Breathing workouts are exercises that teach you how to breathe correctly. As you breathe more deeply, your body benefits with more oxygen getting into your bloodstream, to your body and your brain. Re-learning proper breathing helps you during your exercise sessions, making your workouts more efficient.
What Proper Breathing Does
Breathing correctly helps your body use oxygen, giving you more energy. As you take in more oxygen, it helps to burn excess fat stored in your body. When you drink more water during your workout, your body uses the retained water for elimination of body wastes, according to the Fitness Health Zone.
When you breath in, expanding your abdomen and your diaphragm, your body gets the benefit of the extra oxygen your body takes in. In return, you benefit from a stronger workout, helping you to increase your physical fitness over time.
Breathing Workouts
As you age, your body begins to reduce its oxygen blood levels, which impacts your mental alertness. Your rib cage and the muscles surrounding your torso stiffen with age, which makes breathing harder to do. Because your muscles are not as elastic, you don't expel all the stale air in your lungs and you don't draw in as much fresh oxygen as you did when you were young. This decrease means less oxygen gets into your bloodstream.
As you get older, you begin breathing more rapidly. Your breaths are also more shallow, and this leads to sluggishness, a poor oxygen supply, heart disease and respiratory disease, according to the Center on Aging Studies at the University of Missouri -- Kansas City.
Breathing Exercises
Breathing exercises help you cleanse your lungs out and deepen your ability to breathe and take in more oxygen. Put your hands on your stomach, palm down, just below your rib cage. Move your hands to your stomach just under the rib cage with your middle fingers barely touching. Pull in a deep, slow breath. Your diaphragm pushes down, your stomach expands and your fingers separate. You'll know you're filling your lungs as your belly expands and your middle fingers separate from each other. This deep breathing is what young children and infants do.
As you deep-breathe, the diaphragm creates suction, drawing more air into your lungs. When you breathe back out, the diaphragm pushes back up and carbon dioxide is pushed out of your lungs, according to the Center for Aging Studies.
Breathing During Exercise
As you exercise, breathe out when you exert any physical effort. When you relax or go back to your starting position, breathe in fully so your body gets the fullest benefit from the oxygen you're taking in.
As you're exercising, do not hold your breath. You force your blood pressure to go up, possibly to dangerous levels; blood flow to your brain goes down and the pressure in your chest increases. All of these are dangerous. During your workouts, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, according to Fitness Health Zone.
