I have high blood pressure as well and this is part of my reasoning for making this change. I don't even understand what sort of negative impact that HBP has on you, but I know it isn't good.
I want to do a cardio stress test. I'll have to look into that. My cardio is not great as at a 140BPM heart rate, I can only maintain about an 8 min km.
Yeah, my buddy had a heart attack a while ago along with some other issues and that really got me started on the road to being healthier. Unless you have some kind of underlying condition you are likely going to be okay if I was able to score as high as I did. Funny thing is, I was thinking "this is going to be easy", I use the treadmill all the time. Turns out, it isn't anything close. They have you walking at an incline that most regular treadmills can't even achieve, then every 30 seconds or so they increase the speed. I was just a touch shy of making it 10 minutes and I was going something like 4.3 mph, but it was a lot more intense than it sounds. They don't tell you your time, they basically just want you to achieve a certain heartrate for a certain amount of time for the test to be valid. If I had known I was so close to hitting the 10 minute mark, I would have pushed harder. My legs were burning and I could barely catch my breath which is why I tapped out.