Pay attention to your breathing when you exercise. Breathing does not usually require much thought, but the moment your breathing fails to function properly, you sit up and take notice. Hyperbole aside, breathing directly affects your everyday comfort, and if you enjoy walking or running regularly, breath control can even improve your performance.
The Role of Breath Control
For walkers and runners, breath control is not as critical as it is for swimmers. Nevertheless, anyone can develop respiratory discomforts including shortness of breath and abdominal cramping. These distress signals must not be ignored, but in most cases, adjusting your breathing can reduce and sometimes eliminate any discomfort. Deep, controlled breathing increases oxygen availability to working tissues and allows you to monitor muscular and mental fatigue. Authentic Breathing points out that oxygen is exactly what allows your body to produce energy.
Breathing While Active
Many walkers and runners are advised to suck in their stomach, but this can cause undue tension in your upper body and may in fact impede the normal movements of your diaphragm. Maintaining an erect posture, of course, is required; otherwise you would topple over. Yet consciously tightening your abdomen restricts the normal downward and upward motion your diaphragm makes to accommodate lung expansion and air-expulsion. Peak Performance cites studies of runners who improved their bio-efficiency by incorporating methods such as belly breathing.
Belly Breathing to the Rescue
Authentic Breathing describes belly breathing, or "low breathing," as the outward expansion of your belly when you inhale, and its retraction when you exhale. Placing a hand on your belly may help you focus on making it rise and fall properly. Many scientific studies show that belly breathing significantly reduces stress, and wellness outfits such as Rutgers College Counseling Center espouse belly breathing as a simple, cost-free method for not only reducing stress but also improving concentration, stimulating endorphins, controlling toxins, and assisting blood flow, digestion and healing.
Muscular Tension While Walking and Running
A relaxed stroll with belly breathing is excellent for full-body tension alleviation. Speed walking and running, however, demand more power and faster muscle contractions, which means lower-body muscle tension naturally increases. The key is being able to control the tension and to immediately relax your leg and hip muscles when your foot is not in contact with the ground, and when your leg has finished its thrusting action. If you can maintain a stroll's relaxed belly breathing at higher speeds you will actually increase biomechanical efficiency because belly breathing reduces whole-body tension and thus increases muscle flexibility.
Cramping While Exercising
Abdominal cramping, or stitches, is a common stomach complaint. Rice University explains that tight, rapid breaths can cause muscle spasms, so belly breathing, which forces abdominal muscles to relax, can discourage cramps from even developing. If you have already developed a cramp, take slow, deep breaths and visualize sending them into the cramp, as if you were pushing air into the tightness. This achieves a slight expansion of abdominal muscle tissue. So if you walk and run regularly, practice belly breathing. You may find exercise effortless.
