The Oxygen Advantage: The Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques for a Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter You
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Breathing in (inhaling)—abdomen gently moves outward
Breathing out (exhaling)—abdomen gently moves inward
Abdominal breathing is more efficient simply because of the shape of the lungs. Since they are narrow at the top and wider at the bottom, the amount of blood flow in the lower lobes of the lungs is greater than in the upper lobes. The fast upper-chest breathing of people who chronically hyperventilate does not take advantage of the lower parts of the lungs, limiting the amount of oxygen that can be transferred to the blood and resulting in a greater loss of CO2. Not only this, but upper-chest breathing activates the fight-or-flight response, which raises stress levels and produces even heavier breathing.
Observe your own breathing when you are stressed, or watch the breathing of anxious relatives, friends, or colleagues—you will see that this type of breathing is generally located in the upper chest and goes at a rate that is faster than normal. When we are stressed we tend to overbreathe and resort to breathing through the mouth. Stressed breathing is faster than normal, audible, produces visible movements, and often involves sighs. Many people habitually breathe in this manner every minute of every hour of every day, holding them in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight with adrenaline levels high. The work of even the best stress counselors, psychologists, or psychotherapists will be limited unless they first help their patients to address their dysfunctional breathing. When oxygen delivery to the brain is reduced, no amount of talking and reasoning is going to correct this deficiency. Stressed and anxious patients can only make the progress they really need when their bad breathing habits are addressed.
On the other hand, healthy individuals who are relaxed and relatively free from stress will exhibit breathing that is abdominal: slow, gentle, calm, regular, relatively unnoticeable, silent, and through the nose. To achieve this type of breathing and reduce the negative effects of stressed overbreathing, it is important to activate the body’s parasympathetic nervous system to elicit the relaxation response. To do this, you will need to adjust your breathing habits in order to properly use your diaphragm. Avoid sighing, panting, and breathing through the mouth, and become accustomed to slow, gentle, relaxed, calm, and quiet breathing through the nose. This is how we should breathe during rest every minute of every hour of every day. Within a very short time you will find that you feel calmer and more energetic and are able to sleep better. The positive effects of abdominal breathing will continue to transform every aspect of your health, including your sports performance.
Another advantage of abdominal breathing is that it assists with lymphatic drainage. The lymphatic system is effectively the body’s sewerage system, draining away waste materials and excess fluid. As the lymphatic system does not have a heart to pump the waste throughout the body, it is reliant on the motions of the muscles, including the diaphragm. During abdominal breathing, lymph is sucked through the bloodstream, neutralizing and destroying dead cells, reducing fluid retention, and improving detoxification of the body.
By utilizing the natural benefits of abdominal breathing you will improve the quality of your blood flow, increase delivery of oxygen to working muscles, and reduce the symptoms of anxiety associated with overbreathing. Returning your breathing habits to the natural and efficient methods you were born with will also allow you to enjoy better health and maximize the potential of your sports or exercise performance. Use the following exercise to encourage abdominal breathing during rest and sports until it again becomes second nature. As the objective of the Oxygen Advantage program is to restore light, abdominal breathing with a high BOLT score, the exercise below forms the foundation upon which remaining exercises are practiced.
Breathe Light to Breathe Right
(A more advanced version of this exercise can be found in Part IV: Your Oxygen Advantage Program under Breathe Light to Breathe Right (Advanced Method).)
During the process of breathing, oxygen is drawn into the lungs and excess carbon dioxide is exhaled. The respiratory center located in the brain continuously monitors blood pH, carbon dioxide, and to a lesser extent oxygen. When the level of carbon dioxide in the blood increases above programmed levels, the respiratory center transmits impulses that tell the respiratory muscles to breathe in order to remove the excess gas. When we breathe too much over a period of hours to days, as in the case of chronic stress, the respiratory center adjusts to a lower tolerance of carbon dioxide. Having a lower than normal tolerance to carbon dioxide results in the respiratory center increasing the rate of impulses to the respiratory muscles. The result is habitual overbreathing and excess breathlessness during physical exercise.
You are practicing this exercise correctly when you slow down and reduce your breathing sufficiently to create a tolerable need for air. The need for air signifies an accumulation of arterial carbon dioxide, the goal of which is to reset the respiratory center’s tolerance to this gas. To assist with this, it is very helpful to exert gentle pressure against your chest and abdomen with your hands. Try to maintain the need for air for the duration of 4 to 5 minutes.
To practice this exercise, it can be very helpful to sit in front of a mirror to observe and follow your breathing movements.
• Sit up straight. Allow your shoulders to relax. Imagine a piece of string gently holding you up from the top of the back of your head. At the same time, feel the space between your ribs gradually widening.
• Place one hand on your chest and one hand just above your navel.
• Feel your abdomen gently moving outward as you inhale and gently moving inward as you exhale.
• As you breathe, exert gentle pressure with your hands against your abdomen and chest. This should create resistance to your breathing.
• Breathe against your hands, concentrating on making the size of each breath smaller.
• With each breath, take in less air than you would like to. Make the in-breath smaller or shorter.
• Gently slow down and reduce your breathing movements until you feel a tolerable hunger for air.
• Breathe out with a relaxed exhalation. Allow the natural elasticity of your lungs and diaphragm to play their role in each exhalation. Imagine a balloon slowly and gently deflating of its own accord.
• When the in-breath becomes smaller and the out-breath is relaxed, visible breathing movements will be reduced. You may be able to notice this in a mirror.
By using a simple exercise like this, you can reduce your breathing movements by 20 to 30 percent. If your stomach muscles start to contract or jerk or feel tense, or if your breathing rhythm becomes disrupted or out of control, then the air shortage is too intense. In this situation, abandon the exercise for 15 seconds or so and return to it when the air shortage has disappeared.
At first, you may only be able to maintain an air shortage for 20 seconds before the urge to breathe is too strong. With practice, you will be able to maintain an air shortage for longer periods. Remember, you are trying to create an air shortage that is tolerable but not stressful. Aim to maintain this tolerable “air hunger” for 3 to 5 minutes at a time. Practicing 2 sets of 5-minute exercises is enough to help you reset your breathing center and improve your body’s tolerance for carbon dioxide.
When you practice Breathing Light, the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the blood will result in certain physiological changes in the body. These include:
• A feeling of increased warmth resulting from the dilation of blood vessels
• A rosy red color coming into the face
• Increased production of watery saliva in the mouth, which is an indication that your body is going into relaxation mode and activating the parasympathetic nervous system
All of these changes are normal and should not cause discomfort. However, if you experience dizziness or anxiety while practicing an Oxygen Advantage exercise, then it is better to refrain from doing this exercise and contact an Oxygen Advantage practitioner who can establish that you are doing the exercise correctly. For a list of practit
ioners, please visit OxygenAdvantage.com.
Timing Your Breathing: A Fundamental Error
You may have noticed that while we attempt to reset breathing volume toward normal, there is no suggestion of changing the number of breaths per minute, or to time the length of each breath. This is deliberate—using time to measure the size of a breath is a fundamental error. Modern Western society seeks to quantify everything in terms of measurement, including our breathing, but when it comes to retraining poor breathing habits, it is not the timing that needs to be focused on. Altering the number of breaths per minute or counting the size of each breath in seconds has taken root in many breathing techniques but actually has little or no effect in addressing poor breathing habits.
For example, telling someone to inhale for 2 seconds and exhale for 3 seconds does not provide guidance on whether they should take in a very gentle breath or a huge inhalation of air. The volume of a gentle breath would be far less than the volume of a large breath, and since we are concerned mainly with volume and reducing it toward normal, counting the length of a breath using seconds does not work. The following illustration shows two different breaths, each with an inhalation length of 2 seconds and an exhalation of 3 seconds. Note the difference in the amount of air taken into the lungs by each breath, despite them being the same length:
Similarly, is it not possible to address poor breathing habits by changing the number of breaths per minute. Take, for example, an individual who breathes 20 breaths per minute, with each breath consisting of 500ml of air. This breathing pattern provides a total volume of 10 liters per minute. And, since 10 liters of air per minute is too much, the individual may be mistakenly instructed to remedy this by reducing the number of breaths per minute from 20 to 10. However, changing the number of breaths in this way will simply result in each breath doubling in size to compensate for the reduction of breathing rate. There will be no change to breathing volume and the individual’s symptoms will persist.
There is only one way to change your breathing volume and rate, and that is by slowing down and diminishing the size of each breath in order to create a shortage of air. In time, as breathing volume changes toward normal, you will obtain a higher BOLT measurement and the number of breaths you take per minute will automatically reduce. To reiterate, it is impossible to change breathing volume by altering breathing rate, but the best way to naturally alter your breathing rate is to reduce your breathing volume. As your BOLT increases, not only will the size of each breath decrease, but so too will the number of breaths taken per minute.
Learning and applying the above exercise to your daily breathing will provide an excellent foundation on which to build a more efficient breathing technique during sports. Just as if you were building the house of your dreams, the most crucial aspect is the foundation. There is no point building a beautiful structure on top of a weak foundation. To do so would be futile, as the building would topple soon after it was built. The same rule applies with addressing your breathing volume. Breathing Light to Breathe Right is the foundation on top of which we simulate high-altitude training during many sports activities, as you will see in the following chapters. Take your time to become familiar with the techniques of abdominal breathing and reduced breathing before you move on.
CHAPTER 5
Secrets of Ancient Tribes
In 1974, twenty-one-year-old Tom Piszkin was attending the University of California at Berkeley. He was a runner and worked part-time in the sporting goods department at Montgomery Ward in Oakland. On October 24 he finished his shift and made his way to a bus stop near the Oakland Coliseum, known as one of the tougher parts of town. Soon after, Tom was confronted by four young men who demanded he give them everything he had. Three of the four youths drew handguns and pressed them against Tom’s head, chest, and leg. In shock, when Tom stood up to take his wallet from his pocket, he was shot point-blank in the middle of the chest by a .38 special. The bullet bore through Tom’s sternum and entered his left lung. Tom recalls that, surprisingly, the shot didn’t cause him a lot of pain.
Following an operation to remove the lead fragments, Tom was discharged from the hospital and resumed running within a month, but recovering from such a traumatic experience was slow and arduous. Tom’s journey to restore his lung capacity took over a decade as he continued to fall short of his expectations, despite working hard at his fitness routine. Above all else, Tom wanted to regain the level of athletic fitness he enjoyed before he was shot and was determined to figure out a way to limit his heart rate during his workout sessions. Intuitively, he figured that by reducing the stress on his body during exercise, he would be able to improve his overall fitness and endurance. Tom theorized that it would help to restrict his breathing in order to maintain a steady and manageable exercise intensity—“like a governor on a lawn mower engine”—a solution that was also much cheaper than buying a heart rate monitor.
Tom soon realized that if he couldn’t sustain his pace while breathing exclusively through his nose during training, then he was working too hard and going too fast. At first, he found breathing through his nose during physical training a little challenging, but soon discovered that nasal breathing could more easily be maintained by placing tape over his mouth. Not only did Tom tape his mouth during training, he also did it during sleep to ensure that he continued nasal breathing during the night. One year after beginning his reduced breathing training, Tom went for a lung capacity test. His results showed that he was at 130 percent capacity for his weight and age.
Tom has since dedicated his life to his two passions of sports and inventing. He is currently a triathlon coach at the University of California at San Diego and creator of TitanFlex bikes. He is also certified as a USA Olympic Triathlon coach. After thirteen years of serving at the leadership level in the Triathlon Club of San Diego, he was inducted into their hall of fame.
Switching to nasal breathing after spending years mouth breathing requires courage and commitment. Sometimes it is necessary to take one step back to move two forward if you want to truly improve your performance.
If you observe your teammates or competitors during physical exercise, you will no doubt notice that most will be breathing through their mouths. A question I often hear is: “If nasal breathing is so good, then why do most elite athletes breathe through their mouths and not their noses?” A simple answer is that Western breathing habits have become so far removed from what they should be that mouth breathing has become the norm.
Our ancestors used their noses to breathe during physical exercise, as do present-day indigenous tribes, including the Tarahumara, the famed running tribe of Northern Mexico. When researchers studied the nasal-breathing Tarahumara tribe over the course of a 26-mile run, they were astounded to find that their average heart rate was a surprisingly low 130 beats per minute. Compare this with the normal average heart rate of a Western marathon runner, which lies between 160 and 180 beats per minute, and you can see how nasal breathing allows for a calm and sustained breathing pattern even when engaging in intense physical exercise (more on this in chapter 11). Breathing through the mouth is a relatively modern phenomenon and does nothing to improve performance—in fact, it impedes it.
Harvard-educated anthropologist Wade Davis has devoted much of his life’s work to the study of indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America. To date, he has lived with fifteen groups of indigenous people, including tribal hunters of the Amazon whose senses are so attuned that they can smell the urine of an animal from forty paces and determine whether it is from a male or female.
While staying with the tribe, Davis, who is also a triathlete, was allowed to accompany them on hunting expeditions. Hunts began in the morning at a pace alternating between a jog and a run. As soon as they picked up the trail of an animal, the hunters switched to running in order to catch up. When the animal became aware of the hunters, it would speed away, but they would continue to follow in close pursuit. The hunters were persistent, increa
sing their pace so as to give their prey little time to rest, and each time they lost sight of it they would continue on doggedly until they tracked it down again. This pattern could continue over many hours, possibly even days, but the hunters’ tenacity would eventually pay off and the animal would collapse from exhaustion, enabling them to capture it at close range. While Davis had a hard time keeping up with the hunters’ pace, what was most impressive to him was that they never opened their mouths to breathe. Just like our ancestors, present-day indigenous tribes are able to run at a high intensity with their mouths closed over a relatively long duration of time, a feat that civilized man seems to have forgotten. It is time to go back to basics.
Initially, breathing through the nose might feel strange during exercise, especially if you are used to breathing through your mouth. But remember that the nose is made for breathing, and nasal breathing ensures a number of benefits that are essential not only for good health but for improved sports performance, including:
• Filtering, warming, and humidifying air before it is drawn into the lungs
• Reducing the heart rate
• Bringing nitric oxide into the lungs to open airways and blood vessels
• Better oxygen delivery throughout the body
• Reduced lactic acid as more oxygen is delivered to working muscles