Is there a best type of exercise to reduce blood pressure?

    Researchedby:
    Mike Murray
    Last Updated: October 25, 2023

    Increasing physical activity can reduce your systolic blood pressure by 4–9 mmHg. However, it’s not as clear if there’s a dose-response effect of exercise or what types of exercise might impact blood pressure the most. Luckily, a network meta-analysis aimed to answer these questions.[1]

    Exercise becomes more effective for lowering blood pressure the higher the starting systolic pressure is — in other words, people with higher starting blood pressures tend to benefit more from exercise. You can also see from the figure below that a combination of resistance and endurance training looks to be more effective, although there’s no clear winner between isometric, endurance, and resistance training taken on their own.

    Effects of exercise on systolic blood pressure

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    Reference: Naci et al. Br J Sports Med. 2019.[1]

    However, the authors of the paper caution that more research is needed to explore whether one type of exercise is indeed better than another due to the relative lack of research into this topic.

    There are also some other key takeaways from this research that aren’t apparent from the figure.

    • Due to reporting issues and lack of relevant data, the authors were not able to explore whether some frequencies or durations of exercise improved blood pressure more than others.
    • The authors didn’t see a clear relationship between exercise intensity and blood pressure reduction, mainly due to not having enough data. There is much more room for future research to explore the relationship between exercise intensity and blood pressure reduction.
    • There’s some concern about the generalizability of the exercise results to people with high blood pressure, since most of the exercise trials involved people with normal or mildly elevated blood pressure. Future research focused on exercise’s effect on people with high blood pressure would be useful. In short: all types of exercise seem to reduce systolic blood pressure, especially in people with high blood pressure. However, how much exercise is best, whether intensity matters, and exactly what kinds of exercise have the biggest impact are still unclear.