Easy 5-Minute Workout Lowers Blood Pressure As Much as Exercise or Medication:
Working out just five minutes daily via a practice described as "strength training for your breathing muscles" lowers blood pressure and improves some measures of vascular health as well as, or even more than, aerobic exercise or medication, new CU Boulder research shows.
The study, published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, provides the strongest evidence yet that the ultra-time-efficient maneuver known as High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST) could play a key role in helping aging adults fend off cardiovascular disease – the nation's leading killer.
[...] "There are a lot of lifestyle strategies we know can help people maintain cardiovascular health as they age. But the reality is, they take a lot of time and effort and can be expensive and hard for some people to access," said lead author Daniel Craighead, an assistant research professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology. "IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV."
Developed in the 1980s as a way to help critically ill respiratory disease patients strengthen their diaphragm and other inspiratory (breathing) muscles, IMST involves inhaling vigorously through a hand-held device that provides resistance. Imagine sucking hard through a tube that sucks back.
[...] But in recent years, Craighead and colleagues at the University of Arizona have been testing whether a more time-efficient protocol – 30 inhalations per day at high resistance, six days per week could also reap cardiovascular, cognitive, and sports performance improvements.
[...] For the new study, they recruited 36 otherwise healthy adults ages 50 to 79 with above normal systolic blood pressure (120 millimeters of mercury or higher). Half did High-Resistance IMST for six weeks; and half did a placebo protocol, in which the resistance was much lower. Participants didn't know which group they were in.
When assessed after six weeks, the IMST group saw their systolic blood pressure (the top number) dip nine points on average, a reduction which generally exceeds that achieved by walking 30 minutes a day five days a week. That decline is also equal to the effects of some blood pressure-lowering drug regimens.
Even six weeks after they quit doing IMST, they maintained most of that improvement.
Journal References:
1.) Daniel H. Craighead, Thomas C. Heinbockel, Kaitlin A. Freeberg, et alTime‐Efficient Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training Lowers Blood Pressure and Improves Endothelial Function, NO Bioavailability, and Oxidative Stress in Midlife/Older Adults With Above‐Normal Blood Pressure, Journal of the American Heart Association (DOI: 10.1161/JAHA.121.020980)
2.) Michael J. Joyner and Sarah E. Baker. Take a Deep, Resisted, Breath, Journal of the American Heart Association (DOI: 10.1161/JAHA.121.022203)
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Friday July 02 2021, @05:31AM
If you put a Pillow over your mouth for 5 minutes a day, you can get the same effect.
Amazingly, watching Mr. Pillow talk also takes the breath away enough to achieve the same effect, though 50% of the people that listen to him have their blood pressure go up, which negates all effects.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Friday July 02 2021, @06:38AM (8 children)
Fuck that, hand me the damn pills.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02 2021, @06:47AM
💊🤔
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Friday July 02 2021, @10:27AM (6 children)
The damn pills have a boatload of not very pleasant side effects IME, and it takes months of arguing with doctors and trialing options to get the side effects down from "can't actually even walk" to merely "life is a bit shit on these".
On the other hand, the damn (cocktail of) pills dropped my systolic from >240 to <120, so a workout that drops 9 points in comparison is definitely in the "why bother" category.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Friday July 02 2021, @01:53PM (4 children)
... behavior according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman: https://www.drfuhrman.com/health-concerns/36/blood-pressure [drfuhrman.com]
"The most common category of high blood pressure, however, is called “essential hypertension,” which basically means that it is related to a high sodium/salt diet, being overweight, being sedentary, and having unhealthy arteries. Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, typically advances with aging, and high blood pressure may be the only sign that this is developing. This means that most persons who have high blood pressure will see dramatic improvements in their health if they diligently modify their lifestyle, particularly their diet, to improve and even resolve high blood pressure as well as reduce the burden of atherosclerosis to lower their risk of a heart attack, premature disability, and death without resorting to medications."
Blood pressure medications in practice are essentially are like sticking a piece of electrical tape over the "check engine" light in your car after it turns on so you don't see it anymore. They do not fix the underlying issue -- which continues to progress.
Good luck with whatever path you choose toward wellness.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday July 02 2021, @04:03PM (3 children)
Thanks, but "essential hypertension" just means they don't know what is causing it. I don't have that.
I am slightly overweight - BMI of 26 right now - and yes could do with losing some of that excess but the some of other diagnoses make that difficult, basically my weight bounces around up or down with no dietary changes, depending on whether the hormone replacement medication is right or not and whether it is kept right as the disease progresses.
I eat virtually no salt - I have a varied diet almost all cooked from scratch, I use no salt when cooking, I eat zero processed / convenience food.
I was also fit and active back when my blood pressure went through the roof - I still try but it's harder after having a stroke and all the various medication side effects.
I've sat in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors going through all the hypertension risk factors with me and scratching them all out - yet mine was the highest BP on the ward by a mile.
It took months, but they did get somewhere towards an answer, or answers. Bottom line - my immune system is trying to kill me, in multiple ways. One is the (relatively) common autoimmune hypothyroidism - which if you look it up causes hypertension. Another is a rare autoimmune that attacks the blood and blood vessel walls, which can also cause hypertension. There are probably other autoimmunes in the mix too - there frequently are according to other sufferers, but they also frequently take a long time to get diagnosed.
There are no cures for this sort of stuff, no known way to fix the underlying issue, except maybe allogeneic BMT - but that is so risky in itself it's rarely done unless you need it to fix blood cancer or similar. With the treatment, on the other hand, the docs reckon I should make it to an average lifespan. Sometimes electrical tape is pretty good, especially when it's all you've got.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02 2021, @06:51PM
If you're cooking from scratch and not using salt, you're in danger of not getting enough salt in your diet. This is a real thing (there's a reason animals in the wild go after salt licks). You can cause some major problems that way, as well.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03 2021, @02:40AM
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Saturday July 03 2021, @02:33PM
Thanks for the reply. The sentence just before the section of Fuhrman's website I quoted was: "Uncommon but significant causes of high blood pressure include problems such as kidney failure, heart failure, liver failure, sleep apnea, insomnia, and anemia." So, you apparently have one of the uncommon cases, an apparent autoimmune disorder.
Evolution generally does not select for bodies that try to kill us though. But, our bodies have been adapted for millions of years for an active outdoors-oriented hunter/gathering lifestyle eating mostly whole foods (mainly plants). Very few humans live that way any more given changes over the past 10,000 years and especially the past 100 years, but no one has told our genetically-determined biochemistry and neurology about the change. Thus it is easy to get caught in various pleasure traps and other tricky self-defeating situations where our natural preferences are at odds with what our current environment makes easy to do: https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx [archive.org]
Or as is put here at "The Lifestyle Cure" (for depression): https://tlc.ku.edu/ [ku.edu]
"We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
There are of course lots of great things about our current environment too -- including cleaner water, antibiotics, and excellent trauma surgery for accidents. So it is not all bad news.
Some strokes come from clogged arteries; others come from weakened arteries that burst including from excess blood pressure. Both of those possibilities are often influenced by diet and how it effects the repair of arterial walls and the pressure on those walls.
Autoimmune disorders can have components including:
* diet (e.g. eating animal products usually increases inflammation, many other food tend to lower it, the right amount of vitamin D tends to lower it, too low or too high iodine have an effect, too low or too high salt as others have mentioned have an effect, too low or too high omega3s, etc.)
* gut bacteria imbalance (often from too little fiber in a diet and/or previous antibiotics use) as much of our immune system and also some neurotransmitter production are based in the gut
* psychology (especially trauma, which keeps the body hyper-vigilant, e.g. see "The Body Keeps The Score" book) which can be combine with genetics of being "highly sensitive" (like to dopamine) which can be good sometimes and not so good other times.
* past and current environmental influences (e.g. too much mold in a house, previous prescription drugs including antibiotics).
* being genetically female, because women tend to have ~3X the autoimmune disorders than men, but as a benefit/tradeoff they are more resistant to many contagious illnesses then men due to a more aggressive immune system in general.
You mentioned "a varied diet almost all cooked from scratch". In general that is a great thing. But maybe there is some specific aspect of it that could still be an issue. Even the use of the word "cooked" is a bit of a red flag (e.g. no fruit? no raw vegetables? etc.) You could compare what you eat with the Nutritarian Pyramid here and see how it differs:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/90/dr-fuhrmans-nutritarian-pyramid [drfuhrman.com]
Dr. Fuhrman suggests eating every day one pound raw vegetables and one pound cooked vegetables (~500 calories combined), 1 oz nuts (~150 calories), 1 lb or so of fruit (~300 calories), and then starches from beans and other things (mostly plants, including lentils, squash sweet potatoes and some grains, corn etc.) for the rest of your calories (another ~1000 calories or so typically, depending on caloric needs). For healthy people, he recommends no more than 10% of calories from other stuff including meat, but for people with health issues he generally recommends eliminating that entirely. He also recommends some supplements to go with this diet including vitamin D3, iodine, B12, and Zinc (which otherwise people tend to get from animal products). Is your "varied diet" diet close to that? Does your diet include any problematical refined components like flours or sugars? When you eat whole grains can you hopefully see the individual grains? Do you eat meat? (No need to answer that question here; mainly just stuff for you to think about.)
That said, sure, maybe there is something specific about your personal biochemistry and genetics that requires other changes. For example, some few percent of the world population with Middle East and European origins have genes to digest milk products; most other people in the world get sick from them (one reason the push to get kids to drink milk in US schools is fundamentally discriminatory against minorities through causing potentially life-long health issues). We are still in just the beginnings of personalized medicine based on genetics and so on. Definitely an area that could benefit from more research. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_genomics [wikipedia.org]
Genetics can give us weak links but whether those links get pulled on to the breaking point is usually a function of diet and lifestyle.
I hope for you that you can come up with some specific root cause as to why your body is attacking itself and what you could do about it.
Medically-supervised water-only fasting (e.g. True North Health Center https://www.healthpromoting.com/ [healthpromoting.com] ) is also something to consider looking into as a way to reduce inflammation. As is intermittent fasting (like by reducing your eating window to only eight or less hours a day, e.g. skipping breakfast and no food after dinner).
Something recent from Dr. Fuhrman's members forum: "Question: Also, does your diet ALWAYS cure autoimmune disease? Answer: No, it does not always cure all autoimmune diseases. Sometimes people are so unhealthy and on so much medication for so long that a complete cure is impossible, but even in these difficult cases we can get some improvement."
Still, maybe you are right and there is no "cure" for your specific situation and cover-up electrical tape is the best answer. Maybe you are the exception that proves the rule. But for ~95%-99% (guesstimating) of other people with high blood pressure, autoimmune disorders, and so on, there are ways to reduce it without drugs (but their most doctors don't emphasize those options or doing tests that might uncover nutritional deficiencies or excesses).
And of course, even when you know a better way to eat and live, it can be very hard to put it in practice and keep at it in our society (where getting people to eat animal products and refined junk food is heavily subsidized by the US government after extensive lobbying by the meat and processed food industries). See the movie "Fat Sick and Nearly Dead 2" on that. Or the "Blue Zones" book and website. Also related:
"Economix - Why a Big Mac Costs Less Than a Salad"
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/why-a-big-mac-costs-less-than-a-salad/ [nytimes.com]
Of course, once you are on prescription drugs, changing your diet or life gets trickier because such changes interacts with drugs, and so such changes should be done in consultation with a knowledgeable medical practitioner who can taper medications as needed. For example, the Fuhrman diet is so good at improving blood sugar levels that many Type II diabetics are off related meds like insulin in weeks as otherwise their blood sugar would crash due to their previous medications.
Good luck!
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Saturday July 03 2021, @01:08AM
Because the pills don't fix the underlying causes..
Diet (google Esselstyn and T. Colin Campbell)
And
Exercise do.
http://www.dresselstyn.com/site/ [dresselstyn.com]
Remember with hypertension, often kidneys are damaged or stressed by allergens and a damaged gut. Avoiding allergens (egg for me), gluten, milk products, preservative-laced foods, and using activated charcoal for BP flare-ups works for me. Also a probiotic filled coconut yoghurt helps.
Oh, keep on the meds and dial back when the other things help. Remember, life degrades faster if you stay on pills alone and don't fix the cause.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02 2021, @07:13AM (1 child)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32730174/ [nih.gov]
Meanwhile, here is a study from Thailand that shows how to make a simple diy device,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5440008/ [nih.gov]
Pic of the home made device also shows an expensive "medical" gadget, that has the same hole sizes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 02 2021, @04:06PM
For DIY, how about just inhale while one hand is loosely covering mouth? Inhaling through a straw also sounds real easy to do.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday July 02 2021, @09:18AM (2 children)
> which generally exceeds that achieved by walking 30 minutes a day five days a week.
Walking less than 30 minutes a day is approximately zero exercise.
"Heavy breathing for 5 minutes a day is equivalent to living a terrible, bare minimum, totally unhealthy lifestyle"
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 02 2021, @09:33AM
Yeeees, ummm... how about... I reckon you'll never feel more alive after 5 minutes of waterboarding instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03 2021, @02:43AM
(Score: 2, Disagree) by deimtee on Friday July 02 2021, @02:43PM (2 children)
So it's five minutes per day of making it difficult to inhale. Can you get the same benefits by wearing a mask for several hours per day?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02 2021, @06:01PM (1 child)
You probably wouldn't want to. A mask that makes it hard to breathe is probably going to cause carbon dioxide to build up in the body. The body tends to adapt to the largest stressors that it expects to encounter. So, as long as you don't push the body so hard that it can't adapt, you probably don't need a lot of time.
The main times when longer is better is if you're looking to increase endurance and need to cause things to start depleting in order to build resilience. Otherwise, short and hard is probably better.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 03 2021, @02:41AM
I meant as an unintended side effect of the current mask rules. Are we currently seeing a widespread drop in blood pressure or is it countered by the stress of living in a COVID world?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 02 2021, @04:17PM
So all the pandemic-deniers who complain about having a hard time breathing through the masks they are forced to wear are at lower risk for blood pressure problems?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02 2021, @06:05PM
everyone must play the trumpet - or do Wellness Meditation(tm)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 02 2021, @11:07PM
... by no longer reading SN 'Meta' posts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03 2021, @02:23AM
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday July 04 2021, @12:46AM
Oral Sex!!!
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P