Better than blood pressure medication … just 5 minutes of ‘special’ breathing exercises
Colorado: American experts have discovered that a special breathing exercise for just 5 minutes a day to lower blood pressure and improve the health of the arteries and prevent heart disease can be better than medicine and exercise.
This special breathing exercise is called “IMST” (Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training) which aims to strengthen the muscles that are used in the process of breathing.
The exercise was invented in the 1980s to enable critically ill patients to breathe on their own and get rid of ventilators.
This breathing exercise is done using a small instrument while the practitioner’s nose is closed so that he can only breathe through his mouth.
This device makes breathing more difficult than usual, which causes the muscles of the respiratory system to work harder when they breathe, and they gradually become stronger.
During the exercise, 30 deep breaths are taken through this device while the whole process is completed in just 5 minutes.
In recent years, some research has shown that if the same “IMST” exercises are performed to increase the resistance to air passage in the device, there may be some additional benefits. Such as reduction in stress, good sleep and low blood pressure, etc.
Continuing their initial research, University of Colorado Boulder experts decided to try the same exercise to lower blood pressure.
For the research, they recruited 36 healthy volunteers, ranging in age from 50 to 79, who underwent breathing exercises for just five minutes a day using the IMST device for six weeks.
However, half of these volunteers had to exert a slight exertion to breathe with the given “IMST” device, while the other half volunteered to resist breathing in the “IMST” device. There was so much that he had to put a lot of effort into breathing with this device.
Six weeks later, it was found that the blood pressure of the volunteers who breathed harder than the IMST device was clearly low and within healthy limits.
This benefit to blood pressure was even greater in some volunteers than daily exercise and blood pressure-lowering medications.
Not only this, with the help of these volunteers you can reduce the stiffness of the veins and improve your blood pressure.
Experts say that a reduction in blood pressure and hardening of the arteries also reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 to 40 percent.
Even after the study was over, the drop in blood pressure remained significant, which is a good thing.
In addition to research in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association, the same team of experts has posted a short video on YouTube so that other people can also benefit from this breathing exercise:
The benefits of IMST to blood pressure are clear and obvious, but scientists are still unable to understand why this happens.
He speculates that the exercise may have caused the surface cells in the blood vessels to release large amounts of nitric oxide, which helps relieve muscle tension and improve blood flow.
Discussion about this post