Halfway up the stone steps at Red Rocks, thighs already screaming, I stopped counting rows and started counting my own breathing instead. My golden retriever was three switchbacks ahead of me, tail going like a metronome cranked to double time, completely unbothered by any of this — which is basically her permanent state versus mine, somewhere in the middle of this whole men's wellness after fifty project.
Quick disclosure before we get into it: some of the supplement links further down are affiliate links, meaning I get a small commission if you buy through them. Costs you nothing extra, and I only mention what's actually sitting in my own cabinet.
My doctor brought up a different number at my last physical. Not weight, not cholesterol, the usual suspects for men's wellness after fifty conversations, but my resting heart rate, sitting higher than he liked for a guy who claims to work out three times a week.
The Number My Doctor Started Watching
Resting heart rate is about as unglamorous as health metrics get. No dramatic acronym, no impressive name to drop at a barbecue. It's just how many times your heart beats a minute while you're doing nothing in particular — sitting on the couch, half-watching golf, contributing nothing to society. He also flagged prostate health as its own separate conversation, something with a specific blood marker that's a maze of its own; other guys have covered that ground on this site better than I could here.
Why Resting Heart Rate Beats Guessing
I've got a whole separate habit of logging numbers like this one, which is a rabbit hole for another post, but resting heart rate is simple enough that I actually keep up with it instead of letting it slide after week one. It's the same logic as checking your car's oil level on a schedule instead of waiting for the dashboard light to start screaming at you.
Ted, my buddy from way back, won't try a new brand of coffee without three peer-reviewed studies behind it, so naturally he rolled his eyes when I told him I was tracking this off a cheap chest strap instead of a hospital-grade monitor. Ted's not wrong to be skeptical about home gadgets. But a rough number checked consistently beats a perfect one checked once a year in a paper gown.
The Cold-Turkey Carb Mistake
Before any of that, I tried the blunt approach: cutting carbs completely, cold turkey, convinced fewer bagels would fix my numbers before the next appointment. It did not go how I imagined. I got foggy at work, snapped at my wife over something trivial, and white-knuckled my way through a birthday party glaring at a table of bread like it owed me money. I caved eventually, ate pasta standing over the stove like I hadn't eaten in days, and my resting heart rate didn't move in either direction. Whatever that experiment taught me, patience wasn't it.
Testing Supplements Without Losing My Mind
Around the same stretch I started testing a couple of supplements too, not out of panic, but because testing things is basically my whole hobby at this point. One reader, Carl, the kind of guy who reads every ingredient label twice before anything goes near his cart, asked me about Protoflow after I mentioned it once in passing. Clean list, no hiding behind a "proprietary blend" — more than I can say for most of what's sitting in a drugstore aisle.
A few weeks into taking it consistently, I noticed a shift in my mornings that had nothing to do with heart rate numbers directly, just felt less like dragging myself out of bed by the collar some days.
For guys who'd rather skip another pill, there's also ProstaVive, the liquid-drop version. I wrote up my experience with the drops separately in a full ProstaVive review if that format sounds easier than what I'm doing. Ted still wants to see a study before he'll try either one. Fair enough. I told him the study is called "my own bathroom scale and a cheap heart rate strap," and he was not impressed.
The Value of a Wearable After Fifty
My home office doubles as command central for all of this: a west-facing window that catches the Front Range on a clear afternoon, a whiteboard that's turned into a mess of supplement start-dates and sleep scores nobody but me can decipher, and a dog bed wedged under the desk corner that gets more use than my actual desk chair most days. Some of the tracking itself happens standing in the garage in January, stretching before a walk, wool socks doing nothing against the cold coming up through the concrete floor.
Is a wearable actually worth it? For tracking one boring number consistently, yes. Altitude does strange things to your numbers too, and I've written before about staying hydrated up here, since dehydration alone can push your resting heart rate up before you've even started worrying about anything else.
Things Finally Started Shifting Around Week Ten
By week ten of actually sticking with the tracking, no more, no less, that's just when it happened, my wife noticed something before I did. I stood up off the couch to grab the mail and didn't make the low groan I usually make hauling myself out of that cushion. She laughed and said I sounded almost human getting up. I hadn't clocked it myself; she had to point it out first.
The lesson wasn't that resting heart rate is some magic number. It's that a boring metric, tracked consistently, tells you more than a dramatic one checked once a year. That's the only real system I'd hand another guy staring down his own "well, at your age" conversation: pick one number, track it plainly, and let somebody else notice the payoff before you do.
If you're getting that same look from your own doctor, it might be worth picking one number and sticking with it before anything else. I still take Protoflow most mornings, mostly because it's become part of the routine rather than a miracle fix, and if you want to see exactly what I'm using, you can check out Protoflow here and decide whether it fits your own.