Stabilize Your Blood Pressure Using Biofeedback – Mackay Rippey with Dave Asprey : 853

<p>Let’s not sugarcoat it; both low blood pressure and high blood pressure are bad for you. With either, you can experience an inability to focus, dizziness, heart disease, and other health problems. You want to find a way to stabilize your blood pressure in the Goldilocks zone–just right.</p><p>Controlling blood pressure is especially important when it comes to heart disease, which is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States. There used to be a significant gap between men and women in the incidence of heart disease, but that gap has closed over the past few decades and now women die of heart disease as frequently as men.</p><p>In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, I brought on an expert to talk about Zona Plus. Mackay Rippey serves on the Medical Advisory Board of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.zona.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Zona Health</a>. He explains how the biofeedback device helps you train your own body to change your blood pressure, using isometric exercise. In this kind of muscle contraction, the muscle is tensed and working, but not actively shortening or lengthening. The Zona Plus looks like a joystick from a fighter airplane with a little digital screen on top. That screen gives you immediate feedback.</p><p>Let's jump right into some of the biochemistry that I found with Zona, Mackay says:</p><p>“I started with the hand grip. So, 30% is the magic Goldilocks percentage for your grip. So, you need to calculate what your grip strength is in the morning. It can vary from day to day and the optimal is 30%. Now, if you think you can calculate 30% just by knowing what you're feeling, you're sadly mistaken. That's why it helps to have a biofeedback device that tells you, "You're at 30%. Oh, and, by the way, you have to hold it for two minutes." So, if you think you can do that for two minutes, you need a feedback device. It just makes your life a lot easier.”</p><p>We discuss the effects of pre-hypertension and hyper