If you’re looking for a way to reduce stress, improve your overall wellness, and lower your blood pressure without investing in expensive treatments or medication, evening exercise may be just the thing.
Exercise has long been known to be an excellent method of improving physical health. But many may not realize that there are also great benefits to exercising during the evening hours.
Today, we’ll explore the science behind why evening exercise, in particular, helps to lower blood pressure levels so that you may be inspired to incorporate it into your nightly routine.
The study included 23 older adults with hypertension, all taking blood pressure medication for at least four months. Participants were required to exercise three times a week for 10 weeks by cycling on a stationary bike. One group exercised between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., and the other between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Researchers found that although diastolic blood pressure decreased similarly in both groups, systolic blood pressure only decreased after evening exercise. In both groups, researchers also measured the autonomic functions of the nervous system that regulate involuntarily physiologic processes. An improvement in the neural responses to changes in blood pressure (known as the arterial tonus) was found to be responsible for greater blood pressure benefit from evening stress.
“Although any exercise is always better than no exercise, people who need to achieve faster regularization of blood pressure or who don’t see benefits from exercise might want to try working out in the evening,” said the study’s first author, Leandro Brito. “These findings replicate what we found in a previous study of middle-aged men with hypertension on blood pressure medicine, but now we understand the neural mechanisms that contribute.”
