Breathing Techniques to Improve Your Workout

         

Breathing Techniques to Improve Your Workout

Breathing is Very easy. Because we do it from the moment we are born we barely pause to give thought to it, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no right way to do it.

The rhythm of breathing we establish when we train determines the efficiency of our body’s movement which in turn determines the quality of our athletic performance. 

During the day when we’re inactive most of us Use nasal breathing. During exercise the best way to breathe is inhaling in a measured, deep way, through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. As the difficulty of the exercises we perform increases we need more and more oxygen. Our breathing becomes even deeper and even faster. Ultimately it determines how many calories we burn and how efficiently our muscles work.

 The new studies show that the pathway we choose to breathe through has some very unique effects and that there is an optimum way to breathe in and out even when we are laboring under an extreme physical load.

Breathe and Lose Weight

Breathing evenly and deeply throughout the day can increase our daily calorie consumption because breathing is what activates our metabolism. Also deep breathing engages more muscles in the diaphragm and helps move the upper part of the body .

Experts  estimate that people who breathe deeply burn about 20% more calories than those of us who take shallow breaths.

So, instead of burning 500 calories a day breathing, we can burn up to 1100 calories. That means we burn extra calories without having to increase the level of our physical activity.

Breathing Activates Our Brains

The principle is that when we are under stress, whether physical, emotional or psychological breathing through the nose and out through the mouth allows us to control our emotions and stay calm so we can respond, physically, better.

Studies  show that when we breathe in through the nose and then breathe out through the mouth there are neural pathways activated in the brain that are not activated when we just breathe in and out through the mouth. These neural pathways are throughout a region of the brain known as the amygdala which is strongly linked to emotional processing, in particular fear-related emotions.

 Breathing properly, throughout the day is probably the easiest, smartest thing we can do and there are so many benefits associated with it that once we start.