The easy two-minute exercise that lowers your blood pressure by MORE than medication – all you need is a wall

As we get older, it’s important to pay attention to our heart health – and one of the main ways to stay fit is to keep your blood pressure at optimal level.

You’ll most likely be familiar with the blood pressure check at your GP, where the doctor puts an inflatable cuff around your arm to measure the force of the blood being pushed against the walls of the arteries.

A normal blood pressure reading is below 120/80mmHg. When these levels climb to 140mmHg or higher for systolic pressure (the top number in a reading), or 90mmHg or higher for diastolic pressure (the bottom one), this is considered high blood pressure.

Feeling the pressure

Around one in three adults have high blood pressure – or hypertension, to give it its medical name – and this rises significantly after the age of 60. ‘High blood pressure raises the risk of so many conditions, from kidney disease to stroke and heart attacks,’ says Winchester GP, Dr Eve Wijayanayagam.

So widespread is hypertension that 40 to 50% of UK women aged over 60 may be taking blood pressure medication.

But what if there was a way to lower your blood pressure without taking medications that cause dizziness, headaches or fatigue in some people?

A new study from Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent comes as encouraging news, suggesting that a simple fitness regime can lower a person’s blood pressure by an average of 9.5mmHg – quite a significant amount.

In the experiment, adults with normal or slightly raised blood pressure were asked to do wall sits, three times a week for four weeks. A wall sit is the exercise where you hold yourself up by bending your legs at 90 degrees with your back against the wall – you may have done it to prepare for a skiing holiday.

In the study, each participant did four two-minute wall sits in a row, with two minutes’ rest between them.

Strong and lasting benefits

After just a month, the people doing the wall sits experienced an average 9.5mmHg drop in systolic blood pressure, while their diastolic pressure fell by around 5.5mmHg, compared with participants who didn’t do the wall sits.

Those who carried on doing the exercises – even just once a week – kept their blood pressure down, compared with those who stopped.

Such exercises are known as isometric exercise training, or IET.

‘This new study builds on research… showing that IET can lower resting blood pressure, with reductions that can be comparable to, or greater than, those seen with some blood pressure medications’, says Professor Jim Wiles, professor of exercise science at Canterbury Christ Church University.

The findings follow a 2023 paper in the British Journal Of Sports Medicine, which showed that isometric exercises, such as wall sits, reduced systolic blood pressure by more than 8mmHg.

That’s almost twice the reduction seen with conventional aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling. And the good news? You are allowed to cut back and still get benefits when everyday life leaves less time for fitness training.

‘Exercise does not have to be all or nothing,’ says Dr Harry Swift of King’s College London. ‘Our findings show that when life gets busy, reducing to just one isometric exercise session per week may help sustain the blood pressure benefits already achieved.’