More than any other functionality of the human body the breath is by far the most important, yet it is the one function that is very much over looked by the vast majority of people and also many health care professionals.
Having a good breath practice will help to sustain good vitality and health in many ways, your very existence and longevity has a direct relationship to it. However, there are many, if not hundreds of breathwork practices and many targeted benefits to each individual exercise. In this article I’m just going to highlight a few interesting facts, exercises and their benefits which you may find motivating.
Haemoglobin – correlated to breath
Your aerobic capabilities are related to the amount of haemoglobin levels your body carries around with it. These levels will fluctuant depending on the efficiency of the body’s functioning and the demands that are placed upon the body to accomplish the required task.
The quickest way that I know to increase aerobic capacity, having used it in the past for training sports athletes, is to simply increase their haemoglobin levels. In the past the most favourable (yet illegal) way in endurance sports such as Olympic cycling and the Tour de France is to partake in pre-loaded haemoglobin blood transfusions, which is administrated behind closed doors however my preferred method is certainly less dramatic and very simple but can have immense effects on the haemoglobin levels in the body. This is simply holding your breath after the out-cycle has been completed.
By holding your breath on the out cycle it will activate or fool the spleen, which is partly responsible for controlling the level of white and red blood cells in the body, amongst other things. By holding the breath, the spleen starts producing more red blood cells because it thinks there is a lack, due to the lower oxygenated blood count. This will significantly increase your haemoglobin levels after just two weeks of daily practice, with the more times you do it daily, the higher the red blood count (haemoglobin) which in simple terms means the higher the oxygenated blood level. These increased levels will actually stay in your system for around 4 months before dying and then being replaced. With just a few cycles, you will notice the immediate increased in the amount of time you can hold your breath. This is one of the main methods that ‘clean’ (drug free) free-divers use allowing them to hold their breath for an insane, even unhuman amount of time whilst still needing to perform a certain level of physical output by swimming down to some crazy and unthinkable depths.
This is not only desirable for athletes to power the body tissues to their maximum efficiency and performance but also desirable for the general health and wellbeing of society.
You should always make sure when we do these below practices, that you are in a safe environment and with a breathwork teacher who knows what they’re doing until you are competent in the practice yourself. This is important to protect those die-hard practitioners that can’t help but push themselves beyond what’s consider safe or necessary.
Nervous systems – correlated to breath
Your nervous system is your body's command center housed in the brain controlling all bodily functioning, and indirectly controlling thoughts, emotions and wellbeing due to the fact it controls your bodily secretions and hormones.
However, this indirect process can certainly be overruled by the understanding of your own neurological system, how the breath works and its effects, your mental and emotional past conditioning with conscious awareness of presence. The mistake people make is to see them all as separate but they are actually all interconnected.
The nervous system is subdivided into three: the enteric, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The enteric nervous system is the autonomous part of the nervous system, which includes a number of neural circuits that control motor functions such as blood flow, secretions, modulates immune and endocrine functions and many more. The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for the “fight or flight” response during any potential danger and the parasympathetic nervous system inhibits the body from overworking and restores the body to a calm and composed state.
In recent times some maverick medical practitioners are slowly but steadily aligning the two different medical systems and concepts of the western medicine science and eastern ancient philosophies, gradually integrating them for the greater benefit of all. There is a minor but ever growing new western school of thought, which I generally belong to, that believes that most chronic illness comes from an unbalanced, misfunctioning, disconnected or better put dis-communitive nervous systems. I would also personally go one step further and suggest that it also entails the unbalance and stagnation of qi. Although Qi is a separate bodily system, it certainly has a correlation and causation effect on the wellbeing of the nervous system.
Different breath practices have different effects on the nervous systems, which directly affect the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems accordingly. By holding the breath or extending the breath on the out cycle, will cause the parasympathetic nervous system to calm right down, creating obvious helpful effects for a range of issues such as anxiety, panic attacks and general stresses. The opposite affect happens when breathing in and out at a rapid pace as it activates the sympathetic nervous system giving you more energy at any given time. This happens naturally when we enter fight or flight mode from a threat or prolong stresses, which is actually of benefit in short term, but will certainly be detrimental if sustained for any substantial period.
Abdominal Breathing
Chest breathing is completely inefficient and unnatural and should only be done whilst undertaking demanding exercising or any physically challenging output. The longer you can reframe from doing chest breathing while exercising the better performance you will have, due to the expansive efficiency of abdominal breathing.
When natural abdominal breathing occurs the belly rises, the diaphragm pulls downs and your ribs expand outwards, so that your lungs can fill up. If you go against this natural functioning and not allow the belly to expand you are really hindering your breath, and yet a lot of people subconsciously hold their belly in a somewhat contracted state. This is generally because of unconscious stresses, but sometimes it’s actually through intentionally holding the belly in to stop themselves looking fat. Expanding the belly in all 6 directions is not only a quicker way to intake air but a more efficient, more relaxed and less stressful method of breathing. Abdominal breathing also increases blood flow and removes stagnated qi from the organs, a bit like having an internal massage.
Mind – correlated to breath
By slowing your breath down, you’re also slowing down the mind. It is your mind that uses up most of your energy, so using breath practices will not only help the highly strung minds but will also conserve energy and aid towards extending longevity and life essence in which you only have a limited amount of.
The depletion of your life essence (original life force), given to you by your birth genetics, is one of the reasons people who suffer from endured stress and anxiety generally age a lot quicker than more laid back and relaxed people.
The life essence at a fundamental level is made up of yinyang energy like all other living things. The yin is related to form (bodily tissues) and the yang is related to power or the energetic spark that creates all life. When the yang energy spark from your essence is depleted through stress, anxiety or burning the candle at both ends and there is no more yang spark to go round, you will die. So, to stop this from happening it converts the yin part of the essence into yang to help sustain life. But this means you are now yin deficient which is responsible for the making and replacing of all form (tissues etc). This cell reproduction decrease starts to age you at a more rapid rate.
Surprisingly, humans actually like to worry, but this has negative effects on the nervous system which will then be detrimental to the body and the mind. It’s part of our natural survival instincts, by covering all eventualities over in our minds we feel a paradoxical sense of security and safety knowing that we have covered all bases. This becomes overly habitual in many people and becomes a familiar custom, again finding a deluded sense of comfort in the familiarity. Familiarity is the known, we have done this before and survived which is why it’s so difficult to break and takes great courage to be free from it as the greatest fear of all is the unknown. Specific breathwork can help you break these patterns by calming down the nervous system, reducing the amount of fight or flight secretions which are long term harmful and detaches you from accessing your pre-frontal cortex where rationality and logical resides.
True courage is to face the unknown, to expand beyond our known limitations and sense of safety, isn’t true love a bit like this, showing all of the self, all of your vulnerabilities and hope the other accepts them fully without judgement, and not just projecting what you think the other desires you to be. That’s why to become a true union born out of true love is so exciting, adventurous and takes bravery. Without this courage you will fall short of true love and probably settle for a more comfortable arrangement limited by a set of unsaid yet pre-acknowledge conditional needs.
Anyway, I digress, we humans excessively worry and stress over all the hundreds of urgent tasks that need doing, in which nearly all of them are unimportant if we are looking at the bigger picture. Once you’re dead you won’t be completing any tasks at all, so why waste your essence away on stress, anxiety and the many endless and limiting fears of life. By working with the breath, we can control the parasympathetic nervous system and start regulating these fear responses into a more productive and reform the thought processing, resetting these habitual thoughts and emotional patterns.
Under Breathing
When we under breathe, the body starts using the oxygen a lot more efficiently, which also helps performance by increasing your VO2 max. Breathing less also increases your CO2 tolerance.
When we have the urge to breathe it isn’t because of what most people think, which is due to lack of oxygen in the body, it’s because of our CO2 tolerance. The less tolerant we are, the quicker we breathe. The more tolerant we are the slower we breathe which allows us to hold our breath for longer periods. As mentioned above it will push out more oxygenated red blood cells from the spleen.
You do have to take a certain amount of caution while doing certain breath practices. For example, when we hyperventilate, we’re basically reducing our CO2 in the body which in extreme cases can confuse the bodies communication and may tell the body to stop breathing as there is no longer a CO2 trigger to induce the next breath. So again, it’s important to know your body and its reactions and limitations. When you’re hyperventilating due to extreme stress whether it’s panic or purposely induced, your sympathetic nervous system starts to shut down and blood vessels start to shut off especially in the head, hence why people who hyperventilate often feel the effects of dizziness, over excited and tingles especially around the nose and face, it is also possible you will experience hand and finger cramps. Breathwork experience will remove or able you to recognise the signs of any dangerous bodily responses. These reactions are extremely rare and I certainly wouldn’t over worry but worth highlighting the extreme nevertheless.
However, this will enable you to hold your breath for a significantly amplified amount of time, of which the benefits have already been explained. Your body will also get very efficient at switching between the two nervous systems, going from stress to calm very quickly. So, for stressed or people who suffer from high anxiety this is of great help as with just a few breaths the body already knows how to calm right back down.
Lung Capacity – correlated to breath
Another way to enhance breathing is to increase your tank size, this is called breath loading, breath expansion or lung packing. You achieve this by taking in a deep and full breath, holding for a few seconds before breathing in again on top of the breath you have already taken. By gently stretching out your lungs they can hold a greater capacity of air.
However, it’s not necessarily doing what these names suggest by stretching lung tissue, but what it definitely does do is to slightly stretch the lung surroundings giving more room for the actual lungs to expand into. People who are emotionally unbalanced and frustrated in their own minds create contraction throughout certain parts of their body. This contraction creates tension, tension creates inflammation, inflammation creates ‘dis-ease’ again placing a misfunctioning nervous system at the centre of chronic illness once more. Lung packing may help release tension of the intercostals of the ribs and free up tension of the diaphragm making the movement within them greater, which will allow more room for the expansion of the lungs to occur more fully.
Breath practice at first can be scary as your relationship with your breath is to be alive, so when the breath hunger kicks in, some people can start to panic. To aid you in this you can wear a SPO2 monitor so you can visually see how much O2 is still left in your body. You can purchase them for around £12-£15 on amazon. This takes away some of the panic so you can push just a little harder but also not too hard for more effective results. You can safely drop O2 down to around 70%, I personally think there is no need to go beyond this, although professional free-divers will go down to about 40%. For the beginner even going as low as 90% could trigger panic.
Nitrous Oxide – correlated to breath
Breathing in through the nose will naturally release nitrous oxide which will help you to relax, which does not happen with mouth breathing. You can increase the level of nitrous oxide by not only breathing in through the nose but humming on the out breath, this vibration stimulates the sinus track. The tone is important and maybe slightly different for everyone, but whatever tone produces the most vibrations in the sinus track is the most effective. This will also help you for sleep, increase your concentration level and improve long term memory. Nitrous oxide also has a part to play in sexual activity, activating neuro-transmitters.
Breath Practices
It is important and we must try our best to nose breathing through everyday life, but a good practice to start with would be to hold one nostril shut, then breathe in for a count of 5, hold for a count of 5, then switch nostril and breathe out for a count of 5, with humming to increase the nitrous oxide, then repeat. All with a soft and natural breath intake.
Another method is to over breath at first (hyperventilate), let’s say 30 full quick breaths, then hold your breath on the out cycle to get the CO2 tolerance back up, for about 4 rounds. This is what the famous and incredible multi world record holder Wim Hoff teaches.
Box breathing - which we sometimes practice in class can help regulate and balance the breath, breathe in for 4, hold for 4, breathe out for 4, hold for 4.
Doubling the exhale - breathe in for 5, hold for 5, breathe out for 10 which reacts with the parasympathetic nervous system which aids in calming you down, this simple breathing exercise done before sleep is an excellent way for those who struggle sleeping.
Anything with a long exhale will start to relax and calm you down, therapist’s often use 4, 7, 8 method - inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8. With this method, exhaling through purse lips (pecking kiss) will also activate your vagus nerve in the neck, which is the majority of your parasympathetic nervous system again calming you down rapidly. If you’re using it for sleep after a number of repetitions just become mindful of the whole breath mechanics as you slowly drift off.
A good general breathwork could be - inhale 10, hold 10, exhale 2 then inhale 2, hold 10, exhale 10 for 5 rounds. This equally stimulates both parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems to help balance them out and also helps to recentre yourself so you can focus more on what your meant to be doing in that moment rather than mind drifting.
There are hundreds of breathwork techniques that have arisen from the yoga traditions and I have purposely stayed away from the Tai Chi aspects of the breath, not to confuse you and I recognise this article is already way to long.
The above is just a sample of a few that I personally like and what effects they have on the body when you perform them. I’m hopeful that this may have prompted a little more interest in the breath and what can be reasonably achieved. Never underestimate the power of breath.
Note: nothing changes with accumulation of knowledge alone. Change derives from practice, actually doing the work! ~ Barry Sant
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