Does exercise raise or lower your blood pressure?
While you are exercising, your blood pressure (along with your pulse) goes up, to supply the additional blood flow that your exercising muscles need. Otherwise, regular exercise lowers your blood pressure throughout the day.
Besides lowering your blood pressure, regular exercise reduces your risk of heart disease, many kinds of cancer (including breast and colon cancer), diabetes, obesity, kidney failure, osteoporosis, and gallstones. And, by the way, it also protects your ability to think, improves your mood, and lengthens your life. No pill yet invented can begin to give you all those health benefits. And pills cost money, whereas you can exercise for free.
Do all kinds of exercise lower your blood pressure?
Several types of exercise were evaluated: aerobic exercise training (the kind most often studied and recommended), high-intensity interval training, dynamic resistance training, isometric exercise training, and combined training (aerobic plus one of the other types of exercise).
- High-intensity interval training is a relatively new type of exercise that is popular because it takes less time and may give benefits comparable to more vigorous aerobic exercise. It involves repeated cycles of brief (one minute) high-intensity exercise followed by brief low-intensity exercise.
- Dynamic resistance exercises are a kind of strength exercise that involves movement of muscles and joints, such as push-ups, shallow squats, or dead lifts.
- Isometric exercises are strength exercises in which specific muscle groups are tightened without movement of muscles and joints, such as the wall sit or extended plank.
The good news is that each of these types of exercise was found to be clearly effective in lowering resting blood pressure.
What’s the best type of exercise for blood pressure?
Since none of the studies compared one type of exercise to another — but instead compared one particular type of exercise to no exercise — we can’t be sure which type of exercise is best at lowering blood pressure.
Particularly if you are over age 50 and have not been exercising much, it’s best to check with your doctor before beginning a regular exercise program, since some types of exercise may not be right for you.
But choosing one of them is the best thing you can do for your health.
By Anthony L. Komaroff, MD, Editor in Chief, Harvard Health Letter
Get out those sports shoes ready to start!
Do you have a favourite exercise routine that you’d be willing to share with our readers? Pleae tell us about it below.
Please let us know what is best for us Oldies with High blood pressure,
Would really like to have a go to help oneself.
Thank You.
Totally agree that any sort of moderate exercise is good for you.
I exercise (play tennis) generally 3 times a week; (up to 2 hours) but also associated with the exercise is the social side; After most games, we move onto the coffee shop and there can be up to a dozen of us, discussing all sorts of topics (including tennis!!) and I think that the associated social interaction is a very important aspect of “keeping in touch and discussing (informally) many and varied topics, that also keeps the brain active.
This is such a wonderfully supportive routine for your brain! Not only the exercise, but the mental stimulation of planning your tennis moves and also engaging socially. Keep it up!
Exercise is still very important as a way of lowering blood pressure. Here are two useful articles for you https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/safe-exercise-tips and https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/in-depth/high-blood-pressure/art-20046974
Interesting to note that these are all excellent ways to keep your brain active also!