WTF! Breathe your way to Better Health

_SPOTLIGHTS
Jen Fisher

Breathing Your Way to a Healthier, Happier, High Performing You

We can get on the same page pretty quickly about the value of our breath when we consider how, without our breath, it would only be a matter of a brief moment before we were in critical danger. Our breath is our life. Because of it, everything else that’s truly magnificent about our bodies works the way that it does. Using your breath, you can optimize your athletic performance, your body’s biochemistry and your nervous system. But, it doesn’t stop there. It gets even more interesting than this. Using your breath, the non-physical aspects of you can also be optimized, like your mind, your intellect, your creativity, focus, and your intuition, so they can be the valuable contributors to your life that they are meant to be. This is a two-fer guys!!!!

The way you breathe is the way that you feel and the way that you feel is the way that you breathe. Because you can consciously choose to breathe in very specific ways (such as with pranayama) you can consciously and with intent optimize your body and your Higher faculties to support the way you feel, your performance, and therefore, your success in life. Because how you feel affects how you create in your life we can say that how you create IS your life. So, if you’re following me so far, then you can see how there might be a plausible argument for how you can use breathwork to change your life for the better. I can say from personal experience that it certainly changed mine. That’s how powerful breathwork is.

The Science of Breathing

Let’s now look at some of the science of breathing to better understand the biochemistry involved. You have between 5-6L of blood in your body. A large percentage of your blood is cells in solution — red blood cells in plasma — and plasma consists of clotting factors, antibodies, proteins, electrolytes, hormones and waste. This plasma solution is a transportation system. It keeps your cells and the internal contents of these cells healthy and moving along your vascular network to do their very important work. Each red blood cell (RBC) holds 4 oxygen (O2) molecules each, if they are healthy and have enough hemoglobin. The hemoglobin is a protein that holds the oxygen, or its counterpart, carbon dioxide (CO2), in place until an exchange can be made in the tissues. Your lungs deliver the oxygen to your RBCs and your RBCs deliver the oxygen to your body. Any area deprived of blood would, at the least perform suboptimally, or they would die or go into distress because they would be deprived of oxygen. Because oxygen not only keeps us alive, is responsible for the effective functioning of the very complex and intelligent system known as your body, AND is what’s required for our optimal performance, we’ve historically celebrated it as the most valued component of our air. But, today we’re taking the spotlight off of oxygen and shining it on CO2.

The quality of your breathing directly affects the levels of oxygen in your body but maybe not for reasons that you might think, because we’re talking about quality here, not quantity. How well oxygenated we are is entirely different from how much oxygen we are breathing in or what our O2 sat readout is (unless we are exercising but I’ll get to that soon). Your RBCs will carry around oxygen molecules until, and unless, there is a CO2 molecule ready to take its place. This is called The Bohr Effect, discovered in 1904 by the Danish physiologist Christian Bohr. Put another way, increasing the number of breaths or the amount of air you breathe in doesn’t increase the amount of oxygen your body is able to utilize without the presence of enough carbon dioxide to exchange places with oxygen. So, taking in more air is not the answer and, to be honest with you, most of us are already over breathing. We over breathe by breathing at a higher rate than our bodies require of us and because we breathe shallowly, or become shallow breathers while engaged in various situations (i.e. commuting or work stress). What will improve our health and performance is a lower rate of breathing and a higher quality breath, or more effective breath, in order to increase the O2/CO2 exchange rate. 

When we are exercising, the ideal goal is to reduce our breath hunger, or breathlessness, and improve our tissue oxygenation and this can all be done with breath practices that increase our blood levels of CO2, but more specifically, increase our CO2 tolerance. Because, no matter how much you train or how strong you are, in each moment, it’s how effectively your body is able to exchange O2 with CO2 that will determine your physical performance, strength and your endurance too. When there is not enough oxygen being provided to those parts of our body taking on the load of our exercise demand, we will experience fatigue and breath hunger. This is because it’s actually the level of CO2 in our blood that triggers our brain to adjust our breathing, no matter what we are doing. During exercise, CO2 levels can elevate suddenly due to increased oxygen usage in the muscles. This in turn actually causes us to increase our rate of breathing as a precaution, especially if our O2 levels drop below our CO2 levels, which happens during more intense exercise. This happens in large part because most of us have trained our bodies to have low CO2 tolerance levels just by chronically breathing ineffectively in our day-to-day lives. 

When we study people who live at high altitudes, we learn that their CO2 tolerance is much higher than someone who lives at sea level for example. They adapt. Breath training is how we can adapt. With a regular breathwork practice, we can improve the quality of our breathing, increase our CO2 on demand and, more importantly, increase our CO2 tolerance. With breath training we can consciously and with intent correct our overbreathing which releases too much CO2 from our bodies, improve the release of oxygen into our muscles, organs and supporting tissues and, therefore, improve our overall performance, health and personal wellbeing. 

So much more could be said about the role of CO2 in your body, such as the way it affects the dilatation and constriction of your blood vessels, how your CO2 levels determine your blood pH, and how all of this is interrelated when it comes to how well oxygenated you are, but digging in any more on these goes beyond the scope of this article. So, we’ll leave it at this: CO2 blood levels affect nearly every aspect of our bodies and is a crucial player in our physical and mental performance. Now that we’ve covered the science of breathing and the role of O2 and CO2 in optimal performance, let’s look at a few simple breath training practices that you can start using to support you now, in your day-to-day living, that can improve the quality of your breathing and your CO2 tolerance. This is a great place to start, before moving on to more formal breath training practices that will further improve your tolerance of CO2 and the efficacy of your tissue oxygenation.

Pranayama

Many breath training practices involve breath holding, or prolonged inhales and exhales which have a similar effect as breath holding. Scientifically speaking, when we hold our breath the CO2 in our body builds making more of it available for exchange and increasing our CO2 tolerance. But this isn’t all that’s happening. We are actually moving, and with training, even directing, the prana (lifeforce) within our bodies which removes blockages and improves, even balances, our energetic as well as our physical bodies; both of which impact the way that we feel and perform. 

AN IMPORTANT NOTE:

I encourage you to approach the practice of breath holding in pranayama with care, mindfulness, patience, and proper attention to your body and to the instruction provided. Beginners should start with simple and shorter breath retention practices and gradually increase the duration and complexity of their practice under the guidance of a trained Breath Coach or Yoga Teacher/Practitioner, or as their practice deepens. Listen to your body and discontinue practice if you become light-headed or start feeling unwell. Consult your doctor if there is any question at all about whether or not breath practices are right for you. Do not drive or operate machinery while performing breath practices. 

 3 Simple Breathing Techniques

When using these techniques regularly as practice you will get started on the road to improved oxygenation and improved CO2 tolerance.

Practice One: Conscious Breathing

Your improved breathing starts with conscious breathing, so I would not be a very good Breath Coach if I didn’t at least mention the simple and yet challenging practice of conscious breathing. Conscious breathing is simply being aware of your breathing and then breathing intentionally and with control where necessary. Unfortunately, most of us are distracted away from ourselves and in constant reaction to the world around us. When we consciously breathe, we check in with our breathing often and notice it. Is it shallow? Rapid? Loud? Through our mouth or nose? At first, just start to notice your breathing without changing it at all. In time, with regular breath training and awareness, you will be able to consciously work to regulate your breathing as much as possible throughout the day and with physical exertion using specific breath practices.

Practice Two: Diaphragmatic Breathing

Many of us are breathing primarily with our upper chest. This is called shallow breathing. When you are at rest, if your stomach does not move up or expand outward on your inhale then there is a good chance you are a shallow breather and possibly even breathing backwards. We breathe backwards when our abdomen contracts or falls on the inhale and expands on the exhale. In either case, you would benefit from deeper breathing to correct this. “Diaphragmatic Breathing”, also known as “Belly Breathing”, focuses on engaging the diaphragm to take deep, slow breaths. We know we are diaphragmatically breathing when our belly lifts or expands on our inhale. You can place your hand gently on your abdomen as you breathe in to check for yourself if you are doing it correctly. The diaphragm is a thin sheet of muscle that lines the base of the lungs and, as it contracts, pulls the lungs down to draw air into our lungs like a vacuum. If we’ve been chronically shallowly breathing or breathing backwards for a long time (sigh…that’s a lot of us), our diaphragms might be tight and/or weak. By using conscious deep diaphragmatic breathing we exercise our breathing muscles including our diaphragms. With our deep breaths, we expand our lung capacity and access more of the surface area of our lungs where the gas exchange between O2 and CO2 can occur at the cellular level. To do this breath correctly, you want to fill your lungs from the base to the top. Imagine your lungs are a large wide-mouthed open vat or vase that is somewhat fuller at the base. As you breathe in, imagine your air is like a liquid filling the base of the vase first, and as you inhale, the vase fills from top to bottom.

Practice Three: Nose Breathing

You might be surprised to know that nose breathing is a big topic to cover! It’s a whole other article and a great area for you to dig into and get curious about to support your own best health and wellbeing. Here’s a link to a talk from my Breath Coaching Program that summarizes some of what’s in this article but also gets into how nose breathing vs mouth breathing affects your health and wellbeing. If you take anything away from this article I hope it will be this: Nose is for breathing. Mouth is for eating — even while you are asleep if at all possible. I recognize that some of us don’t have the luxury of always-clear nasal passages. For those that can, I strongly encourage you to breathe entirely with your nose for the following reasons: it cleans, filters and even conditions the air that you breathe in, warming and humidifying it to enhance respiratory gas exchange. But, perhaps the greatest benefit is that by closing your mouth, you retain more CO2. This is because we release more CO2 when our mouths are open. But, it’s also because the pathway to your lungs is longer and narrower from your nose, so you naturally lengthen your inhale and your exhale. But, wait! There’s more! With nose breathing, you stimulate the production of Nitric Oxide (NO) — only produced within your nasal cavities when you breathe through your nose. Nitric oxide plays several important roles in your body, including: helps to regulate blood flow and airway diameter, it has antimicrobial properties, it assists in the regulation of the cardiovascular system, supports the regulation of blood pressure and “vascular tone” AND it plays a role in immune function and inflammation pathways. Nearly all pranayama practices are done through the nose — you can see now why. When you breathe through your nose and add in these additional practices described here in this article, you have a powerful set of breath tools to truly become empowered to start to change your respiratory fitness and your overall health and wellbeing. 

Nose breathing becomes a practice when we consciously choose to nose breathe at all times — as much as possible. Even while exercising, it’s a great habit to build on. When we increase our heart rate and increase the demands on our body, our rate of breathing picks up and most of us will experience breath hunger that might cause us to shift from nose breathing to mouth breathing. This is OK – listen to your body. In time, by using these breath practices, and with conscious breathing you will see this improve. 

Targeting breath practices and regular breath training can improve your lung capacity, your CO2 tolerance, and your tissue oxygenation which will enhance your endurance, reduce your breathlessness, and optimize breathing efficiency. Of perhaps even greater importance is how effective breathing can improve your health, wellbeing and overall performance in life – in ALL areas. Overall, the practice of breath holding in pranayama offers a holistic approach to well-being, addressing physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of health. When incorporated mindfully and with proper guidance, it can contribute to improved respiratory function, enhanced mental clarity, and a greater sense of inner balance and presence.

Use coupon code WTFIT to gain FREE access to my Ujjayi Breath Technique mini video course.