Chapter 13: Breathing - The Practice of Natural Movement

“And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.”

 

—Black Elk

 

Breathing is a natural movement. It doesn’t involve the motion of your body through space; it’s an internal movement your body needs to do from the moment you are born to the moment you die. Most of us take it for granted, but if you talk to anyone with breathing issues, they will tell you that they would give anything to be able to breathe easily.

Breathing is the control of ventilation and the set of physiological mechanisms involved in generating the physical movement of air into the lungs (inhalation) and out of them (exhalation), which is also known as gas exchange. Breathing is responsible for cellular respiration, which is the biochemical process that allows oxygen from outside air to be transported to the cells in the body. The cells use the oxygen and leave the carbon dioxide, which is transported back outside the body. (I describe cellular respiration in more detail later in this chapter.)

Fortunately, breathing happens unconsciously through the autonomic nervous system. However, the automatic nature of breathing makes it easy to assume that it does not have to be questioned, which makes it a component of movement efficiency that is too often overlooked. Very few people are aware that they can consciously train to develop an ability to control how they ventilate and improve the efficiency of their breathing patterns even when they are not thinking about it. However, breathing is movement skill—even though it’s internal rather than external—which means that it’s like other natural movements in that it can be methodically and mindfully trained.

The benefits and potency of mindful, controlled breathing has been known and practiced throughout history and throughout the world. You can reprogram, improve, and master the pattern of breathing, strengthen the respiratory system, and transform cellular respiration. Aside from supporting greater levels of health and vitality, breath control used in movement practice supports energy systems, relaxation, mental clarity, alertness or calmness, recovery, and even coordination. Needless to say, breathing well is great for your quality of life, but controlling breathing in motion supports greater levels of performance, and without it a crucial aspect of your movement competency is missing.

So, what can go wrong with the most natural movement of all—breathing? Before I tell you anything, do these two quick self-assessments while breathing exactly the way you normally do. Don’t take extra big breaths because that would defeat the point of this self-assessment:

• Count how many breath cycles (one inhalation and one exhalation) you do within one minute.

• Place one hand on your chest and the other one on your abdomen just below your sternum. Just breathe as you normally do and feel what part (or parts) is moving or moving first. How much does it move? What direction does it move? Are you reflexively breathing through your nose or mouth?

For now, just remember what you have observed about your current breathing so you can compare it with the patterns I describe and/or recommend later.

Inefficient Breathing

 

Chest breathing is a breathing pattern that is done through the upper chest and respiratory muscles. It is what we all do when effort becomes very intense and we’re breathing hard with our chests expanding to a much greater amplitude than when we’re at rest. The problem is that we might chest breathe superficially (with a small amplitude) even when we’re not doing any physical effort. When we chest breathe, our bellies are pulled inward and only our upper chests expand as we inhale. Clavicular breathing—which also normally occurs only with high intensity efforts—is even worse; in that case, only the collarbone and shoulders rise while the rest of the thorax remains motionless. With such shallow breathing, only a small amount of air flows, and it reaches only the upper lobes of our lungs, where less blood flow occurs. The result of this shallow breathing is poor oxygen absorption by the blood, and an oxygen deficit for the tissues that need it.

Consequently, over-breathing ensues. If we over-breathe (also known as hyperventilating), we continuously breathe through the upper chest with short, small, rapid breaths. It’s an unconscious compensatory attempt to keep the body properly oxygenated. A person who chest breathes will always end up over-breathing.

The breathing pattern that combines chest breathing and over-breathing is deemed “normal” only because most people are accustomed to it; however, it’s an inefficient way to breathe. It feels weak, it’s neither relaxed nor relaxing, and it’s very unsatisfying. You might not even be able to breathe deeply when you want to. If you look at a person lying down with closed eyes who is breathing shallowly in this way, it is very likely that the person is actually neither relaxed nor asleep; the person is probably anxious about something and unable to fall asleep.

A normal, healthy breathing rate should be, on average, 12 to 14 breaths (that is one inhalation and one exhalation) per minute. Although trained individuals can use less than 8 breaths a minute, most people can take up to 20 breaths or more per minute. A person who takes 10 breaths per minute breathes about 15,000 breaths a day. With 20 breaths per minute, the person is breathing 30,000 breaths each day.

With more breaths, a significantly greater volume of oxygen than is needed by the body is taken in, which paradoxically impairs proper oxygenation while accelerating oxidative damage and aging. Physical signs that accompany over-breathing are breathing through the mouth, regularly sighing, or regularly needing to take large breaths.

Movement behaviors are often unconsciously influenced, if not determined by, family, mindset, or culture. Just like the way you stand or walk, breathing is mostly learned unconsciously through mimicry, and you might have inherited the way you breathe from your parents. In addition, countless variables may negatively affect breathing, both mental (negative emotions, anxiety, mood swings) and physical (sitting too much, sitting in bad positions). Suffering from lack of movement, breathing polluted air, smoking, eating junk food, becoming sleep deprived, being overweight, inflammation, and general fatigue are some of the main variables that might factor in and lead to the pattern of over-breathing. Pregnancy also makes it harder to breath abdominally, and months of shallow breathing can result in a pattern of inefficient breathing that persists even after childbirth.

When you default to relying on superficial respiratory muscles to breathe, the otherwise primary respiratory muscles, such as the diaphragm and transverse abdominis, are weakened. The stabilization provided to the pelvic floor, spine, or sternum is also weakened, which has negative implications to your posture and to your ability to control breath through movement. Think how your performance can be impaired when you start moving, especially when you move vigorously!

Needless to say, improving your breathing patterns, starting with learning to breathe both abdominally and through the nose and to bring your breathing rate and volume to normal, helps correctly oxygenate your tissues, organs, and brain; reduces stress; and increases your levels of health and energy both when you move and don’t move. If your breathing isn’t optimally efficient yet, making it a real skill is the first priority and most potent way to improve your movement, physical performance, and whole life.

The importance of inhaling through the nose (nasal breathing)—except when the intensity of an effort makes it too hard—cannot be understated. Indeed, science indicates that breathing in through the nose, not the mouth, positively influences the brain and our cognitive functions, including improving the way we process emotions and memory. However, nasal breathing isn’t actually a technique in the sense that all that is required to do is to keep your mouth closed.

NOTE

 

To read more about the positive influences of breathing through the nose, read “Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function” (www.jneurosci.org/content/36/49/12448).

 

Breath Control and Benefits

 

Breath competency means having optimum breathing mechanics and a highly functional respiratory system, both when you’re at rest and when you’re physically active. Natural, efficient breathing is centered in the abdomen—specifically in the diaphragm.

No less than ten muscles can be used for inhalation, but the diaphragm is the primary respiratory muscle we need to use. It is large and dome-shaped, and it extends across the bottom of the thoracic cavity (which contains the heart and lungs) to separate it from the abdominal cavity. When the diaphragm contracts, it pulls away from the ribs and creates an internal depression or vacuum effect that draws air into the lower part of the lungs, which are right at the base of the rib cage. The lower lobes of the lungs are where the greatest amount of blood flow occurs, which means that diaphragmatic breathing dramatically optimizes ventilation and oxygenation. This type of breathing has many obvious physical and mental benefits in both day-to-day life and in athletic and real-life physical performance.

Breath control starts with the ability to breathe slowly and quietly through the abdomen (and through the nose) when at rest. Though it is also known as diaphragmatic breathing, I prefer the term abdominal breathing because the transverse abdominal muscle (or transverse*) balances the action of the diaphragm by enabling exhalation. Another term for abdominal breathing is deep breathing, but that might imply that we must take deep breaths, which is not necessarily the case when breathing abdominally. Breathing abdominally isn’t exclusively about the diaphragm but about the abdominal area generally speaking. Thanks to a mechanism called “baroreflex sensitivity” that regulates blood pressure via heart rate, slow abdominal breathing lowers your heart rate and blood pressure which signals your brain that all is fine and positively influences relaxation at a hormonal level (in the parasympathetic nervous system). Reduced stress, improved mental relaxation and focus, lower inflammation (and associated discomfort or pain) in the body, more restorative sleep, and the diminution (or even disappearance of) breathing-related sleep disorders are some of the direct benefits of keeping your breath slow and relaxed when at rest.

From a movement practice and physical activity perspective, breath control is the ability to breathe at a rate with an amplitude and timing that adapts best to your current movement pattern. Some of the benefits include the following:

• Promotes improved cellular respiration, which turns into a more efficient use of existing levels of metabolic conditioning

• Supports greater postural and positional control (bracing)

• Provides greater ability to sustain high-intensity physical activity (by improving ventilation, muscular relaxation, and energy metabolism)

• Promotes faster recovery, including in between bouts of high-intensity activity

• Helps with motivation and overcoming fear or negative emotions

• Participates in efficient thermoregulation and immunity

• Supports breath-holding whenever necessary (such as when you’re under water or surrounded by smoke or toxic air)

Frequent, conscious practice of efficient breathing patterns—both when at rest and, of course, when practicing movement—reprograms the part of your brain responsible for your respiratory system to efficient breathing patterns, making it a healthier behavior both when you are and aren’t paying attention. Of course, this does not shield you from involuntary, normal, and healthy reflexes that temporarily modify your breathing, such as sneezing, sighing, burping, or coughing. It also doesn’t prevent alcohol, medication, weather, dust, smoke, pregnancy, occasional negative emotions, or physical activity from modifying your breathing pattern. However, breathing control helps you minimize how those things affect you, or for how long they affect you, and it enables you to return to normal, slow, relaxed breathing faster.

Before You Start Practicing

 

1 Breathing is and should stay simple and straightforward in the way it is explained and practiced.

2 Seek the purest air you can. The exercises can help you develop great ventilation, breath control, and cellular respiration, but if you breathe polluted, toxic air, your health and energy levels will be negatively affected.

3 Intentionally modifying your habitual breathing pattern can cause a minor physical or emotional response that initially might not feel good. Uncomfortable symptoms can include mild and temporary light-headedness or dizziness, which is why it is best to first practice while you’re in a ground position (lying, sitting, kneeling). Don’t practice breathing while standing, moving—or worst—driving until you have practiced enough to not experience any dizziness. If you feel dizzy, stop until you have regained clarity. Just don’t overdo it at first.

4 Establishing the consistency of breathing efficiency when at rest—abdominally and through the nose—is your main objective. You may practice breathing exercises every morning and in the evening, or you can do it while you’re sitting and doing other activities.

5 As with any exercise, you can do breathing drills in sets, and you can practice other movements in between breathing sets. Keep focusing on body sensations and quality rather than the number of sets you do.

6 You only need to practice the following drills if you encounter issues performing them correctly or easily. After you’ve mastered breathing efficiency while at rest, establishing breath control while in motion is your next step and the ultimate goal of breathing practice. Of course, you can always return to practicing the drills while at rest.

Maintaining breath control while performing complex movements and/or at high intensity will be the ultimate level of breath control. As a matter of fact, if you can only maintain breath control while in a resting position, but not when moving swiftly through complex environments, do you even have any breath control at all?

To the practice!

Control of Abdominal Breathing

 

Your primary goal is to make sure that you are breathing with the abdomen (or abdominal muscles) instead of the chest. You first need to locate the diaphragm by feel and make sure its movement is right.

 

1 While in a sitting or kneeling position, place one hand on your chest and the other on your upper abdomen just below the rib cage (as in the self-assessment test you previously did). If you’re lying on your back, an alternative to using your hands is to use two books for feedback: one placed on your chest and the other on your upper abdomen. You may close your eyes to enhance your perception. (Stand only if you are not subject to dizziness.)

2 Pay attention to the movement you feel as you breathe. If you perceive a little movement at chest level and most of the movement in your abdomen (with your abdomen pushing your hand away as you inhale), bravo! You’re already naturally breathing abdominally. However, if you perceive the most movement at chest level with little or no movement in your lower hand (the one placed on your abdomen) as you breathe, or if your abdomen pulls in first when you breathe in, but you do feel movement and expansion in your chest, you’re a chest breather. It’s also likely that the number of breath cycles you counted during the self-assessment was high, which indicates over-breathing. Let’s fix this.

3 Start breathing out—either through your nose or mouth—by gently contracting your abdominal muscles. As you do, the transverse contracts as the diaphragm relaxes. You should feel that your hand is drawn in as your abdomen pulls in. Don’t force your exhale. Now let your diaphragm take over and expand so you can inhale through the nose, pushing your abdomen and hand out. You want to feel that your chest is completely relaxed, meaning you’re not engaged in any active breathing effort. If your spontaneous reflex is to raise your chest and use your superficial, upper respiratory muscles, resist it. Visualize breathing as something taking place primarily lower and deeper in your abdomen. Your upper hand should experience only barely perceptible movement from your chest.

Only your lower ribs should slightly and passively expand sideways because of the inflation of your lower lungs due to the action of the diaphragm.

Keep breathing this way for some time, simply making sure that your chest stays relaxed and still and the in-and-out motion of your abdomen is constant. Once you start to control your abdominal breathing, you may relax your lower hand and keep only your upper hand on your chest; as long as there is no movement in your upper chest, you are breathing abdominally. You may eventually release both hands once you feel that your abdominal breathing is consistent. You may occasionally take a deep chest breath for the purpose of perceiving the sharp contrast between abdominal and chest breathing.

Now that you have identified the movement of your diaphragm contracting and pushing out as you inhale and relaxing and pulling in as you exhale, I’m going to explain how to keep expanding your understanding and control of breathing.

Perception of Abdominal Diaphragmatic Power

 

This drill is the same as the first one, except you need a partner who can give you honest feedback and help you better perceive the diaphragmatic respiratory power that lies within your abdomen.

 

1 Place a firm hand on your partner’s abdomen (below the rib cage/sternum) and a light one on the chest. Your arm should be fully extended so that you can apply downward pressure gradually and effortlessly simply by leaning forward onto your hands a little more. Your partner should relax his diaphragm to breathe out; his abdomen will pull in and lower your hand.

2 Your partner should contract the diaphragm—not the abdominal muscles—so the abdomen pushes out against your hand and elevates it. Obtain your partner’s permission to shift more body weight onto your lower hand each time he inhales, which generates increased resistance to the motion of the diaphragm and helps your partner realize how powerful the diaphragm is.

If your partner breathes through the chest (make sure not to forcefully prevent this), he is either unconsciously reverting to an inefficient breathing pattern or doesn’t trust the strength of the diaphragm, unless you are applying too much force too soon onto his diaphragm and causing discomfort.

Control of Amplitude and Strength

 

Now it’s time to experience how much amplitude, or to what length, you can inhale and exhale abdominally. You do this by forcefully exhaling to the greatest extent you can so that you fully depress your lungs, and then you contract the diaphragm to the greatest extent you can (but without following up by expanding the rib cage using the upper-chest respiratory muscles).

At this point, you’re not concerned with generating maximum air intake; you’re only trying to reach full abdominal inhale and exhale. By increasing the amplitude of your abdominal in-breath, you naturally increase the amplitude of your diaphragmatic out-breath. To achieve this, first relax the diaphragm and exhale as you normally would, which is far from reaching the maximum exhale you could actually reach. At the moment between the end of the exhale and the beginning of the inhale, start contracting your exhalation muscles more. (With forced exhalation, a total of no less than eight muscles are involved; it’s not just the transverse!) It should feel like tightening your belly in public to make your belly look smaller than it is, except that you keep pulling and pulling inward as long and as far as possible. Pull your whole waist area inward until you sense intense tightness and it feels that your lungs are absolutely empty and your rib cage is significantly reduced in size. You may voluntarily produce a sound with your throat as you exhale if it helps you emphasize and strengthen your exhale. When you feel that your lungs are completely empty—they aren’t, but it will feel like it—resume inhaling normally until you reach the point between inhale and exhale where you would normally stop inhaling. At that point, keep pushing your abdomen out to the point that you cannot push it out any farther. Your belly should look as big as you can make it because your diaphragm is inflated to its fullest extent, which pushes your abdomen out as far as possible.

Through this drill of forced inhalation and exhalation, you might experience tightness, discomfort, or gentle stress in areas of your body that you might not have suspected were involved in breathing. This is because abdominal respiratory muscles play a fundamental role in stabilizing both your lower spine and pelvis through intra-abdominal pressure. (This effect is called “bracing,” and I talk about it more in Part 4.) With forced inhalation and exhalation, both your diaphragm and your transverse contract to the maximum, which strongly pulls on your lower ribs, sternum, spine, and pelvic area. It also exerts pressure on your organs, which you might not be used to.

WARNING

 

If you experience an unpleasant sensation, either stop or reduce the strength and amplitude of your abdominal breathing. You need progressive practice to fortify your abdominal respiratory muscles as well as the diverse tissues involved in or affected by a powerful use of these muscles. In any case, bear in mind that this drill is for “perception” only; it helps you to better feel and use your abdominal breathing muscles. In reality, when in movement, you will rarely reach full abdominal inhale and exhale, which I talk a little more about at the end of this chapter.

As for the strengthening of all the muscles and tissues involved in abdominal breathing, it takes place primarily with abdominal breathing applied while in movement and during physical exertion.

 

Control of Rhythm

 

Now let’s move on to contracting and relaxing the diaphragm and transverse alternately at diverse speeds and amplitude, which helps you generate any breathing rhythm you want. Practice the following breathing exercises, making sure to breathe in through your nose.

Slow Breathing

The primary goal is to fix over-breathing and reprogram your unconscious respiratory pattern to slow (or at least slower) breathing when at rest. Practice slowing down your breath—both the inhale and exhale—as much as you can, but do it without holding your breath. The out-breath is generally easier to slow down; therefore, the time you spend exhaling will usually be longer than the time you spend inhaling. You can measure your progress by looking at a clock and counting how many breaths you take within a minute. Make your first objective to breathe in and out no more than ten times a minute. Ultimately, you could go as low as a single breath each minute.

Though it is not actually breath-holding, this slow breathing is a potent way to improve your cellular respiration. However, it is better to aim at reaching a point where you can sustain a minimal number of breaths per minute (for at least ten minutes) rather than breathing only once per minute and then having to interrupt the exercise because you are huffing and puffing after sixty grueling seconds.

In any case, slow breathing will not just help you with cellular respiration and ingraining a slower breathing pattern; you will rapidly feel its tremendously calming benefits, which themselves can become quite addictive.

Hyperventilation

This drill is the exact opposite of the Slow Breathing Drill, and it is basically a form of voluntary, exaggerated over-breathing. The difference between this drill and unconscious hyperventilation is that you do this drill abdominally rather than superficially at chest level. The drill teaches you to become able to rapidly dissociate the tension-relaxation action of the diaphragm and transverse muscle while maintaining a quick turnover. Consequently, it becomes quite challenging to remain in perfect control of your abdominal breathing pattern without getting confused and reverting to chest breathing.

As you do this drill, it’s a good idea to place your hands on your abdomen and chest so that you get instant feedback if your breathing pattern begins to elevate to the chest. Start accelerating your breathing progressively until you breathe as fast as two breath cycles per second (at least one hundred per minute), which is a very high rate that you can’t sustain very long. Obviously, the faster you breathe, the more the amplitude and duration of each breath must be reduced.

You don’t need to do this drill for longer than thirty seconds at a time. Once you can steadily maintain such a quick abdominal breathing pattern for about half a minute without interruption, confusion, erratic rhythm, or chest breathing, you can stop practicing.

Free Rhythm

Now that you can breathe long and slow as well as short and fast, you can imagine that you are a “breath drummer” and play with changes in breath rhythm. In this drill, you breathe and intentionally mix short, long, slow, or fast inhales and exhales, alternating them at will. You may accentuate the noise it makes through your nose or throat to make it more audible and “musical.”

This drill promotes true control of abdominal breathing, and with it you can synchronize your breath with specific movement or effort at will.

Reaching Maximum Lung Capacity

 

After you’ve worked through the Slow Breathing, Hyperventilation, and Free Rhythm Drills, you can begin to learn to use the capacity of your rib cage to the fullest, which, when combined with abdominal breathing, enables greater air intake whenever you need it. Greater air intake in this case means greater air volume per inhale, which does not necessarily mean increasing your breathing rate, depending on the practical reason why you are expanding the chest. In this case, greater air intake is different than over-breathing, which is when an excessive number of small air intakes leads to an overall excessive amount of oxygen inhaled.

The ability to expand your rib cage optimally is natural and useful as you engage in bouts of high-intensity movement. It has the following benefits:

• Helps you through the effort, which increases breathing rate

• Helps you recover faster from effort, which tends to return breathing rate to normal

• Makes it possible for you to hold your breath when necessary, which decreases your breathing rate

You are not substituting abdominal breathing with chest breathing, nor are you reverting to superficial chest breathing in these situations; you’re prolonging and expanding breathing thoracically, always starting with abdominal breathing (at a faster rate) and continuing with filling the lungs all the way to the top by using your upper respiratory muscles.

The objective of the following drills is to enhance your perception of the three-dimensional nature of the expansion of your rib cage and the “spaces” in which the expansion takes place, especially the sides and back of the rib cage. It’s a common belief that the rib cage expands only to the front (think of a chest being puffed out), but the reality is that your rib cage expands all the way around, even though your breathing may be too weak and shallow for it to be significant and for you to notice it. The “rounded” expansion of the rib cage already happens when you take a deep abdominal breath, though it is less perceptible in the back and front (chest) and more detectable in the sides because most inflation occurs in the lower lungs, which pushes the lower ribs out. After you have reached the limit of your diaphragmatic inhale, you should be able to expand your rib cage significantly to the side, back, and front for maximum lung capacity.

The more flexible your rib cage is—more specifically, the more flexibility you have in your thoracic spine, which involves the mobility of both the spine and thorax—the more room you have for your lungs to expand and reach full capacity. Many natural movements, including but not limited to crawling, rolling, hanging, and lifting loads overhead, contribute to making or keeping the thoracic spine supple, which consequently enables you to breathe more freely. You may also practice partial or full thoracic expansions as a separate drill to develop even greater thoracic mobility and volume.

WARNING

 

Like forcefully breathing abdominally, forcefully breathing thoracically challenges the muscles and tissues involved in the upper respiratory complex, and these drills can cause discomfort. Greater air intakes can also make you light-headed. Make sure to pay attention to warning signals and sensations, and pause or reduce the intensity of practice whenever something doesn’t feel comfortable.

 

Start each drill with a firm, but not forced, full exhale followed by a full diaphragmatic inhale. In each area you focus on, notice the significant difference in volume between the full exhale and inhale.

Coastal Breathing (Lower Ribs)

 

1 Place your hands around your lower ribs and gently apply pressure. You may extend your thumbs toward your kidneys/back to get more feedback from all around your lower ribs. Fully deflate your lower lungs.

2 Deeply inhale through the diaphragm while constantly maintaining a bit of resistance against the ribs with your hands but allow your lower ribs to reach maximum expansion to the sides.

Back Breathing

The back is the space where the rib cage can expand the most and where you can potentially make the most gains in lung capacity. This explains why track cyclists can breathe quite effectively; their hunched-over position prevents their chests from expanding much but allows the back of their rib cages to expand fully.

 

1 From a standing position (you may also sit or kneel) and while keeping your spine straight, press your forearms tightly against each other and against your chest to prevent it from expanding. First exhale deeply (but not fully), then fully inhale (reaching full abdominal inhale, which is the point at which you cannot breathe in more through the diaphragm), which should give you a mild sensation of expansion of your rib cage in the back. Now, using your upper respiratory muscles, allow your rib cage to expand to the back as much as you can. If you have good mobility in the back of your rib cage, your back will look rounded—not because your spine is flexed but because your rib cage is fully inflated in the back.

2 Lie down in a prone position as a partner applies firm pressure on your upper back with their open hands (position may change with each inhale). Exhale deeply (but not fully), then take a full abdominal inhale that makes you feel your abdomen push against the ground. Your partner’s resistance against the expansion of the back of your rib cage will be evident if you really focus on inflating that space. You will feel that your chest wants to expand as well, but it is made difficult by the ground.

Chest Breathing

Expanding the chest is something everyone knows how to do reflexively, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your chest expansion.

 

1 Bend at your hips and place your hands above your knees to support your torso. Extend your upper spine as if a hand was pushing against it. Exhale, breathe abdominally, and then expand your chest as much as you can as you inhale. You should notice that your clavicles move slightly, enabling you to fill the top third of your lungs. While the movement in your collarbone area takes place whenever you are fully expanding your chest, you might feel it more this time because of the position you’re holding and because you’re focusing on this particular perception.

Bracing and Resistance Breathing

Resistance breathing, also known as inspiratory muscle training (IMT), is an effective way to increase diaphragm strength and endurance to help you maintain efficient breathing longer during effort, especially at high intensity. It also supports the improvement of cellular respiration. If you are already adept at abdominal breathing, resistance breathing occurs naturally during physical exertion when the abdominal wall is under great tension (such as when you’re lifting or carrying heavy loads, power jumping, or grappling from your back). It’s a reflex—and technique—called “bracing” that helps support lower spine stability. Despite the great tension, both the diaphragm and the transverse must keep functioning optimally without reverting to chest breathing. However, it’s one thing to be able to breathe abdominally when you’re at rest and you’re paying attention, but it’s a whole different animal to maintain abdominal breathing as you make swift changes in position, movement patterns, or intensity of effort, which is often the case in Natural Movement. To avoid becoming a chest breather when you’re moving, you must start by developing the reflex and strength to maintain diaphragmatic breathing under abdominal tension—in other words, you develop an ability to “brace.” It must become a reflex because during adaptable movement, you might need to prioritize attention to other aspects of your physical action or effort, such as anticipation, timing, precision and so forth. Bracing should reflexively take place at a degree of tension that’s dependent on the intensity of the effort and how much support the lower spine needs to remain stable as you move.

You can already replicate this type of demand and enhance your abdominal breathing strength and endurance with the following Abdominal Resistance Drill. (Note that the Abdominal Resistance Drill doesn’t improve cellular respiration unless you combine it with the Mouth Resistance Drill.) You need to keep the abdominal wall—the web of abdominal muscles and tissues—contracted to stabilize your lower spine as well as maintain the sitting balancing position regardless of whether your diaphragm is contracting or relaxing. So, whereas the diaphragm can and must relax fully upon exhalation, the transverse and other abdominal muscles must remain constantly contracted in this position—not only when you exhale. When the diaphragm contracts as you inhale, it must do so while pushing against the resistance of your abdominal muscles, which is a great way to strengthen the diaphragm.

If you can mindfully master abdominal control under very tense abdominal contraction when you’re in a controlled position, you are more likely to be able to do the same as you engage in more dynamic movement that involves tense abdominal contraction. Obviously, mastering control under tense contraction also makes it even easier to breathe abdominally when tension is light or nonexistent.

Abdominal Resistance

 

1 Assume a balancing seated position with both legs off the ground and all your body weight on your rear, which creates great abdominal tension. While holding this position, breathe abdominally only. You may place your hands on your abdomen and chest to assess that you are able to maintain abdominal breathing without reverting to chest breathing. Given the tension, you should notice that the amplitude of the movement of your abdomen is not as big as when you aren’t experiencing additional abdominal tension. You may add some front or side rocking motion while doing this, and you also may change the rhythm of your breathing. Pause when it becomes difficult to maintain the position or breathing pattern.

Mouth Resistance

Another way to train inspiratory muscles is to impose a resistance to air flow, either by using a device (which could be as simple as an empty pencil shaft) or by pursing your lips to make it more difficult for air to enter your lungs. The resistance happens at the entry point of the breath, which achieves two benefits:

• It strengthens your respiratory muscles because you need to forcefully, slowly, and continuously draw air until you can fill your lungs. If you emphasize the diaphragm, it will be strengthened by this exercise. If you breathe with your upper respiratory muscles, those will strengthen. You can do this training from any position or even while moving slowly, such as when walking. What matters is the amount of resistance to breathing.

• It improves cellular respiration, which is explained in the next section.

Cellular Respiration

I defined cellular respiration at the beginning of this chapter and explained that efficient ventilation mechanics are the priority way to drastically improve cellular ventilation.

Regardless of the mechanics of your ventilation, both high-intensity and endurance training improves overall metabolic conditioning, including cellular respiration. You also can improve cellular respiration through mouth resistance breathing, such as the last drill I described (or through breath-holding exercises). Because resistance breathing slows down your breathing rate significantly, you need to be patient to get the oxygen you need. If you also slow down your exhale, the impact and benefit on cellular respiration is even greater, resembling the benefit of breath holding. Whereas you aren’t actually holding your breath, significantly slowing down ventilation challenges cellular respiration, forcing it to adapt.

By exhaling slowly and keeping air in your lungs over a longer period, less oxygen is available to your tissues, which significantly optimizes your use of oxygen in two ways. You will adapt to

• Extract more oxygen for a given volume of air

• Transport oxygen faster to the tissues (organs, muscles, cells) that need it

But that’s not all. When you slow down breathing (or hold your breath), oxygen in your body is used and turned to carbon dioxide (CO2), which accumulates in your body until you finally breathe out. By delaying the exhale (because you are busy struggling to inhale or because you are holding your breath), you build a higher tolerance threshold for CO2, which is very helpful in challenging efforts, such as endurance or anaerobic efforts. This higher tolerance can really help boost performance.

Breath-holding is another type of breath training that is especially important for aquatic locomotion and competency, especially diving or swimming under water. It can also be very handy in cases of air toxicity. In my opinion, it’s quite important to develop a decent ability to hold your breath for practical real-world reasons and not just for the sake of optimizing overall physical performance. A minimum of three minutes is a good goal, but breath-holding for duration requires training methods and protocols beyond the scope of this book. You may experiment on your own, and improved breathing mechanics will help you greatly.

Breathing in Movement

 

Your ability to use and synchronize breathing with any type of movement and physical effort determines how much control you have over your breathing. If you have breath control in a comfortable resting position but lose it when performing complex and intense movement, then do you actually possess breathing control?

Breathing supports mindful movement, relaxation, as well as positional control of the lower spine and pelvis, which in turn supports better position and proper timing in executing the right movement sequence of any particular technique. Breathing also helps you use your energy systems more efficiently.

To develop breathing control while in motion, paying attention is the most important factor, of course, as your attention can easily wander to other aspects of your activity—such as the detail of a specific technique you are trying to learn or improve, the changing environment you navigate, or the sheer willpower needed to achieve an intense physical effort. Because your focus can so easily stray from your breathing, it is important to start with relatively easy movements, efforts, and environments and increase those variables progressively. So, you start with only breathing and add all other variables incrementally while maintaining breathing control. For instance, a great breathing/moving practice is to do a variety of ground movements at low intensity as you maintain abdominal breathing. Whereas normally your breathing should synchronize with your movement, when starting to practice breathing control together with movement, you should place breathing at the core of the practice and align your movements to consistent abdominal breathing.

The main issues of breathing in movement are to revert to chest breathing, over-breathing, and having frequent, unwanted, and prolonged moments of unconscious apnea (breath-holding). Overall, you should focus on maintaining abdominal breathing without being preoccupied by the moment you inhale or exhale. This is true for cyclical movements such as running, where the effort is uninterruptedly shared between both legs at a high cadence, which renders irrelevant the decision of optimum timing for inhaling or exhaling.

That said, synchronicity does matter and can support movement efficiency. While the relevance of such synchronicity is very clear when swimming (when your face is intermittently immersed in water), it also matters on land when the effort is more intense and the timing more specific.

Last but not least, a very important consideration that you must take into account is that inhaling has a tensing effect, whereas exhaling has a relaxing effect, which can be used to your advantage. You can use inhaling before you “load” your body before an intense muscular contraction, and you can even briefly hold your breath to maintain the tensing effect as you produce significant levels of force, and then you relax by exhaling immediately after the contraction. You also can choose the timing of exhalation with the moment when you need the most relaxation in a movement.

However, inhaling or exhaling too hard and too deeply can turn those tensing and relaxing effects against your performance if they happen at the wrong time. As I have briefly mentioned previously, when in movement you should rarely reach full abdominal inhale and exhale unless it is necessary, just as you will rarely have to fully use your lung capacity or exhale to a maximum. In fact, efficient breathing in most movements and physical efforts implies maintaining a constant mild compression (or “bracing”) of your abdominal area and avoiding prolonged inhale and exhale to the point they reach maximum abdominal amplitude. I can’t show this with photos, but I invite you to experiment for yourself as you start practicing breathing control with movement.

The best way to start for this purpose is to explore a number of movement variations shown in Chapters 24 and 25, which are about ground movement.