How To Improve Breathing Capacity

How To Improve Breathing Capacity

So really the only people who could benefit from breathing correctly are people who breathe. So if you don't breathe, then you probably won't get much benefit out of learning how to breathe better and also how to improve breathing capacity.

Recently I watched a conference by James Nester, where he was talking about "ways to improve breathing". He is the author of The New Science of a Lost Art. Depending on his talk, now I am going to share five ways to improve your breathing.

1. Stop Breathing Through Your Mouth.

So breathing through your mouth isn't going to kill you. It's going to allow you to get enough oxygen to survive. But just surviving is different from being healthy, so compensation is different from really celebrating vibrant health.

Stop Breathing Through Your Mouth

So the difference between the mouth and nose, there are numerous differences, but the main ones are the nose is the filter. This is our first line of defense for the body.

The nose also heats up the air. It pressurizes it, moistens it, and conditions it so that by the time the air gets to our lungs, we can extract about 20% more oxygen breathing through our nose than we can equivalent breaths through the mouth.

And if you think that's not going to make a difference throughout the day, throughout your life, you're crazy.

When you start looking at so many chronic illnesses. From asthma to allergies to even anxiety. And how they are directly tied to the way in which you breathe. And oftentimes they are tied to how we tend to over breathe.

You start to understand that having that extra pressure and resistance in your breath is so essential to calming your body down. Filtering that air. And allowing yourself to work at peak efficiency. 

And when we walk through the day, just for one, we're not filtering that air, but we're also taking in way too much air, which stresses the body out. So a lot of you breathing through your mouth right now.

It sounds crazy. Everyone now breathes through their mouths. What is crazy is to look at 5400 other mammals on the planet right now and look at how they're breathing. Dogs breathe through their mouths and they are thermoregulating to offload heat.

But no other animal is an obligate mouth breather for a reason. It is terrible for our health. It affects how your face will look. It makes you more susceptible to periodontal disease. It creates hyperventilation.

It can stress you out. I can give you a whole laundry list of problems associated with it. The science is very clear. Don't breathe through your mouth. Breathe through your nose as often as you can.

2. Use your nose.

So if you were to take an X-ray of your head, which is something I have done, you would notice something at the front of your face. You would notice that we have all of these crazy structures right in front of our faces.

Use your Nose

These structures take up the equivalent space of a billiard ball. You could just imagine putting a billiard ball in the middle of your head. Those structures aren't there randomly. When we breathe air through our nose, we're forcing this air through a gauntlet of different passageways where that air is purified and where that air is heated and pressurized.

See, animals that live in shells use their shells to keep out invaders, to keep themselves safe. We use our noses to do the exact same thing. So how we breathe affects every system of the body. It affects how your heart beats, it affects your circulation, it affects digestion, and it affects how your brain operates.

So if we are breathing in a dysfunctional way, if we're taking in way too much air and overworking ourselves all the time, we put these other systems of our body in a state of stress.

And if you don't believe it, just try to hyperventilate right now for about ten to 20 seconds and see how you feel afterward. Many of us won't be spending all of our days in the state of acute hyperventilation, but we will be over breathing, and eventually, our bodies will break down.

So this is why we want to breathe through our noses. We want to filter air, especially if we live in an environment with pollution or allergens or covet or wherever else.

We want that air to be moistened, we want that air to be pressurized because we want to breathe fewer breaths, but to obtain more oxygen in each breath.

So that is efficiency. Why would we unnecessarily be overworking ourselves all day long?

We don't want to do that. We want to be in a state of calm and efficiency. And that's what breathing through the nose helps us do.

3. Improve your lung capacity.

There was this fascinating study done about 40 years ago, where they looked at all of this data from about 5000 different subjects and they found that the number one marker of longevity wasn't genetics, it wasn't diet, it was lung capacity.

Improve Your Lung Capacity

The larger our lungs are, the more efficient and healthy they are operating, and the longer we will live.

So how do you fix this?

If you have lungs that are alien or if you're older and your lungs start to shrink, which is what happens to everybody after the age of about 35.

Well, you can fix it by breathing properly. And you can help yourself breathe properly by having proper posture and breathing very slow and low breaths.

This isn't pushing it too hard. This is breathing in this almost imperceptible way where you take very calm and controlled and rhythmic breaths.

This helps you retain your lung capacity as you age and it helps your body stay in a calm state and more efficiently get oxygen with each breath.

So one of the things that you can do to improve your lung capacity would be to exercise. Even mild to moderate exercise helps us retain lung capacity.

We can also do something called yoga, which was a technology of breathing before it had any vinyasa flows. So the yoga most of us are doing today was invented about 100 years ago. The original yoga was about sitting in a position and controlling your breath.

So by controlling your breath and keeping flexible in this area, you can allow your lungs to inflate and deflate to their maximum potential. And that's exactly what we want to do throughout the day. 

4. Slow down.

Inhaling and exhaling slowly have numerous benefits. One of those benefits is you are sending signals to your brain that you're in a calm state.

Slow Down

So about 80% of the messages between the brain and the body come from the body to the brain. So if you are hunched over and stressed out and you're breathing like the above picture, you are sending your brain alarm signals that there is a problem, that you need to be ready to fight or run away from something.

You're also unleashing all these different hormones and adrenaline to allow you to be awake and alert. But we don't need to be awake and alert all the time during the day. That leads to chronic inflammation and so many other issues.

So by breathing slowly, you can take over these systems. You can control your nervous system in many ways to send your brain signals that you are relaxed and in a safe place. And when you do that, the rest of the body and the brain responds.

The great thing about breathing is it's so easy. So when it comes time to slow down your breathing, you just simply slow down your breathing.

For some people, that means breathing into account of about three and out to the account of about three. Other people are comfortable with extending that, which is great.

When you do this, you further relax the body and you elicit a parasympathetic response. And you can measure this by measuring what happens to your heart rate when you tend to extend your exhales, measuring what happens to your blood pressure.

And you can just feel it throughout your body as well. And this is something you can use anytime, anywhere. So slow down your breathing. Doing so will calm your body down and send those signals to your brain that you are in a safe place and that you can relax. And it will also balance your levels of CO2 and Oxygen so that you will be able to utilize more of that oxygen as it enters your bloodstream.

5. Hold your Breath.

So, breath holding is both good and bad. When we hold our breath unconsciously, it's very bad. And an estimated 80% of office workers do this. What we do is we sit down and we see all these emails and then our phones are blowing up, we become stressed out and we hold our breath.

Hold Your Breath

Then we breathe too much. we hold our breath again. if you're doing anything in a way that stresses your body out, eight hours a day, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, it's gonna eventually catch up with you.

Breath holding can also be very beneficial to you. Because when you hold your breath, you increase your levels of carbon dioxide. And by increasing your tolerance over time for carbon dioxide, you can learn how to calm your body down and actually increase athletic performance. It is not very easy at the beginning, it seems so counterintuitive.

A lot of people say, oh I need to keep breathing because I need oxygen. But you'll notice something when you hold your breath and look at your oxygen levels, they don't go anywhere for a very amount of time. it takes a couple of minutes for your oxygen to really be hitting some serious level of deficiency.

So by holding in your breath, what you are doing is just controlling your respiration. You are bringing yourself more deeply into your body. And you can then use those breath holds as tools to help you perform better or enter states of focus, or even heat yourself up when you're cold. 

I think the number one thing I would like people to take away is that things don't have to be complicated in order for them to be effective. And in some cases, transformative.

Doing very simple breathing tweaks throughout the day, and even before you study, before a workout, can have a transforming effect.

This seems impossible, it seems too simple to be true until you spend years looking at the science. And until you talk to hundreds and hundreds of people who have helped take control of their own health and their own sicknesses by helping take control of their own breathing.

That's what I've discovered and I think you will find the same true for yourself.