If you’re looking for a way to reduce stress, improve your overall wellness, and lower your blood pressure without investing in expensive treatments or medication, evening exercise may be just the thing. Exercise has long been known as an excellent method of improving physical health. Still, many don’t realize that there are also great mental benefits to getting out and exercising during the evening hours.
Today, we’ll explore the science behind why evening exercise helps to lower blood pressure levels so that you can incorporate it into your nightly routine!
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There are many people who don’t always experience as much blood pressure benefit from exercise as they should. This can include the elderly, people with resistant hypertension, and people with obesity. So, a new study from the University of São Paulo in Brazil set out to determine if there was a more valuable time for these people to exercise so they could reduce their need for medication or help it work better.
The study included 23 older adults with hypertension, all taking blood pressure medication for at least four months. All participants were required to exercise three times a week for ten weeks by cycling on a stationary bike. One group exercised between 7 and 10 a.m., and the other only exercised between 5 and 8 p.m.
Researchers found that although diastolic blood pressure decreased similarly in both groups, systolic blood pressure only decreased after evening exercise. In both groups, researchers also measured the autonomic functions, which are nervous system functions that regulate involuntarily physiologic processes. An improvement in the neural responses to changes in blood pressure (known as the arterial tonus) was found to be responsible for greater blood pressure benefit from evening stress.
“Although any exercise is always better than no exercise, people who need to achieve faster regularization of blood pressure or who don’t see benefits from exercise might want to try working out in the evening,” said the study’s first author Leandro Brito, Ph.D. “These findings replicate what we found in a previous study of middle-aged men with hypertension on blood pressure medicine, but now we understand the neural mechanisms that contribute.”
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