Training Modifications for High Blood Pressure

and then you know doctors aren't they're not taught what to do with the lifestyle and the training but neither are coaches which is why we wanted to bring this out like there are some things you do and don't want to do um and there's some like really really weird things like you've heard me talk about this before like the one piece of equipment if you've got really high blood pressure that you don't want to do leg press okay um but but it gets even deeper than that whereas if you've got high blood pressure you probably want to do more isolation work probably more machine type work, unilateral work, really, really blew my mind too about rest periods. So what they showed in a lot of the research was if you're not taking significant enough rest periods, every set after the first set, your blood pressure progressively climbs and stays elevated. Wow. So now I'm kind of thinking, well, you know, we get more unilateral work, great, great time for more structural work, lower trap raises and split squats and things like that. but also thinking, okay, maybe it might be better to have complete rest periods and not too huffy puffy. Right. A lot of stuff like that. Yeah. Wow. That I think you guys, um, first of all, I would hope that if you tell a man, yo, you're going to lose your boner. That would be just as scary as you're going to die. So maybe not, but it's funny. Well, no, well, here's the thing. like I remember Charles, Charles Poliquin telling us one time, if you can't get a solid boner, that's like a heart attack for your dick. So that's that for a lot of people, if you've got like high hip to waist ratio, you've got metabolic syndrome, you've got some of these other things going on, you start losing your boner. That's a good indicator that your cardiovascular system is not functioning well, but here's the problem. Go to a doctor, doctor goes, oh, here's some Cialis. They don't say, Hey man, let's go get a scan. Let's look at your labs. Okay. You got high cholesterol. Let's look at your blood pressure really high. Okay. Maybe just go, go exercise and eat better. It's like, what the fuck does that mean? Like we have a pill for that. Most trainers don't know how to train correctly. So you think that you're, you're that, that patient's going to understand what they're supposed to go do so that then the patient goes, well, I don't know what I'm doing. I'll go find a coach. They go to some bodybuilder, bro coach, She puts them on the leg press or screaming at them and doing drop sets and adds bands on the machine And then the guy gets a fucking widow maker And you you guys said on a different podcast what does the blood pressure get up to when they on something like a leg press Oh man, they did. Um, there was a study in 1985. I can't remember the name of the study, but they, they compared the leg press bilateral leg press with, um, single arm dumbbell curl. And they found that the dumbbell curls would raise people's blood pressure into the high two hundreds, but the leg press raised into what was it Zoe 400s what was it was the first number yeah 480 over 350 in one of the guys and those were in people with normal blood pressure so here's the thing if you've got normal blood pressure and it's raising that high that's fine because that's gonna happen and that's that's probably a good thing that it conditions the arteries. But if you, if you're walking around at like 180 over a hundred, and then you say, well, I'm going to get on this leg press that you already have arteries that are starting to harden. Um, if they weren't, they'd be able to expand. So if they can't expand, blood pressure is going to go up. So you're already walking around with stage two hypertension. Um, then you get on the leg press and it goes up what three, 400%. And you do this repeatedly over time. Everything's going to get harder and harder, harder, your blood pressure is going to keep climbing up and transient increases in blood pressure, not that big of a deal. So I want people to understand too, you want to lift weights. That's a good thing. It's the constant lack of, or it's the constant increased vascular resistance around the clock. That's going to cause the damage, which is also another point we put in there. You want to take your blood pressure. Let's say you take it in the afternoon. If you see that that's high, probably the two best times to take it is first thing in the morning before you go to bed. Because even if you have high blood pressure or higher, like stage one, maybe even dipping into stage two, in the middle of the day, because you have work stress and all that, you definitely want your blood pressure to be normal or as normal as possible before bed. And when you get up, because you don't want high blood pressure when you're asleep, that's really bad because that's constant high blood pressure that's going to constantly damage the endothelial lining, which is going to constantly create a situation where the endothelial cells can't produce the chemicals they need to create vessel dilation. And then, so you start to get hardened arteries. So what would be a good blood pressure nowadays? So I would say you want to be under 120 over 80. That's what you want. um hold on Pablo my damn chihuahua he's making my bloopers go but like you're it's normal to have slightly high in the morning um and it's normal it's normal to have it a little bit elevated in the afternoon but if you can keep that you're under 120 over 80 you're doing pretty good but if people are doing like medications for ADD and uh coffee and work stress your blooper don't freak out if your blooper is 135 over 90 in the middle of the afternoon just make sure you're taking it at home when you're in a relaxed position because you want it you definitely want to make sure that it's normalized in a relaxed situation