How 5 minutes a day could make your trip more healthy

Travel can impact negatively on your health.

All that time immoble on long-haul flights. Sitting on shuttles, or tour buses.

But if you can find five minutes a day during your tourism adventures that time could significantly lower your blood pressure.

New research suggests that adding a small amount of physical activity - such as uphill walking or stair-climbing - into your day may help to lower blood pressure.

The study, published in Circulation, was carried out by experts from the ProPASS (Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep) Consortium, an international academic collaboration led by the University of Sydney and University College London (UCL).

Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviours with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, stair-climbing, running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.

Joint senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, director of the ProPASS Consortium from the Charles Perkins Centre, said: “High blood pressure is one of the biggest health issues globally, but unlike some major causes of cardiovascular mortality there may be relatively accessible ways to tackle the problem in addition to medication.

“The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise per day could be associated with measurably lower blood pressure readings emphasises how powerful short bouts of higher intensity movement could be for blood pressure management.”

Hypertension, or a consistent elevated blood pressure level, is one of the biggest causes of premature death globally. Affecting 1.28 billion adults around the world, it can lead to stroke, heart attack, heart failure, kidney damage and many other health problems, and is often described as the ‘silent killer’ due to its lack of symptoms.

The research team analysed health data from 14,761 volunteers in five countries to see how replacing one type of movement behaviour with another across the day is associated with blood pressure readings.

Each participant used a wearable accelerometer device on their thigh to measure their activity and blood pressure throughout the day and night.

For those who don’t do a lot of physical activity, walking did still have some positive benefits for blood pressure. But if you want to change your blood pressure, putting more demand on the cardiovascular system through exercise will have the greatest effect, the study showed.

Image: Ludigvine Borello, Scopio.