart rate competition

The firewood however was purely decorative, with temperatures reaching 34°C and a bright blue sky during the week it's needless to say there was no use of a fire. "It was hot! I was jealous of my colleagues who were at our booth inside the air conditioned show halls", Tilde Grahn, competition manager and daughter of Tentipi CEO Bengt Grahn says. 

But she overcame the heat and succeeded to bring a fair amount of aspiring low pulse masters to the tent."One guy did a try and had a 92 resting pulse. He was really disappointed of course but came back next day and had a whole bunch of colleagues with him. It became a fun way to challenge your co-workers!" Tilde says.

The competition was co-hosted by two other Scandinavian brands: Finnish sports watch manufacturer Suunto and Swedish outdoor cooking supplier Light My Fire, contributing prizes for the winners. The participants were armed with a Suunto Spartan pulse watch fitted around the wrist and then laid down in the Nordic tipi for one minute, trying to get the pulse down. 

National Institute of Health, USA, states that a normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per minute (bpm). Well trained athletes usually have heart rates between 60 and 40bpm. In 2005, Guinness World Records registered Martin Brady (born 1969) as the world record holder with as few as 27 heart beats per minute while resting. However that record was beaten in 2014 when British pensioner Daniel Green, then 81, at a check-up recorded a resting pulse of 26 beats per minutes, lower than Usain Bolt (33 bpm) and five-time Tour De France winner Miguel Indurian (28 bpm) according to the Daily Mail. Mr Green puts his incredibly low pulse down to daily exercise and running marathons in his younger days.

When the Guinness World Records measure low pulse they hook the candidate to an ECG machine for 24 hours, measuring the average pulse. We, however, took it a tad less seriously and gave the participants only 60 seconds to get as low as possible. Despite the short time and the high temperature at the booth, we still expected it to be a close competition since the Outdoor Show features plenty of sports brands and sporty people.

"We're here promoting our company, me and my wife. We sell a lightweight bag with compartments for organized hikers and travellers", Griffin Brungraber of GobiGear says when he receives the silver medallion in form of the very Suunto pulse watch that measured his pulse at an impressive 56 bpm. Does it also give you the physique of a top athlete?  "Haha, you wish! No, we also have a company called SummitWest Environmental where we look for rare plants out in the wilderness of southern California. It's for a wildflower database. This means we hike about 15-20km every day!"

Among the participants you'd find skiers, mountaineers, long-distance runners, kayakers, one of them was Freddy Bliss of UK power and survival brand Tex Energy. "Fun competition, I'm sending over my colleagues!" Freddy says after registering a heart rate of 71 bpm.

Freddy, however was well beaten by his company's own ambassador – the first British woman to climb Mt Blanc and then paraglide down from the top. Adventurer Squash Falconer has climbed about every mountain out there, she's even bum boarded down from the 6th highest mountain in the world, the Cho Oyu in the Himalayas. "I tried to be as calm and relaxed as possible to get my pulse down low. I focused on my breathing, my tactic was regular breaths that weren't too deep", Squash says with a big smile after reaching a third position with a resting heart rate at 60 bpm. "I entered the competition because I was curious how low I could get my heart rate and because I thought the prizes were really good! Also, there was no stress involved! So often a competition creates a certain level of stress."

As third prize she got a nice kit with sporks, fire steel and other outdoor cooking gear from Light My Fire, first prize winner Fabiana Fenuta gets the pleasure to go to a Tentipi Camp somewhere in Europe.