How to Breathe while Exercising?
Is there a proper breathing technique while exercising? Can it improve the way you exercise?
When we train for better fitness, we usually just think about training our muscles, our movement patters, our hearts and our lungs, but we should also be focused on our breathing.
It happens automatically, 26,000 times a day without us even having to pay any attention to it, yet breathing is one of the only autonomic systems in our body that we can control, if we choose to. But because we can do it without consciously thinking about it, we often forget about it.
The Mechanics of Breathing
During inhalation, the diaphragm, a muscle that attaches in a dome shape to your rib cage and abdominal wall, flattens out, expanding your rib cage and pushing your abdominal wall out due to the increase in pressure from your organs dropping/compressing.
Conversely, resting exhalation is largely an involuntary process, but the portion we care about is “forced” exhalation—the type of breathing you should use during sport and exercise. This is accomplished through the rectus and transverse abdominals as well as the obliques contracting and forcing the wind back out of your airways.
Your autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary actions like heart rate and digestion, is split into two parts. One part, the sympathetic nervous system, controls your fight-or-flight response. The other part, the parasympathetic nervous system, or “rest and digest” controls your rest and relax response and helps produce a state of equilibrium in your body.
Proper breathing activates your Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS), while shallow breathing activates your sympathetic nervous system (SNS). In general, when we are stressed or anxious, your breathing tends to be irregular and shallow.
When your sympathetic state becomes chronic, physiological problems will emerge.
The things that happen when you are stressed, such as increased heart rate, fast breathing, and high blood pressure, all decrease as you breathe deeply to relax. A growing number of empirical studies have revealed that diaphragmatic breathing may trigger body relaxation responses and benefit both physical and mental health. Therefore, the way you breathe affects your whole body, influences the way you cope with stress, affects the quality of sleep, and mental health.
When it comes to athletic performance breathing also matters. There are different types of breathing recommended for different types of sports. For example, when lifting weights, deep breathing with subsequent core engagement activates the Valsalva Maneuver. The Valsalva Maneuver is a forceful exhalation against a close airway.
The Valsalva Maneuver is extremely useful when lifting weights as it significantly increases pressure and stability around your organs and spine, which, in turn, makes your lifts easier. However, this breathing technique impacts the heart rate and blood pressure. For this reason, make sure to consult a training expert and/or a health professional before trying it.
Proper breathing while stretching effectively increases your venous return—the amount of blood that is pumped back to your heart. An increased venous return has many benefits but most notably to performance it aids in the disposal of metabolic waste that arises from exercise.
If your are seeking a method to improve your performance and general well being, adequate breathing technique may be the right answer.
References
Busch V et al. The Effect of Deep and Slow Breathing on Pain Perception, Autonomic Activity, and Mood Processing. Pain Medicine 2012; 13: 215–228
Jerath R et al. Self-Regulation of Breathing as an Adjunctive Treatment of Insomnia. Front Psychiatry 2018; 9: 780.
Ma X, et al.The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults. Front Psychol. 2017; 8: 874.
Nobel DJ et al.Hypothesis: Pulmonary Afferent Activity Patterns During Slow, Deep Breathing Contribute to the Neural Induction of Physiological Relaxation Front Physiol. 2019 Sep 13;10:1176.
Perciavalle V et al. The Role of Deep Breathing on Stress Neurol Sci. 2017 Mar;38(3):451-458