I was about to be put in blood pressure medication. Then I started a gym, with a trainer. I noticed that, after the exercise, blood pressure would immediately drop and stay low for a few hours.
Over time, the amount of time it spent lower than average increased, and it got lower and lower. It crossed 24h.
Now? I can go to the gym Mon/Wed/Fri and it will remain low at all times. I did stop for a couple of weeks and it started creeping back up so it's not a 'cure', but functionally, as long as I keep it up, I have normal BP.
I still have some weight to lose, that can further help things, most likely. And removing sugars also did help since I dropped a lot of liquid I was retaining.
Great that you have the time to do it. I just cycle the children to kindergarden and then to work everyday. I am lucky to fit in one evening of sports every week. Plus owning no car saves lot of money. I guess I am quite lucky.
That is how I do it too. I don’t have time for much dedicated exercise with a full time job and two small kids, but cycling allows me to get a decent amount of exercise every day while saving both time and money. (And about time, if you work in a city and have less than a 10 km commute, cycling is almost always faster during rush hour. )
I would guess that they did it using a blood pressure meter. That's how I do mine. They are cheap and reasonably accurate. Mine is from Omron, very similar to the one my doctor uses.
And it could skyrocket for example if you get into a stressful situation. And you wouldn't notice that you are over 180+. And one day you get a stroke and become paralyzed. Sure, do not take the medication. These exists since the 40s, there is nothing wrong with them.
The point is that exercise can remove the underlying problem. And those who stay active enough don't develop it in the first place. Doc was amazed that I wasn't on any maintenance meds at 55. (Since then I've gone on blood pressure meds but if other health issues were resolved I don't think I would need them.)
Anybody can spike to 180 in a sufficiently stressful situation. (And, personally, I would very much notice 180. Otherwise calm, I'll probably notice 140.)
Do you have experience living with high blood pressure for 20+ years? Have you ever experienced blood pressure spikes and the after effects in stressful situations?
With the caveat that I'm just a random non-expert on the internet who has nevertheless spent too much time reading scattered studies and scholarly opinion articles:
We don't need "more" evidence exactly, but rather a better model of how the effects of exercise map to a given individual's physiology. Exercise is good overall, but it's also considerably overhyped due to a procession of weak and narrowly-applicable results being misconstrued as adding up to a massive pile of benefits that applies to the average person. In reality, the average person does not get anywhere close to the sum of all the touted benefits; they get some constellation of some of the benefits, while other outcomes are flat or even regress [1].
So yes, "exercise is good" at a sufficient level of abstraction, but it's much harder to make the case that it's "good for [specific outcome] for [specific person]". Which is one reason that it's such an obnoxious trend for specific health complaints to be met with generic recommendations to exercise (or exercise more, or exercise differently).
It seems a bit silly to me that in many circumstances it's just way more acceptable for exercise to be zero part of your life than the reverse, and that an argument needs to be made for geting more than even 30 mins worth of movement in a week. A culture of getting exercise by default seems like the way things should be, and the should be an affordance for those who can't rather than a luxurious escape from not having to.
It's not as true in some places in some circles, but it's hard not to notice a difference when you temporarily visit the others.
I think you're right overall, but a lot of that is an unexamined reaction to a built environment designed for motor vehicles, rather than being designed for humans. In suburban America, it too often doesn't occur to people to walk even modest distances, and when they decide to try, the experience can be scary considering that they're likely to interact with inattentive truck/SUV drivers while crossing intersections. If I just crossed the major intersection on the way to work without being paranoid about vehicle traffic, I'd probably be wheelchair-bound by now.
Until society has better work-life balance to allow for exercise while allowing for cost effect doctor visit to assign supportive and recognized improvement. Cheerleaders are more useful then people think.
This is a big problem in the UK I think. The idea of having a regular checkup with a doctor is unheard of and will get you some weird looks if you ask for it.
The NHS doesn't seem (as an outsider looking in) to do well with preventative care. I firmly believe (without necessarily a lot of evidence) that if we focused more on healthy lifestyles and made them more cost effective for people the amount of money we plough into the NHS every year could be reduced drastically.
I suspect that regular check-ups for most people would simply regularly confirm what they already know: they need to lose weight, stop smoking, take more exercise, eat more fruit and veg.
The UK now has a sugar tax on soft drinks that seems to be having a measurable positive effect. Whether it is a meaningful effect remains to be seen though:
"The findings suggest that a year after the sugar tax was introduced, adults reduced their daily free sugar intake by about 10.9g, and a reduction in soft drinks accounted for over half of this reduction. This translates to a reduction of around 40 calories daily, which if maintained, and assuming no other changes, could lead to 1.5kg weight loss over a year."
Yes a regular check-up wouldn't be the silver bullet but it would help expose larger problems under the surface which could be prevented with prescribed exercise, diet, etc.
Ultimately it's down to the patient to put in the work but if the NHS focused more on creating community practices where these things could be more widely available then maybe we should see more meaningful change.
