A three-month pilot study of hypertensive patients shows that including yoga into a regular exercise regimen improves cardiovascular health and wellbeing . Yoga reduced systolic blood pressure and resting heart rate by lowering the systolic blood pressure .
Washington, United States, December 8, 2018: A three-month pilot study of hypertensive patients published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology by Elsevier shows that including yoga into a regular exercise regimen improves cardiovascular health and wellbeing, and is more effective than stretching exercises.Yoga reduced systolic blood pressure and resting heart rate by lowering the systolic blood pressure.Millions of people around the world are pursuing spiritual and exercise methods.With yoga therapy now becoming a widespread practice form of exercise, the body of yoga research is expanding.It is a multifaceted fitness regime that can improve cardiovascular health and wellbeing.
Although there are some reports that yoga therapies and cardiovascular exercise have equal and/or higher health benefits, there is a lot of overlap in terms of yoga types, components, frequency, session length, duration, and intensity.We used a rigorous scientific methodology to identify cardiovascular risk factors for which yoga is beneficial to at-risk patients and how it can be applied in a clinical setting such as a primary prevention program.For an exercise training program, investigators recruited 60 individuals with previously diagnosed high blood pressure and metabolic disease.Participants were divided into two groups over the three-month intervention period, each receiving 15 minutes of either structured yoga or stretching in addition to 30 minutes of aerobic fitness training five times a week. There was no difference between groups in age, sex, smoking intakes, body mass index (BMI), resting systolic and diastolic blood pressure, resting heart rate, and pulse pressure at baseline.After three months, there was a decrease in both groups' resting systolic and diastolic blood pressure, mean arterial blood pressure, and heart rate.Nonetheless, systolic blood pressure decreased by 10 mmHg with yoga compared to 4 mmHg with stretching.Yoga has been shown to improve hypertensive patients by lowering their resting heart rate and 10-year cardiovascular risk, according to the Reynolds Risk scale. Dr. Poirier noted that this pilot randomized study shows that its advantages cannot be simply attributed to stretching alone.This report also provides evidence for a novel non-pharmacologic therapy option for cardiovascular risk reduction and blood pressure monitoring in patients with high blood pressure in the context of a primary prevention exercise program.As has been shown in several studies, we encourage patients to try to find exercise and stress relief for the treatment of hypertension and cardiovascular disease in the order that they find it most rewarding.According to our report, structured yoga practices can be a more effective complement to aerobic exercise than simply muscle stretching.