Video: Exercise for High Blood Pressure

This Season: Tailgating; New Year, New You; Tax Time

Exercise has been proven to lower high blood pressure in many people. Learn about how to exercise to reduce blood pressure with tips from a doctor in this free health video.

Video Transcript

Okay so next we want to talk about how exercise relates to blood pressure. There's some research done on how exercise can reduce blood pressure. And they found that exercise can reduce your blood pressure by as much as ten millimeters of mercury on the systolic side. And you have to continue to do that exercise in order for it to have that effect though. Once you reach that reduced blood pressure you have to maintain that other wise it will go back up. So we want to talk about, in this series, we want to talk about the kinds of exercise, the duration of exercise, and the intensity of the exercise. So what kinds of exercise have this effect on blood pressure? Mainly aerobic exercise. So aerobic exercise can be different things for different people, and you need to be careful when you're starting a new exercise program. But what we can say is that you should be breathing briskly. So we will get into the intensity in the next segment, but you should be doing this brisk walking, jogging, where you can still carry a conversation, but you're a little bit winded and you should be doing that for thirty to forty minutes, four to five times a week. And how this has its effect is it allows the arterial system to be more responsive to the changing pressures that occur with exercise. And we'll be demonstrating that a little bit later, but it's basically the arterial system has to go a little bit further and to a wider range of muscles and tissues and so the heart has to work a lot harder to get that pressure to that area. And when you're at rest, as your body accommodates to the exercise that you're doing, it's allowed your blood pressure system can make those changes a little bit easier. So now let's talk about how to calculate or figure out how intensely you should be doing this aerobic exercise.

Follow eHow: Follow @eHow

Exercise for High Blood Pressure

Related Ads

Related Articles & Videos