Breathing

The previous chapter was about posture: the thing that influences your health every second of every day. What’s another thing you need to do every second of ever day? Yeah, breathing. It’s another area that fitness guides barely touch upon, even though it’s extremely important. It goes hand in hand with my notes about using your abs for good posture.

The general idea

Many people use their mouth to breathe. This is wrong. Our mouth is for eating, our nose is for breathing.

Studies have shown that mouth breathing is one of the leading causes for issues with breath, stamina, teeth, frequent illness, and more.

Our nose is great at breathing. It also has these great tools for battling bad air and viruses. It provides a more even and controlled airflow. (Mouth breathing often leads to asking too much air. Which results in stomach aches, the feeling of being full, and even farting. Again, speaking from personal experience here. A large part of my stomach troubles turned out to be the result of trying to get too much air with every breath.)

So breathe in through your nose, breathe out through your nose.

Again, you won’t make this a habit by telling yourself “use your nose, dammit!” all day. Make it a habit through targeted exercise. Once or twice a day, simply sit down and breathe through your nose for 5 or 10 minutes. Once you can do that, start singing, or talking, or humming. All the while focusing on breathing through the nose.

Let’s involve abs again

If you practice this, you might notice your abs start doing stuff. That’s good.

Our lungs don’t “request” or “pull” air into them. They simply open up and air automatically flows into them. To breathe out, they compress again to push the air out.

Which muscle should be responsible for this? Your abs. Relax them—which makes your belly flop forward—to let the air in. Don’t try to actively “breathe”. Then compress and tighten them, as much as you can, to push the air out.

This is a good general concept if you want to improve your speaking or singing voice. (Or prevent the issue of “overbreathing”.)

But I tell this due to a more important consequence.

When exercising, breathe in during the easy part, breathe out during the hard part.

For example, let’s say you lift a simple dumbbell. When letting go, or at rest, breathe in. When pulling it up, the hard part of the exercise, the part where you use muscles, breathe out.

Combine the two, and you’ve just learned to manage breath and engage your abs whenever you do some activity. Because, remember, engaging your abs will push the air out.

It’s important to make these states really distinct. Don’t keep your abs engaged when you’re breathing in, or at rest. Because you can’t properly breathe in with your abs tight. Completely relax them. And when it’s time to lift something heavy again? Engage and compress, push the air out.

I’d highly recommend focusing on this first. Pick the simplest exercise you can think of. Maybe even no weight at all, something you can do in your dreams.

Now focus on breathing properly. Engage and relax your abs at the right times. Breathe in and out at the right times. Don’t take more air than you need. (This will lead to a feeling of fullness and sluggishness. You can’t perform that well, because your body is filled with air, like a balloon.)

After a few weeks, it will feel like you didn’t do anything. But you’ll actually have formed a habit that will prevent many issues with exercise and posture along the way.