Fluctuating Blood pressure

[Boconcept]

Hiya

I am a healthy weight 7st 8 and I exercise daily. I play tennis, take long walks and do a lot of aerobic exercise. I've been monitoring my blood pressure which is always very low and almost always under 120/80. I'm concerned because I fitted a blood pressure monitor on my arm while I was exercising and the reading was dangerously high: 233/155. It went back to below 120/80 within 8 minutes but I'm worried about the high reading. Could it be because I was jumping around with the monitor on my arm or not?

[Happyrosie]

When your heart beats, it pumps blood around your body to give it the energy and oxygen it needs. As the blood moves, it pushes against the sides of the blood vessels. The strength of this pushing is your blood pressure. When you exercise, the body needs higher pressure in order to get the blood and thus the oxygen and so on to the muscles.

At 120/80 your blood pressure isn’t “very low” it’s at the high end of normal unless you are in your eighties,

There is no point in using the monitor whilst exercising. The recommended bp levels assume you’ve been resting for about ten minutes.

[Madlegs1]

Definitely!

[Brisk61]

There must be something wrong with the monitor, a sudden spike to that level would cause a collapse. You have a normal B/P , enjoy your healthy life.

[oldhuntress]

As others have indicated you can only check your BP after sitting down for 5 minutes - the fact that you bp spiked when exercising then dropped to normal shows that you heart is strong.