Blood Pressure Log: How to Keep One (Template Included)

• Date and time — morning vs evening matters; blood pressure follows a daily rhythm.
• Systolic and diastolic — both numbers, exactly as shown. No rounding.
• Pulse — your monitor shows it anyway, and it adds context (see pulse and blood pressure).
• Which arm — stay consistent (use the higher-reading arm), and note it.
• Notes — medication taken or missed, stress, poor sleep, caffeine, exercise, symptoms. This column is where patterns hide.

Record readings immediately. Transcribing from memory an hour later is where most log errors happen — studies of patient-kept logs find a surprising share of misremembered or "improved" numbers.

This layout covers everything a clinician needs. Copy it into a notebook or spreadsheet, one row per reading, two readings per session:

Use it with the standard 7-day schedule — morning and evening, two readings a minute apart each time, day 1 discarded — described in our measurement guide.

Doctors work from averages, not individual rows. At the end of a 7-day run:

1. Cross out day 1 (routine-settling readings run high).
2. Average all remaining systolic values; do the same for diastolic.
3. Optionally, average mornings and evenings separately — a large morning-evening gap is itself useful information.

A home average at or above 135/85 mmHg roughly corresponds to clinic hypertension at 140/90. Check where your average lands on the blood pressure chart — and bring the whole log to your appointment, not just the summary, so your doctor can see the spread.

A paper log works — this template is enough. But after a few weeks, paper starts to cost you: nobody averages 28 readings by hand twice, trends are invisible in a column of digits, and the notebook is never there when the cuff is. An app fixes the boring parts:

• No transcription — point the camera at your monitor and the numbers are read off the display into the log.
• Averages and trends computed for you, with each reading color-coded against the chart categories.
• MAP calculated automatically — the mean arterial pressure figure some clinicians track.
• Doctor-ready export — a clean PDF of your history instead of a photographed notebook page; plus XLSX, CSV, and JSON if you want the raw data.
• Apple Health sync and reminders so morning and evening sessions actually happen.

Whichever you choose, the log you keep consistently beats the perfect one you abandon. Start with what you'll stick to.

If you would rather start from an official form, the major heart authorities publish free printable blood pressure logs — all built around the same morning-and-evening structure as the template above:

• US — the AHA/AMA Target:BP 7-day recording log (PDF)
• UK — the British Heart Foundation’s blood pressure chart and diary, a printable reading chart with a 25-week diary; the NHS home-monitoring protocol it supports is the NICE one our template follows
• Canada — Hypertension Canada’s fillable home blood pressure log (PDF, also available in French)
• Australia — the Heart Foundation’s blood pressure measuring guide and diary
• Germany — the Deutsche Hochdruckliga’s Blutdruckpass (PDF)
• France — the relevé d’automesure sheets on automesure.com, built for the règle des 3
• Japan — free printable 血圧手帳 (blood pressure notebooks) from Kenporen

Whichever form you use, the point is the same: consistent conditions, two readings per sitting, morning and evening, and the average over days. The app keeps the identical structure and computes the averages for you — and its printable report is the digital version of these sheets.