Fix Your Breathing To Optimize Your Performance: introduction to the magic of your breath
“If you’ve hit a strength, endurance, or performance plateau, or are just feeling beat to shit after every training session with the inability to recover, stop blaming your training and nutrition program on your stagnation and start looking at the movement pattern that transcends any activity or sport-specific focus, breathing.”
Chances are, you’ve never spent the time or focus fine-tuning a fundamental skill that is literally keeping you alive and you are most likely butchering more than 20,000 times per day.
But not all breathing is created equally. And the way you breathe during max effort squatting cannot be the same way you breathe during a 5k run. In order to truly unlock your potential, you must first learn to breathe well by correcting the dysfunctional breathing patterns that have plagued your performance and recovery, then learn to breathe according to the specific task and goal at hand.
Let’s get one thing straight, this isn’t some fluffy deep breathing article to make you better at yogalates or not keeling over from a stress-induced aneurism after the next fight with your spouse.
“This series of blog posts are the ultimate breathing resource featuring the top 6 battle-tested breathing techniques that you’ll literally be able to instantaneously see notable results from in terms of your performance in sport, lifting, and more importantly your recovery during training and between sessions.”
Here’s how fixing your breathing will finally unlock that potential and blast you through those frustrating plateaus once and for all. Game-changing results can be as simple as taking the right type of breath. Here’s an INCREDIBLE story to highlight how powerful your breath can be…
When U.S. Marine Corp Officer Jake D.’s vehicle drove over an explosive device in Afghanistan, he looked down to see his legs almost completely severed below the knee. At that moment, he remembered a breathing exercise he had learned in a book for young officers. Thanks to that exercise, he was able to stay calm enough to check on his men, give orders to call for help, tourniquet his own legs, and remember to prop them up before falling unconscious. Later, he was told that had he not done so, he would have bled to death.
If a simple breathing exercise could help Jake under such extreme duress, similar techniques can certainly help the rest of us with our more common workplace stresses. The combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and battles for social justice have only exacerbated the anxiety that many of us feel every day, and studies show that this stress is interfering with our ability to do our best work. But with the right breathing exercises, you can learn to handle your stress and manage negative emotions.
“In two recently published studies, we explored several different techniques and found that a breathing exercise was most effective for both immediate and long-term stress reduction.”
In the first study run by our research team at Yale, we evaluated the impact of three wellbeing interventions:
Breathing Exercises: in our experiments, we measured the impact of a particular program, SKY Breath Meditation, which is a comprehensive series of breathing and meditation exercises learned over several days that is designed to induce calm and resilience.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction: a meditation technique in which you train yourself to be aware of each moment in a non-judgmental way.
Foundations of Emotional Intelligence: a program that teaches techniques to improve emotional awareness and regulation.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three programs or to a control group (no intervention). We found that the participants who practiced SKY Breath Meditation experienced the greatest mental health, social connectedness, positive emotions, stress levels, depression, and mindfulness benefits.
In a second study, conducted at the University of Arizona, SKY Breath Meditation was compared to a workshop that taught more conventional, cognitive strategies for stress management (in other words, how to change your thoughts about stress). Both workshops were rated similarly by participants and they both produced significant increases in social connectedness. However, SKY Breathing was more beneficial in terms of immediate impact on stress, mood, and conscientiousness, and these effects were even stronger when measured three months later.
Before and after the workshops, participants underwent a stress task that simulated a high-pressure performance situation, akin to presenting at a business meeting. In anticipation of the stressful performance, the group that had completed the cognitive workshop showed elevated breathing and heart rates, as expected. In contrast, the SKY Breathing group held steady in terms of breathing and heart rate, suggesting the program had instilled in them a buffer against the anxiety typically associated with anticipating a stressful situation. This meant that they were not only in a more positive emotional state but also that they were more able to think clearly and effectively perform the task at hand.
Similarly, in a study with veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who struggled with trauma, we found that not only did SKY Breath Meditation normalize their anxiety levels after just one week, but they also continued to experience the mental health benefits a full year later.
So what makes breathing so effective? It’s very difficult to talk your way out of strong emotions like stress, anxiety, or anger. Just think about how ineffective it is when a colleague tells you to “calm down” in a moment of extreme stress. When we are in a highly stressed state, our prefrontal cortex — the part of our brain responsible for rational thinking — is impaired, so logic seldom helps to regain control. This can make it hard to think straight or be emotionally intelligent with your team. But with breathing techniques, it is possible to gain some mastery over your mind.
Research shows that different emotions are associated with different forms of breathing, and so changing how we breathe can change how we feel. For example, when you feel joy, your breathing will be regular, deep, and slow. If you feel anxious or angry, your breathing will be irregular, short, fast, and shallow. When you follow breathing patterns associated with different emotions, you’ll actually begin to feel those corresponding emotions.
How does this work? Changing the rhythm of your breath can signal relaxation, slowing your heart rate and stimulating the vagus nerve, which runs from the brain stem to the abdomen, and is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the body’s “rest and digest” activities (in contrast to the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates many of our “fight or flight” responses). Triggering your parasympathetic nervous system helps you start to calm down. You feel better. And your ability to think rationally returns.
“To get an idea of how breathing can calm you down, try changing the ratio of your inhale to exhale.”
This approach is one of several common practices that use breathing to reduce stress. When you inhale, your heart rate speeds up. When you exhale, it slows down. Breathing in for a count of four and out for a count of eight for just a few minutes can start to calm your nervous system. Remember: when you feel agitated, lengthen yours exhales.
“Breathing is truly no different than any other movement pattern.”
When you step back and view breathing mechanics as a motor skill, this means that it can be improved with the same type of corrective and activation-based strategies and progressions that you’d use to correct a squat or a deadlift.
But due to the fact that the average person takes over 20,000 dysfunctional and compensatory breaths per day, fixing faulty default breathing mechanics can be hugely challenging. Many times, verbal cues and corrections are ineffective, presenting the need for more tactile-based cues to create a mind-muscle connection that will start to improve breathing mechanics from the ground up.
