Friday, April 8, 2011

How Does Exercise Help Your Blood Pressure?

If you are concerned about your blood pressure being high, which is also known as hypertension, you are almost certainly wondering what you can do about it. Well, no guidance on medical matters could be complete without the get-out phrase of telling you to chat about it with your doctor first, so now that we have got that out of the way, there are a number of things that you can do that your physician will not argue with.

The first is to lose weight through a sensible diet, if you are overweight. Cut down on salt and eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. The second is to give up smoking, the third is to not imbibe so much alcohol and the fourth, the subject of this article, is to take more exercise. Exercise will help you reduce weight and it will also moderate your blood pressure.

Blood pressure tends to increase with age and age has a tendency to coincide with a less energetic job, as you are promoted into the office and a less active home life as the kids are older and have almost certainly left home. If you let watching TV take over from walking as your foremost form of entertainment, the chances are that you will acquire hypertension.

The fact is, that you ought to be taking more exercise as you get older not less. Exercising will not merely reduce your hypertension, but avoiding hypertension will also reduce your likelihood of having a stroke and having kidney disease. Exercising is a medium to long term strategy, because the premise of the tactic is to fortify the heart. Exercising will cause your heart to beat faster which will make it stronger.

A more powerful heart will have less trouble pumping your blood around. Exercise can moderate your blood pressure by ten points or ten millilitres. Exercise can not just reduce your hypertension, but it can stop you from procuring it.

If you have let yourself go, be wary of exercising very strenuously at the start. Do not put excessive strain on your heart for the first couple of months. What can you do? Well, walking or swimming is a decent start. Most doctors would agree that walking merely thirty minutes every morning and thirty minutes every evening can make a huge difference to your heart and your blood pressure.

You can walk in the open air or if that is not convenient, you could get a stepping machine. After a few of months, you will be fit enough to take on more arduous exercises like yoga or going to a gym.

If you are worried about over doing it, you should join a gym where someone will keep an eye on you or even think up a routine for you. A home blood pressure monitor is a useful device to have. The best type to get is the fully automatic digital monitor with a self-inflating cuff. If you buy one that has a memory, you can easily evaluate your progress at decreasing your hypertension.


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