Study suggests tai chi is more effective in reducing high blood pressure than aerobic exercise

A large team of medical researchers affiliated with several institutions in China reports that volunteers who regularly practiced tai chi for a year saw their systolic blood pressure decrease more than volunteers who practiced aerobic exercise for a year. Their study is published in the journal Open JAMA Network.

Prehypertension is a condition leading to hypertension, another name for chronic high blood pressure. Previous research has suggested that aerobic exercises (those that increase breathing and heart rate) may prevent the development of hypertension in people with prehypertension. Tai chi has also been reported to have much the same effect.

For this new study, the researchers wanted to know more about the impact of the two activities over an entire year. To this end, they recruited 349 adult volunteers with prehypertension. The group was split approximately in half, with one subgroup committing to doing tai chi for an hour four times a week for a year, and the other subgroup doing aerobic exercise at the same frequency. The researchers took blood pressure measurements at the start of the study, at six months and then at 12 months.

Researchers found that tai chi had a more significant impact on reducing blood pressure than aerobic exercise. Specifically, they found that volunteers in the tai chi group experienced changes of -7.01 mmHg compared to -4.61 mmHg for those in the aerobic exercise group when tested in an office setting and while walking on a treadmill.

They also found greater reductions in the tai chi group by testing the volunteers’ blood pressure while they slept. As they continued to monitor the volunteers after the study concluded, they found that fewer people in the tai chi group progressed to hypertension than those in the aerobic exercise group.

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