The #1 Exercise to Lower Blood Pressure (It Beats Cardio in 270 Studies)

Can one exercise help lower blood pressure naturally? Discover a simple exercise that can help support healthy blood pressure and cardiovascular health.

The number one exercise to lower your blood pressure. This exercise has beaten cardio in 270 different studies that [music] involved almost 16,000 people. And the winner was an exercise that involved no motion whatsoever. All you need is the wall right behind you as you’re watching this video. The absolute best exercise to lower the systolic blood pressure that won over every other exercise was a type of exercise called the wall sit or wall squat.

This is an isometric exercise. That means you’re not moving, but you’re contracting your muscles. I’m going to explain it thoroughly. Virtually every single person watching can actually perform this exercise. But what was really shocking to me is over 50% of the adults in the US have high blood pressure, and most of them don’t even know it.

And it’s earned its name the silent killer because a lot of times you don’t feel high blood pressure. Now, isometric exercises, especially for blood pressure, are completely underneath the radar. They’re not really recommended by a clinical practitioner or physician because when they initially studied isometric exercises way back in the day, they found that this exercise increased blood pressure. So, they automatically ruled it out and actually told people not to do isometric exercises for blood pressure because it was going to worsen the problem. And this also filtered through certain scientific committees.

And so, this is a thing that you did not want to prescribe for anyone with a heart problem or high blood pressure at all. Not based in any long-term studies, just some initial observations. And a tremendous amount of research in the area of exercise involves observational studies, which are not nearly as credible. That’s basically where they don’t really recommend anything. They just observe the data, and so those things are then associated with some outcome, but they’re just good guesses.

Then when they finally did the research, they found that that high blood pressure was very temporary. But of course, in the meantime, they recommended cardio. In 2023, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a study where researchers gathered 270 randomized controlled trials. They pulled them together, they got just under 16,000 people involved, which is quite a large group of people. So this is what they found in the study.

And this is relating to bringing down systolic blood pressure. That’s the top number. Combination training brought the systolic pressure down just over six points. Resistance training brought the systolic blood pressure down just slightly more than four and a half points. Aerobic, four and a half points drop.

High-intensity interval training brought it down by four points. But check this out, the isometric training, specifically the wall sit, brought the blood pressure down more than eight points. But they also found other types of isometric training that were slightly less than the wall sit, but they were better than the other types of workouts. Quite fascinating. Now, I do have to say one thing about the diastolic blood pressure.

If your diastolic blood pressure is the one that’s high, cardio was the one that brought the diastolic down the best. Okay, I just want to point that out. But most people have a problem with the systolic, which is the top number. I’m not against any of these. In fact, I do all of these right here.

So you just want to include this extra one right here if you want more specific systolic blood pressure decrease. There was a meta-analysis in the Lancet, 123 studies, 613,000 people. They found when you lower the blood pressure by 10 points, major cardiovascular events dropped by 20%. Coronary heart disease went down by 17%. Stroke went down by 27%.

Heart failure went down by 28%. And death from all causes went down by 13%. That’s just dropping the blood pressure down by 10 points. And so this isometric exercise, the wall sit, was eight points, which is not far away from the 10 point drop. I have a free download that I want to give to you.

This free download is my daily routine and a checklist. This is a routine that I use every day to feel like I’m 18 years old, even though I’m 60 years old, and I want to give it to you for free. And so there’s a little link down below, click it, and definitely download that. Now, I do want to actually mention one additional thing. There are a lot of randomized controlled drug studies on blood pressure.

And a lot of them individually will show a decrease in blood pressure right around eight points. So this isometric exercise compares to a single drug effect reduction in blood pressure. Now right there, doctors should be recommending this to help reduce blood pressure, but of course it’s not on the radar yet. Usually consensus or mainstream is about 10 to 15 years behind what’s happening in actual research. Now the next thing I want to talk about, and this is very important.

How can an exercise that provides no movement lower your blood pressure? You’re in a seated position against the wall. The blood pressure is going up. How is that going to lower your blood pressure? What you’re doing when you’re contracting those muscles is you’re creating this sustained contraction that’s squeezing down on those vessels or those pipes, restricting blood flow.

Very similar to having a kink on your water hose. And so when you then stand up, you release the contraction or the constriction, and the blood flow comes in rapidly, suddenly. The velocity of that blood flow that gets released rushes through the blood vessels against the inner lining called the endothelial lining. And then it turns on a certain mechanism that spikes something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a very powerful vasodilator.

It relaxes the blood vessels. All the resistance through the blood vessels is lowered. Now the blood pressure’s coming down. So when you do the exercise, you’re going to do four of them in a row, each for 2 minutes, resting 2 minutes between those exercises. You do those three times a week.

That’s 24 minutes a week of exercise. Your arteries are going to become more and more relaxed. What you’re really doing over a period of time is you’re remodeling the artery. You’re also changing the nervous system that’s controlling those blood vessels. And so the reason why the wall sit is the best exercise is you’re working the largest muscles of your body.

Your thigh muscles and your glute muscles. So the bigger the muscle you’re working on, the bigger the drop in blood pressure. So a lot of people ask me, “What supplements do I recommend? ” Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line. But if you go to Amazon and type Dr.

Berg supplements, you’ll find more information. Now, the single biggest reason why people quit this exercise is because it’s actually quite difficult for some people. The key thing is the knee angle, okay? And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to start out at 135°. That’s basically almost with your knees extended fully, okay?

We’re just slightly bending the knees down. And then if they can tolerate that after 2 minutes, they’ll drop down 10° lower, okay? So we’re going to gradually do this every 2 minutes until you balance the difficulty of doing this with the intensity so it’s not too intense, it’s not too easy, and you’re able to do it for 2 minutes. So, the goal is over time to strengthen your body so you can actually do this wall sit at 90°. So, what determines the intensity is you’re able to have a conversation without straining your voice, without shaking.

So, you want to feel like you’re in control. You want to breathe steady. Don’t hold your breath. Okay? You’re going to slowly breathe in and out through your nose.