Is Walking Enough to Lower Blood Pressure?

Training
1

Hello,
I am 19 and I have pretty high blood pressure (around 140/90) AND heart rate (up to 100 while doing nothing). I know it can be inherited, but I have been successfully avoiding cardio for last 9 years, so I recon that might be the problem.

My question is, if walking 6x times a week in the morning (without eating anything) and cutting salt as much as possible is good enough to lower the pressure and the heart rate? I absolutely hate running, I am willing to run 1x a week but no more, even if it meant I will die next year :smiley:

My height is 190 cm, weight around 85-90kg and bf 15-19%, so I don’t even look like I lift, but I think those are important information to get the overall picture of me.
Thanks.

2

[quote]Barbar Conan wrote:
Hello,
I am 19 and I have pretty high blood pressure (around 140/90) AND heart rate (up to 100 while doing nothing). I know it can be inherited, but I have been successfully avoiding cardio for last 9 years, so I recon that might be the problem.

My question is, if walking 6x times a week in the morning (without eating anything) and cutting salt as much as possible is good enough to lower the pressure and the heart rate? I absolutely hate running, I am willing to run 1x a week but no more, even if it meant I will die next year :smiley:

My height is 190 cm, weight around 85-90kg and bf 15-19%, so I don’t even look like I lift, but I think those are important information to get the overall picture of me.
Thanks.[/quote]

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.

19 years old, around 6’2 and 190 lbs, Are you on medication? Under a doctors care? resting heart rate of 100? “I know it can be inherited” makes me believe you don’t know. see a doctor, now.

“successfully avoiding cardio for the past 9 years” Whats successful about that? You would rather “die” than run more than once a week" What? are you serious? Have you ever been anywhere close to being killed? Dude, think about what you just said. There are many forms of cardio besides running. search “predator conditioning”

Walking is absolutely good for you, improving your diet is even better, any small steps you take for general physical fitness is always good.

What are you goals in life? at 19 , that should be crossing your mind, think, realize you probably could not run for your life if your building caught on fire. Don’t choose to be weak, don’t choose to be prey.

Get a medical exam, then members can advise you on training.

3

Yes, I have been to a specialist during an army recruitment process. They have done EKG and some other tests and the result was, that my heart is completely healthy. My blood is also ok, everything is fine except the high blood pressure. She said that it’s not bad enough to treat with pills (I know that in USA you take pills for everything, even if you don’t have to, but we don’t pay for the medicine in Europe so doctors are pretty ?frugal/sober/reserved? with the prescriptions). She said it may be caused by doing too much anaerobic and no aerobic exercise and consuming too much salt.

100 BPS is too high actually, I just counted it and I have around 80, which is still high though.
So basically I just wanted to know if walking in general is enough to train the cardiovascular endurance, or do I have to run? Of course there are other forms of aerobic exercise, but there’s no way I could go swimming more than once a week, I don’t have acces to ropes or sledge or anything “too fancy”. Most of the time it’s either walking or running.

Of course some things in the first post were exagerated or just plain jokes.

4

have you checked for ‘white coat hypertension’

[[Yes, I have been to a specialist during an army recruitment process]]

if trying to go military dont you have to pass pt test
does it have a run
can you pass it?

i dont do cardio
resting heart rate sitting low 70’s, laying down 5 minutes heart rate low 60’s high 50’s

5

[quote]cavemansam wrote:
have you checked for ‘white coat hypertension’

[[Yes, I have been to a specialist during an army recruitment process]]

if trying to go military dont you have to pass pt test
does it have a run
can you pass it?

i dont do cardio
resting heart rate sitting low 70’s, laying down 5 minutes heart rate low 60’s high 50’s[/quote]

Yep, white coat syndrom was the reason I was sent to the specialist at the first place. But unfortunately I don’t have it. They gave me the 24-hour pressure meter, so my high pressure is confirmed (so they dind’t accept me to the military college and I went to study IT instead :frowning: ).
When I mobilize all my physical and mental power I can pass the 3000m/12min run, but it’s absolutely exhausting for me and I don’t think I would be able to do better even if I was running for my life.
I guess I will try to maintain the morning-walking less-salt regime and get my pressure checked every now and than and see if it’s improving.
I really do think it’s caused by the disproportion between anaerobic and aerobic activites, although I can’t provide any arguments whatsoever :-D. Maybe the fact, that I have always had good pressures (120/80) when I was young before I started lifting hard.

6

I wouldn’t expect poor cardio conditioning to be the cause of a very high resting heart rate in a teen who can run 3km in 12 minutes (even if that’s an all out effort and you never do any exercise).

How long have you had the fast heart rate? All your life? Either way, get blood work done, talk to a specialist.

7

my little brother had his first heart attack in his early 40’s
dont screw around with this

cardio
high rep squats light weight
push a car
set of stairs carry heavy dumbells,weight plate,bag of sand
any thing to get breathing hard
you know what you do every day so start reading and see if what you do is causing a problem

8

At 19 and not massively obese, no walking alone won’t lower your blood pressure. If you have time to go for long boring walks then you have time to go for shorter jogs. I get that cardio sucks and I agree, but if doing some can lower your blood pressure now rather that hopping on meds later ( which is what will happen if you age and it gets higher) isn’t that worth it?

Like everyone else has said, get some blood work done and talk to a specialist to make sure it isn’t something more serious. Then, find a style of cardio that works for you and do it enough times that its no longer worse than dying. Your future self will thank you.

9

To lower your heart rate you need to increase your cardiac output and stroke volume. Walking six times a week is an excellent way to do this. Whatever you do you don’t want to be out of breath or even breathing hard. You should go at a pace where you can carry on a conversation. If you breathe hard you are predominantly anaerobic. Walking is a great idea! Good luck!

10

I brought my numbers from 130/82/68 down to 105/64/59 and then down to 105/63/54 through incline walking at a moderate level of effort 2 to 3 times a week each reading taken about 6 months apart, not sure if you would see the same kind of progress but if your physician says there’s nothing wrong with you I don’t see why not, I also do jog occasionally when I get bored and do other random sports when the opportunity arises, I’m 24 177 cm about 80 kilos