A 30-minute walk can reduce blood pressure as much as medications.
Just 30 minutes of exercise each morning can be as effective as a medication to lower blood pressure for the rest of the day. One study found that a short burst of treadmill treadmill each morning had lasting effects, and there were more benefits of additional short walks later in the day.
In experiments, 35 women and 32 men between 55 and 80 years old followed three different daily plans, in random order, with at least six days between them.
The first plan was to sit uninterruptedly for 8 hours, while the second consisted of 1 hour of sitting before 30 minutes of walking on a treadmill at a moderate intensity, followed by 6.5 hours of sitting. The final plan was 1 hour of sitting before 30 minutes of walking on the treadmill, followed by 6.5 hours of session, which was interrupted every 30 minutes with 3 minutes of walking at an intensity of light.
The study was conducted in a laboratory to standardize the results, and men and women ate the same meals the night before the study and during the day.
Michael Wheeler at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his colleagues found that blood pressure was lower in men and women who participated in exercise plans, compared to when they did not exercise.
The effect was seen especially with systolic blood pressure, which measures the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart beats and is a stronger predictor of heart problems such as heart attacks than diastolic blood pressure, which measures the pressure in the blood vessels. when the heart rests between beats.
Women also saw additional benefits if they added short 3-minute walks throughout the day, but the effect was less for men.
The team does not know why there was a gender difference, but believes it may be due to different adrenaline responses to exercise and the fact that all women in the study were postmenopausal and, therefore, had an increased risk of disease cardiovascular.
"For both men and women, the magnitude of the reduction in mean systolic blood pressure after exercise and the pauses in the session approached what one might expect from antihypertensive medications in this population to reduce the risk of death from heart disease and stroke, "says Wheeler.
The study supports a host of tests that show that regular physical activity can help lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, says Chris Allen of the British Heart Foundation. "It can also give your body and mind a boost, so 30 minutes of activity in the morning is an excellent way to prepare for the day," he says.