It almost sounds like an advertisement (and we haven't even mentioned how you can do it from the comfort of your own home while sitting on the sofa watching TV).
But this isn't a ruse. It's the genuine deal, according to recent research: a very handy and simple-to-apply approach that might benefit the health of millions of people, particularly older individuals with high blood pressure and cardiovascular issues.
"We've discovered a unique kind of therapy that reduces blood pressure without the use of pharmaceutical substances and with far better adherence than aerobic exercise," says integrative physiologist Doug Seals of the University of Colorado Boulder.
It's called Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST), and it's a type of physical training that uses a portable device that produces resistance as you inhale through it to strengthen the diaphragm and other breathing muscles (kind of like an asthma puffer that works against you).
IMST has developed decades ago as a means to help critically sick respiratory illness patients strengthen their independent breathing capabilities by utilizing a device with only mild or moderate resistance.
However, a more recent study has indicated that the same approach, when combined with strong resistance and used in short daily sessions of about five minutes, can improve sleep in individuals with sleep apnea, lower blood pressure, and reduce stress perception.
To learn more, a team lead by integrative physiologist Daniel Craighead from the University of Colorado Boulder performed a six-week clinical experiment in which 36 healthy people aged 50 to 79 tried out IMST.
Half of the participants in this study were randomly allocated to conduct high-resistance IMST, which involves utilizing equipment that makes inhaling via the nose much more difficult.
Aside from that significant change, the experiment was identical for all groups: use the device to inhale 30 times a day, in five-minute intervals, for six weeks, six days a week.
After six weeks, the high-resistance IMST treatment group observed significant reductions in systolic blood pressure (SBP), more than or equivalent to what may be achieved with other healthy lifestyle measures such as aerobic exercise and some blood pressure-lowering medicines.
"This improvement in SBP is clinically important since it is linked with a 30% to 40% decreased risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease," the researchers write in their paper, noting that the improvements remained for weeks after the trial was completed.
"After six weeks of abstaining from IMST, the drop in casual SBP was mainly sustained, with nearly 75% of the original reduction kept."
Furthermore, the IMST group exhibited substantial increases in vascular endothelial function, implying enhanced artery health (although arterial stiffness remained constant in such a short period), whereas indicators of systemic inflammation were lowered.
While the researchers aren't sure how high-resistance IMST achieves these results, it's conceivable that the breathing exercises cause the cells lining blood vessels to create more nitric oxide, which helps muscles relax and increases blood flow.
The researchers believe that a lengthier intervention might provide even more spectacular outcomes, but they also admit that their findings need to be reproduced in a broader experimental environment before we can learn more.
While high-resistance IMST cannot be widely advocated until the findings of bigger trials are available, the technique does appear to be simple to implement: 95% of those who took part in the study. Nobody dropped out of the research because they completed all of the requirements from their 5-minute exercise sessions.
That high level of adherence – facilitated by the simplicity and comfort of doing something for just a few minutes each day – is noteworthy, considering that adults' adherence to the widely suggested 30 minutes of physical exercise per day is significantly lower, with one research estimating it to be as low as 5%.
"Taking a deep, resisted breath offers a novel and unusual approach to create the advantages of exercise and physical activity," said Michael Joyner and Sarah Baker of Mayo Clinic.
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