Healthy heart: With these exercises, you can lower your blood pressure

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A few relaxing stretching exercises in your everyday life not only keep you fit, they can also lower your blood pressure. Find out here how you can do something good for your heart with simple movements.

Too little exercise, stress and an unhealthy diet are important factors that can trigger or worsen high blood pressure.

If you don’t want to take medication for high blood pressure, you are advised to go for walks and do more exercise in your everyday life.

But a new study shows which other form of exercise can help even better against high blood pressure.

Walking was yesterday, today is stretching

Researchers at the University of Saskatoon in Canada discovered which sporting activity has the greatest effect on high blood pressure.

40 men and women with mild high blood pressure took part in the study. For eight weeks, half of the participants should go for a 30-minute walk every day, while the other participants should do 30 minutes of stretching exercises.

All participants adhered to the DASH diet, in which salt, sugar and red meat are only allowed to be consumed in small quantities. Healthy foods such as vegetables, fruit, fish, poultry, beans and nuts regularly ended up on the plate.

After two months, the participants’ blood pressure was measured again. Both groups showed a decreasing trend in hypertension. But the stretching group saw a significantly higher decline.

Simple exercises strengthen the body

The study’s stretching exercise set consisted of 21 different exercises that stretched the back, shoulders, hips, buttocks and legs. It’s best to orientate yourself on yoga exercises such as downward dog, forward bend or pigeon bend if you are not yet familiar with stretching.

Each exercise was performed twice and held for 30 seconds. There was a 15 second break between each exercise. In total it takes 30 minutes to do all the exercises

This is how stretching exercises help with high blood pressure

“When you stretch your muscles, you also stretch all the blood vessels that lead into the muscle, including the arteries,” explains Professor Phil Chilibeck, co-author of the study.

The stretching reduces the stiffness of the arteries, which in turn reduces the resistance to blood flow. In conjunction with a balanced diet, a reduction in blood pressure can be achieved without the use of medication.

However, the results of the study do not mean that walking is bad compared to stretching. In fact, the participants who walked had a greater reduction in waist circumference than those in the comparison group.

Belly fat in particular is considered a risk factor for high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. That’s why it’s very important to do endurance training – be it in the form of walking, jogging, cycling or swimming.

In the best case scenario, both types of training are combined with each other.

This article also appeared on FitForFun.