Turns out, teenagers who engage in high-intensity exercise have lower blood pressure which ultimately may lead to a lower risk of developing heart diseases later in life.
The study by researchers at the Children’s Health & Exercise Research Centre, University of Exeter, conducted an experiment on healthy teenage males (12-15 years old), who underwent testing on four separate occasions across three weeks.Exercise is important for everyone to enhance health and quality of life. Exercising regularly decreases a person’s risk of developing several diseases and conditions like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers, etc. Being physically active helps people maintain a healthy weight. Physical activity and exercise can have immediate as well as long-term health benefits. Now, a research suggests that teenagers who do high-intensity exercise tend to have lower blood pressure, which in turn, lowers their risk of developing heart diseases later in life.In the current study, the researchers at the Children’s Health & Exercise Research Centre, University of Exeter, included 13 healthy teenage boys (12-15 years old), who underwent testing on four separate occasions in a period of three weeks. In the first visit, teenage participants were made to perform an exercise test to calculate the exercise intensities reflective of vigorous and moderate intensity exercise.
In the first visit, teenage participants performed an exercise test to calculate the exercise intensities reflective of vigorous and moderate intensity exercise.
In the hours following exercise, blood pressure decreases below resting values. This is known as post-exercise hypotension. These results suggest that in teenagers, eight bouts of one minute’s worth of running at a vigorous intensity (i.e. running close to the maximum heart rate) caused post-exercise hypotension lasting up to an hour.However, the same result was not observed after running at moderate intensity (i.e. jogging), where blood pressure was restored just twenty minutes after exercise.These findings indicate that exercise intensity alters other mechanisms of adjustments in blood pressure differently, one-hour following the completion of the exercise in healthy teenagers.
