Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally: Step 5
This webpage is a companion to Step 5 of our book:
Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally – The Complete 9 Step Guide
Step 5 discusses the importance of exercise for healthy blood pressure, with suggestions for different ways you can be more active in your daily life without needing to go to the gym or yoga classes (though those are great too). There are even some exercises to lower blood pressure which don’t require getting up from the sofa…!
Click here for more information on the book: Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally
Active Health and Happiness: Exercises to Lower Blood Pressure
Exercise Overview
If you’ve found yourself on this webpage and haven’t yet bought our guide, you can look at our post here for an overview of exercises to lower blood pressure: Lower blood pressure through exercise
Weight and Blood Pressure
Body Mass Index (BMI)
You can calculate your BMI online here:
US National Institutes of Health BMI calculator
Abdominal Fat
This article describes why belly fat can cause health problems:
Web MD The Risks of Belly Fat
Smoking and Blood Pressure
The Preach Free Guide to Smoking and Quitting is the best resource for quitting smoking in our opinion, so have a look at that if you haven’t already.
NOTE: The Preach Free Guide to Smoking and Quitting comes as a free bonus with our book, Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally – The Complete 9 Step Guide. If you haven’t yet got the guide, click here.
Good resources for quitting smoking can also be found here:
Quit Smoking Community – recommended by a reader – a US organization “which helps people quit smoking and advocates for healthy, smoke-free public spaces and towns”
Quitting Smoking (US Government Health Website)
Aerobic / Cardio Exercise
The UK National Health Service website has some useful articles about exercise recommendations, including information on strength (resistance) training:
NHS exercise information (aerobic and resistance/strength training)
How and why to spend less time sitting
Here’s a couple of excellent articles on why sitting a lot may be bad for our blood pressure and general health:
Allthestuff.com – The health risks of prolonged sitting
NHS – Why sitting too much is bad for us
Plus our own overview here: How sitting affects blood pressure
Calculating Heart Rate (and Heart Zone Training)
If you’re interested in measuring your heart rate while exercising, see this American Heart Association article on how to measure your heart rate and how to use it to assess and manage your exercise activities:
If you want to get technical, you can tailor your exercise to challenge your heart rate in a more specific way through ‘heart zone training’. This article explains what heart zone training is, the different training zones and their benefits, and how to calculate your target heart rate zone:
Biketrainerworld – Understanding Heart Zone Training – All You Need to Know
Track Your Progress
The British Heart Foundation publishes a good activity diary, and a progress tracker, which you can download or print out from their website:
Stretches before activity
The American Heart Association has a good illustrated guide to stretches for walking, which you can view or download:
Isometric handgrip exercises
The Zona Plus
Detailed information about the Zona Plus can be found on our post:
Zona Plus review
You can also currently get a $50 discount on the Zona Plus. Click here: buy Zona Plus with $50 off
The Zona Plus discount should be applied automatically when you add the Zona Plus to your basket and go to the checkout. Alternatively you can enter this Zona Plus coupon code at the checkout: Simon
Other devices for doing handgrip exercises
There are various other, cheaper, things you can use to do isometric handgrip exercises (following the instructions in Step 5 of the guide). Here are a few suggestions:
A good squeezeball, recommended for IHG exercises by one of our mailing list members who found it very effective:
IronMind EGG squeezeball (blue) – $25.95 (Amazon.com)
IronMind EGG squeezeball (green) – £28.99 (Amazon.co.uk)
You can also use hand-grippers. These come in different resistances – some are more difficult to squeeze than others – so pick one appropriate for your strength level. But remember, you only want to be squeezing at about a third of your full grip strength so you don’t need to be crunching something super-strong.
Reviews say these two handgrippers are quite easy to squeeze, so could be good to start with:
ZoN Handgrips- about $8 (Amazon.com)
Ultimate Hand Grip Strengthener – £6.99 (Amazon.co.uk)
If you need something stronger, you can always try these Captains of Crush ones (available in various resistances):
Captains of Crush handgrippers – $19 – $28 (Amazon.com)
Captains of Crush handgrippers – £29 – £49 (Amazon.co.uk)
Send us your ideas and suggestions
If there are other websites, resources or products you’ve found useful and you think would be useful to others, please email them to us and we’ll include them: simon [at] highbloodpressurebegone.com
NOTE: This page is designed to be a companion page to Step 5 of our guide, ‘Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally’. As such, it only contains supplementary resources rather than being a full discussion of activities which can improve your blood pressure.
For more information on exercises to lower blood pressure, you can further browse this website or, of course, buy the guide..!
Click here for details: Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally – The Complete 9 Step Guide
ANOTHER NOTE: We’ve supplied Amazon links to those products that may be a little trickier to find, as Amazon is popular and convenient to use. However, Amazon aren’t known to be the most ethical company (we do not endorse them ourselves) so we recommend buying your healthy products in your local shops if you can!
