Where do the benefits of exercise come from? Some of the benefits probably come from exercise making people breathe harder, as a study based at the University of Colorado Boulder suggests. I have the links above, but let me give a few of the key quotations from Lisa Marshall’s article “5-minute breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs.” What they did was to have all the people in the study inhale for 5 minutes through a handheld device, half at high resistance and half at low resistance. At high resistance, this is called High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST). Here is what they found:

When assessed after six weeks, the [high resistance] IMST group saw their systolic blood pressure (the top number) dip nine points on average, a reduction which generally exceeds that achieved by walking 30 minutes a day five days a week. That decline is also equal to the effects of some blood pressure-lowering drug regimens.

Doing the 5 minutes of high-resistance inspiratory muscle strength training each day seemed easy:

… remarkably, those in the IMST group completed 95% of the sessions.

Assuming the results hold up, this treatment should be coming to you reasonably soon:

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded Seals $4 million to launch a larger follow-up study of about 100 people, comparing a 12-week IMST protocol head-to-head with an aerobic exercise program.

Meanwhile, the research group is developing a smartphone app to enable people to do the protocol at home using already commercially available devices.

These results are especially intriguing in relation to what the book Breath talks about. I found that book so interesting, that I have 4 blog posts on it:

1. James Nestor on How Bad Mouth Breathing Is

2. Carbon Dioxide as a Stimulant for Respiratory Function

3. A Modern World of Endemic Jaw Dysfunction

4. Human Skulls, Ancient and Modern

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

• Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide