Having high blood pressure can increase your risk of developing everything from heart disease to vascular dementia, and it can also lead to medical emergencies such as heart attacks and strokes. As such, anyone who has high blood pressure will likely have been recommended certain lifestyle changes to control the condition as much as possible. Such changes typically revolve around improving your diet and undertaking more physical activity.
If you're on a journey to lower your blood pressure through such lifestyle changes, it makes sense to invest in a home blood pressure monitor. Here are just four reasons why.
1. Show Your Progress
There's often a limit to how far blood pressure can be reduced, but your doctor may be able to set a goal. By taking regular readings at home, you can see how lifestyle changes are impacting your blood pressure over time. Seeing readings slowly drop can provide additional motivation to get into the gym and keep away from salty snacks. Some newer devices can even send data to a smartphone or other personal device to provide various data breakdowns of how things change over time.
2. Control Most Variables
Investing in a home blood pressure monitor means being able to take readings at the same time each day and under very similar conditions. This removes the stresses people often feel when visiting a doctor, as well as other variables that could affect readings. You can even take multiple readings each day to provide a more accurate picture.
3. Prevent Overexertion
While exercise can help lower blood pressure over time, it will increase it while you are exercising and for a short time afterwards. Unfortunately, it's common for people to push themselves too hard in a bid to get healthy, and this can elevate blood pressure too high, which can lead to serious consequences. By checking each day, especially after exercise, you can ensure you aren't pushing your body harder than is necessary.
4. Track Your Fitness
Proper exercise is a great way to improve your blood pressure, and you can see this in terms of how soon it returns to normal as well as how low it gets. As a general rule, your blood pressure will return to your typical range more quickly as your physical fitness improves. Other variables can affect this, including genetics, sex, age and ethnicity, but tracking how quickly your blood pressure returns to your normal range is a great way of seeing how your physical fitness is improving.
Contact a company like Primary Wellness to learn more.