Daily 'breath training' works as well as medicine to reduce high blood pressure | Hacker News Reader

Daily 'breath training' works as well as medicine to reduce high blood pressure

npr.org

53 pointsgeph202119 comments

Here's the article from earlier last year: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/06/29/5-minute-breathing...

I'd refer to this as a "submarine article" or whatever, but that would mean that there was an actual link to the product somewhere in TFA...which if there is, I didn't find it:

https://www.powerbreathe.com

US$40 and up. My wife has high blood pressure, but I don't. However, as a distance runner, this part interested me, so perhaps I'll get one or two:

"Craighead, whose personal marathon best is 2 hours, 21 minutes, says he has incorporated IMST as part of his own training."

Assuming the health claims are true, I wonder how well a cheap balloon would perform compared to this product.

I feel like the balloon would probably be helpful for exhalation, but as I understand the article, the devices also provide resistance for inhalation.

Looks like “PowerBreathe” is linkified in the article?

There are also training masks that make it difficult to breathe. I think it's supposed to mimic elevation training. https://www.trainingmask.com/

I bought one of the cheaper Powerbreathe mechanical trainers a few years ago. It seems to work. But it's a bit of a hassle to use because the internal valve keeps getting stuck closed so that I can't inhale at all. So then I have to rinse it out and bang on it to get it unstuck.

So mouth-breathers probably have higher blood pressure?

I seem to remember coming across this at some point. Something about forcing yourself to breathe through your nostrils to improve health.

If you’re so out of shape that your breathing through your mouth entirely, I imagine you would see some of these similar benefits through that one change in habit.

The correlation could go the other way though. I lost 30 lbs and find I no longer breathe through my mouth the way I used to.

The breath training they are referring to is breathing through a device with flow resistance, making it harder to pull in the air. (30 times per day for six weeks).

Strengthening the breathing muscles is what improves the blood pressure, according to the article.

That's a neat idea. I used to keep an incentive spirometer on my desk and use it throughout the day on the theory that "exercise" would improve my breathing. I noticed a lot of improvement at first, probably more due to my understanding how to use/game the spirometer, and then not much improvement after that. Never thought about measuring other things (like blood pressure) with it.

Now I'm going to get one of these things!

Can someone kindly ELI5 the relationship between blood pressure and diaphragm strength?

Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system which decreases the heart rate and dilates blood vessels, reducing your overall blood pressure.

Strengthening the muscles you use to breathe make it easier to do and thus puts your body in a relaxed state more often.

You don't need a device to do this. You can also do any popular deep breathing exercise like Wim Hof, square breathing, 4/7/8 breathing, or restricting airflow with thumbs in nostrils. A device may be more effective at training your resistance however.

As well as strengthening your breathing muscles (there are very many I guess) restringing air flow on an in breath, like in Ujjayi Breathing, brings more blood into the alveoli because of the low pressure in the lungs. I guess this would have some effect like enhanced gas exchange.

Additionally to the parasympathetic changes, there are mechanical effects. the lungs are a negative pressure system. When you breathe, you drop the diaphragm, increasing the negative pressure in your chest while also increasing the positive pressure in your abdomen. Blood flows through the vena cava (the main vein bringing blood back to the heart which runs through the abdomen and chest) towards the negative pressure. This means more blood gets back to the heart (“increased preload”) and so the right heart can pump more blood to the lungs, and more blood gets to the left heart to be sent around the body without the heart muscle actually having to do more work.

Thank you! This is exactly the answer I was looking for!

I wonder if you could just get a regular or boba straw and practice breathing through that for the same benefit.

You have this device built in to you body already.

In yoga there is a practice called Ujjayi Breathing where you restrict airflow in and out of the lungs via the the throat, making a soft sound. This is often combined with meditation or sometimes uses in very energetic situations to calm the breath.

This sounds plausible to me.

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