Any exercise is better than no exercise. That said, for cardio exercise there are nuances that can affect you. HIIT is quick and stressing, and moderate cardio is slow and time consuming but gentle. Are the results the same for both?
High intensity interval training HIIT requires you to go all out in your cardio workout, but for extremely short periods of time, such as one minute. You then rest for a couple of minutes and repeat. A couple of cycles of this, and three times a week, and you’re done. You may not even do cardio for an hour per week, cumulatively. Maybe you do this for only 15 minutes a week.
Diet and exercise are the general non-medicinal recommendations to reduce blood pressure. This makes some sense, in general, for overall health improvements. A German study has concluded that low amounts of daily consumption of dark chocolate can have a marginal but still significant outcome in reducing blood pressure.
Dr. Dirk Taubert, of the University Hospital of Cologne, published his findings in JAMA.
Here’s the recipe: Eat 6.3g of dark chocolate (min 70% cocoa) daily, 2 hrs after your last meal, and within 18 weeks reductions of 3mm hg systolic and 2mm hg
diastolic blood pressure can be observed.
There is something about singing that puts me in a better, more cheerful mood, but I don’t really know what it is. Increased oxygen intake? Distract you from other issues? A recent study has come out from Harvard Medical School documenting how a 76 year old arthritis patient with high blood pressure was able to lower her BP by 40hg by singing hymns, just before her surgery. I wonder if this has further implications than a single sample size.
Here is the link to this interesting article in Science Daily, as well as the journal article, published Mar 30, 2011. It is difficult to extrapolate from a sample size of 1, but maybe we could sing a little more?
