Today we’re going to talk about combining two of my very favorite tools for lowering blood pressure, isometric exercise, and breathing. I’m going to show you a combined pattern here really quickly that you can use, uh, that I find very, uh, useful and powerful for a lot of our clients who are dealing with hypertension.
I’m wearing red because it’s February. It is American Heart Association month in the United States where we talk about raising awareness around heart disease. As I mentioned in a previous blog, heart disease had a huge impact on my family. It’s taken the lives of most of my family members, including my parents.
So it’s something I’ve always had an interest in for myself and for everyone that I know. And obviously when we look at the stats, strokes, heart attacks, these are still some of the major killers and will continue to be, uh, until we get better and better approaches. So as a brain-based practitioner, we are always trying to find ways, based on current research that we can add benefit to our clients who are struggling with blood pressure particularly those who have maybe resistant hypertension. They’re already on a bunch of medications and it’s a struggle. That was actually my dad.
So here is what I want you to understand there are two really well researched approaches that we can use to lower blood pressure and what sometimes we need to do in a brain-based training world, is we need to do what we call stacking, where we’re going to put two, three, or four different movements or exercises together in order to create a larger effect neurologically.
So in this case, like I said, we’re going to take the best evidence that we have for isometrics and the best evidence that we have for breathing, and we’re going to put them together into a very simple exercise. The two things that you’re going to focus on, one is going to be a wall sit.
A wall sit is an isometric exercise where you’re going to get your back to a wall. You’re going to move down as far as you comfortably can. Most people, when they teach this, make a mistake because when they’re teaching this for blood pressure, they’ll say, hey, do a normal wall sit, which is get down to about a 90 degree knee bend. Now, that’s great for a wall sit isometric position.
Unfortunately, whenever you’re doing this for blood pressure, , reduction, you’re going to have to stay in that position for two minutes, and you’re going to have to do that four times. The majority of my clients over the years, especially if they are dealing with something like hypertension and that it’s more age related and diet related, et cetera, they can’t maintain a two minute wall sit in that 90 degree position.
So you’re going to use two minutes as your guide for determining how deeply you go into that wall sit. As you get stronger, you can go deeper, but two minutes is going to be your guide. So the basics of the wall sit are find a position, set your clock for, or your, your stopwatch for two minutes, and you’re just going to sit there.
Now, what we know about this is that this compared to aerobic exercise, strength training, et cetera, um, in a big review that was done, I believe in 2023. This was the most effective exercise available for reducing hypertension. And that sounds crazy because people think wouldn’t aerobic exercise or strength training or something be better?
Nope, this little guy right here. There are about eight different reasons we look at neurologically and physiologically about why isometric exercise may be so effective. , but that is the current research. Now, the protocol is three times a week, you do four, two minute sets, all right? Three times a week, four, two minute sets.
You take a two minute break in between each set. So it’s really simple. It’s just, it’s kind of challenging, but like I said, you’re going to, grade the wall sit based on your ability to hold it for two minutes. Now, what we’re going to do is now we’re going to stack that with some breathing. One of the best research breathing approaches for also reducing blood pressure is called the 4 7 8.
The 4 7 8 is inhale for four through the nose. All right, we talked about nasal breathing already in another blog. So you got to inhale through the nose for four seconds. You’re going to hold for seven seconds, and then you’re going to exhale for eight seconds. So four in, hold for seven, out for eight.
What we’re going to ask you to do is stack these two together. So your isometric combined protocol for lowering blood pressure would be get into your wall sit position, find something that’s relatively comfortable, set your timer for two minutes. When you hit go, you’re going to begin the breathing pattern.
Inhale for four,
hold for seven,
exhale for eight,
inhale for four.
And continue. Now, what’s nice about this is often what we will see with our clients is the focus on breathing and keeping that 4 7 8 pattern makes them forget about how uncomfortable their legs are getting. So there’s some side benefits in making the wall sit more effective, but what a lot of people will find is that if you actually compare these, you just do four weeks of breathing using 4 7 8 for 10 minutes a day, or you do your three times a week of, wall sit Both have been shown to significantly lower blood pressure.
But if we combine the two in our clients, at least we’ve seen even greater drops because we’re kind of hitting the best of both worlds. So I’m going to encourage you to try this. If you are a movement professional, try it with your clients. And like I said, what we’re looking for here are things that are cheap, easy, accessible to everyone that has a few minutes per day.And it can be an assist to what they’re already doing to for their medical management of their hypertension. All right. So give it a try.
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