Effects of progressive muscular relaxation and stretching exercises combination on blood pressure among farmers in rural areas of Indonesia: a randomized study†
Article Category: Original article
Published Online: Dec 30, 2021
Page range: 365 - 374
Received: Feb 14, 2021
Accepted: Mar 26, 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/fon-2021-0036
Keywords
© 2021 Tantut Susanto et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Objective
Maintaining blood pressure (BP) could improve the quality of life among farmers in agricultural health. The study aims to evaluate the effects of progressive muscular relaxation and stretching exercises (SEs) for BP in farmer subjects in rural areas.
Methods
A randomized controlled design was applied for this study. We performed a method, which is the combination of progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) and SEs for participants (30 in the control group and 60 in the intervention group). The intervention group self-practiced PMR and SEs through a video that providing instructions for 15 min. PMR practiced before going to sleeping in the night, and SEs practiced before going to farms in the morning per day for 3-months. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed to measure the difference between systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) as one pre- and post-test comparison of baseline and 3 months data in control and intervention groups.
Results
There were no significant differences between SBP and DBP pre- and post-test in control group (
Conclusions
This pilot study demonstrated effectively to reduce SBP and DBP among farmers using the combination of PMR and SEs in the agricultural health setting.