Secrets to Optimal Breathing Techniques

Breath work, it's getting its day in the sun. And this is great because breathing obviously is important. And you see books like Breath by James Nestor or the Wim Hof method is programmed for type of breathing becoming very popular. But is putting tape over your mouth when you sleep or a breathing program all that you need for proper breathing? Stay tuned and find out. Hi, I'm Akim Asao. I'm the owner of Soulcore Fitness, and I've been in this field for about 30 years. I'm a summer therapist and summer trainer. So I do therapy and fitness, and I work here in Santa Fe and also with my online program. When anything new comes out, I get a lot of questions asked by members and past members about the validity of it. And so when the Breathbook came out from James Nestor and when Wim Hof got really popular with his programs, I had a lot of people talk to me about breathing. I said what they say in this book and in their thing is good stuff. There's nothing wrong with it, but I want them to understand also the mechanics of breathing. That's not just about a technique, putting tape over your mouth. It's not just about a breathing technique to stimulate different things for your body. It's also about how your physiology allows you to breathe. And this is important because if you don't understand the totality, the complexity of something you're working from, you become dogmatic. And so you become dogmatic and just do this one way. And I saw this personally because back in the pandemic, I was teaching classes online like most people, and I was working out while I taught something I can't stand. I hate working out and teaching, but I was doing it because I had to. And so I had two forms that needed oxygen. I need the exercise portion and I need the talking portion, which means I needed more oxygen, right? So she saw me breathing through my mouth and wrote me this big, long email, not understanding one second that at that time I needed more breath to bring into my body, so I have to use my mouth. Didn't make me a mouth breather, but I use my physiology. And because I know my body's balanced with all the things I'm going to talk about here, that I'm not worried about that if I have to use that as an accessory. So stay tuned. Now, breathing should be smooth, fluid, and automatic. The breathing you do obviously helps you to not die, but it also helps to structure your body. So we all know that, or hopefully we know that muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, all Have a job to do and that that allows our body to move properly and for us to function properly. What not a lot of people know or think about is that our body also functions on a pressure system like hydraulics. So in this example, right, I want my abdominal cavity, my thoracic cavity and a little bit of my cervical thoracic and my pelvic cavity to function with proper pressure. So in the abdominal I have a fluid filled sac, in the thoracic I have more of a gas filled sack. It's that coordination and equalization of the pressures that allows us to also to breathe, but also to have a good structure and to move well. So as I breathe in, it should be like a wave like position. It should breathe in. Belly button up, chest down, belly button, chest, nice and smooth. It should be predominantly nose breathing. Inhale nose, exhale nose. Right. It's okay if you're exerting yourself hard to mouth breathing occasionally. It's not, you're not going to die, right? But you don't want to be predominantly mouth breathing because then you're using a bunch of. It's not effective. And a bunch of accessory muscles. As you breathe in, a bunch of stuff needs to happen, right? As I breathe in, my diaphragm goes down, so I get pressure going up and down. My belly button goes out because as a diaphragm go down, it pushes that fluid sac out omnidirectional. So I get also pressure forward and back or anterior, posterior. And then my ribs should move from the bottom to the top. It should move out like that, okay. Should each move out like that at the same time or coordinated time to allow my expansion, expansion of my ribs to allow more air to come in. Then when I breathe out, the reverse happens. So you can see there's a lot of different physiological things that need to happen for us to breathe properly. But because the body needs to breathe, it's going to breathe how it wants. So like any dysfunctional movement, the body does it because it has to or because you want to. It doesn't mean it's right. So in breathing, if I don't breathe that way and I breathe accessory, I still breathe right through my mouth and I'm using my scalenes and pec minor, all that stuff to help with the breathing. It's not right, but the body does it anyway. So it's important to not only go through different techniques like taping mouth or if you need to, or breathing techniques to facilitate different things for breathing. But your body has to learn to breathe properly, which means you need to do a bunch of exercises and stretches to make sure you that these areas work properly. You will only breathe as well as you work on the potential of how much you can breathe. So by that I mean if I have a little tiny bag that's tight and I'm trying to breathe in a little tiny bag, I can only work to that level, right? So I can do all the breathing techniques I want, but if I only have that much potential, that's how much I'm working with. So you can say you're working with 20% or 100%, but if I train myself to work with 100%, then all these breathing techniques I do and just in life now I work with more 100%. It's the basic idea of your body, right? It'll work to whatever level you're at. When you're working globally, that means body as one. So with breathing, you got a lot of different things need to happen first within that bag. You got a lot of different layers of soft tissue that need to be thought about. You have the serous and periteal fascial layers of your lungs. You have a different layers of fascia via your intercostals, your obliques and your abs that through your body. And then you have some thoracic fascia. So you can say you have, I don't know, seven, eight layers of soft tissue, each one a bag that all need to be to move to that 100%. Those need to be trained separately. You need to have a strong and mobile diaphragm. I can't tell you how many people have weak diaphragms. And if you have a weak diaphragm that's not mobile, you're not going to breathe. I'll give you an example. I'm training a guy who's, I don't remember exactly. I think it's 80, right. And he's had a lot of physiological trauma to his body and he had trouble breathing. His oxygen was starting to go down low. I simply gave him a couple diaphragm awareness and strengthening exercises and a couple of stretches to do on his own. And his, his O2 shot back up to 98% or so because now his diaphragm was doing its job right, like all things. So. So I want that diaphragm to work properly, but I also want, I have three layers of intercostals. Intercostals are muscles between the ribs that participate in inhalation and exhalation. So they need to do their job. Like all muscles need to do their job. You have what else? Your abs, right? Your abs participate with the breathing because they need to go out and come back in. So if I have tight, weak abs, then my breathing is going to be compromised. I have accessory stuff like my pec minor, pec major, my lat, my scalenes. All those are accessory. They're not primary. But if they're accessory, then they also need to work well. Your body is only as strong as your weakest link. So if you have a weak link within some of these areas I talked about, then you're going to have issues. You have a lot of different parts of your body that works with your. With your breathing process is not just diaphragm, it's not just ribs, there's a lot. So if you have a weak link with that, that's as strong as your breathing is going to be. Are you getting to breath work or some proper breathing techniques? Are you also working on your physiology to make sure the different parts of your body are strong enough and flexible enough to allow proper breathing? Let me know in the comments and don't freak out. You don't have to go ahead and quit your day job and work out eight hours a day to make sure your physiology is working properly. You just need to start where you're at. Now, I don't typically show exercises on this channel because there's no way for me to formulaically give a program that works for everybody and know how everybody wants to be, needs to be taught and progressions and all that stuff. But learn that wave like breathing I talked about at the beginning is pretty safe for, I would say, pretty much everybody. So I'm going to show you that, okay, to first work on this proper wave like breathing. I'm going to teach you right now the best thing to do is to lie on your back because the more you come down to the ground and the more you give your body less things to do, the easier it is for you to focus on one specific thing. So as I tell my clients, at night before you go to bed, great way to practice breathing, but also to just kind of be mindful, calm your mental emotional state before you go to sleep so you can wake up a little more restful. So when you're on your back, you want to have one hand belly button, one hand chest, and first you just want to breathe for awareness. So I breathe in and out. As I'm breathing, I'm just paying attention to do I feel that wave like belly button, chest, belly Button chest, or do I feel something else? Is my body trying to shrug? Am I breathing to my chest mainly? Am I squeezing my glutes? Like all exercises, the body will cheat if it can't do it properly because it's uninformed. Once you have that down, the idea is to slowly increase how much you breathe in, how much you hold, how much you breathe out. I say start with three, which means breathe in three, hold three, breathe out four. You do that for a while, then each time you increase the parameters, right? 4 seconds, 4 seconds, 5 seconds, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7. The goal is to get to 10, 10, 11, 12. Right there, you always want to breathe out a little bit deeper than you breathe in. And you want to try all this through your nose. So I'm practicing. Smooth breathing. And as you increase the parameters, how much you do the in, the hold and the out, start to pay attention. Because again, as you increase the intensity, which is breathing in longer, holding longer, out deeper, your body may want to cheat. So again, those same places. Are you shrugging? Are you crunching your glutes? Are you trying to. To use your abs or whatever? It should be, as I say, it should be lazy. Your body should be in place, but lazy. And the breath should come just from that wave, like coordination between the diaphragm and ribs and all that fun stuff. So practice that. That was a really powerful exercise I just showed you and should not be taken lightly. It may seem simplistic and nothing but. Do that progression I talked about and you'll notice tangible results in your breathing and also your mental, emotional and physiological state. Now, as you're doing that, hopefully you're aware of your body and maybe you can start to feel, hey, what's tight, what's weak, what's not as smart? What's my physiology telling me about this breathing pattern, like all global patterns? And then you need to start to dissect that and go through and go, okay, if it's weak, I need to strengthen it. If it's tight, I need to stretch it. Generally, it's both, but you need to start to become aware. Now, I know there's a lot of different areas in your body that we talked about. Maybe you're not in tune with all of it. That's where seeking a professional like myself is going to be the best benefit. Because we say, oh, don't worry, this area needs to be worked like that because you need to work each thing specifically and segmentally. So like I said before, you're a combination of links like A chain. Your body only functions as well as the weakest link. So if you have a bunch of chains and most of them are wrought iron and the one in the middle is made of thread, you're as strong as that thread. So I can't just do a global movement like practicing breathing and expect my body to strengthen that thread link. I have to go to that thread link and go, okay, thread link. What do you need? Do you need some proprioception, which is like awareness work, like turning things on? Do I need to strengthen and stretch it? What do I need to do to make sure that thread turns into iron so that I am iron all the way through? It's going to come down to whether you just want quick results and like to do new things and just want to feel ego gratified, or you want to develop a relationship with your body, learn how it works and what it needs. We all want to use our bodies for different things, but we also want to start to think about, what does my body need? It's preventive care. That's mainly what you do. You don't want to go to symptom care, which is going to a doctor and expect it to help with all these different things. You want to prevent those things from happening to the best ability. So you need to go through and teach yourself these things and get in tune with what your body needs. Have the two match so you can have a program to keep your body functional. That is the definition of longevity and sustainability. If you want some more help with that, I'd be glad to help. You can join my private Facebook group. You can get a free download PDF thing in my book. Sorry. Or you can speak to me one on one with a consult. All three are down in description. You want to be more interactive. It's a group. If you want to read something, get the book. If you want to talk, we can talk. So I hope you found this helpful. I wish you the best and I'll see you next week.