Five minutes of exercise a day is enough to lower blood pressure, study finds
Exercising for even a few minutes each day could lower your blood pressure, an Australian-led study has found, in good news for the health-conscious but time-poor.
Just five minutes of higher intensity movement a day could potentially reduce blood pressure, an international study out today in scientific journal Circulation has found.
Hypertension - or a consistent elevated blood pressure level - is one of the biggest causes of premature death worldwide.
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Something as simple as spending a few minutes running for the bus is enough to lower your blood pressure, the researchers found. Getty
Affecting 1.28 billion adults around the world, it can lead to stroke, heart attack, heart failure and kidney damage and is often described as the 'silent killer' due to its lack of symptoms.
"The finding... emphasises how powerful short bouts of higher intensity movement could be," senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, the Director of the ProPASS Consortium at the University of Sydney, said.
The results come from an analysis of 14,761 volunteers across five countries who used a wearable accelerometer to measure their activity and blood pressure throughout the day and night.
Their daily activity was split into six categories: sleep, sedentary behaviour like sitting, standing, slow walking, fast walking and high-impact exercise.
Replacing sedentary behaviours with 20 to 27 minutes of exercise such as walking uphill, climbing stairs, running or cycling was found to be enough to meaningfully reduce blood pressure in the long term.
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Having consistently high blood pressure is one of the biggest causes of early death worldwide. Getty
It was estimated that this would reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 28 per cent.
The higher intensity the activity, the greater the benefits.
"What's unique about our exercise variable is that it includes all exercise-like activities, from running for a bus or a short cycling errand," Dr Jo Blodgett from the Division of Surgery and Interventional Science at UCL said.
"Walking did still have some positive benefits for blood pressure. But if you want to change your blood pressure, putting more demand on the cardiovascular system through (high intensity) exercise will have the greatest effect."
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