If you do have blood pressure keep in mind that it's one of the top risk factors for heart disease. Luckily, it's a risk factor that you can do something about. Lets get started.
What's the best BP lowering exercise?
A combination of all three forms of exercise listed below:
1. Stretching or the slow lengthening of the muscles. Stretching your upper and lower body before and after exercising helps prepare the muscles for activity and helps prevent injury. Consistent stretching will also increase your range of motion and flexibility in your muscles and joints.
2. Aerobic exercise is steady physical activity (usually 30 minutes or more) using large muscle groups. This type of exercise will strengthen your heart, lungs and also improve your body's ability to utilize oxygen.
Continuing to engage in aerobic exercise for the long term will allow you to see a decrease in your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing.
3. Resistance exercises are done by lifting weights and allowing your muscles to contract (shorten) and expand (lengthen)
FYI ? Forms of Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercises include: walking, jogging, jumping rope, bicycling (stationary or outdoor), cross-country skiing, skating, rowing, high or low-impact aerobics, swimming and water aerobics.
How long should I exercise in order to see BP results?
Usually, to achieve maximum benefits, you should gradually work your way up to an aerobic session lasting anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes, at least three to four times a week.
What Your Program Should Include
Your exercise sessions should include a warm-up phase, conditioning phase and a cool-down phase.
Warm-up. This allows your body to slowly adapt itself from rest to exercise. Doing a warm-up will also reduce the stress on your heart and muscles, slowly increase your breathing, circulation (heart rate) and body temperature. It also helps improve flexibility and reduce muscle soreness.
A good warm-up includes light stretching, range of motion activities (arm circles) and the beginning of the activity at a light intensity level.
Conditioning. Following the warm-up, the conditioning phase is where you'll be putting a lot of your energy. At this point the benefits of exercise are gained and calories will be burnt. Be sure to monitor the intensity of the activity (check your heart rate) and try not to go too hard too fast.
Cool-down. This is the last phase of your exercise session. The cool down will allow your body to gradually recover from the conditioning phase. Your heart rate and blood pressure should return back to normal within a few minutes. Now a lot of people have this theory that cool-down means to sit down. Boy, is this ever wrong! Please don't sit, stand still or lie down right after exercise. This may cause you to feel dizzy or lightheaded. The best cool-down is to slowly decrease the intensity of your activity.
There is a lot of physical activity that we do on a day-to-day basis. But it requires your initiative to indulge into some extra activity to work in the direction of treating blood pressure. And that can be achieved in the form of an impeccable workout regime.
A good physical activity in the form of regular exercising not only controls high blood pressure, but also prevents hypertension to occur in future with age. A good exercising routine does way with your need to binge up on unnecessary medicines to control blood pressure.
Besides keeping your blood pressure to the normal limits, a regular exercising regime has other benefits too. It will also enable you to maintain proper weight, which is a prerequisite to have normal blood pressure and healthy living. It will open up your capacity to eat healthy food. It will also open gates of energetic living.
With regular physical activities you will feel a birth of new synergy in your body that you always desired. In a matter of just three to four months, you will be able to see a considerable positive change in your high blood pressure. And the benefits will stay with you till you exercise.
Generally the exercises that are advised to people who suffer from high blood pressure fall in the category of aerobic exercises. Aerobic exercises are the ones that increase the consumption of oxygen in the body. These exercises are of low intensity. Because of this they can be performed for long durations and continuously.
Some of the common aerobic exercises are swimming, jogging, dancing, climbing stairs, cycling. The mantra to normal blood pressure levels is to exercise for 30 minutes daily. But if you cannot exercise for 30 minutes on a stretch, you can divide the whole exercising pattern into short pieces during the day.
But then there are certain things that you need to keep in mind before setting your mind on any exercising pattern. Get yourself checked with a good medical practitioner. Only if he confirms that you are fit enough to start with a short dosage of exercises, then you can go in this direction.
All in all, you can say that our body is just like a machine. The more you use it, the more flexible it becomes and thus more output is delivered. Therefore it becomes very essential that you involve a considerable amount of physical activity in your daily routine that keeps you jazzed up through out your life.
Both Marci Lall & kanishkmanchanda are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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