Want to show you a quick approach today to improving your breathing capacity or your lung capacity. One of the things that is most overlooked in the breathing world, in my opinion, is the fact that I can teach you all the cool breathing ideas. You know, we’re gonna do this time breath pattern, we’re gonna show you how to do fast inhale, exhale, et cetera. That’s all great, but sometimes we have to take a step back and go, what is your actual physical, mechanical capacity to expand your lungs? So I’m gonna show you a couple of simple ways that you can start to work on this.
First thing we want you to do is we want you to focus on doing movement, particularly spinal movements, with either a full inhale or a full exhale, ideally both. Whenever we are doing this, we’re gonna be trying to emphasize flexion and extension of the spine, lateral bending of the spine, and rotation of the spine while we are holding either a full inhale or a full exhale. The reason that we’re gonna do that is we want your brain to begin to map that you may have more actual size, capacity, or space capacity, so that when you’re doing your breathing, you can take a larger breath in and get a more full, and complete exhale.
very, very simply we’re gonna start off with an inhale, but the way that we’re gonna do this is we’re gonna do a double inhale technique. So we’re gonna deep breathe in as deeply as we can through the nose. You’re gonna try to fill everything from your pelvis all the way up. Pause and do do then do another sharp, fast inhale.
So we’re trying to maximally inflate your lungs. Now you’re gonna hold this. You have to make sure you don’t get dizzy while you’re doing it. If you get dizzy, stop or make sure you’re close to something you can hold onto. Once you have that double inhale, you’re going to begin doing three to five repetitions of a spinal flexion and extension.
So, inhale, second, hold. And as you are doing this inhale, exhale, you can stop and see, can I breathe into a spot in my back that doesn’t feel expanded? Do I feel a spot in my abdomen when I’m in extension that I could actually create more space? So you’re gonna do that three to five times. You’re then going to follow that within full exhale.
You’re gonna exhale what would be a normal full exhale for you, and then. Add additional. So we should, everything should be a tight cylinder. Hold that, and again, begin working through your flexions and extensions. Just noticing are there areas where maybe there’s still what feels like air left, right?
Can I actually compress an area even more? We’re trying to make your brain understand that breathing is compression and expansion, and you have to make sure that you’re using all the available space. Once you’ve done that, you’re gonna repeat that in a right side bend and in a left side bend, and then you’re gonna do that in a right rotation. And a left rotation.
Why? Because every single one of these movements puts a different stress on your midline, and you’re gonna find in some positions that you have more areas where you can either expand or compress a little bit more. This will take you about six to seven minutes to go through if you’re doing it very consciously.
And that is the key. You must do it consciously ’cause you’re trying to figure out or learn something about your trunk with every single repetition, both of the inhale and the exhale. This is one of my very favorite initial starting drills to have people begin to become more competent breathers. It’ll have a tremendous impact on your anxiety levels because when you do this, it will often reduce sympathetic tone, so it can help you relax and it will teach your brain a tremendous amount about your spine, about your ribs, about your abdomen, and about all these different areas that have to coordinate well in order for you to be a better breather.
If you are new to Z Health, we are a brain-based education company. We specialize in coaching doctor’s, therapist, and elite coaches from around the world.
So if you’re interested in integrating brain-based training in what you already do, well please check out all of our free resources and if you’re interested in breathing, we are also pretty well known in the field for having a lot of innovative ways to blend, breath work with brain-based training, so we also have some products and other things available on that. So check all that out. Make sure to subscribe the channel. We’ll see you next time.
Want to learn more? Check out our free mini course.
