Meditate for Your Heart
By Tony Horton, creator of
P90X®
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A recent study of adolescents with high
blood pressure found that those teens who practiced transcendental meditation
for 8 months improved the ability of their blood vessels to relax and dilate by
21 percent. That's about the same improvement expected from taking
antihypertensive drugs.
Dr. Vernon A. Barnes is a physiologist at
the Medical College of Georgia's Georgia Prevention Institute and the lead
investigator on the study. Researchers concluded that 15 minutes of
transcendental meditation twice a day steadily lowered the blood pressures of
156 inner-city adolescents, with levels tending to stay that way.
 "Our blood vessels
are not rigid pipes," says Dr. Barnes. "They need to dilate and constrict,
according to the needs of the body. If this improvement in the ability to
dilate can be replicated in other at-risk groups and cardiovascular disease
patients, this could have important implications for [the] inclusion of
meditation programs to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease and its
clinical consequences."
"Change can't be expected overnight," Dr.
Barnes says. "Meditation and other positive lifestyle habits such as exercising
and eating right have to become part of your life, like brushing your
teeth."
Since heart and cardiovascular disease are
such a serious problem in the U.S., the encouraging results of this study and
others like it have prompted researchers to begin long-term studies to
determine the long-term impact of meditation on heart disease risk.
 The
obesity epidemic in the United States is probably the main contributor to
increasing blood pressure rates in children. But obesity appears to be part of
an unhealthy cycle wherein the stresses of everyday life, such as poverty and
feeling unsafe at home, contribute to bad habits like overeating and/or eating
high-fat comfort foods and not exercising. Stress can also lead to sleep
problems, preventing the body—and blood pressure—from resting and
recovering. Meditation is one of the best tools against stress we can use. (In
fact, my P90X® program
dedicates an entire workout to yoga—Yoga X.)
As with all lifestyle changes, the full
benefits of meditating can take a while to really show up. Likewise, along with
other healthy choices like a good diet and an exercise program, like
Power
90® and
10-Minute
Trainer®, an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure every time.
Meditation is free, chills out your stress,
and has no negative side effects. So get quiet, shut out the world, and give a
nice, soothing "Ohmmmmmm." Your heart (and your nerves) will thank you.
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