It doesn’t take much: Adding just five minutes of exercise to your daily routine lowers your blood pressure and might cut your odds for heart disease, new research shows.

“The good news is that whatever your physical ability, it doesn’t take long to have a positive effect on blood pressure,” said study lead author Jo Blodgett, from University College London (UCL). “What’s unique about our exercise variable is that it includes all exercise-like activities, from climbing the stairs to a short cycling errand, many of which can be integrated into daily routines.”

Her team published its findings Nov. 6 in the journal Circulation.

According to the researchers, high blood pressure affects almost 1.3 billion adults globally and is one of the biggest causes of premature death due to stroke and other causes.

The new study focused on almost 15,000 adult volunteers who were given activity trackers to chart their daily involvement in six key activities:

  • Sleep
  • Sedentary behavior (such as sitting)
  • Slow walking (less than 100 steps per minute)
  • Fast walking (100 steps per minute or more)
  • Standing
  • More vigorous exercise (such as running, cycling or stair climbing)

Each day, the average participant got seven hours of sleep, 10 hours of sedentary behavior such as sitting, three hours of standing, one hour of slow walking, one hour of fast walking and just 16 minutes of exercise activities such as running and cycling, according to the data.

Using those numbers, the team calculated what would happen to blood pressure if a person replaced a less active behavior with even five minutes of exercise.

The result: A healthy drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a reading) of 0.68 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.54 mmHg2, according to the British team.

A slightly bigger drop in blood pressure — a 2 mmHg reduction in systolic and a 1mmHg reduction in diastolic — could lower a person’s odds for heart disease by 10%, the researchers noted. Incorporating 10 to 20 minutes of exercise per day into a daily routine could make that happen, they said.

Anything that raises heart rate — cycling, climbing stairs or short bursts of running — works to ease high blood pressure, according to the researchers.

“Our findings suggest that, for most people, exercise is key to reducing blood pressure, rather than less strenuous forms of movement such as walking,” said Blodgett, a senior research fellow in the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health at UCL.

But she stressed that, “for those who don’t do a lot of exercise, walking did still have some positive benefits for blood pressure.”

Emmanuel Stamatakis is joint senior author and a professor of medicine and health at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

“The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise or vigorous incidental activities 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,” he said in a UCL news release.

Article by Ernie Mundell on healthday.com

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