Setu Bandha to help manage high blood pressure

NB: I'm not a medic and if you have high blood pressure, the first place you need to go is to see your doctor. If they agree that exercise might help - and they almost always will - then please use these exercises and see what they do for you. It's always better to go to a live class than to use online information, but if you want to experiment to begin with, that's OK, that's what this is for. Get a taste of the benefits, and then go to a local class and practice, practice, practice! Setu Bandha (bridge pose). This pose gives you the benefits of a slight inversion but without issues to do with balance, since it's very stable. You're also only just bringing your heart higher than your head so it's not putting any great strain on the blood vessels. The bridge pose also opens your chest so you open the area around your heart. Since posture plays a role in stress (you tend to hunch forwards and hold yourself more rigidly when you're stressed) then countering that with a pose to open the area around your heart is going to help relieve some of that stress, and that, in turn, will have an impact on your blood pressure. 1. Lie on your rug or mat and bend your knees so the soles of your feet are flat on the floor, about hip width apart, your arms alongside the body with the palms down. Draw your shoulder blades close together behind your back and draw the tops of the shoulders away from the ears. 2. Inhale there and as you breathe out, push your hips up towards the ceiling. Go as high as feels comfortable, remembering not to let your knees flare out to the sides. Push evenly into the whole of your palms and the whole of the soles of both feet. 3. When you're ready to come out of this pose, do so very slowly, as though you were zipping your spine back down onto the floor, vertebra by vertebra, from the top of the spine down. 4. Relax and see how you feel. You can repeat this two or three times if you feel good doing it.