According to new research, exercising for five minutes every day can lower blood pressure. The study, published on Thursday by experts from an international academic collaboration led by the University of Sydney and University College London, suggested that engaging in five minutes of physical activity per day, such as walking uphill or stair climbing, could help to lower blood pressure.
According to research conducted by the Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting, and Sleep (ProPASS) Consortium, substituting sedentary behavior with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day can result in a clinically relevant drop in blood pressure.
“High blood pressure is one of the biggest health issues globally, but unlike some major causes of cardiovascular mortality there may be relatively accessible ways to tackle the problem in addition to medication,” Emmanuel Stamatakis, joint senior author and director of the ProPASS Consortium from the University of Sydney, said.
“The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise per day could be associated with measurably lower blood pressure readings emphasises how powerful short bouts of higher intensity movement could be for blood pressure management.”
The researchers analyzed data from 14,761 volunteers to see how switching one type of activity with another affects blood pressure.
The researchers projected that substituting sedentary behaviour with at least 20 minutes of exercise every day could reduce cardiovascular disease incidence by 28%.
According to the World Health Organization, 1.28 billion adults aged 30-79 years have hypertension, which is defined as consistently raised blood pressure, and 46% of adults with hypertension are ignorant of the illness.
Source: In