Lower Your Blood Pressure Without Medicine Or Exercise

Take a deep breath — this one is gonna’ knock your socks off, because…

“Not only is it more time-efficient than traditional exercise programs, the benefits may be longer lasting.”

— Dr. Daniel H. Craighead, PhD, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Assistant Research Professor, Integrative Physiology of Aging Lab, Department of Integrative Physiology, University of Colorado Boulder, referring to research findings of a 5-minute breathing exercise upon lowering blood pressure

And, it’s easy!

How easy is “easy”?

Dr. Craighead said the exercise called “IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV.”

These findings are significant, because 65% of adults over age 50 have above-normal blood pressure, which puts them at greater risk of heart attack or stroke, and less than 40% meet guidelines for recommended levels of aerobic exercise.

“It’s basically strength-training for the muscles you breathe in with,” said Dr. Craighead, who added that,“it’s something you can do quickly in your home or office, without having to change your clothes, and so far it looks like it is very beneficial to lower blood pressure and possibly boost cognitive and physical performance.”

Dr. Craighead acknowledged that traditional exercise regimens can be difficult to maintain, which for some are costly burdens they can ill afford, and said that “the reality is, they take a lot of time and effort and can be expensive and hard for some people to access.”

High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST) was developed in the 1980s as a way to help wean critically ill people off venilators, and involves breathing in vigorously through a hand-held device called an inspiratory muscle trainer which provides resistance, and by so doing, helps people strengthen their diaphragm and other inspiratory (breathing) muscles. Some have described as sucking hard through a tube that sucks back.

The research, published in the June 29, 2021 edition of the Journal of the American Heart Association, reported that “the training consisted of 30 inspiratory efforts (5 sets of 6 efforts at 75% of peak inspiratory pressure with 1 minute rest between; ≈5 minutes in duration) 6 days a week for 6 weeks,” and was able “to reduce blood pressure (≈9 mm Hg systolic).”

Systolic blood pressure – the upper number of a blood pressure reading – refers to how much effort is required by the heart to push blood out to the body.

The findings also showed “a reduction in blood pressure was maintained in the high‐resistance inspiratory muscle training group in a 6‐week follow‐up visit after the training intervention in which the participants returned after stopping training.”

Especially surprising findings were of improved endothelial function in estrogen‐deficient postmenopausal women, who typically don’t experience such improvement, even with traditional exercise. Endothelial function is a measurement that reflects the production of endothelium-derived messengers that control vascular tone, blood flow, immune cell activity and adhesion, which all have a role in regulating blood pressure and perfusion.

Another fascinating finding was that “the authors reported decreases in systemic inflammation” of the arteries.

In conjunction with that and other findings, “participants in the high‐resistance inspiratory muscle strength training group also had improvements in NO bioavailability that occurred via a combination of increased endothelial NO synthase activation and decreased oxidative stress.”

NO, or nitric oxide, is a multifunctional signaling molecule involved in the maintenance of metabolic and cardiovascular homeostasis. NO is also a potent endogenous vasodilator and enters for the key processes that suppresses the formation vascular lesion even AS (atherosclerosis).

NO bioavailability indicates the production and utilization of endothelial NO in organisms, its decrease is related to oxidative stress, lipid infiltration, the expressions of some inflammatory factors and the alteration of vascular tone, which plays an important role in endothelial dysfunction.

Endothelial dysfunction is closely associated with atherosclerosis.