Share
My favorite thing about yoga classes - other than the part at the end when you get to lie down and act like a corpse - is that the instructors always remind me to breathe. Pretty much without fail, whenever I get the cue "Don't hold your breath," I am. And as soon as I go for a deep, belly-expanding inhale, I feel amazingly able and at ease.
It's no mystery why this happens. Stress causes us to tense up, while breathing brings oxygen to the muscles and allows us to relax.
"It helps with concentration. It increases endurance. It slows your heart rate," rattles off Alvaro Maldonado, co-owner of a FIT personal training gym in Washington. In short, full lungs do a heck of a lot more than just keep you alive, especially during strenuous physical activity.
Any personal trainer knows the basic rules: Exhale on the exertion part of a movement, and inhale on the recovery. During cardiovascular exercise, short, shallow breaths are a clue that you're overdoing it. And if you can develop a pattern for your breathing, you're likely to last longer.
But much of the time in gym settings, the breath takes a back seat to other concerns: what we're lifting, how we're squatting, when we're leaving.
That may be why when Karen Sherman, a senior investigator at Seattle's Group Health Center for Health Studies, looked into treatments for chronic low-back pain in 2005, weekly yoga classes plus home practice appeared to be slightly more effective than weekly sessions of aerobic, strengthening and stretching exercises plus home practice.
"What's the active ingredient?" asks Sherman, whose results were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. No one knows why yoga was more effective than the other exercises, but Sherman believes part of the answer is attention to breathing.
"It's not that people don't think about breathing, but they don't give you the same language and imagery that creates more awareness," she says. "For someone with back pain, one of the possibilities is they haven't been paying attention to their bodies."
If you're doing more-vigilant surveillance, there's a better chance you'll notice that you should stand straighter or move differently, and those tweaks could provide the treatment you really need.
FIT's Maldonado taps into a similar approach with his weekly stretching and alignment class, which draws from Pilates, yoga and multiple dance techniques to enhance flexibility, coordination and performance.
"The bottom line is, there isn't a specific way to breathe. We all have different rhythms, and we all have to find a way to send oxygen to the muscles," he says.
Once you figure out how best to get air flowing in and out of your body, then you can attempt to master the sorts of moves he teaches. The bends, extends and reaches all rely on the power of the exhale to stretch your limbs further.
And if your tummy is bloated with air when you need to lean over, you'll block your own progress.
There's also no cheating when it comes to breathing. "I can hear if they're relaxed and focused and the body is doing what it's supposed to be doing," Maldonado says.
When they're not, his trick - other than reminding them to inhale and exhale every few seconds - is to tell them not to stiffen their faces. "If they're like this," he says, demonstrating a pained, tight expression, "they're not relaxed."
