Lesson 11: What is My Blood Pressure?

I was able to borrow two blood pressure cuffs, one from the university health and wellness department and another from a co-worker whose father had a personal one he allowed us to borrow for the day. If your program didn’t have access to a blood pressure cuff you could perhaps work with your local health department or on site nurse to help you out.

After we discussed the lesson points from the curriculum book, each participant took their resting blood pressure measurements. Next we did our warm up and then started into aerobic activity such as marching in place, jumping jacks, and step touches making sure to incorporate arm movements so we got our heart rates up.   Since we didn’t have individual blood pressure cuffs we did aerobic activity for 2-5 minutes post the warm up before I had my partner pull participants out one by one to check their blood pressure during activity. Since it only takes roughly 1 minute for the blood pressure to be checked, the participant was able to grab a drink of water, see their blood pressure during activity and then jump back into the aerobic activity with the rest of the group. This allowed us to do aerobics for 15-20 minutes total and for all participants to measure their active blood pressure.   We completed the activity with a cool down while incorporating balance exercises and stretching.