YOU Docs Daily The online edition of their daily newspaper column
No Time to Walk Today? Try This
Don’t have 30 or -- even better -- 40 minutes to walk today? No sweat. You can make any day a day to get younger by taking four 10-minute walking breaks. Doing several shorties a day could do more for your blood pressure (BP) than one 40-minute session on the treadmill.
In one study, people who took four short daily walks got more blood pressure benefits than people who took a single long one. While any walk is a treat, the short ones reduced systolic BP (the upper number) for 11 hours and diastolic BP (the bottom number) for 10 hours versus only 7 hours each among the longer walkers.
All the walkers in the study may have benefited more than average because they all had “prehypertension” -- while they technically didn’t yet have high blood pressure, they were close enough to already have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Their BP numbers: 120–139 over 80–89, which is a pretty common range. In fact, you could be prehypertensive, too: More than 70 million people in the U.S. are, but many of them don’t know it. Don’t be one of them -- the second most important number to know is your blood pressure.
What’s the most important number for you to know? Your beloved’s birthday. We both forgot once, and sleeping bags in the living room ain’t as much fun as a walk. So remember that date, know your BP numbers, and do your daily walks.
Just step out for 10 minutes -- that’s a walk around the block in the morning, a spin around the office parking lot during lunch, a no-dawdling loop through the grocery store on the way home, and another walk after dinner. Taking 10 minutes longer to get home or back to work could have a huge health payoff.
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