These aerobic exercises can help lower your blood pressure
A variety of physical activities—including aerobic exercise, heated water-based exercise and isometric exercise training—are associated with drops in blood pressure (BP) in both hypertensive and non-hypertensive patients, according to new data published in Current Problems in Cardiology.
Researchers examined data from 24 different studies that focused on the relationship between aerobic exercise (AE) and BP. The studies were all published from January 2010 to September 2021.
"Certainly, not all studies on this topic have been included in this study due to their large number, but an attempt has been made to include a variety of AE training methods, the different populations of participants and different AE methods and AE durations," wrote lead author Mehrnoosh Esmailiyan, MD, a specialist at Raghib Isfahani Institute of Higher Education in Iran, and colleagues.
Overall, Esmailiyan et al. found that many types of AE can help reduce BP. The specific types of AE covered in this analysis included regular AE, resistant AE, acute/short-term AE, chronic/long-term AE, power exercise training, circuit exercise training, heated water-based exercise and isometric exercise training.
Almost all study participants see the impact of such training, including pre-hypertensive, hypertensive, non-hypertensive and diabetic patients. Age did not appear to play a significant role in one way or the other.
Moreover, physical activity can lower BP even in resistant hypertensive subjects who have low responsiveness to medical treatment.
One group that did not seem to see the full impact of AE, however, was patients with chronic heart failure.
"For those with chronic heart failure, more concern and help might be needed to decrease BP via exercise," the authors wrote.
Read the full study here.