High Blood Pressure and Exercise

exercise is generally safe but what happens if you put your body under too much pressure [Music] hello healthy people i'm richard and welcome back to exercise for health and in today's video i'm going to offer you eight tips on what exercise considerations you should take if you have high blood pressure or if you're taking medication for it if you are new to this channel we offer tips advice and exercises each week to help you manage your health condition and fitness levels so go ahead and tap the subscribe button below and the bell icon so you're notified of when we upload a new video so the first thing we need to answer is what is blood pressure well the heart pumps your blood through your arteries to all your organs and tissues in the body a bit like a tap attached to a hose pipe where the tap is the heart the hose is your artery and the water passing through is the blood if the pressure wasn't there then the blood wouldn't flow so it is crucial to our survival if your blood pressure is low which can happen under certain conditions like high heat and humidity you can start to feel faint or light headed and you've probably felt this at some point in your lifetime however if your blood pressure rests consistently high then this can be a risk factor for other health conditions such as a stroke or a heart attack sometimes there are indications that can lead us to understand why our blood pressure is high for example caffeine salt high saturated fat diet prevalence of mental or emotional stress obesity family history of high blood pressure or even high cholesterol levels however in about 85 percent of cases it's not actually known what causes it and this is known as essential hypertension blood pressure is measured using a sphygmomanometer to determine two numbers a high number called the systolic reading and a lower number called the diastolic reading essentially the systolic number is the pressure on the artery wall as your heart beats and pushes the blood around the body so that's like when you feel the pulse the diastolic number is the pressure posterior wall in between the beats when the heart is actually refilling with blood so what is a normal blood pressure reading well blood pressure reading of up to 120 millimeters of mercury over 80 millimeters of mercury would be classed as normal but you could be considered as being hypertensive if your blood pressure at rest exceeds either 140 for the systolic reading and or 90 for the diastolic reading from an exercise point of view it wouldn't be recommended to undertake physical activity if your blood pressure is exceeding that of the threshold of 160 over 100 on either reading as the risk would outweigh the benefit if your blood pressure is classified as severe 180 over 120 or higher then you'd be strongly recommended to seek medical advice as you may have an underlying issue that's causing such extreme blood pressure in addition if you suffer from diabetes the thresholds are set lower as the risk for other clinical conditions is much higher if your blood pressure is not controlled so what can you do to manage it well firstly in most cases it may be just a change of your lifestyle so reviewing your diet to reduce certain fats and salt and increase vegetable intake reduce an alcohol consumption yeah that doesn't go down very well when i mention it quit smoking losing weight if you need to do that so put less of a strain out that's placed on the heart and on the body and generally being more active in reducing your sedentary time during the day if this doesn't work though after a period of time then your gp may decide to prescribe you medication to try and get your blood pressure to come back down but there are many studies that are now showing that regular exercise can reduce the blood pressure between five and ten millimeters of mercury which is just as effective of some medications so this can go a long way to managing it for life so what recommendations do i have if you've been diagnosed with high blood pressure but have it under control well let's go through each one in turn right tip number one then is to try and make sure that you can exercise for about three times a week so three exercise sessions a week and each exercise session you should be looking to be able to do at least 15 minutes of aerobic based exercise or cardiovascular based exercise so this could be whether you're doing it in the gym environment where you can do it in a sort of controlled manner it could be whether you're doing an exercise class it might be though you could be going outside for a walk you could go for a cycle ride you can even go for a swim okay tip number two tip number two is to make sure that you prolong your warm-up and cool down before you do the main part of the x-ray session so normally most people would end up spending three to five minutes doing a warm-up and a cool down at the end of the session you need to be doing double that really if you've got high blood pressure so looking to do between six to ten minutes for both the warm up and the cool down and the reason for that is you just want to gradually allow the heart rate to build up slowly so you start with a low intensity build the heart rate up slowly as you gradually increase intensity so then the change of the actual blood pressure is a gradual change and it's not sudden so certainly just don't go in if you let's say you go into the gym and you go on an exercise bike and you whack the resistance right up and start pedaling really quickly that's probably the worst thing you can do so just start off very very gently build up slowly but about six to ten minutes for each warm up and cool down right tip number three is no heavy lifting so no heavy weights to give an example eddie hall who's the former world's strongest man he lifted 500 kilograms on the deadlift which is over 1100 pounds and they estimated his blood pressure to be 300 over 180 so phenomenal blood pressure that his body was under and that caused his to bleed from his nose and from his ears so really really important that you don't lift heavy you should be able to lift any weight you're lifting comfortably between 10 and 15 repetitions without actually straining so any any weight training that you're doing as part of your exercise program just make sure that it's of a moderate weight and you can manage at least 10 to 15 repetitions okay tip number four is no isometrics or no static holds and basically what that means is having your body or muscles in the body actually undergo a contraction where they're not actually either getting longer or shorter so an example this would be something like a wall set or something like the plank where you're holding the position the muscles are under contraction what that does that actually then starts to push the blood pressure up in the body so i wouldn't advise doing any static or isometric holds it's better to make sure that while you're actually exercising the body's consistently moving all the time so no isometrics right tip number five is no actual lifting of weights above your head so what we don't want to do if you're in the gym environment or even if you're at the at home we don't want to be pushing weights up above your head and the reason for that is as you're pushing the weight up above the head then the heart's gotta work harder to pump blood against gravity in all these smaller muscle groups and it then puts more pressure back on the heart so i wouldn't recommend doing anything like this you just need to find an alternative so if you're wanting to try and work your shoulders as an example for the shoulder press you would then change it for something like a side raise side lateral raise or you could even do a front raise or you could do something like an upright row so you're always looking for an alternative so you're not actually pushing weights up above your head okay tip number six really coincides with some of the previous tips i've already said and that's to make sure that when you're doing any type of lifting so any type of resistance training or weight training to ensure that you're breathing correctly so what we don't want to do is i use what's called the valsalva maneuver which is where you hold your breath because that's going to actually increase the amount of pressure internally and push the blood pressure up so as an example if i was lifting a weight as the weight's being lifted against gravity so the hard part you should be breathing out and then as the weights then lower back down that's when you should be then breathing back in again okay so making sure that you're breathing with the movement is crucial to not allowing the blood pressure to go up okay tip number seven is looking at how you actually structure your exercises within your routine so ideally you should use what's called a peripheral heart action effect and basically that means that you pick an exercise that works the muscles in the upper body first and then you follow that with an exercise that then works the legs and then the next one after that is back to the upper body and then back to the legs and what that does is it allows the heart to pump the blood to different areas of the body so it shunts the blood to the upper body and has to shunt the blood to the lower body so it keeps the heart rate up but also because you're working big muscles within the body and allowing the blood to flow round it just actually allows to reduce the amount of blood pressure from going up so peripheral heart action effect is probably the best way to do any sort of routine in addition to that it's probably best if you can try and stick to compound exercises rather than isolated so an isolated exercise for example would be where one joint moves like a bicep curl action if i was lifting the weight doing this it just means then the heart's got to pump the blood just to this small muscle group so then there's more resistance pushing back to the heart which is then going to increase the pressure if i change that to something like an upright row where i still work the muscles in their biceps by also with the shoulders and the muscles on the top of the back there's more muscles being worked so therefore then the blood's got to pump the blood into more of a cellular structure so there's less resistance in the muscles so therefore then that reduces the pressure so you're not putting the blood pressure up too high so compound exercises where two joints work and also then peripheral action where you start with an upper body then lower body upper body lower body so move the actual blood around the body while you're exercising so the final tip number eight then this is where you need to consider other health conditions that you might have alongside your high blood pressure so even if your high blood pressure is controlled whether it's through medication or not sometimes other health conditions may take precedence over how you structure your exercise program so just make sure that the program that you're doing is tailored to you right i hope you found those eight tips useful on how you can manage your blood pressure while you're exercising if you've got any questions then leave it in the comments below but otherwise stay active and i'll see you next week thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video today please give it a thumbs up you can also click here to subscribe to this channel or click here to watch a recent video see you soon

Channel: Exercise For Health

Views: 292,093

Keywords: Exercise For Health, Hypertension, High Blood Pressure, Blood Pressure, Low Blood Pressure, Seniors, Exercise advice, Exercise tips, Sphygmomanometer

Id: vpqX8zJujDY

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020