In this instructional YouTube video, Bill from Beyond Fitness Online explains how intentional breathing can modulate the sympathetic nervous system, lower blood pressure and heart rate, alleviate pain, improve sleep, and address vestibular issues such as vertigo. He introduces a simple self‑assessment: timing how long one can exhale after a normal inhale, and then timing a normal exhale followed by a maximal inhale. After recording these baseline numbers, he guides viewers through rhythmic breathing exercises—starting with a 5‑second inhale / 10‑second exhale pattern, or a shorter 2‑second inhale / 5‑second exhale pattern, optionally adding a brief hold (e.g., 2‑second inhale, 2‑second hold, 5‑second exhale). The practice is to be performed for 2–3 minutes, after which the initial test is repeated to gauge improvement. Bill emphasizes that simply becoming aware of breath often yields benefits, and he promises a follow‑up video showing how to integrate these techniques into actual exercise routines. He concludes with a call to subscribe for weekly updates and a reminder to “live healthy.”
Chapters
Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online. Today I want to talk to you more about breathing. Now I've been talking about this a lot in recent weeks, and that's because breathing can be so powerful for a lot of different things. Your breathing can help to control your sympathetic nervous system, meaning you can control your blood pressure, your heart rate, and those things. You can kind of start to bring those down when you're breathing properly. It can control pain. It can also help to get you better sleep. It can help to eradicate any issues you may be having with vertigo or other vestibular issues. There are so many different things that happen with breathing as well as endurance. Normally we think about breathing and exercise, we think, I've just got to be able to jack my heart rate up, and that's not entirely true. We would need to be able to control our breath. So what I want to show you here Is a simple test to start with. I want you to sit there, and you may need to pause the video to do this, but you're going to sit there, take a normal breath in, and then see time yourself to see how long you can make your exhale. So it's just in, long exhale. Now hopefully that can be about thirty seconds or more for you. Then try it again the other way. Do a normal exhale and see how long you can make your inhale and time that as well. So it's exhale. Slow inhale. Now, I'm not really doing this because of sake of time, but give those a shot, write those down. And then what we want to do is we want to start to work on how much better we can control our breath, because the better breath control you have, the better your endurance will be, and the more it will impact your entire body, including all of your— anything connected to hormones. So if we're gonna work on this, here's how we get this better. We're gonna start breathing with a rhythm, and there are ways to advance this. So I'm gonna show you the first level here, and in my video next week, I'll show you how to advance this into your exercise. But this will be great right now to warm up before you work out. So focus on just taking breaths at different paces. So get out your stopwatch, time yourself, and go ahead and breathe in for 5 seconds. And out for 10 seconds. If that's too hard, you can shorten it. Try to breathe in for 2 seconds and out for 5 seconds. Play with your different ratios. I'm not huge on starting people with breath holding necessarily, but if you want to try and breathe in for 2, hold for 2, breathe out for 5, that's fine. What I want you to try and focus on is making your exhale longer than your inhale. Do that for 2 to 3 minutes, then go back to those tests that we just did and see if you've improved. Oftentimes, just by being aware of our breath, it starts to get better. What we can do from here is take this into our exercise. I'll show you that in the next video. So if you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel. I post new updates every Friday, and next Friday you'll get that one. And until next time, live healthy.
