Proper breathing helps your heart, keeps your lungs clear, empowers your brain and all organs with oxygen and expels your most common waste product, carbon dioxide. This helps regulate your body's acid/base balance. Breathing properly means breathing deeply--with good posture so your ribs and diaphragm can move freely--breathing slowly (10 to 15 breaths a minute) and with a regular rhythm.
Heart Health
Proper breathing aids your heart. Normal inhalation pulls air into your lungs. Your ribs and diaphragm pull outward, creating a slight vacuum inside your chest. This also helps expand your heart when it relaxes between beats. Unrestricted expansion allows good refilling for its next beat to pump out. Shallow breathing and bad posture, such as slouching, compress and confine your heart.
Lung Clearance
Your lungs take in 2,000 gallons of air a day, and much more if you work hard. Much of the dust, pollen, smoke and mist in that air deposits inside your lungs. Proper breathing helps your lungs clear themselves of the normal mucus it produces to trap those foreign substances. Proper breathing keeps the clearance mechanisms mobilized and empowers a strong cough when you need it.
Oxygen Delivery
The only way to feed your brain, muscles and all of your internal organs with oxygen is to breathe efficiently. Each breath must be big enough to deliver fresh air all the way down to your alveoli--the microscopic, blood-rich sacks at the ends of your air passages where oxygen is absorbed. But every time you exhale, those passages fill with the stale stale air you're exhaling. Each inhalation must be at least three times as large as the stale, residual air volume in your airways.
Carbon Dioxide Elimination
Every metabolic process in your body--burning calories, consuming nutrients, building new tissue or creating energy--makes CO2 as waste. When your blood carries CO2 to your lungs, the gas floods into the fresh air each inhalation delivers. Then exhalation flushes it out of your body. Shallow, slow breathing pools CO2 in your lungs, and it backs up into your blood. Unpleasant sensations, shortness of breath and metabolic disturbances result.
Acid/Base Balance
Carbon dioxide from your body enters your blood partially as carbonic acid. Your physiology works best with a specific amount of this acid, so too much or too little causes disruptive and dangerous biochemical imbalances. When the carbonic acid reaches your lungs, it converts back into CO2 gas and is exhaled. Proper breathing maintains a healthy, internal acid/base balance.
Proper Breathing Pattern
Stew Smith, fitness author and former U.S. Navy SEAL, teaches military recruits to breathe in a 3:2, inhalation-to-exhalation ratio while exercising. Inhale during Left--Right--Left footfalls then exhale during the following Right--Left footfalls. This maximizes cardiac benefits and CO2 clearance. The proper resting pattern for breathing is a 1:2, inhalation-to-exhalation ratio. During exhalation, airways become smaller, so you need more time to exhale all you inhaled. This prevents accumulation of air and CO2.
