If you think there is anything more vital to your health and fitness, go without breathing for the next 5 minutes and let me know if your perspective changes. Right now, you are breathing, but are you doing it properly? Here at The Spot Athletics, we put breathing as the most important factor in determining your health and fitness. We spend a lot of time teaching and coaching our clients on how to do it properly. In this blog I will outline what proper breathing looks like and the life changing effects it has on the body.

Proper Breathing Overview:

No different than eating, everyone must do it to stay alive. However, there is a huge difference in your health between eating fruits and vegetables and eating only Twinkies. It’s not about merely breathing, but breathing properly. To breathe properly you must keep your chest still and breathe low into your belly. We find this is helped by placing your hand below your belly button to feel the air move into that part of your belly first. This type of breathing is known as diaphragmatic breathing but instead of using fancy words, we simply call it belly breathing. Once the air fills low into your belly it will start to fill the rest of your abdomen and eventually you will feel the air starting to lift your chest slightly. Once this happens, it is end of your belly breath. As the air fills your abdomen, you should feel it filling all 360 degrees. This means that a proper belly breath can be seen as parts of the lower back moving, as well as the front. The key to belly breathing is the sequence. The lower belly must fill first, and then the air moves up the body as the cylinder is filled with air. However, most people in todays world are breathing in the exact opposite of a proper breath and breathing into their chest. Breathing where the chest raises first is the nutritional equivalent of eating nothing but Twinkies.

Along with breathing into your belly, you must breathe using only your nose. This is the most high functioning way for your body to operate. In cultures that still live in their indigenous ways, everyone breathes in and out their nose only. However, in our culture, there are countless people who are chest and mouth breathers and as you will read, this wreaks havoc on your health.

How breathing got so messed up:

From an evolutionary standpoint, we have been living in our current environment for 4/10,000 of a percent of time. This is hardly enough time to adapt to an environment. Our bodies were designed as hunters and gatherers, not as office workers that sit in artificial light all day. For this reason we are constantly getting stress signals that our bodies interpret as “a lion is going to eat me”. This constant stress and signaling to the body shifts the way a person breathes. Breathing is the most important way our body regulates our nervous system and thusly, our health. If you watch infants and toddlers breathe, they only breathe in their belly and through their nose. That is because they have not been overtaken by the daily stresses that start as soon as kids enter school age. We are not going to change the environment we live in, but we must change the way we react with our breathing to the environment or the quality of our lives will be greatly affected.

The Science:

Many studies have shown that nasal belly breathing stabilizes the autonomic nervous system (stress management), decreases blood pressure and improves immune function, digestion and sleep. Improper breathing has also been linked to the rise in ADHD, anxiety, obesity, depression and many other issues plaguing our society today. As if this wasn’t enough reasons to get you to understand how important proper breathing is, it also has a huge impact on your performance in athletic competition.

Going into every research study on how awful mouth breathing and chest breathing is would include thousands of studies. The effects of not breathing nasally and/or diaphragmatically have been well documented. Even with an abundance of research, we still find this to be one of the things people have never been coached or educated on. It is literally the most essential thing to your health and well being, which is why we spend so much time coaching and educating it at The Spot Athletics.

The Solution:

In our experience people have been chest breathing for so long that simply teaching them how to breath properly is a big undertaking. However, it is something that will yield the biggest results in terms of improvements in health. We have had people walk in with years of lower back pain and after their first session of being taught to breathe properly, for the first time in their adult lives, their back pain goes away.

Being mindful of how you breathe is the best way to improve your breathing mechanics. Now, doing that during every waking hour is a little much for most people, so we recommend you focus on 3 key times of day.

Those times are:

During stress
During stressful times, the more you can nasally belly breathe, the less stressful those times will feel. Also, the better decisions you will make during those times.
During exercise
When exercising, make sure you start and end every workout with some really good, mindful nasal belly breathes. At The Spot Athletics, this is something that is worked into every session we coach, but if you don’t train here, make sure you are doing this on your own.
At bedtime.
Lastly, before you go to sleep. When you lay down in bed, we recommend getting in 10-20 good, deep, nasal belly breathes. You will be surprised at how much this will impact the quality of your sleep. Remember, you don’t get better from working out, you get better from recovering from working out, and you can’t do that well without proper breathing.

Conclusion:

We know it sounds simple, but trust us, almost no one that walks in our facility is breathing properly. It is the simplest and most important thing that you can do for your health. It is also extremely simple. Most people want the answers to their health to be super complicated, but in our experience, the simplest solutions are usually the best ones. Be warned though, simple does not mean easy. We like to say the simplest thing in the world is squatting 1,000lbs. You just pick it up, go down and come up. However, that simple task is not very easy. Breathing is the same way. It takes a lot of practice, mindfulness and coaching to get it right. However, when it starts to just happen naturally in the proper way, it will literally change your life.