It might seem counterintuitive since exercising clearly gets your blood pumping, but regular exercise actually serves to lower your blood pressure overall. But how does exercise lower blood pressure?

Learn more about the connection between exercise and blood pressure and explore what type of exercises lower your blood pressure so you can find the best solution for you.

How Exercise Affects Blood Pressure

You probably know that 120/80 is the ideal blood pressure reading, but what does it mean? Systolic blood pressure (SBP) is the top number of a blood pressure reading, and it measures blood pressure as your heart beats. Diastolic blood pressure (DBP) is the bottom number and measures blood pressure during the resting phase between heartbeats.

When looking at how exercise impacts blood pressure, it’s important to look at two different things:

• How does exercise affect blood pressure while exercising?
• How does regular exercise impact blood pressure in the long term?

The short-term and long-term impacts have different meanings for your health, so it’s important to separate the two.

Blood Pressure Impacts While Exercising

During exercise, your heart beats faster and harder to increase your blood flow and supply your muscles with oxygen-rich blood. This causes your blood pressure and your pulse to rise temporarily during exercise. Your blood vessels expand to allow for the increase in circulation, which increases your systolic blood pressure (the top number). However, your diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) stays roughly the same.

Your systolic blood pressure will return to normal after exercise, typically within about 6-10 minutes afterwards. In fact, you may even experience slightly lower than baseline blood pressure after exercising for several hours. If your SBP stays elevated for hours after exercise, it may be due to your age and exercise intensity, or it could be a reflection of your cardiovascular fitness. If that happens, talk to your doctor to see if there are any concerns beyond the need for regular exercise.

Blood Pressure Impacts With Regular Exercise

How does exercise lower blood pressure in the long term? After one to three months of exercising regularly, your blood pressure will decrease and stay lower than it was throughout the day, regardless of whether you’ve just exercised or not. That’s because regular exercise strengthens the heart and helps it pump blood more efficiently.

Additionally, your blood vessels become more flexible with regular exercise, improving circulation. These benefits last as long as you continue to exercise regularly and stick to a routine, but will dissipate if you stop.

The Connection Between Heart Strength and Circulation

Exercise offers a lot of health benefits, including strengthening your heart muscles and improving blood vessel function and circulation over time. With regular exercise, you increase the size of your heart’s chambers and strengthen its muscles, conditioning your heart and allowing it to pump blood more efficiently and relax more easily.

Exercise also encourages your blood vessels to become more flexible by increasing the circulation of your blood by about 25% and causing your vessels to expand with the help of increased nitric oxide. It also improves the function of the lining of your blood vessels, further supporting more relaxed arteries.

So, how does exercise lower blood pressure? Together, a stronger heart and stronger, more flexible blood vessels equal a stronger and more resilient cardiovascular system. The result is a body that handles stress better, has a significantly lower risk of heart disease due to lower heart rate and blood pressure, better oxygen consumption, and is stronger all around.

Best Types of Exercise to Lower Blood Pressure

Does exercise lower blood pressure if you’re only doing low-impact exercise? What about only running? Or maybe you prefer just hiking for a couple of hours every weekend. Will exercise lower blood pressure if you’re just sticking to what you enjoy?

The good news is that any amount of exercise is going to help. For the greatest benefits, experts recommend you aim for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise, per week, or a comparable combination of the two. Ideally, you’ll also include at least 10-15 minutes of strength training twice per week. That said, aerobic exercise, isometric exercise, and other types of strength training have all been shown to help lower blood pressure.

Aerobic Exercises

Aerobic exercise, sometimes called cardio, is exercise that uses the large muscle groups in your body and is rhythmic, repetitive, and sustained, causing you to breathe harder. Aerobic exercise can be light, moderate, or vigorous, depending on the intensity of the workout for you. Some examples include:

• Walking: Moderate intensity = walking on a level surface at about 2.5-4.5 miles per hour; vigorous intensity = walking 4.5 miles per hour on a level surface, or briskly walking uphill.
• Cycling: Moderate intensity = biking on level terrain at 5-10 miles per hour; vigorous intensity = biking 10 miles per hour or faster, or biking up hills.
• Dancing: Moderate intensity = ballroom dancing; vigorous intensity = energetic, bouncy dancing.
• Swimming: Moderate intensity = recreational swimming; vigorous intensity = swimming laps.
• Yard work: Moderate activity = weeding and raking leaves; vigorous intensity = chopping wood or shoveling snow.

The intensity of an exercise will vary for you depending on your current level of fitness and comfort with the type of exercise. Here’s a good rule of thumb for measuring the intensity of a workout for you. Moderate intensity exercise allows you to talk while participating in the activity, but not sing. Vigorous intensity exercise does not allow you to speak more than a few words without having to take a breath.

Isometric Exercise

Isometric exercises are a type of strength training in which your muscles are contracted without any significant movement of the joints. These can be especially beneficial for people who need low-impact exercises or for people who struggle with more vigorous aerobic exercise. Examples can include:

• Yoga: Choose a yoga class in which you hold poses for a set amount of time.
• Wall squats: Lean your back and shoulders against a wall, squat down, and hold.
• Glute bridges: Lift your pelvis into a bridge and hold it to strengthen legs and glutes.
• Hand grips: Hold a firm ball or gripper and squeeze as hard as possible for 10-15 seconds; repeat three or four times.
• Dead hangs: Hang from a pull-up bar for as long as possible to strengthen your arms.

Isometric exercises not only improve strength, but they also improve stability and endurance.

Other Strength Training

Strength training strengthens your muscles and improves bone health and stability. Incorporating strength training twice per week benefits overall strength. Examples can include:

• Weight training: Any type of weight training, including kettle bells, free weights, weighted ropes, medicine balls, resistance bands, and weight machines, will work.
• Exercises using body weight: These can include Pilates, push-ups, squats, and certain types of yoga like Ashtanga or Iyengar.
• Explosive strength training: This could include power or Olympic lifting, jump training, burpees, and more.

Strength training is also important for helping you avoid falls or injuries when doing things like moving furniture or carrying heavy bags of groceries.

How Often You Should Work Out for Lasting Results

Can exercise lower blood pressure even if you don’t exercise every single day? Absolutely. The best type of exercise for high blood pressure is the exercise that you’ll actually do, and do regularly. If any amount of exercise sounds daunting, start small. It’s not necessarily about exact frequency or duration. Instead, it’s about exercising regularly and getting enough time in over the course of the week.

There are a couple of different metrics you can use to ensure that you’re getting enough exercise to lower blood pressure and keep it down. Let your preferred measurement guide how long you work out and how many exercises you do per workout.

Daily Exercise

If you want to track daily exercise, 20-30 minutes of moderate exercise per day will allow you to reach the recommended total. If that’s still intimidating, start with just 5 minutes of exercise per day at first. Any increase in activity helps! Start with a walk up the street, and slowly increase to the whole block.

Weekly Exercise

How can exercise lower blood pressure if you’re only tracking your exercise by week? If you prefer to go to exercise classes or spend your weekends on some kind of aerobic activity like tennis or rock climbing, this might be a better way to track your progress. Two classes lasting an hour and a half will fulfill your quota, or even one super-intensive boxing class. Just try adding in other smaller movements throughout the week, like a short walk, a quick plank session, or a dead hang at the park with your kids.

Daily Habits That Support Blood Pressure

Will exercise lower blood pressure? Yes! But only if you do it, so that’s the biggest priority. Start where you are with a goal you can achieve. If you need help getting started or deciding what type of exercise is best for you and your current fitness level, consider talking to a coach. They’ll walk you through your best options and help you every step of the way. Whether you need encouragement, help with goal-setting, or guidance on a particular type of exercise, they’re trained to support you in the best possible way.