When your body experiences the stress involved with exercising, it requires even more oxygen than usual to function well. Improper breathing while exercising can restrict your body's intake of oxygen during the time your body needs oxygen the most, which can lead to pain, and at worst, severe injury.
Function
Deep breathing while exercising pumps oxygen directly into your bloodstream to get metabolized by your body. When your body picks up on the fact that it is lacking oxygen, it releases neurotransmitters to provide a chemical pain signal to your brain.
Identification
In the absence of oxygen, your muscles produce and store lactic acid. Lactic acid that does not become metabolized into energy through using oxygen builds up in your muscle tissues, which causes you to feel pain and soreness after working out.
Potential
Controlled breathing techniques can be used while you exercise to help control the levels of pain you experience while doing so. Taking quick breaths to fill your diaphragm up with fresh air can provide you a burst of oxygen that can possibly compensate for the pain-creating oxygen loss that you experience due to increased physical activity.
Expert Insight
According to Dr. Majid Ali on his "Science Health and Healing" radio show, pain and oxygen are intimately connected, to the extent that Dr. Ali actually helps relieve his patients' coronary chest pain through oxygen administration. He also provides oxygen treatments for migraine headaches and those who suffer from fibromyalgia. Dr. Ali treats chronic back pain with specific breathing techniques and provides oxygen therapies to those suffering from other forms of pain.
Benefits
Not all physical activity leads to pain. Exercising increases your lung usage and the capacity for higher oxygen intake during both exercise and times when you are resting. This increase helps the body automatically recover more quickly from pain and increase the ability of your immune system to heal itself. It is only when you consciously or unconsciously restrict your breathing that pain occurs.
Prevention/Solution
The practice of yoga can be a particularly effective way to prevent and solve the problem of pain associated with exercise. This is because the yoga asanas (physical poses, or exercises) are always coordinated with deep breathing, to ease the buildup of lactic acid, which causes pain. Some yoga styles, such as Sivananda yoga, also integrate relaxation during the class session to help students breathe deeply to send oxygen to parts of the body that would otherwise become sore after practicing. Yoga also offers specific pranayama breathing exercises to help your body deal with pain.
References
- Majid Ali: Oxygen View of Pain
- Quick-Pain-Relief: Alternative treatment: Pain Relief with Yoga Exercise and Breathing
- Sivananda Yoga Teacher Training Manual; Swami Vishnudevananda; 2003
