Looking for info on blood pressure

[chris hansen]

Hello,

Someone at work asked me about lowering blood pressure because her mother has it and the doctor wants to put her on medicine. I didn't have too much to offer but I also have family members with high blood pressure so I thought I'd do some research and write up an article or something on lowering blood pressure.

I've been looking around and am having trouble getting some of my questions answered, if anyone could suggest some references I would really appreciate it. What I'm trying to find out is:

Has it ever been decided what kind of exercise is best for lowering blood pressure? What kind of exercise might be less effective or even inappropriate?

Exactly what role does dietary fat play? The standard advice seems to be to lower fat intake, especially saturated fat, but the studies I've read don't tell what kind of fat was reduced or exactly what the calories were replaced with, the role of trans fats, the effect of different kinds of fat, omega-3 fats, etc. I've been led to believe that saturated fat isn't the villian people say it is but almost everyone says to reduce it, what's the bottom line?

How do carbs affect blood pressure? Most sources seem to recommend a high carb diet but what about sugar, pasta, and other starches?

What role, if any, does protein play. I haven't seen much mention of protein.

Anything about relaxation, stress reduction and the mind body connection in controlling blood pressure.

If you could suggest some reference material that would be great. I'd like to be able give quality references for all my information.

Thanks.

[hammer_2020]

Hello Chris. Just off the bat, with regard to exercise, I recommend anything that increases your peripheral vascularity, that is, the network of capillaries in your body, particularly in skeletal muscle. In doing so, you increase the total cross-sectional surface area of your circulatory system, which will bring down your total peripheral resistance and hence blood pressure. High-volume resistance training using compound exercises at a moderate-high intensity should help in this regard, as do slightly more unorthodox things like yoga and taijiquan (apparently, the strong cognitive focus on the body coupled with mindful movement helps to stimulate the growth of peripheral capillarity).

I personally like a mix of both resistance and one or the other of the latter (I do taijiquan), since the latter greatly helps in relaxation and recovery and also improves the quality of my resistance training with improved breath control, visualisation and somatic awareness. Also, yoga/taijiquan/any other form of athletic moving meditation help to reset your nervous tone, which may be skewed towards a sympathetic balance from too many intense resistance workouts.

Regarding your questions on diet, I'll have to refresh my rather rusty nutrition knowledge, but no doubt some of the more knowledgeable members in this regard will have answered them by then (and if they do, it will save me the trouble of rifling through my notes and textbooks ;)).

Hope this helps :D

[tyciol]

Hammer, that's an interesting idea, resetting it. In reading the CST articles I have been noticing Coach Sonnen talking about avoiding recruiting the sympathetic nervous system, which is sort of confusing since I figure there would be limits on what the body would do without it.

I can only think maybe it is aimed at pushing the barrier at which they are recruited and to increase the body's ability to perform with a more relaxed hormonal profile. The idea of resetting it with relaxed things is very interesting for that. Increasing efficiency in movement is another of course.

It gets confusing though, when I read articles like this one: http://www.musclewithattitude.com/readArticle.do?id=1881918 where it talks about it being important to switch over to that nervous system by doing things like heavy barbell squats for fat burning. It's like, those full body movements that stress you so much, are they bad? They are natural, but isolation would recruit that system much less, if that is indeed bad. At the same time, it would not increase the lactate threshhold (if that is actually desirable?) nor would it teach you to use the body in a unified alignment for maximal force.