5 Minute Facts - Breathing

This is episode 193 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Beautiful. Welcome to Performance Power. Today's five minute fact. We've got breathing as our five minute fact topic. It's that kind of thing we can't do without anybody. Try stopping breathing or holding your breath. Most people can't hold their breath for more than one to two minutes. The record I think is somewhere around 22 minutes or more. Some people hold them for incredible amounts of time. And there's a swim coach on this call, so I'm sure she's familiar with rhythm of breathing, timing breathing, as well as holding your breath underwater. So to start it off, we've got 17,000 breaths per day on average is what we take. So it's kind of important that we can breathe. So our first fact number one in our five minute facts is that our diaphragm, our diaphragm is this incredible muscle that's got not only voluntary muscle fibers, but involuntary muscle fibers. So what that means for you and your breathing, and you know this, we can breathe without thinking about it and we can breathe on purpose. And that's the beautiful thing about having it be involuntary and voluntary. So we can use our breath as a mechanical break to change some things about our physiology. So really cool that way. Fact number two, the type of breathing we do brings us into our sympathetic or our parasympathetic nervous system. Depending on how breathe, we can energize or we can calm. So here's the trick. If we take really fast inspirations or that activates our sympathetic nervous system, our sympathetic nervous system is our energizer one. It's our one that's going to get us up and go. If we do long controlled exhales, That puts us into our parasympathetic nervous system. And our parasympathetic nervous system is our rest and digest. It is our one that we recover in. It is the one that we need to counterbalance all that drive and hard go that we have in our sympathetic nervous system. So that's fact number two. The type of breathing that we do will affect what nervous system we take our physiology or our body into. So that's going to be really important. All right, fact number three, nose breathing is always preferred. So if we're walking through our day, mouth breathing, and I see a lot of people mouth breathing nowadays, if we're mouth breathing a lot, it's not as good for us. Our nose is fantastic not only to pressurize the air, it filters the air. So it has us healthier. If we're mouth breathing for long periods of time, we actually change the structure of our face and our mouth. We want to be into this nose breathing. It's a better filter, it's better for pressurizing the air. It's going to take us into a calmer state as well. So filtered pressurizing and calmer. Those are the benefits of our nose breathing. Fantastic option. And we've got fact number four, nasal breathing. When we're using our nasal breathing, we can activate either the left side or the right side of our brain. So when we choose, what we do is a breathing exercise. Often when we plug one nostril and we breathe only through the left, we activate more through the right side of our brain. Right side of our brain tends to be known for creativity, although they both can do that. And same thing. When we close the left nostril and open the right nostril and only breathe through the right nostril, that'll love that. I'm doing this on camera and that one's going to activate the left side of our brain. That's where we tend to repeat. Think more do our ruminating in our left side of our brain. So left side or right side of our nose breathing can activate or cross over one side of the brain or the other. So really powerful to be able to stimulate one side of our brain, especially if we want to do that proactively for whatever doing or creating in the world. Number five, a physiological sigh. If you've never heard of a physiological sigh, Andrew Huberman has a wonderful podcast. He talks a lot about breathing and talks a fair bit about the physiological sigh. This is your shortcut to getting some things done within the lungs, like opening up your alveoli. These are these little, little guys at the end of your bronchioles. You can open these up really fast with a physiological sigh instead of doing a 20 minute breathing exercise. So say you don't have the time. A physiological sigh is like this. It's a deep inhale and then another and a long exhale. So that one action, that physiological sigh, can be fantastic to just reset yourself with your diaphragm, open more alveoli, especially if you've been sitting for long periods, you're not moving your lungs as much, you're not moving your thoracic, your rib cage, your thoracic spine as Much so that physiological size, fantastic. Again, it's a deep inhale followed by a short other inhale, an extra second inhale and then long expiration. So that is the physiological thigh. Now lastly, as a bonus, the lungs are our biggest waste remover in our body. By removing the CO2 that we are bringing in and expiring, the CO2 is going to be coming from a lot of the processes within our body. Not only movement like exercise, but just day to day processes. So exhaling that CO2 is that biggest waste remover that our lungs do. So 70% of our body waste is coming out in the form of CO2. So this is fantastic. Waste removal engine is our breath work, our breathing. So those are your five minute facts. I'm going to quickly recap them. Number one, the diaphragm is made up of voluntary and involuntary muscle. So you don't have to think about your breathing or you can control it as well. The type of breathing we do, whether it's fast inhales or or long slow exhales, can stimulate either the parasympathetic or the sympathetic nervous system. The fast inhales are the sympathetic that get up and go in that drive. The long exhales are your parasympathetic. Nose breathing is always preferred over mouth breathing, not only for the filtering of the dust particles, our health, our bacteria, all of the things, as well as pressurizing the air and bringing us into more of a controlled state. And mouth breathing tends to change our facial structure. Nasal breathing, we can go on either side, stimulate one side or the other side of the brain. When we block our nostril to purposefully breathe on one side and the physiological sigh. If you want a shortcut to get some real great activation of our bronchioles and popping open more alveoli in our lungs and then you can do that physiological sigh, long inspiration, short extra inspiration, and then long deep expiration. Ok, this opens up our Q and A. So feel free to bring on the questions that have to do with breathing, breath work or anything else. Nutrition, training, exercises, injuries, all of those things. Bring it in. If I can answer it, I will. If I can't, it'll be another topic that I'll research for our performance power. So what do you got? Pop it in the chat or unmute yourself and we will start in our performance power Q and A. If anyone has their hand to pop up, you can do that or pop the question in the chat. In the meantime, we just finished our zenith retreat and on the zenith retreat we Had a number of people who had old injuries like most of us. So we spent a lot of time making little adjustments. And what I'm going to point to on this one that's so powerful is that there were things that people thought they couldn't do, and instead of going on and not doing them, we made the adjustments because I have the expertise, have the background in that realm, and they could do them. So the things for one of them, for one person was, I can't work out in the morning. We worked out at sunrise every single day. Another one was, I can't do these certain things because of my knee. My old ACL and my knee can't do these certain things. And they were able to do those things. We just had to try a different way. We just had to try a different option. Another person had a shoulder injury. They were currently dealing with not an old injury, but a current injury. So then they wanted to limit a lot of things naturally to protect. But what they discovered is that most of the movements were not painful anymore. They were just apprehensive. Anybody deal with that, where you've had an old injury or you've had a current injury, you're actually recovering from it, but the pain is gone, but the apprehension to get into that range of motion is still there. That apprehension is there to protect us from injuring ourselves further. It's a brain pattern. However, what happens is it lingers on, and then that holds us into a limited range of motion and holds us with less. Less movement pattern, less activation, less of all the things that that wing, that shoulder actually needs to get back to former function or even better than before. And that's the thing. Don't ever believe, if you have an old injury that you can't get back to where you were, you can actually get better than where you were. So those are some things that some people were having huge, aha. Breakthroughs from a physical standpoint, never mind the mental breakthroughs that we had going on. We have a question on the best way to recover from a slight muscle pull, rest, or keep it stretched and warm. So this is a fantastic question because that automatic is going to guard it, to protect it. Most of us will do that, and that's natural because that's one of the ways that our body rests and recovers. However, when you're going to use a couple things as your guide. If you've got a muscle pull, let's say it's in your hamstring or your bicep, whatever, if you notice that there's Warmth. So it's hot. There's some warmth there that's not normally there. That inflammation is an indication that you may not be ready to use it normally and that you should still be icing it. When you ice it, you're going to ice it for 15 minutes, usually once an hour. We don't want to ice it more than 15 or 20 minutes within a 45 minute span. You don't need to ice all of the time. You ice for that short span of time, otherwise you go into an opposite effect. So we don't want that. So you'd be icing it if you feel it that warm and hot, little tender or, sorry, that hot inflammation. The rest, yes, it needs some recovery. So you may not do all the things you used to do. However, it needs some movement, it needs some regular activity. So what you might be doing is just a change instead of full rest. Sometimes we like to say change is as good as a break. So if you used to run and you've got that little muscle pull, you might be stationary biking or you might be walking. Because the blood flow, and this is really important, this is key. The blood flow is going to be imperative to remove the waste product from the injury. So the waste cells, all that cellular work that's going on to repair the injury, that needs to be flushed out. So that flushing out will serve the healing process. So you want to do some activity, just adjust the activity so it's not as intense or whatever you used to do. So it gets the recovery, it gets the healing, but the blood flow is happening. If it's something where you can't go and do the activity because you've got this pull, this muscle pull, then you can passively warm or cool it to cause more blood flow that might be moving it more when you're in a warm shower or a hot tub or putting a heat pack on it. If you're past the inflamed stage, if it's not hot anymore, then you can start to use heat. You if it's still inflamed, you're going to stick with cold. 15 minutes on the hour. And same thing with the heat, you're not going to be heating it for an hour long. Heat it for about 15 to 20 minutes. Okay, hope that serves that one. There's another question coming in. Any questions further on that particular one? Does that sound pretty good? Awesome. The next question is, is it better to do cardio before weight training or after weight training? Awesome question. Love that question. So here's the extra question. On top of it. So, Kelly, is it, what's the, what's the goal? If the goal is, for instance, somebody might want to gain muscle mass, somebody might want to change or shift body composition for, for increasing muscle mass, decreasing fat mass. They might want to overall lose a dress size. They might want to have optimal health or optimal brain performance. So if you can pop in the chat, Kelly, what is the outcome you're looking for specifically? While I wait for that, I'm going to say doing cardio before weight training. I can tell you it's easier. I'm just getting my hair done. That's why my. Perfect. Go ahead. Hi. So for me it's. More muscle is not the issue. I'm trying to tone down so that it's a little bit more pronounced rather than trying to add to the muscle I have. Okay, so you were toning. You want to lean out more. So. Okay. Okay. So if that's the case, you can do either. However, one thing I would suggest in this case would be do you work out in the morning? Yes, I do. Okay, so if you're working out in the morning, here's what I would suggest. I would suggest that you do what we just did this whole week on the retreat, is that you are not having any meal for at least 12 to 16 hours. So whether you're doing intermittent fasting for 16, if you're not doing official intermittent fasting of any sort, then make sure that you've had a break from digesting for at least 12 hours. And then if you're working out in the morning, you can actually do your workout on an empty stomach. If you are currently doing that, then I would suggest doing a little bit of both. So you can do a little warm up. So you can do a little bit of a warm up prior to your weight training. So that could be not necessarily cardio, but rather, but rather just a little warm blood flow so that you're good to go into your, into your weight workout. Oops, I'm losing some. Everybody still hear me here? There we go. So you've got good blood flow going into your weight workout, but then do a hard bout after. So I would actually, instead of doing the cardio before or after, I would actually split it to a different day. That's personally what I would do and that's what I do, practice. So I do a lift and then a hard cardio and then a lift and a hard cardio on day after day. And the reason that I do that is because then I can get more intensity in the lift and more intensity in the cardio. When you do both on the same time on the same workout, you're going to be trying to put all your energy into two baskets. So it's going to get divided a little bit because typically if you're doing a hard cardio, that's going to be a pretty intense anaerobic energy system, and weight training is a pretty intense anaerobic energy system. So to get the results you're looking for, the cardio should be fairly intense. The weight training should be fairly intense. You want to be in that anaerobic energy system. However, you will not be in that anaerobic energy system because you won't be able to do the entire intensity that you need for both buckets. Does that make sense? Are you following me here? Okay. Yes. She says. So what I would suggest is giving more intensity to both of them by separating them out. That would be more ideal in this scenario. Looking for leaning out, looking for maintaining muscle mass but getting as getting a little leaner so you're a little more defined, perhaps maybe losing a little bit of fat mass or just shifting body composition a little bit that way. So that's what I would separate, not necessarily before or after, but separating them out. If you're stuck and you can't afford that day to do a completely separate day, then I would suggest doing a little more intensity with it. And what you could do is even combine it. So then you're doing a hard lift exercise with maybe 20 seconds of skipping or a fast sprint or something that keeps your heart rate and keeps the intensity up for the full 45 minutes or hour if you're really tight on time. Because I know for a lot of us we're real go getters, so we're tight on time. We're doing a lot of other things. So then you might be putting more intensity by going between one exercise and another exercise at a higher intensity. But in that case, you're going to have to shift body parts to get the most intensity out of it. So if your legs have just worked, then you're going to have to shift to an upper body work, if that makes sense. All right, I hope that answers that one. The point is that we're trying to get more intensity to get the outcome that she wants. If she didn't want to lean out, then I might suggest something different, like stuff keeping it on the same day. Another question here. Love the idea of cardio for mental health and heart health. When is best to do that? Well, this might be Something that you're just doing as more of an aerobic option. So it might be walking or biking or an easy jog. That tends to be better for mental health simply because we're not having to focus on putting in the massive amounts of effort in. So what I'm suggesting for mental health and using your cardio for mental health, maybe it's a brisk walk, maybe it's a moderate bike ride. So that's going to be in more of an aerobic energy system. So in that case, you're doing some great blood flow, you're getting your heart rate up a little more. It's good for the body, but also great for the mind because you're not working so hard that you're demanding on your brain to focus directly on only what you're doing. What you're doing is being able to allow your brain to do other things by noticing the trees outside. If you get to be outside, by being able to just enjoy yourself, the movement, maybe you can do it with someone, you can enjoy them all kinds of ways to enjoy mental health. And in that case, it's typically going to be something that's not as high intensity and then you're going to be doing moderate or lower intensity. So that's a fantastic, fantastic option. I love that, that option. Okay, other questions here. I want to make sure that I'm targeting people's things that they want to know for their personal wellness training. So we can support that in every way possible. Feel free to type or unmute yourself if you're on a phone or it's just a challenging typing. I'm going to add something else that we did in this past week for the retreat when we were eating. We did that after we had worked out on the beach, after we had watched sunrise. And then by the time we finished eating in the evening, we watched sunset. We had a coaching session and then went to bed. Now, believe it or not, most of us would have eaten sometime in those zones where we were watching the sunrise or watching the sunset. And yet the sunrise and the sunset were helping us reset to our circadian rhythm. So that was a huge health benefit as well. Those are the types of things that are all positive stacking for our health. We worked out on an empty stomach. We were working out at sunrise. We did our gratitude at sunrise. We ate after we'd done gratitude, sunrise and workout, but we ate as a community talking together, so it wasn't some sort of fast shoveling the food in. We then finished our eating in the evening with our Beautiful meal and then watched sunset and then went into further coaching Again, more mental connection. It all plays together. It's not just one thing. Separating, separating, separating. They all tend to work together to stack for those health benefits. Breathwork training. I have a few videos on some breathwork training. I love nasal breathing. If there's one thing I would suggest right now on the topic that we did for our breathing today, it would be this one. And we can finish this up today with this one as well. So what I do is do the pinky and the thumb. And what we'll do is we'll do an exhale on one side and an inhale and then switch, exhale and inhale. Switch, exhale. Inhale, Exhale. Inhale. Switch, exhale. Inhale. Switch, exhale, Inhale. Switch, exhale. Inhale, Switch, exhale. Inhale, Switch, exhale. Now just pause here and breathe through your nose. Now pop in the chat. What you noticed with that breathing exercise. What you noticed with that breathing exercise. One thing that happens is that when we breathe only through our nose, we can't take in as much air. And then when we breathe only in one nostril, not only can we not take in as much air, but it slows our breathing rate right down. Because in order to get a full inhale, it's slower. In order to get a full exhale, it's slower. Some people noticed a light headed tingling in the head. Energized nose breathing is usually very calming, but when we stop doing one side or the other, you notice that you might be able to breathe in so much more freely because we pressurized by breathing one side and breathing the other side and only breathing through the nose, you might notice the calming and the clear breath as well. The other thing that's happening for feeling energized, one thing you may notice when you feel energized is because we switched activating one side of the brain by breathing only through the left nostril, activating the other side of the brain, the left side of the brain, by only breathing through the right nostril. Nostril. So when you feel energized, it may be because you were just in a work bout or in a part of your life where you were only dominating through one side of your brain. And then you got to activate the other side of your brain. So that can be one of the reasons that you feel a little more alert but calm. Activated on one side, activated on the other. So that's one of my favorite, favorite breathing techniques is that nasal breathing, switching from one nostril and switching to the next. It's calming, it creates clarity, it activates one side and the other side. So very, very powerful. Another thing that's fantastic and that's very useful is if you're in a workout, if you're not doing high, high intensity, try nasal breathing only. What you will do is you will train your sinuses, your nasal passageway to open more and become more effective at filtering. So try nasal breathing when you're working out. If it's a very intense bout of exercise, then what you're going to do is nasal breathe on the recovery portion. So say if you were running hard and then you had some rest, use the nasal breathing on the rest because you would have needed to mouth breathe on the intense part of it, the intense portion. So the nasal breathing on the recovery for intense things or even a moderate exercise will train this area to become more effective, more efficient at your nasal breathing. So that's something I have some of my clients do and I do frequently when I'm recovering from an interval run, doing any of the recovery portions of the interval run. Ok, so that's going to wrap it up for today. I encourage you to try the nasal breathing and some of the things that we've looked at today. And by all means, if you think of a question throughout the next couple weeks, just pop it down. Pop that question down. We will address it in our Performance Power monthly. We have a topic every month and I typically take people's questions questions and do a deeper dive into the research so that you can have it answered more fully in our five minute facts that we start with and then we field whatever Q and A you have coming our way. So fantastic work. Happy day everyone today. Huge hearts for everyone and have a beautiful, beautiful rest of your day. Keep being healthy, keep doing all the things you, your wholeness, your body deserves it. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. The Empowered Team runs year round. It is our group coaching and accountability program where we take mindset and physical performance concepts and break them down to usable action steps that optimize results. To learn more about our Empowered leadership coaching for business, our custom online physical training plans, and of course the Empowered Team group coaching. Head to www.theempowered.ca empowered learn more. That's www.theempowered.ca Empowered learn more.