Perfect Breathing

The human body is a marvel of form and function, capable of feats of speed, endurance, strength, fluid grace, beauty and expression. We’re blessed with a magnificent machine, from the ingenious architecture of the skeleton, through complex  muscular, circulatory, respiratory, digestive and nervous systems, as well the body’s innate ability to constantly rejuvenate and rebuild. The harmony and coordination required to ignite billions of cells, fire the synapses and touch points of thousands of nerves and muscle fibers, and continuously pump an adequate supply of blood and energy throughout is simply enormous.

At the core of that harmony and coordination is the breath. It’s your touch point to all those functions. By developing an awareness of it, by focusing on it and developing its potential, you can take greater command of your body’s abilities. By harnessing the breath, you can take control of your body, your mind, your emotions and inner spirit for any pursuit.

Physical Aspects
While there’s no shortcut for sheer hard work, whether you’re a world-class athlete or a casual mall walker or jogger, it’s all about breathing efficiently. The goal for all endurance training is to build a more extensive cardiovascular system or network. The lung muscles and diaphragm will only achieve a certain strength, but, says famed marathoner Alberto Salazar, “What you’re doing is creating a capillary-blood network to service the muscles so that whatever amount of air that you can get in, you can keep as much of that oxygen as possible. The less oxygen you have for whatever reason, the more you have to rely on stored blood sugars, and eventually you run out of that. The better you breathe, the more oxygen you can get in, the less you have to use your glycogen stores. When you get to that point, you are able to go a little faster and a little harder.”

The trick is to find a comfortable rate at which to breathe. In any workout, breathing can become haphazard. In the course of his running career, Salazar would find himself in races where “I’d hit a really hard hill or I’d sped up or somebody surged,” he says, “and I’d find my breathing really out of sync. You have to relax and get it back to a level where it is natural, where you don’t have to think about it again. It’s something of an oxymoron: You’ve got to concentrate on relaxing. It’s hard, but that’s what athletics is.”

Normally in athletics, you focus on trying to take natural, deep breaths, both through your nose and through your mouth concurrently, and exhaling at the appropriate time. If it becomes forceful, where you’re straining to blow everything out, he says, “People feel like they’re losing control of their breathing and they sort of panic and start gasping. He suggests finding a natural rhythm that perhaps correlates with a cadence, and this can work with most kinds of exercise. “It could be, like in swimming, with a certain amount of strokes, every stroke or every other stroke,” he says. “In running, it could be every other stride. You have to find that natural cadence that you have, and stay relaxed within that cadence.”

Mental Aspects
Without understanding the effects the breath has on the mind, on mental clarity, on achieving, you’re likely to feel that you’re driving with the hand-brake on. Certainly the body must be kept in shape to be able to perform physical functions, but unless the mind is in tune, it can’t effectively captain the multifarious functions that need to occur for peak physical performance. But that performance can be taken even a step further. Awareness of your breath is the first place to start. Knowing how to achieve that focused relaxation will keep you from stressing and knotting up.

The mind, as we’ve all experienced, can be both a powerful ally in achieving our goals, and a major impediment in keeping us from them. Often the mind is ready to quit well before the body hits its limitations, and can easily grow confused, with distracting little “voices” dictating your course of action.  Thus, it often needs to be coerced and cajoled into shoving aside or even obliterating your often self-imposed physical limitations, allowing you to go far beyond what you might imagine.

Simply, the single most important effect awareness of your breath brings is focus. If you are focused on even a single breath, you aren’t distracted by the regrets of yesterday or the anxiety of an unknown tomorrow. That breath brings you to the here and now. Being conscious of a single breath and staying in the moment is a simple yet valuable perception for easing anxieties about the past and fear of the future, keeps you tuned to whatever task is at hand, and provides a strong bridge between mind and body.

The Zone
On an even deeper level, breath awareness can also play an active role in helping you find what sport psychologists call the zone. Everybody has had a brush with it, that rare place or moment of mental perfection, physical clarity and performance, when all your cylinders are firing in perfect harmony, when there’s absolutely no disconnect between your mind, your body and your emotions. It’s when time stops and there is the freedom of complete absorption in the activity at hand. We see examples of it all the time in sports world – the odds-defying last shot, an error-free performance, an impossible comeback.

Finding this rarified zone rarely happens by our sheer force of will. The Zone goes by many names: “peak experience,”  “flow state,” or an “altered state” of human consciousness that cannot generally be intentionally created. It also answers to “runner’s high,” “exercise high,” the “groove,” being “unconscious” or “locked in.”  Athletes are as confused by it as anyone, and find it difficult to describe when they emerge from it, but usually lay claim to supernatural concentration, religious mysticism, Zen, heightened visualization or biorhythms

The single biggest and most common barrier to finding the Zone, or quashing one while you’re in it, is listening to the inner dialogue, the self-talk,  the marvelously distracting little voice or cacophony of voices we all possess in our heads. It may be the biggest distraction to Perfect Breathing we know. Until you learn how to quell that noise, you may find yourself filled with doubt, fueled by that chatter. At worst, it is debilitating and can easily keep us from any kind of success. At best, it’s a distraction that can keep you from ever finding your Zone or quickly drive you from one.

Work toward eliminating the chatter or replacing it with something useful. Most athletes and performers claim that inside the Zone, it’s as if there is no thought, no distraction, no annoying little voices. There’s a decided lack of that inner dialogue. And it’s a point where breathing can dramatically help. Recall the exercises that help bring your conscious thought back to the breath, such as the Six-Second Breath and Performance Breathing. No yesterday, no tomorrow, only now. Practicing those techniques will set you up for using them when the noise grows too great. It’s one more way for you to be in control. Make no mistake, the voices will get loud at times. It’s human and it’s inevitable. But with breath awareness, you’re in control.

Performance Breathing

Here is an exercise that is well suited for any type of sport or exercise that requires repetitive motion, such as walking, running, hiking, biking, swimming, rowing, etc. The focused breathing helps to maximize your energy intake, while keeping the mind “in the body” and clear of distracting, self-limiting thoughts. Studies with athletes utilizing conscious breathing techniques have shown that performance and efficiency can improve on the order of 10 percent or more. Once you become familiar with this method, it requires little or no concentration, allowing your workout to become more meditative.
 
Note: A complete full breath is a critical foundation of this technique. Make sure you are comfortable with the Perfect Breath breathing technique before continuing.

How it works
For this exercise the breathing cycle is divided into three parts, with each part getting a set number of counts:

1. The Inhale (2 counts)
2. The Hold or Retention, before the exhale (2 counts)
3. The Exhale (4 counts)

Try this breathing method a few times to become familiar with it.

Now, let’s look at how we can use this technique while walking, for example. In this case each count corresponds to one step, for example:

1. Inhale for 2 steps
2. Hold for 2 steps
3. Exhale for 4 steps

To adapt to cycling, each pedal stroke gets one count. For swimming, each stroke gets one count, and so on.

Suggestions

• It is important to find a pace and count that you can maintain and that feels natural. As you become more adept with this technique, you will want to try and increase your counts while keeping the same ratio. For example inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts, exhale for 8, or 6, 6, and 12. Experiment and find a combination that works well for you. Slower, deeper breathing will give more energy, endurance, and focus.
•  If your mind wanders, or you lose your count, gently bring your mind back to the count. This may take a little practice, but if done regularly, it will become second-nature. The goal is to find the perfect pace for your body and your breath. This will help you to slip into that meditative performance state often referred to as the “zone."

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Don Campbell and Al Lee are the authors of Perfect Breathing: Transform Your Life One Breath At A Time (Sterling Publishng/2008) and write, speak, train, and blog tirelessly on the subject. Discover more ways you can improve your health, performance, and wellbeing at www.perfectbreathing.com. Reach them at info [at] perfectbreathing [dot] com or call 1-888-317-6718 (toll-free).