Could working out five minutes a day,
without lifting a single weight or jogging a single step, reduce your
heart attack risk, help you think more clearly and boost your sports
performance?
Preliminary evidence suggests yes.
Now,
with a new grant from the National Institute on Aging, CU Boulder
researchers have launched a clinical trial to learn more about the
ultra-time-efficient exercise known as Inspiratory Muscle Strength
Training (IMST).
“It’s basically strength-training for
the muscles you breathe in with,” explains Daniel Craighead, a
postdoctoral researcher in the Integrative Physiology department. “It’s
something you can do quickly in your home or office, without having to
change your clothes, and so far it looks like it is very beneficial to
lower blood pressure and possibly boost cognitive and physical
performance.”
Developed in the 1980s as a means to wean
critically ill people off ventilators, IMST involves breathing in
vigorously through a hand-held device—an inspiratory muscle
trainer—which provides resistance. Imagine sucking hard through a straw
which sucks back.
During early use in patients with
lung diseases, patients performed a 30-minute, low-resistance regimen
daily to boost their lung capacity.
But in 2016,
University of Arizona researchers published results from a trial to see
if just 30 inhalations per day with greater resistance might help
sufferers of obstructive sleep apnea, who tend to have weak breathing
muscles, rest better.
In addition to more restful sleep
and developing a stronger diaphragm and other inspiratory muscles,
subjects showed an unexpected side effect after six weeks: Their
systolic blood pressure plummeted by 12 millimeters of mercury. That’s
about twice as much of a decrease as aerobic exercise can yield and more
than many medications deliver.
“That’s when we got interested,” said Professor Doug Seals, director of the Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory.
Seals
notes that systolic blood pressure, which signifies the pressure in
your vessels when your heart beats, naturally creeps up as arteries
stiffen with age, leading to damage of blood-starved tissues and higher
risk of heart attack, cognitive decline and kidney damage.
While
30 minutes per day of aerobic exercise has clearly been shown to lower
blood pressure, only about 5 percent of adults meet that minimum,
government estimates show. Meanwhile, 65 percent of mid-life adults have
high systolic blood pressure.
“Our goal is to develop
time-efficient, evidence-based interventions that those busy mid-life
adults will actually perform,” said Seals, who was recently awarded a
$450,000 NIA grant to fund a small clinical trial of IMST involving
about 50 subjects. “The preliminary data are quite exciting.”
With
about half of the tests done, the researchers have found significant
drops in blood pressure and improvements in large-artery function among
those who performed IMST with no changes in those who used a sham
breathing device that delivered low-resistance.
So far, the IMST group is also performing better on certain cognitive and memory tests.
When
asked to exercise to exhaustion, they were also able to stay on the
treadmill longer and keep their heart rate and oxygen consumption lower
during exercise.
“We suspect that as you improve the
function of your respiratory muscles, they don’t need as much blood to
work and that blood can be redistributed to your legs so you exercise
longer,” said Craighead.
Some cyclists and runners have
already begun to use commercially-available inspiratory muscle trainers
to gain a competitive edge.
But Seals and Craighead
stress that their findings are preliminary, more research is necessary
and curious individuals should ask their doctor before considering IMST.
That
said, with a high compliance rate (fewer than 10 percent of study
participants drop out) and no real side-effects, they’re optimistic.
“High
blood pressure is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which
is the number one cause of death in America,” said Craighead. “Having
another option in the toolbox to help prevent it would be a real
victory.”
This article has been republished from
materials provided by
University of Colorado Boulder. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.
Reference: Heinbockel,
T. C., Rossman, M. J., Jankowski, L. R., Jackman, R. A., Bailey, E. F.,
Chonchol, M. B., … Craighead, D. H. (2019). Effects of Inspiratory
Muscle Strength Training on Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Middle-Aged to
Older Adults. The FASEB Journal, 33(1_supplement), 695.4-695.4.
https://doi.org/10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.695.4
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