High blood pressure is one of the most common conditions that the population faces. In fact, it’s estimated that almost half of all adults suffer from elevated blood pressure to varying degrees.
This makes it a pressing health concern that needs to be taken seriously. Of course, there’s the pharmaceutical route, but can exercise lower blood pressure? Yes.
This article will go over what type of exercise lowers blood pressure and how much you need to do.
What Is Blood Pressure?
Your heart is the most sophisticated pump on the planet. It’s composed of a series of chambers, valves, and blood vessels that work with the lungs to constantly replenish oxygenated blood and send it to your muscles.
Here is what the basic order of blood flow looks like.
Body – Blood delivers oxygen to tissues and picks up carbon dioxide (now deoxygenated).
Right Atrium – Receives deoxygenated blood from the body.
Right Ventricle – Pumps deoxygenated blood to the lungs.
Lungs – Blood picks up oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide.
Left Atrium – Receives oxygenated blood from the lungs.
Left Ventricle – Pumps oxygenated blood to the body.
Back to the Body – Blood delivers oxygen again and repeats.
And that’s the simple version!
To ensure your muscles and organs get plenty of oxygen and nutrients, it must deliver 5-6 liters of blood throughout over 60,000 miles of blood vessels! To do this, your heart beats 60-100 times every minute during times of rest!
This means that your blood has to forcefully pump blood every heartbeat. When your oxygenated blood leaves your left ventricle, it is pumped out into your arteries. The blood in your arteries presses on the walls of your arteries creating pressure – this is blood pressure!
Systolic And Diastolic Blood Pressure
Have you ever wondered why your blood pressure has two numbers? It might look like this;
120/80
124/81
131/91
Why is that?
Your heartbeat occurs in a rhythmic pattern in which the heart pumps blood out and then must be refilled with blood. These two processes generate different amounts of pressure.
Systolic pressure (the top number): This is the pressure when your heart contracts and pumps blood out. It shows how much pressure your blood is exerting on artery walls during a heartbeat.
Diastolic pressure (the bottom number): This is the pressure when your heart is at rest between beats. It reflects the pressure in your arteries when the heart is filling with blood again.
As your systolic pressure is when your heart contracts, this number is going to be higher.
What’s Considered High Blood Pressure?
When reading your blood pressure, there can be quite a bit of variance. Here are the 5 levels of blood pressure
Low Blood Pressure: <90/<60
Normal Blood Pressure: 120 / <80
Elevated Blood Pressure: 121-129 / <80
Hypertension Level 1: 130-139 / 80-89
Hypertension Level 2: 140+ / 90+
To be diagnosed with high blood pressure, only one number must be high.
Also, your blood pressure can fluctuate due to various circumstances so one reading doesn’t mean you have high blood pressure. Before you get concerned, you should measure high on at least 3 different times on different days.
When you measure your blood pressure, be sure you are rested and in a calm state; don’t measure after exercise or after you sit in traffic for an hour. After sitting, wait at least 5 minutes before taking your measurement.
What Causes High Blood Pressure?
Your heart and cardiovascular system is a very complex system. As such, there are numerous variables that can cause elevated blood pressure. We can break these down into two main subcategories: ¹
1. Lifestyle Factors. Lifestyle factors are those that are caused by the way you live your life. The good thing about these is they’re modifiable by making different life choices. You have a lot of control over most of them, so you can easily mitigate your risk by eliminating harmful behaviors. These can include;
Smoking
Poor Diet
Stress
Smoking
Drinking Alcohol
Lack Of Physical Activity
2. Biological Factors. Unlike lifestyle factors, you have little control over biological factors. This can include;
Age
Genes
Underlying Medical Conditions
As you can see, apart from the biological factors, many of the causes of high blood pressure are caused by ignoring generic advice given to live a healthy life.
Risks Of High Blood Pressure?
When not taken care of, high blood pressure can result in serious consequences, including death.¹
Heart Disease
Stroke
Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD)
Aneurysm Formation
Cognitive Decline & Dementia
Vision Loss
Kidney Damage
None of these are good and will have a significant effect on your life.
And this is important. High blood pressure is a chronic condition. It’s not going to cause immediate health concerns; this can cause some people to ignore it. However, overtime, the extra pressure wears on the heart and vessels – eventually you have a major problem.
It’s similar to losing tread on a tire. It takes years to occur, and while you lose tread, you may not see any major effects. However, all of a sudden, one day, your tire blows.
Will Exercise Lower Blood Pressure?
Yes!
Above we went over the various factors that increase your risk of developing high blood pressure. A major risk factor are various modifiable lifestyle choices with exercise playing a major role.
Exercise can increase the strength of your heart and is also going to help improve your body composition by increasing your caloric burn – this assumes you also watch your diet, which you 100% should do!²
With that said, it’s important to understand that exercise can affect your systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure differently. This means certain types of exercises can affect systolic pressure and diastolic pressure differently, which we’ll discuss below.
Regardless, there are a ton of variables that can affect how blood pressure is changed with exercise. However, when looking at all studies, exercises provides the following improvements on blood pressure;
Systolic BP by 5–11 mmHg
Diastolic BP by 3–7 mmHg
How Does Exercise Lower Blood Pressure?
There are numerous mechanisms by which regular exercise can lower your blood pressure. Depending on your specific situation, you may benefit from one or all of these.
1. Reduces Arterial Stiffness – Exercise, especially aerobic activity, helps blood vessels become more elastic. This increased flexibility results in less resistance to blood flow and lower blood pressure.
2. Improves Endothelial Function – The endothelium is the inner lining of blood vessels and controls dilation. Exercise boosts nitric oxide production, which helps relax and open blood vessels, reducing pressure.
3. Strengthens the Heart (Lower Systolic) – A stronger heart pumps more blood with less effort. That means less force on the arteries, lowering systolic blood pressure.
4. Reduces Peripheral Resistance (Lower Diastolic) – With regular training, especially resistance exercise, your small arteries and capillaries become better at distributing blood. This reduces the baseline pressure in your vessels, especially diastolic BP.
5. Lowers Stress Hormones – This is associated with lowering levels of stress. Exercise lowers the hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which can constrict blood vessels and raise BP. Regular movement can help calm the body resulting in lower blood pressure.
6. Promotes Weight Loss and Fat Reduction – Less body fat ultimately decreases body weight and lowers the overall strain on the circulatory system. It can also decrease the amount of visceral fat, which is linked to high blood pressure and insulin resistance.
What’s The Best Exercise To Lower Blood Pressure?
When it comes to lowering your blood pressure, the world’s your oyster! Basically any kind of increased activity through exercise can be an effective tool to lower your blood pressure.
1. Cardio Exercise. It seems that the best exercise is prolonged endurance of cardio exercise, with most interventions seeming to consist of sessions of 30 min or greater. This consists of various types of cardio, such as jogging and brisk walking. For example, some research found the following protocols effective;
Swimming, dance
Moderate intensity
50-60 minutes
2 times a week
However, there does seem to be evidence that the best results are seen by using the following guidelines on a consistent basis.³
Jogging, cycling
Medium-high intensity
40-60 minutes
3 times a week
The primary takeaway is that including cardio is crucial. While there is some variation in types and intensity, the most important factor is consistency.
2. Strength Training. While most people turn to cardio when speaking about lowering blood pressure, strength training has also been shown to be effective at lowering blood pressure.
Remember that your blood pressure is ultimately controlled by your cardiovascular system (heart, blood vessels, blood), and strength training places high demands on intermittently.
And here’s the good news: when it comes to a specific type of resistance training, there seem to be many choices. Some of the methods shown to be effective at lowering your blood pressure include;
Circuit training
Bodyweight training
Traditional resistance training (3X10 @ 75% 1RM)
Isometric training
Now, some studies suggest that dynamic exercise may lower blood pressure to a smaller degree than aerobic endurance and even isometric training. Mouch of the isometric training consisted of contracting a muscle from 30-120s.
Basically, any type of external stimuli that places a greater demand on your heart will have a positive effect under one condition – it must be consistent for a prolonged duration!
3. Walking (Increased General Activity). Walking again! More and more research is coming out that shows the incredible health benefits from walking. Again, we’re differing this from cardio as we believe they do fall under different categories.
Regardless, if you’re not walking, start. Research has found that walking an extra 30 minutes daily, or 3km, can significantly reduce one’s blood pressure. And these effects can be huge.
Some research found that walking for 30 minutes 4 times a week combined with hand grip training lowered⁴
Systolic blood pressure by 10 mmHg (127.8mmHg to 117.8mmHg)
Diastolic blood pressure by 5.8 mmHg (94.1mmHg to 88.3 mmHg)
Walking is free, low-impact, and requires minimal skill, making it the perfect tool for everyone to lower blood pressure.⁵
How To Use Exercise To Decrease Your Blood Pressure
Above, we went over various protocols for lowering blood pressure. It’s hard to give a specific number for how much exercise you need to do to lower blood pressure for several reasons;
How high is your current blood pressure?
What are your current activity levels?
Increased activity lowers blood pressure on a continuum. Some is good – More is better
To optimize your blood pressure, we would follow these guidelines;
2-3 strength training sessions weekly
3 cardio sessions of 30-60 minutes of moderate-high intensity
Increase steps to at least 10,000 steps a day.
Decreasing your blood pressure doesn’t need to be complicated. At the very least, following a consistent walking program would do wonders for many people. As we went above, increasing your daily steps at appropriate intensities can result in significant decreases.
Plus, it’s 100% free!
So, if anything, everyone should be walking if they want to decrease their blood pressure!
References
Chiang, P.P., Lamoureux, E.L., Shankar, A. et al. Cardio-metabolic risk factors and prehypertension in persons without diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. BMC Public Health 13, 730 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-730
Jurik R, Stastny P. Role of Nutrition and Exercise Programs in Reducing Blood Pressure: A Systematic Review. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2019; 8(9):1393. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm8091393
Börjesson M, Onerup A, Lundqvist S, Dahlöf B. Physical activity and exercise lower blood pressure in individuals with hypertension: narrative review of 27 RCTs. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(6):356-361. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-095786 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26787705/
Baross AW, Hodgson DA, Padfield SL, Swaine IL. Reductions in Resting Blood Pressure in Young Adults When Isometric Exercise Is Performed Whilst Walking. J Sports Med (Hindawi Publ Corp). 2017;2017:7123834. doi:10.1155/2017/7123834 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5438836/?utm_source=chatgpt.com#sec5
Lee LL, Mulvaney CA, Wong YK, Chan ESY, Watson MC, Lin HH. Walking for hypertension. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2021, Issue 2. Art. No.: CD008823. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD008823.pub2. Accessed 21 April 2025.
