alt Hacker NewsFive minutes of exercise a day could lower blood pressure
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How much more evidence do we need, that exercise is good and any amount is better than none?
This could get far more mileage with people by saying "activity" instead of "exercise." It is amazing how much people can get out of a simple walk around the house. Make it out and around the neighborhood, and you start getting absurdly good results.
FYI, the absolute fastest way to lower blood pressure is to lose weight if you are obese.
Rule of thumb is that your systolic blood pressure will drop by 1 mmHg per 1 lb of weight loss, eventually slowing down to 1 mmHg per 2 lbs of weight loss as you get back down to more normal blood pressure range / weight range.
Source: went from 160/110 to 120/90 in several months by dropping 60 lbs.
Or just exercise a more normal amount.
My anecdote is that my BP was typically around 135/90. I started exercising regularly and now it's usually around 115/75.
I have a neighbour who's in his 60s. Blood pressure was of the charts while in his 40s. The guy was cycling to work everyday (and thought that was enough exercise) and was living a stressful family and work life.
Doctor never prescribed any drugs but told him that he had to start exercising. Signed up for judo class. He couldn't believe the amount of exercise he got from the warm up alone. Been doing judo 3 days a week for 20 years now. Haven't had any heart or blood pressure issues since.
Magnesium will lower your blood pressure, just take magnesium. The crazy thing is the diuretics that are prescribed to lower blood pressure cause magnesium deficiency.
Exercise has changed my life for the better. I'm not a fit-geek but 20 minutes of light running really helps me clear my head
"Could" is an interesting choice of word. I know researchers are cautious but that wording makes it meaningless.
But my blood pressure is already too low, though I barely exercise.
GASP, exercise is good!? No way. The hard part is finding time and having the motivation. Particularly the latter. There's constantly about 49 other things that feel like they need doing more than purposely exercising and wearing myself out even more than I'm already worn out.
At that point if you don't walk 10k+ steps a day nor lift weight every other day you can't say you care about your long term health.
For anyone over 60 I recommend 3 sets of full squats before bed for a good night's sleep and strength for hill walking and climbing stairs.
the research metric I'm interested in is "if you exercise for 5 minutes, you should expect to live 1 minute longer" and I would look at that and say "so I lost 4 mins? no thanks"
but if it ever comes out with a surplus, I'll turn on a dime (and turning on a dime for 5 minutes a day probably lowers blood pressure)
NHS cardiac rehab videos on YouTube are quite good too. More like 20 min though.
I thought blood pressure is at first order an effect caused by too much sodium.
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some people just have a bad genetic soup and do exercise and diet and such and still have hbp well beyond the numbers designated as meaning "high" ultra high etc I didn't see any hard numbers of reduction in the article either, I've read that smoking raises bp by 5-10points which is largely marginal when you look at how inaccurate most bp readings are. I'm skeptical in this selling environment we live in that this isn't all just to sell drugs to people for their whole lives, these are the same people who want to decimate human populations btw
Tabata et al.[1] found in the mid-1990s that just 2-4 minutes of "high-intensity intermittent training may improve both anaerobic and aerobic energy supplying systems significantly." This was popularized as "Tabata training" 20+ years ago. I generally believe that brief bouts of exercise can be very beneficial, especially because they're easier to do consistently over the long-term vs. more time-consuming routines. For a decade now, I've just been running through my neighborhood most days for 20-30 minutes (with some sprints mixed in) and doing one or two maximal sets of pushups or pullups or barbell exercises at home on a weekly basis. I know a lot of people who got really into longer (e.g. 60-90 minute) gym routines but couldn't sustain it for more than a few months, and then stopped doing anything.
[1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/1996/10000/Effec...