How To Properly Breathe During Intense Exercise

Learning how to properly breathe during intense workouts can do wonders for the body's recovery rate, stamina, and performance. Knowing exactly when to exhale and inhale during your exercise routine can prove very tricky for some, however, with a bit of practice, proper techniques can fast turn into healthy habits. Unfortunately, though, many of us don't know how to properly breathe when doing push ups, running, lifting weights and the like. This is not something school teaches you, and even some of the best trainers can easily not notice our problematic and erratic breathing patterns.

How To Breathe When Running

Practically, proper breathing when you're running looks basically like a 3:2 inhale to exhale ratio. What this translates into is you inhaling for three steps, which is right-left-right, and then exhaling for two, which is left right. This might be really tough for some. They might even end up passing out. However, these are some of the situations that people with Basic Life Support (BLS) including CPR training can handle. The knowledge they get from such training will ensure they know exactly what to do in such situations. Anyway, if breathing properly is something you have trouble with during exercise, you generally might want to consider going a bit slower until you've fully developed your 3:2 breathing ratio.

How To Breathe When Lifting Weights

If the Valsalva maneuver is something you've never heard of before, then when lifting heavy weights you might be getting breathing all wrong. This technique involves taking deep breaths just before you lift and afterwards holding that particular breath during the part of the lift that's the most strenuous. What this technique does is it increases your body's intra-abdominal pressure which, in turn, can help strengthen your core allowing you to lift heavier weights much easier. If you watch any professional weightlifting athlete you'll be able to see all this live in action.

Belly Breathing Vs Chest Breathing

Using the top of the chest during intense workouts uses the shoulders and neck muscles that are not really designed to undertake such tasks. This can help increase neck and shoulder tension, leading to you having a weaker diaphragm as well as compromising your blood flow during your exercises. Contrastingly, breathing from your abdomen or belly helps strengthen the diaphragm and allows you to get full breaths for better physical performances. Teaching yourself how to breathe through the stomach can also help increase your awareness levels of knowing when to detect shallow breathing. Stress and poor or slumped posture are usually the major culprits when shallow breathing is concerned, even in professionally trained athletes.

If you are struggling with your breathing during intense exercises, hopefully, this article has shown you what you need to be doing to make everything better. Many of these techniques mentioned above are not that hard to integrate into your training. Most of them just need a little patience and a lot of practice if you want to have them figured out. When you learn how to breathe properly during intense workout sessions you'll help make the physical activities you have to undertake more enjoyable, much easier and better for your overall health.

This is a contribution from one of our contributing writers.

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