It’s a no brainer that regular exercise can help lower high blood pressure. To help you throw your sedentary (inactive) lifestyle out the window and decrease your BP values, incorporate some of these exercises into your daily routine and watch your BP amazingly decrease.
If you do have blood pressure keep in mind that it’s one of the top risk factors for heart disease. Luckily, it’s a risk factor that you can do something about. Lets get started.
What’s the best BP lowering exercise?
A combination of all three forms of exercise listed below:
1. Stretching or the slow lengthening of the muscles. Stretching your upper and lower body before and after exercising helps prepare the muscles for activity and helps prevent injury. Consistent stretching will also increase your range of motion and flexibility in your muscles and joints.
2. Aerobic exercise is steady physical activity (usually 30 minutes or more) using large muscle groups. This type of exercise will strengthen your heart, lungs and also improve your body’s ability to utilize oxygen.
Continuing to engage in aerobic exercise for the long term will allow you to see a decrease in your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing.
3. Resistance exercises are done by lifting weights and allowing your muscles to contract (shorten) and expand (lengthen)
FYI – Forms of Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercises include: walking, jogging, jumping rope, bicycling (stationary or outdoor), cross-country skiing, skating, rowing, high or low-impact aerobics, swimming and water aerobics.
How long should I exercise in order to see BP results?
Usually, to achieve maximum benefits, you should gradually work your way up to an aerobic session lasting anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes, at least three to four times a week.
What Your Program Should Include
Your exercise sessions should include a warm-up phase, conditioning phase and a cool-down phase.
Warm-up. This allows your body to slowly adapt itself from rest to exercise. Doing a warm-up will also reduce the stress on your heart and muscles, slowly increase your breathing, circulation (heart rate) and body temperature. It also helps improve flexibility and reduce muscle soreness.
A good warm-up includes light stretching, range of motion activities (arm circles) and the beginning of the activity at a light intensity level.
Conditioning. Following the warm-up, the conditioning phase is where you’ll be putting a lot of your energy. At this point the benefits of exercise are gained and calories will be burnt. Be sure to monitor the intensity of the activity (check your heart rate) and try not to go too hard too fast.
Cool-down. This is the last phase of your exercise session. The cool down will allow your body to gradually recover from the conditioning phase. Your heart rate and blood pressure should return back to normal within a few minutes. Now a lot of people have this theory that cool-down means to sit down. Boy, is this ever wrong! Please don’t sit, stand still or lie down right after exercise. This may cause you to feel dizzy or lightheaded. The best cool-down is to slowly decrease the intensity of your activity.
