Improving Your Blood Vessel Health by Strengthening Your Breathing Muscles
Link to the article shown above
Where do the benefits of exercise come from? Some of the benefits probably come from exercise making people breathe harder, as a study based at the University of Colorado Boulder suggests. I have the links above, but let me give a few of the key quotations from Lisa Marshall’s article “5-minute breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs.” What they did was to have all the people in the study inhale for 5 minutes through a handheld device, half at high resistance and half at low resistance. At high resistance, this is called High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST). Here is what they found:
When assessed after six weeks, the [high resistance] IMST group saw their systolic blood pressure (the top number) dip nine points on average, a reduction which generally exceeds that achieved by walking 30 minutes a day five days a week. That decline is also equal to the effects of some blood pressure-lowering drug regimens.
Doing the 5 minutes of high-resistance inspiratory muscle strength training each day seemed easy:
… remarkably, those in the IMST group completed 95% of the sessions.
Assuming the results hold up, this treatment should be coming to you reasonably soon:
The National Institutes of Health recently awarded Seals $4 million to launch a larger follow-up study of about 100 people, comparing a 12-week IMST protocol head-to-head with an aerobic exercise program.
Meanwhile, the research group is developing a smartphone app to enable people to do the protocol at home using already commercially available devices.
These results are especially intriguing in relation to what the book Breath talks about. I found that book so interesting, that I have 4 blog posts on it:
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: