Welcome to the Cabral House Call. I'm Stephen Cabral, Board certified naturohic doctor and

today we're back to answer your questions.

So let's get right into it.

So the first question today from Walter is, does Tai Chi lower blood pressure?

So there's actually a lot of great research behind not only

Tai Chi but also meditation, Chigang, and yoga that all of those do help to

lower blood pressure. So you can look at specific things called the relaxation response.

You can look at, there's all different actually kind of meters that you can actually test

your blood pressure, you can test your heart rate variability, all fun scientific things to look at that, but let's talk just

about why.

Why this would make sense in the first place.

The bottom line is even if you were just to slow life down, to take a deep breath in through your nose and a longer

breath out through your mouth. I usually say about five seconds in and about seven

seconds out. Just relaxing the body. All of these things are doing this one thing.

They're calming the central nervous system.

When you calm your central nervous system,

all this excitation, which constricts the arteries and blood vessels

that gets you amped up and gets you in that fight or flight

base response that can cause high blood pressure.

All of a sudden they start to dilate, that means open up the blood vessels, you start

to relax, your body starts to calm down,

and guess what, your blood pressure goes down.

...