Wall Squats Are Sitting in a Chair That Isn’t There, and Systolic Pressure Noticed

Adults who did home wall squats three times a week for a month, then cut back to once or twice a week, kept a significantly lower systolic blood pressure for four more weeks. That is the finding of a randomized trial of 100 adults led by Jim Wiles of Canterbury Christ Church University in England. It was published in late September in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.¹⁵

A wall squat is the exercise of sitting in a chair that isn’t there. You lean your back against a wall, bend your knees, and hold still while your thighs file a complaint. It is a kind of isometric exercise, which means holding a fixed position with your muscles tensed. Planks and handgrip squeezes count too.²

The appeal is obvious. The routine needs no gym, no equipment and no special clothing, only a wall, which most homes already have. The researchers wrote that lower-frequency training offers “a pragmatic option for individuals with limited time or adherence challenges.”¹

How the trial worked

The volunteers averaged 37.4 years old. Their systolic pressure (the top number, measured while the heart beats) ran from 120 to 140 mmHg, which is normal to high-normal. None had been diagnosed with high blood pressure, none had ever taken blood pressure medication, and all were nonsmokers who didn’t regularly do structured exercise.²

They were randomly split into a control group and four exercise groups. Every exercise group spent four weeks doing the same home routine three times a week: four wall-squat holds per session, with two minutes of seated rest between holds.²⁵

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After that month, all four exercise groups had significantly lower systolic and diastolic pressure (the bottom number, between beats) than the control group. Their mean arterial pressure, the average pressure in the arteries across a heartbeat, was also lower.²

Then the groups went separate ways for four more weeks. One kept training three times a week, one dropped to twice, one dropped to once, and one stopped.²

What happened when people cut back

At eight weeks, the once- and twice-weekly groups still had significantly lower systolic and mean arterial pressure than the controls. Neither group kept a statistically significant improvement in diastolic pressure.²³

Average systolic drops from the start of the study were 13.73 mmHg for the three-times-a-week group, 6.95 for twice a week and 6.56 for once a week.³ Only the three-times-a-week group also held on to gains in total peripheral resistance (how hard the blood vessels push back against flow) and heart rate variability, a measure of how flexibly the heart responds.²

Quitting entirely undid the work. “The group who had stopped doing the isometric exercises after the initial four-week period showed a reversal of their blood pressure to levels not significantly different from the control group,” Wiles told Newsweek.⁵

What the study suggests, and what it doesn’t

• More often worked best. Three sessions a week gave the biggest and most lasting benefit. The authors wrote that “higher frequencies are required to preserve these benefits and the associated vascular and cardiac autonomic adaptations.”²
• The once-a-week result came after a head start. Everyone first trained three times a week for a month. The trial tested keeping gains at a lower frequency, not starting from scratch with one session a week.²
• Cutting back beat stopping, at least for a month. The maintenance phase lasted only four weeks, and the researchers say longer studies are needed to know whether the benefit holds over months or years.²⁵
• Exercise isn’t the whole picture. Fox News reported a cardiologist’s view that changing your diet may matter even more for blood pressure.⁴

The participants were also a fairly narrow and modest-sized group: healthy, non-smoking adults in their 30s on average, none with diagnosed hypertension.⁴ The results may not apply to older adults, people with high blood pressure or people taking medication for it.

Still, as the researchers put it, the study “offers evidence that lower frequency isometric exercise training can help maintain short-term blood pressure reductions.”¹ The next step is finding out how long short-term lasts.