If it feels like current events are conspiring to raise your blood pressure, now might be a good time to go sit against a wall for a few minutes.
In a new study, several minutes of wall sits — also called wall squats — three times a week effectively lowered people’s blood pressures over time. Those gains lingered even if people cut back to doing only a few wall sits once or twice a week.
The findings add to existing evidence that wall sitting may “reduce blood pressure more than other forms of exercise,” said Jonathan Wiles, a professor of exercise science at Canterbury Christ Church University in England, who oversaw the new study.
The time commitment may be much smaller than you’d expect, and starting with a very shallow sit — just bending your legs a bit — can be an effective way to begin.
Even people “who struggle to find the time and motivations to exercise” might be able to gain and hold on to the pressure-lowering benefits of wall squats, Wiles said.
Why wall squats are good for your blood pressure
To do a wall squat, find an unadorned wall, lean against it and walk your feet out as you slide down the wall until your thighs are as close to parallel with the ground as feels comfortable.
Few of the study participants sat deeply, at first. For most, their knees were “not at 90-degree angles,” Wiles said. They sat, instead, at whatever depth they could maintain.
The goal was to hold that pose for two minutes at a stretch.
Wall squats involve isometric contractions, meaning that during the exercise, your muscles, held in one position, tighten and generate force, but don’t lengthen or shorten. (Muscles shorten during concentric contractions, such as raising a dumbbell, and lengthen during eccentric ones, like lowering that dumbbell again.)
Other examples of isometric exercises are planks and squeezing a ball or device to build handgrip strength.
A wealth of past studies show that isometric exercises lower blood pressure, both immediately and in the long term. Isometric contractions squeeze blood vessels inside muscles, temporarily reducing blood flow. Then, when the contraction stops, the blood gushes back, sparking the release of biochemicals that widen vessels and help them stay flexible and responsive, keeping blood pressure under control.
In a 2023 review of 270 exercise studies, researchers, including Wiles, concluded that isometric workouts lowered blood pressure more effectively than any other exercise, except possibly running.
Lower blood pressure in 4 weeks
In the years that Wiles and his colleagues have been studying isometric exercise, they’ve developed and tested a simple routine that reliably lowered people’s blood pressure in experiments within about a month.
You sit against the wall for two minutes, stand, sit on an actual chair or otherwise rest for two minutes, and repeat that sequence three more times, for a total of four bouts of wall sitting during eight minutes of total exercise.
In past studies, that workout, completed three times a week, led to meaningful reductions in people’s systolic (the top number in your blood pressure reading, measuring arterial pressure as your heart beats) and diastolic (the lower number, measuring pressure as your heart relaxes) blood pressures.
But because many people can’t or would rather not work out three times a week, the researchers decided to see if even less time might work.
Some of the previous research also focused only on people with existing hypertension, not those who might be at risk of developing the condition.
How little exercise do you need to do?
So, in the new study, published in September in BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine, Wiles and his colleagues decided to have people, including those at risk of high blood pressure, start a regular isometric routine, and then cut way back on their workouts.
They recruited 100 inactive adults, many with blood pressures in the high-normal range, a risk factor for later hypertension, and had most of them begin wall sitting three times a week. The rest didn’t exercise, as a control.
After a month, some people continued their three weekly workouts, but others dropped down to two, one or zero weekly wall-sit sessions for an additional four weeks.
Throughout, researchers checked everyone’s blood pressures, resting heart rates and other cardiac markers.
8 minutes a week led to healthier blood pressure
At the end of the first four weeks, all the wall sitters’ blood pressures were lower. None had improved in the control group.
After the second month, the people still exercising three times a week had retained or increased the reductions in their blood pressures.
Blood pressures among those in the once- or twice-a-week groups, though, were still healthier than at the start, but a little higher than they’d been after the first month.
But those who’d stopped wall sitting altogether had lost almost all the improvements from their earlier month of squats. Their blood pressures were as high as at the start.
Hand grip exercise may also help
Based on these and other past results, Wiles said, “we would advise adults” who are worried about their blood pressure and able to wall sit “to add isometric contractions” to their weekly routines, as often as they can manage.
The study followed people for only two months, though, and it’s not clear whether one or two sessions a week would maintain blood pressure improvements over longer time frames.
The study also didn’t look at other isometric options. Wall squats engage the leg muscles, Wiles said, the body’s largest, and so are likely to produce the strongest effects.
But “for wheelchair users and older adults at risk for falls, isometric handgrip exercise may be more appropriate,” said Yih-Kuen Jan, a kinesiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He wasn’t involved with the new study, but in a recent review he co-wrote, the researchers found that a similar isometric protocol — four sets of two minutes of squeezing a handgrip device three times a week for at least two months — lowered blood pressure in people with hypertension.
If you’re interested in starting your own isometric program, talk to your doctor first, Wiles said, and discuss your current fitness, capabilities and blood pressure.
Bear in mind, too, that isometric exercises shouldn’t be all you do, he said. No one’s heart rate or other cardiac measures improved during the experiment, only their blood pressures.
“We would strongly recommend that all people, if they are able, participate in regular physical activity, including aerobic, resistance and flexibility exercise,” Wiles said, along with some wall squats, if blood pressure is a concern. “I do all of that in my weekly training,” he said.
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