How To Walk Your Way To Perfect Blood Pressure Naturally

本站添加: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]If you're not already walking after every time you eat, then this is probably the single easiest thing that you can add to your life that will lower your blood pressure and in turn lower your risk of dying. The numbers honestly really do shock people. If you do this consistently, walking after meals can lower your blood pressure more than some of the medications that we can prescribe to you in the A&E. There are no side effects. There are no prescriptions needed. There is no visit to a clinic needed. There are no waiting lists.

[00:00:28]There is no collection from the pharmacy. It costs absolutely nothing.

[00:00:33]And it works whether you're 25 or 75.

[00:00:38]And remember, a blood pressure tablet does one thing. It lowers your blood pressure. A blood sugar tablet does one thing. It lowers your blood sugar. Now, walking does both of those things at once at the same time. And on top of that, it improves almost everything else in your body as well, from your mood and your cognition to your memory and your bones and your kidneys as well. It works on every single part of your body. If you're new here, then welcome. I'm Dr. Alex and I'm here to help you prevent the diseases that I see all the time in the A&E, the stuff that kills us most often. And so if you find this video useful, if you get something from this video today that will help you, then the best thing that you can do to support the channel is hit the like button and subscribe to the channel as well. If you do that, then I promise you I will keep making these videos for you to help you live longer. So in this video, I want to do three different things. The first one is I want to tell you exactly what happens inside your body when you walk after a meal. And I want to do this properly this time. So, this video is going to be a little bit longer than usual. The second thing is I want to take you through the different studies that are relevant here because some of you will quite reasonably ask whether the evidence really backs all of this up. Is this too good to be true? The honest answer is yes. The evidence absolutely supports what I'm saying here. And I'll put all of the different studies in the description below so you can go through all of them yourself. And the third thing is I want to give you quite a simple way to actually do this in real life because most people will agree with everything I say and then change nothing about their habits tomorrow. And so I want to make this as easy as possible for you to implement into your daily life and hopefully if you're on a blood pressure tablet eventually try and reduce that dose down with supervision from your doctor and maybe even come off your tablets altogether.

[00:02:36]As I always say, this isn't replacing any medical advice that you get from your own doctor, but we do see it all the time. When people start walking regularly, they can gradually reduce their reliance on medication. Now, the first thing I want to do is actually give you a way of picturing high blood pressure in your mind that hopefully touchwood you'll never forget. So, imagine a garden hose pipe. And I use this analogy all the time, but that is basically what your blood vessels are.

[00:03:04]They are tiny tubes that run to literally every single corner of your body, all branching off each other like connected hose pipes. Now, imagine somebody turns that tap on a little bit too hard, a tiny bit too much. So, the hose is running at a pressure that's slightly higher than it was built for, just marginally higher than it should be. For one day, nothing happens. For one week, nothing happens. For a year, that hose looks pretty much completely fine from the outside. But inside that host pipe, where we can't see, over the course of that year, tiny little cracks have started to appear inside the wall itself, inside the rubber, and the rubber slowly starts to stiffen because of that constant force pressing against it. Now, after 10 years, the hose has lost its flexibility. After 30 years, the inside has built up really rough patches where dirt has stuck to it and then gathered up and accumulated. After 50 years, the hose is now brittle and narrow. And one day, without warning, it just bursts. The wall of that hose pipe will burst and you know, all that water will flow out. And that is exactly what high blood pressure does to your arteries. It is happening inside you right now. And yes, somebody with a normal blood pressure, you know, their vessels will start to stiffen and then form plaques. You know, this exact process that we're talking about if we wait long enough. That is part of getting older. What we're interested in is trying to prevent that happening too soon, which is what happens in the Western world. This aging process of our blood vessels happens much earlier than it should do because our blood pressure is higher than it should be. And the thing is when your blood pressure starts increasing, you don't feel anything. You don't get any pain. You get no warning.

[00:05:01]Nothing on your skin tells you that the inside of your blood vessels is being slowly chewed up by a pressure that they were never built to handle. The damage builds very slowly over decades until one of your blood vessels becomes narrow enough to starve your heart of oxygen which causes angina or until one of your plaques rupture which then causes a heart attack or a stroke. All the tiny blood vessels feeding your kidney start to fail and then you go into kidney failure. All the small blood vessels feeding your brain slowly choke off and then you develop dementia. This is why high blood pressure matters so much. It is not just a number on a screen. It is a force that is quietly damaging every single blood vessel in your body, every single second for as long as it stays elevated. And the longer it's been high, the more damage that has already been done. This is why the patients that we see arriving in the emergency department with a heart attack at the age of 50 or 55 or 40 like my dad, these people aren't unlucky. Very often they are showing me the result of 20 or 30 years of slightly raised blood pressure working away in the background in silence until the day the system finally gives up. And here's the first thing to understand about all of this. Your blood pressure goes up for lots of different reasons. And no single thing alone on its own is fully to blame. But three of those reasons matter more than the rest of them. And the remarkable thing about walking is that it reaches into all three of those and quietly reverses them. So this is what I'm going to focus on in this video. The first one is what happens to your blood sugar and a hormone called insulin. The second one is what happens to the lining of your blood vessels called the endothelium.

[00:06:57]And the third one is what happens to your nervous system. And I'm going to take you through each of these three.

[00:07:03]And then after each one, I'll show you the research that proves what I'm saying. Because once you see how walking works on all three at once, you understand exactly why it's so powerful for bringing your blood pressure down.

[00:07:17]So the first mechanism is all about your blood sugar and insulin and your muscles as well. So let me give you the short version first and then explain all of this properly. So when you eat something your blood sugar usually rises unless you eat something that is completely carbohydrate free and to deal with it your body releases a lot of insulin and high insulin day after day after year is one of the most direct ways that your blood pressure usually climbs. Walking after a meal blunts that whole process at the source at the very bottom level.

[00:07:52]Now, let me show you how that happens step by step. So, when you eat something, sugar gets absorbed into your blood. And we call this sugar glucose.

[00:08:04]And here's something that a lot of people don't actually realize. So, almost every carbohydrate that you eat ends up as glucose in your blood whether it tastes sweet or not. And the reason for that is quite simple once you see it. So a potato or a slice of bread or a plate of lentils or a bowl of pasta or rice, none of these taste sweet obviously, but they are all built from the same thing which is glucose or starch in this particular case. And starch is just glucose. It's hundreds and hundreds of glucose molecules joined together in very long chains almost like they're holding hands. When something tastes sweet though, that is because the glucose is already loose and single.

[00:08:47]they're not joined together and so your tongue can actually taste that a lot better. Starch essentially hides that glucose by linking it up into really long chains so they can't bind to the taste receptors on your tongue because they're too big. There's too many of them joined together. But your gut does not care how it tastes. Your gut has enzymes whose entire job is to snip those chains of glucose apart link by link, hand by hand, and then sort of separating them back into single glucose molecules. So by the time a baked potato or a bowl of rice has gone through your gut, it has been broken down into the exact same thing as a spoonful of sugar.

[00:09:31]Roughly speaking, a medium-sized baked potato releases about 8 teaspoon of glucose into your blood. A cup of cooked white rice is around 10. A small bag of crisps or chips if you're across the pond is about five. So basically, your tongue is a very bad judge of what spikes your blood sugar. Your gut is the real judge. So, even if something doesn't taste sweet, if it's got carbohydrates in it, like a potato or rice or pasta, then it's going to spike your blood sugar. So, now you've got all this glucose, all this sugar flooding into your blood. But before I tell you why that's a problem, it helps to think back and remember what your body was actually built for. So, for around 250,000 years, 300,000 years, humans lived without anything close to the food that we have today. There were no sugary cereals. There was no white bread or fizzy drinks or snacks sitting in a cupboard. Food was pretty scarce. Our ancestors ate a small number of times a day, maybe twice or three times a day, very often with long gaps in between them. And what they ate was mostly food that released its energy very slowly because everything was unprocessed then.

[00:10:47]Everything was in its whole original form. And your body was shaped by all of that. It evolved to handle the occasional very gentle rise in blood sugar with plenty of quiet hours in between for everything to settle down, particularly your insulin levels. It was never designed or never evolved for what we do now. And what we do these days is genuinely new and still a big shock to our bodies. It's not had time to evolve and catch up with that. It's only in the last 60 or 70 years, you know, a tiny blink in human history that we've surrounded ourselves with refined and processed foods that spike our blood sugar really hard and fast and made food available every hour of every single day. And if you think about what insulin resistance actually is, it is your body after a quarter of a million years of handling sugar just fine, finally failing to do one of its most basic jobs. Your body cannot handle the amount of sugar that we bring in anymore. The insulin is still there, often in enormous amounts, but it can no longer actually bring your blood sugar back down because there is too much of it.

[00:11:58]And your cells have stopped listening.

[00:12:00]They are now resistant. This is your body telling you as clearly as it can that the way we now live is very actively harming us. But we think about pre-diabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance almost as inevitable. But it is such a dangerous thing to our health if you think about it like this. And so most of us these days are now walking around with far more glucose in our blood far more of the time than any of our great-grandparents ever did. Your body is running ancient software in a world it was never written for. And that mismatch is really where the trouble begins. But why is all of that glucose, all of that sugar actually a problem?

[00:12:44]Like what's actually happening? Well, because glucose at really high levels is genuinely damaging. It is sticky. It sticks to the proteins inside the lining of your blood vessels and causes those proteins to change their shape. It makes them stiff. It causes a kind of slow rusting inside your cells and it irritates and inflames the lining of your arteries. Your body wants that glucose out of the blood and into the cells where it can't cause damage as quickly as possible because every minute it sits there in your blood at high levels, it is doing damage. But how does your body actually get that glucose out of the blood and into your cells where it can't cause damage anymore? Well, it uses that very special hormone called insulin. Now, picture an enormous multi-story car park and the glucose is this really big flood of cars that keeps arriving all at once. Now, the cars cannot park themselves. They need a parking attendant to help them park because there are barriers down at every single level. And basically insulin is the parking attendant. They are the ones that lift the barriers so the cars the glucose can go and park inside those cells. When you eat your pancreas sends out a big wave of parking attendants and they run around lifting those barriers.

[00:14:04]So again the cars can go and park in those empty spaces. And once those cars are parked the roads outside your bloodstream is clear again. That is basically how the system is meant to work. Now, here's the part that is really, really interesting. Of all the places that glucose can park, your muscles are by far the biggest car park, around 80% of the glucose from your meal eventually ends up in your muscles. And your muscles have a very clever trick that almost nobody seems to talk about.

[00:14:38]So when a muscle contracts, when you actually use it, it can lift its own barriers directly without waiting for the parking attendant or insulin to come and lift it for them. So when you're moving, when you're walking, when your muscles are contracting, the cars just drive straight in. The glucose can go into the cells of the muscles without needing insulin. And there's a real name for this. The barriers are actually a protein called glut 4, GL UT4. And when your muscles move when you're walking, they push more of these barriers open automatically. So a moving muscle can pull glucose out of your blood without your pancreas having to send out nearly as many attendants. You don't need as much insulin. Now put those two pictures side by side and watch what it does to your blood pressure. So if you sit on the sofa after a meal and you don't move your muscles, your blood sugar climbs pretty high, your pancreas then has to flood the place with insulin and the glucose is cleared quite slowly. But if you walk for just 10 minutes after that meal, your leg muscles lift their own barriers and start pulling that glucose in directly. the glucose spike is then much smaller. And because the muscles are doing the work, the insulin spike is much smaller as well. And that smaller insulin spike is the whole point here.

[00:16:04]Because so far, I've only told you what high blood sugar, what high glucose does to your vessels. What high insulin does is arguably worse, and it's the part that a lot of people don't mention. So, here's the trap. When your pancreas has to keep flooding your blood with insulin, meal after meal, day after day, your cells, as I mentioned, get sick of this constant signal and they stop responding to it. We call this insulin resistance. But the pancreas doesn't just give up. It shouts even louder and releases even more insulin, which makes the cells listen even less, which makes it release even more. And then round and round we go until you're living with permanently high insulin in your blood.

[00:16:50]And permanently high insulin drives your blood pressure up in four separate ways.

[00:16:55]It tells your kidneys to hold on to more salt and water and more fluid in the system means more pressure. The second thing it does is that it switches on your fight or flight nerves which tighten up your blood vessels. It makes your muscles in your artery walls grow thicker, which makes the tubes a bit more narrow. And it stops your blood vessels from making a gas called nitric oxide, which is normally what tells them to relax and widen, which then helps to lower your blood pressure. And hold on to that last point because it's what bridges the gap into that next mechanism, mechanism two in a couple of minutes. So the picture is well partly complete here. High glucose damages your vessels directly and the high insulin that your body pumps out to deal with that glucose drives your pressure up in four more ways on top of those. So a walk after your meal lowers both at once. This is you reaching in and switching off one of the main engines driving up your blood pressure three times a day. And so you should be able to see a lot of the picture quite clearly. Now, we know that this isn't just theory because it's been backed up in lots of different research studies.

[00:18:03]There was a study published in 2016 where researchers took adults with type 2 diabetes and split them into two different groups. One group was told to walk for 30 minutes once a day, the way that most people tend to think about exercise where they just do it once a day in a sort of distinct time period.

[00:18:23]The other group though did the exact same total amount of walking 30 minutes but broke into 10-minute walks after each of their three meals. So the same shoes, the same total minutes, the same total efforts. The only thing that changed was the timing. And the important point about this research study is that the blood sugar after eating was clearly lower in the group that walked after their meals rather than just walking for 30 minutes at one point in the day. And the mechanism really is the exact same one that I described, proven in real people in a real research study. Now, the second mechanism in this video is all about the lining of your blood vessels. Now, that gas that I just mentioned, nitric oxide, comes from a part of your body that I sort of want you to fall in love with and be obsessed about. That is your endothelium. Because it might just be one of the most important structures in your entire body. And let me tell you about it in a bit more detail. So on the very inside of every single blood vessel, there is a single layer of cells, literally one cell thick microscopic lining the inside of the tube, like a very thin layer of wallpaper.

[00:19:36]And that wallpaper has a name. It's called the endothelium. And if you laid all of this endothelium out flat, the endothelium in one person would cover an area bigger than a tennis court. And this isn't just like a passive lining.

[00:19:50]It is one of the most active intelligent organs in your entire body. And it's doing arguably the single most important job for your blood pressure. It's deciding moment to moment how wide or narrow your blood vessels should be. So if you look after your endothelium, then you protect yourself against high blood pressure, against heart attacks and strokes and kidney disease and dementia all at the same time. If you damage it, then you open the door to every one of those things. And here's how it controls your blood pressure. So the endothelium makes that gas called nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is a signal. When the wallpaper, that thin lining of single cells releases nitric oxide, it tells the muscle in the vessel wall to relax and the vessel then becomes a bit wider.

[00:20:41]And when that tube widens, the pressure inside it drops. It's exactly like opening a tap. The same amount of water flowing through it, but a wider pipe means a lower pressure. If you sort of squeeze the end of the hose pipe, the pressure becomes, you know, much higher.

[00:20:57]It forces out at a much higher speed.

[00:21:00]So, a healthy endothelium making plenty of nitric oxide keeps your vessels relaxed and your pressure low. A damaged one cannot do this. And your pressure then creeps up. And remember, high glucose and high insulin, both of those damage this layer and sort of choke off its nitric oxide, which is exactly how mechanism one that we just talked about quietly pushes up your blood pressure.

[00:21:24]Now, what does walking actually have to do with all of this? Well, when you walk, your muscles need more blood. So, your heart pushes more blood through your vessels a bit faster. And as that blood rushes past the wallpaper, rushes through the inside of your artery and then sort of rubs against the endothelium, it drags along that surface. And that dragging force is the trigger. It tells the endothelium to release more nitric oxide. So the vessels become wider, the blood flows more easily, and your pressure inside, your blood pressure will drop. And the thing is that doesn't just happen just when you're using your muscles, when you're walking. It stays lower for hours afterwards. A single walk can keep your blood pressure lower for up to a full day, a whole 24 hours. And here's the really important part about all of this.

[00:22:14]The endothelium really sort of behaves like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. So if you walk regularly, your endthelium gets better and better at making nitric oxide, which means your baseline blood pressure, the pressure that you carry around all day, every day, slowly drops over weeks and months. This honestly is one of the biggest long-term wins from walking. And it's why people who walk consistently for years and years end up with permanently lower blood pressure than people who don't walk consistently. And the evidence here really does measure this effect directly. There was a big review of different meta analyses published in 2024 in the journal of clinical hypertension and doctors have a way of measuring how well your endothelium is working by watching how much an artery widens when blood flow increases. And this review found that exercise clearly improved this. And people with high blood pressure, who usually make less nitric oxide than they should, saw that production go back up with regular training, regular walking.

[00:23:21]So really, this isn't just a story about pipes and tabs. You can actually measure this wallpaper, the endothelium getting healthier and the arteries getting better at widening in real patients. And there are more studies like this, and I'll put a couple more in the description below. Now, the third reason your blood pressure rises sits in your nervous system. We've talked about insulin and glucose. We've talked about your endothelium. The third one is about your nervous system. And walking actually calms your nervous system down.

[00:23:54]As you know, your nervous system has two different settings. The first one is called the sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight setting. The one that fires off when you are stressed or in danger or you're sleeping quite poorly. And it does things like speeds your heart rate up. It tightens your blood vessels and it pushes your blood pressure up. Essentially getting your body ready for a really high pressure situation like fighting off a tiger. The second one is called your parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest setting. And what this one does is the opposite. It slows your heart rate down. It relaxes your vessels and it lets your blood pressure fall quite naturally. So, which setting you spend your day in is quite literally one of the main controls on your blood pressure. And here's the problem with modern life. Most of us are stuck in that first setting almost all day. We're talking about things like work stress and screens and traffic and the news, which is always bad these days, and deadlines as well. Our fight or flight system is switched on more or less permanently. And in the background, our blood pressure quietly climbs because of that. And notice how this one links back to mechanism one. High insulin switches on those same fight or flight nerves. So the two feed into each other. Now, walking, especially somewhere green and outside and in the fresh air, is one of the most reliable ways to flip your body back into the parasympathetic nervous setting, the rest and digest setting.

[00:25:31]Your heart rate will calm down, your stress hormones drop, and your vessels will start to relax, and your blood pressure will follow all of those down.

[00:25:40]And again, this has been measured, and I've said this before. There's a reason why David Atenburgh has lived to be 100 because he spent so much of his time outdoors in green spaces.

[00:25:51]Now, there is another review published in 2024 in the Journal of Sport Sciences that looked at exactly this in people with high blood pressure. Doctors can measure the balance between those two nervous system settings. And this particular review pulled data together from 12 different randomized trials. And it found that exercise shifted people away from fight or flight towards rest and digest. And it lowered their resting blood pressure and their heart rate with the strongest effect coming from gentle aerobic exercise. Exactly like walking.

[00:26:28]That nice feeling isn't just in your head. It shows up as a real measurable change in your nervous system and it shows up as a lower number on your blood pressure monitor. Now, here's the part that I really want you to remember about all of this because this is where the magic happens. So, these three mechanisms are not three separate stories. They are one story looping back on itself. And that's exactly why they're so hard to escape once they get going. So, watch how they feed into each other. So high glucose and high insulin from mechanism one damage your endothelium and choke off its nitric oxide which is mechanism two going wrong. High insulin also fires up your fight orflight nerves which is mechanism three going wrong. And when your fight orflight nerves are switched on, they tighten your blood vessels and make insulin resistance even worse which loops you straight back to mechanism one. So, a bad diet and a still body that doesn't move doesn't just nudge your blood pressure up through one door.

[00:27:30]They jam open all three doors at once.

[00:27:34]And each one holds the others open as well at the same time. This is why high blood pressure is so stubborn and quite difficult to treat and why a single tablet aimed at just one mechanism so often isn't enough. If you need a blood pressure tablet, very soon you'll probably be needing a second or a third one. But here's the amazing part about all of this and the whole reason for this video. Walking pushes on all three doors, all three mechanisms at the same time in the right direction. It blunts the glucose spike and the insulin spike.

[00:28:11]It tells the endothelium to make more nitric oxide and it flips your nervous system into rest and digest. And because all three of these are linked together, helping one helps the others. If you calm the nervous system, then insulin will work better. If you improve insulin, then the endothelium will start to heal. If you heal the endothelium, then your blood vessels will relax. And the same loop that was working against you starts working for you. This is why walking is so incredibly powerful. Like I said, a blood pressure tablet works on one very particular specific pathway.

[00:28:51]But exercise works on everything together at the same time. Now, you might be watching this video or listening to it when you're walking and thinking to yourself, "Right, all of this sounds great, but is the actual drop in your blood pressure big enough to matter?" And obviously that is the correct question to ask. So let me give you the honest numbers. When you sort of bring data from all of the different trials on regular walking, you find that walking lowers the top number, the systolic pressure by somewhere around a sort of like five to seven points on average and a bit more if you walk briskly. So you could possibly get up to 10. Now let's just assume five. Five might sound a bit small, but here's the context that changes everything about that. If you held that across your entire life, a five sort of point drop in your systolic blood pressure, a drop that size really does lower your risk of stroke and heart attack by a good amount. The cardiology data on this is pretty solid. For every 10point drop in your top number, your risk of a major heart attack falls by roughly sort of like a fifth 20% and your risk of dying falls by more than 10%. So even a few points in the right direction held over years and decades and that's the most powerful part sort of sustaining this consistently really does change whether or not you have a stroke or a heart attack or whether you die from it. Now let me try and put this another way. If a drug company had a pill that gave you the same blood pressure drop as regular brisk walking with none of the side effects and all of the other benefits, they would market it as one of the best treatments on the planet. Except this version is free. It has no side effects and the only prescription you need is just a comfortable pair of shoes. And one more thing here to think about is how much you actually need. The magic number, as I've mentioned in other videos about walking, is not 10,000 steps. That number was never really a research finding. It came from a marketing slogan in Japan in the 1960s.

[00:31:09]When researchers actually plot steps against the risk of dying, the benefits start surprisingly low at around 4,000 steps a day. And then it keeps climbing the more you do all the way up to around 20,000 steps a day where it starts to sort of plateau and level off. So there is no magic line to cross. But really I tend to say to people try and aim for around 7 or 8,000 steps if you can. If you're on 3,000 steps a day, then getting to 6,000 gives you a really, really big win, a big benefit there. If you're on 6,000, then getting to nine gives you another big win as well. the more you move, basically the longer you live. And before we get into the practical side about all of this, just a couple of questions that people tend to ask quite often in the comments of other videos. The first one is how fast should you be walking? Well, what we say here is that a brisk pace is best for this.

[00:32:04]Basically, you should be able to talk with somebody next to you but not sing or talk really long sentences without sort of feeling a bit out of breath. If you can hold a conversation but would struggle to belt out a song, then you're walking at the right pace. If you can sing when you're walking or if you can speak really quick and really long sentences without feeling out of breath, then you probably need to speed up a bit. The second question is, what if you have knee or hip pain? This one is really important. It's quite interesting actually because a lot of people assume walking will make it worse. Often it is the opposite. Most joint pain is driven by inflammation. Mostly it's either osteoarthritis or less commonly rheumatoid arthritis. And walking actually lowers inflammation throughout the body, what we call systemic inflammation. So very often it helps the joints rather than harms the joints. The key though obviously is to build up gradually and just listen to your body and stop if something genuinely hurts.

[00:33:08]And if you have a specific joint problem, then just discuss this with your doctor first. I'm not going to override anything your doctor tells you about your particular condition because obviously I don't know your medical history, but for most people generally, you know, gentle walking is one of the better things that you can do for your joints, not one of the worst things, if that makes sense. And now the part that everybody, I'm sure, has been waiting for. How to actually do this in real life. This is the practical part of the video. So, let me be really clear here.

[00:33:38]The plan should be fairly simple. After every main meal, so that's breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you need to try and walk for at least 10 minutes if you can.

[00:33:47]If you can only manage five, then just do what you can manage. But really, we're aiming for 30 minutes a day in three small chunks. And really, what I also say is if you have snacks between your main meals, try and walk for at least 5 minutes after those as well. So, obviously, this doesn't mean you need to join a gym. You don't need any special gear, no complicated routine. You just go outside or if the weather is pretty crap, just walk around the house or up and down the stairs for 10 minutes. And then on top of that, build in one longer walk somewhere in your day if you can.

[00:34:22]And try and make it non-negotiable.

[00:34:24]Treat it, you know, as religiously as you would as having your breakfast. Walk to work if you can. Get off the bus a couple of stops early. Walk to the shops instead of driving. or if you go to the supermarket then park, you know, down the next street. So, you've got to carry your shopping bags through the car park down the street to your car so you're getting all of these steps in. Try and walk first thing in the morning if you can or in the evening before bed if that works better for you. Basically, just try and find the version that fits for your life. Try different routines, try different ways of doing things, but protect it in the way that you would protect a meeting in your diary because this is ultimately helping you to live longer. And if you want to make this really stick, then I would go and buy two pretty cheap things. The first one is just a basic fitness watch, not an expensive one like this one. You can get these for20 off Amazon or, you know, somewhere on just type in uh fitness watch on Google. I guarantee there will be something for less than £30 or $30.

[00:35:29]Basically, anything that counts your steps reliably will do here. And as I've said before, it will probably track your sleep score and your resting heart rate and your heart rate variability as well.

[00:35:39]All of these are really important metrics. But here's why counting your steps really matters specifically. The reason is that most people massively overestimate how much they walk. You will think you did 7,000 steps a day and the watch will tell you that it was 2 or 3,000 steps. And so really, you cannot manage what you don't measure. And so with a watch on your wrist, you'll start spotting little chances throughout the week where you can add a few hundred steps here and there. All of this will add up over time. The second thing to buy is probably the most obvious one here. It's a home blood pressure monitor. They are really, really cheap these days. And really, it's the only way to know if any of this is working.

[00:36:22]And if you're starting all of this from scratch, before you start, take your blood pressure twice a day, morning and evening, for a full week. Write all of those numbers down and get an average.

[00:36:34]That gives you your true starting point, your true average blood pressure.

[00:36:38]Because a single reading at the GP is often falsely high just from the stress of the appointment. something that we call white coat syndrome. Once you have your baseline, start walking after every meal and keep measuring at the same times each day, morning and evening, to get an average. And you will usually start to see those numbers move within a couple of weeks, maybe four weeks. And watching that number fall week by week is one of the most motivating things in all of health. It turns this from a theory into something that you can actually see and feel. And once you start seeing that blood pressure come down, you'll have such a buzz that all of this is working, you'll probably start walking more as a result. And here's a few tiny little extras that will always add up. Try and take the stairs wherever you can. Forget lifts or elevators. Only focus on the stairs from now on. You can also pace around when you're on the phone. You can walk over to a colleague instead of messaging them. You can park further from the supermarket door or further away from work. None of these feel like much on their own, but by the end of the week, the difference honestly is bigger than you would expect. And remember, everything I suggest on this channel, we're thinking about things over years and decades. Tiny little changes like this. 1% better every day, 1% further, 1% more steps every day add up over the long run to a much much bigger result and much better health over years. So, if you've been looking for one change to make with your health, then let it be this one. Walk after your meals and build a bit more walking into the rest of your day. All of this is simple. It is free. And as you've seen, it works on the three biggest drivers of your blood pressure all at once. So just start small. Start where you are. Add in a few minutes of walking after your meals.

[00:38:45]Increase that very gradually. Measure your blood pressure regularly so you can see how this is improving. And write all of those numbers down. And I promise you, you will feel so much better after implementing this into your life.