Easy 5-Minute Workout Lowers Blood Pressure as Much as Exercise or Medication

upstart writes:

Easy 5-Minute Workout Lowers Blood Pressure As Much as Exercise or Medication:

Working out just five minutes daily via a practice described as "strength training for your breathing muscles" lowers blood pressure and improves some measures of vascular health as well as, or even more than, aerobic exercise or medication, new CU Boulder research shows.

The study, published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, provides the strongest evidence yet that the ultra-time-efficient maneuver known as High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST) could play a key role in helping aging adults fend off cardiovascular disease - the nation's leading killer.

[...] "There are a lot of lifestyle strategies we know can help people maintain cardiovascular health as they age. But the reality is, they take a lot of time and effort and can be expensive and hard for some people to access," said lead author Daniel Craighead, an assistant research professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology. "IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV."

Developed in the 1980s as a way to help critically ill respiratory disease patients strengthen their diaphragm and other inspiratory (breathing) muscles, IMST involves inhaling vigorously through a hand-held device that provides resistance. Imagine sucking hard through a tube that sucks back.

[...] But in recent years, Craighead and colleagues at the University of Arizona have been testing whether a more time-efficient protocol - 30 inhalations per day at high resistance, six days per week could also reap cardiovascular, cognitive, and sports performance improvements.

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