For more on wearables, including two more videos with the amazing @MedlifeCrisis, go here:    • Smartwatches series  

You’ve probably heard that blood pressure is important—but what is a healthy blood pressure, how can you check yours, what can you do to improve it, can it be measured from a smartwatch, and…which is higher, a deadlifter’s blood pressure, or a giraffe’s?! (Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that either.) I sat down with Dr Rohin ‘Medlife Crisis’ Francis to chat all health and heartrelated numbers.

We also cover another common measure, heart rate variability, and what its potential use in fitness, illness, recovery and elite sport could be. I got lots of questions about HRV under our first video about the most important number for your health (watch here!    • The most important number for your he...  ) so hopefully this video answers them!

This is episode five of my Smartwatches Series! In case you’re wondering about the connection… Samsung watches claim to be able to measure blood pressure from the wrist, while Fitbit, Garmin, Apple, WHOOP and more report sleep scores or recovery metrics based on HRV. Probably the best ‘wearable’ suggestion here is a blood pressure cuff—which also comes in far cheaper than a new fitness watch, unless you’re looking at one of the really lowcost offerings like a Mi Band!


Chapters

00:00 Introduction
00:44 What is blood pressure?
02:49 Maintaining a healthy blood pressure
03:50 Continuous blood pressure monitoring
04:50 Blood pressure while…deadlifting?!
08:38 What is heart rate variability?
10:49 HRV for tracking recovery


Sources and further reading

Suggestions for reducing blood pressure from the American College of Cardiology Clinical Practice Guidelines for high blood pressure (Whelton et al. 2017) https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.11... Definition of hypertension in Table 6. Nonpharmaceutical interventions in Table 15.

‘At ages 40–69 years, each difference of 20 mm Hg usual SBP (or, approximately equivalently, 10 mm Hg usual DBP) is associated with more than a twofold difference in the stroke death rate, and with twofold differences in the death rates from IHD and from other vascular causes. All of these proportional differences in vascular mortality are about half as extreme at ages 80–89 years as at ages 40–49 years, but the annual absolute differences in risk are greater in old age.’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/la...


Credits

Heart animation adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CG...


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