These Aerobic Exercises Can Help Lower Your Blood Pressure

Researchers examined data from 24 different studies that focused on the relationship between aerobic exercise (AE) and BP. The studies were all published from January 2010 to September 2021. 

"Certainly, not all studies on this topic have been included in this study due to their large number, but an attempt has been made to include a variety of AE training methods, the different populations of participants and different AE methods and AE durations," wrote lead author Mehrnoosh Esmailiyan, MD, a specialist at Raghib Isfahani Institute of Higher Education in Iran, and colleagues. 

Overall, Esmailiyan et al. found that many types of AE can help reduce BP. The specific types of AE covered in this analysis included regular AE, resistant AE, acute/short-term AE, chronic/long-term AE, power exercise training, circuit exercise training, heated water-based exercise and isometric exercise training. 

Almost all study participants see the impact of such training, including pre-hypertensive, hypertensive, non-hypertensive and diabetic patients. Age did not appear to play a significant role in one way or the other.

Moreover, physical activity can lower BP  even in resistant hypertensive subjects who have low responsiveness to medical treatment.

One group that did not seem to see the full impact of AE, however, was patients with chronic heart failure.

"For those with chronic heart failure, more concern and help might be needed to decrease BP via exercise," the authors wrote.

Abstract:

“High blood pressure (BP) is one of the main modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and preventing it greatly reduces the vascular consequences of aging and, along with intensive treatment of hypertension, eliminates a large portion of the burden of CVD-related mortality. Many meta-analyses and studies proved that regular aerobic exercise (AE) reduces BP but most of these studies consider only hypertensive populations or only AE but not resistant exercise or their combination. In this review, we aimed to study the effect of different types of physical activity (PA)/AE on various populations including normotensive, prehypertensive, primary hypertensive, and resistant hypertensive with different comorbidities. We searched PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar for English articles with keywords for physical activity, aerobic exercise, and blood pressure from January 2010 until September 2021. Finally, 24 studies were included. Results showed that chronic or acute AE (long-term or short-term), either alone or as combined with different sessions and programs can reduce systolic and diastolic BP in every group including normotensive, prehypertensive, primary hypertensive, resistant hypertensive individuals and diabetic patients and those with kidney problems but not in people with chronic heart failure. Isometric exercise training showed to be useful in reducing BP in all groups either as low intensity or as high intensity but the rate of reduction was different in terms of gender. AE showed to be effective in terms of BP reduction in a different age range. It can be seen that different types and duration of AE independent of the modality and programs and independent of the BP medical situation of individuals have been successful in terms of BP reduction. For those with chronic heart failure, more concern and help might be needed to decrease BP via exercise.”