Effect of breath holding during abdominal exercise on blood pressure and heart rate in hypertensive individuals

Background: Abdominal exercises have become an important part of fitness and rehabilitation. Sit ups are most common abdominal exercise performed by people without proper training. Hypertension is a progressive cardiovascular syndrome arising from complex and interrelated etiology in which the blood pressure in the arteries is elevated. Material and methods: An experimental study including 30 hypertensive males and females aged 30-60 years was done. Exclusion criteria were back pain, spinal disorders, diabetes, renal disease, cardiovascular disease. They were divided into two groups: Group 1 performed straight and oblique sit ups with breath holding. Group 2 performed straight and oblique sit ups without breath holding. Instructions were given to perform 10 repetitions of straight and oblique sit ups with 10 min rest period between. Heart rate and blood pressure were measured before and after each set of repetition. Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used for within group analysis and Mann-Whitney ‘U’ Test was used for inter group analysis. Results: For group A, W= -3.426, -3.458, -3.458 respectively for heart rate (HR), systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and p=0.001 and for group B, W= -3.426, -3.475, -3.464 and p=0.001. The U value for inter group analysis is U=103.00, 73.00, 81.00 respectively for HR, SBP and DBP and p= 0.68, 0.099, 0.183 respectively for HR, SBP and DBP. Conclusion: When performing the OPSU and SPSU exercises as used in this investigation, hypertensive individuals may experience peak heart rate and blood pressure increases. Voluntary breath holding significantly increased the blood pressure elevations for both the exercises, but particularly for the OPSU.