How do you measure your blood pressure so that you can track your progress as you implement my program?

At some point you are going to have to buy a blood pressure monitor. I made the mistake at first of getting one that was too small for my arm. This led to strange measurements.

Each blood pressure monitor will have instructions on where to put it on your arm, and how to position your arm and body while taking the reading. Just follow those instructions.

The advice I want to give is about how to get accurate averages over time. The best system I found was every week over a 3 day period to take measurments. So say Friday, Saturday and Sunday I would measure my blood pressure. On each day I would take 3 measurements. And then average the results. So here is an example:

148/92, 128/95, 145/89
Average: 140/92

And let us say this is the Friday measurement. And then you repeat this for Saturday and Sunday. Then you take the averages for all 3 days, and take the average of that average. What you are doing is smoothing the variation in the readings. As the body fluctuates day to day, even minute to minute with blood pressure.

So imagine if you took only one measurement the whole week, you might think you either made more progress than you have, because the body happened to have lower blood pressure at that moment.. or conversely that you had regressed during the week, because blood pressure happened to be high for you on that day and time when you took the measurement.

What you will get in time is a series of averaged weekly numbers. So you can see your progress over weeks and months. Week 1, Week 2, … Week 10 and so on.

I find a week is a nice unit of time for seeing differences in the body. A month is ideal, but it is nice to measure once a week to keep yourself focused. A day is too short. I can imagine someone obsessively measuring their blood pressure each day, and not seeing any progress day to day. That is just discouraging and pointless.