Your blood carries oxygen and all the nutrients needed across your body. When your heart beats, it pumps the blood around. As the blood moves, it pushes against the sides of the blood vessels carrying it. The strength of this pushing is called Blood pressure.
I am sure most adults at some point in their life have taken their blood pressure and many must be aware of what those two numbers actually mean. But for the uninitiated let me expand. The top number or the first number is called the systolic blood pressure which is the highest force of push when your heart beats. The second or bottom number is the diastolic pressure which is the lowest level of pressure when your heart rests between beats.
When you exercise, your heart rate elevates and your Blood pressure will rise. The more active you are the harder your blood needs to be pumped. This is because your muscles need more oxygen during exertion. The heart pumps more blood around your body with more powerful contractions which increases the blood pressure. For people with normal blood pressure, the rise during exercise will automatically return to normalcy within a few minutes of finishing to exercise. When the blood pressure at rest is high, that is even without hard activity or exercise if your normal rate of blood pressure is higher than standard, people begin to worry about exercising as the body cannot ‘increase’ the blood pressure anymore during the course of exercise. While people with high BP ought to take recommendations from their general physician before getting more active, to most, exercising consistently will lower blood pressure.
The systolic blood pressure is the one that normally rises during exercise while the diastolic for healthy individuals who exercise regularly marks very little change. That is to say the heart pushes blood with greater force but the rest period between beats is well within control. A normal range for systolic rate during exercise is 160 to 200. Not just cardio exercises, weight lifters too have higher systolic rates during exercise. Diastolic rate on the other hand should not rise more than 15 to 20 mmhg during exercise. If it does, you ought to immediately stop.
Given all these details it is easy for you to believe that not exercising is a better option for hypertension. But you will be so wrong! Regular exercise can help you lower blood pressure for it makes your heart more efficient – that is it teaches your heart to pump more blood with lesser effort. Just as the adage goes ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’; teaching you heart to become efficient through exercise will improve your quality of life much more permanently than relying on only medication to lower the blood pressure.
Written by Gita Krishna Raj | Published in Food & Health in December 2015
