Study says short bursts of activity can lower blood pressure

If you have high blood pressure — or want to prevent it — a new study suggests that short bursts of activity may help a lot. In an international study that’s published in the journal Circulation, walking uphill, climbing stairs and a brisk cycling sprint all had positive effects on blood pressure.
The research is the work of the Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep Consortium, which is an international collaboration that’s headed by University College London and the University of Sydney.
In study background material, the researchers noted that “just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviors with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.”
“The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise per day could be associated with measurably lower blood pressure readings emphasizes how powerful short bouts of higher intensity movement could be for blood pressure management,” said the study’s joint senior author, Emmanuel Stamatakis, director of the consortium from the Charles Perkins Centre.
Said first author Jo Blodgett, a physician from the Divison of Surgery and Interventional Science at University College London and its Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health: “Our findings suggest that for most people, exercise is key to reducing blood pressure, rather than less strenuous forms of movement such as walking.”
Blodgett added, “The good news is that whatever your physical ability, it doesn’t take long to have a positive effect on blood pressure. 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, many of which can be integrated into daily routines.”
Walking does positively impact blood pressure, according to the researchers, but putting more demand on the cardiovascular system yields bigger results.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that in 2022, high blood pressure was a “primary or contributing cause of 685,875 deaths in the United States.”
An estimated 1.28 billion people worldwide have high blood pressure, which can lead to heart attack, stroke, heart failure, kidney damage and other health woes. And hypertension, which is consistently high blood pressure, is a leading cause of premature death globally.
Since 2017, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association have defined hypertension as blood pressure at or above 130/80 mmHg. Stage 2 hypertension is blood pressure at or above 140/90 mmHg. Arteries carry blood from the heart to the rest of the body and blood pressure is the pressure at which blood pushes against the walls of the arteries.
The CDC said nearly half of adults have high blood pressure and just 1 in 4 have it under control. Of those who don’t, about half have stage 2 hypertension.
The public health giant also estimates that high blood pressure costs the U.S. about $131 billion a year.
The researchers looked at health information from nearly 15,000 volunteers in five countries to see the blood pressure effects of replacing one type of movement behavior with another. Each wore a movement tracker on their thigh to measure both activity and blood pressure around the clock. The average age of study participants was 54 and there were slightly more women than men in the study.
The activities were sorted into categories: sleep, being inactive such as sitting, slow walking, fast walking, standing and more vigorous activities like stair climbing and cycling. The news release said the team created statistical models of what would happen if one behavior was traded for another for various lengths of time. The goal was to see what happened in those cases to blood pressure.
They found that replacing sedentary behavior with 20-27 minutes of exercise each day had potential to reduce heart disease by up to 28% at the population level.
People sometimes have trouble getting started, Dr. Matthew Tomey, a cardiologist at the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital in New York City, who was not involved with the research, told NBC News. “Some people feel like they are too busy,” he said. “Papers like this point out that it doesn’t have to take up a huge amount of time. Depending on what you’re doing you may need little or no equipment.”
The article also quoted Dr. Evan Brittain, professor of cardiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not part of the study. “We used to think if you didn’t go for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, it wasn’t enough. There’s a lot of data now showing that short bursts of activity work.”