Want to Lower Your Blood Pressure Risk After Age 40? Increase Your Exercise

• Researchers say increasing the amount of exercise you do in a week can lower your risk of high blood pressure after age 40.
• They noted that the correlation was strongest when it came to Black men.
• Experts say the most important factor is how much exercising you are doing now, not how much you did in the past.

To avoid high blood pressure when you’re older, you need to exercise more when you’re younger — and not slack off even when you start hitting those big, round-number birthdays.

That may mean more weekly exercise than is currently recommended by federal guidelines. Although, experts say almost any amount of activity can help.

Adults under age 30 who get about 5 hours per week of moderate intensity exercise are less likely to have hypertension during midlife, according to a new study.

That’s double the 2.5 hours of moderate exercise currently recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco’s (UCSF) Benioff Children’s Hospitals found that the almost 18 percent of study participants who got at least 5 hours of moderate exercise weekly had an 18 percent lower risk of developing hypertension than those who exercised less.

“There is a dose response with exercise, and more is better,” Glenn Gaesser, PhD, an Arizona State University professor of exercise physiology, told Healthline.