You breathe constantly, continuously, every single day. But how much time you do you actually put into focusing on your breathing? Breathing exercises, putting focus on how you breathe and even why you breathe, can help propel you to higher levels of fitness, well being, health and happiness.
“Man may exist some time without eating; a shorter time without drinking; but without breathing his existence may be measured by a few minutes.”
– Yogi Ramacharaka
Probably not. Do you know what “entropy” is? Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system.
What that means to your body is that everything is slowly degrading and falling apart. The less attention you put into a part of your body, the more you’re allowing the natural inertia towards increased entropy to occur. Consequently, you’ve got to put work into your breathing, just like you do your muscles. And just like with training muscles, you’ve got to start at the beginning with Diaphragmatic Breathing.
Unless you’re hyperventilating, there are spaces between breaths, both after the inhale and after the exhale.
Most of the time, you won’t notice or pay attention to these spaces. But each of them has value and spending some time expanding both of the retained segments of a complete breath
The science has show that Nadi Sonham (Alternate Nostril Breathing) can lower blood pressure and pulse rate1, improves manual dexterity2 and has a balancing effect on the functional activity of the left and right hemispheres of the brain3. All that just from breathing!
Now that you've started on the path of training your breath, you can continue on with these advanced yoga breathing exercises. All these breathing exercises are built on the Yogi Complete Breath, so if you haven’t already been practicing your belly breathing and your Yogi Complete Breath, please go back to those pages now.
Now that you’ve strengthened your diaphragmatic breathing, it’s time for the Yoga Complete Breath. (You have been practicing diaphragmatic breathing, right???) The belly breathing exercise is the beginning. Now we’ll add in the rest of the lung capacity.
There are three parts of a Yoga Complete Breath. Unless you specifically develop all three aspects in the correct order, you are most likely over-emphasizing one of the aspects to the detriment of optimal breathing mechanics.
First is low breathing, which was covered in diaphragmatic breathing.
The second aspect is middle breathing. This involves widening and slightly lifting the rib cage to fill the middle of the lungs. This part of the breathing cycle uses the internal intercostal muscles, the ones between the ribs.
The third portion is high breathing. The ribs, collarbones and shoulder blades are raised. This involves the use of neck and shoulder muscles: the SCM (sternocleidomastoid), the scalenes and the upper trapezius.
Any of the three of these phases of this deep breathing exercise can be used independently for inhalation but there are drawbacks to using any of these by themselves. Of the three, low breathing is the best, with the only drawback being that the lungs are not completely filled. Middle breathing is limited in that the intercostal muscles cannot create enough space to completely fill the lungs.
Of the three portions, high breathing has the most drawbacks. Like the others, it is incomplete. However it has the additional negative that the primary muscles used for this portion of the breath are usually too tight in people anyway, especially in our current, computer oriented culture. Those three muscles being too tight is a primary cause of forward head posture. That in turn can lead to nerve entrapment through the neck bones and the scalenes themselves, can lead to tension headaches from shortened and tight sub-occipital muscles and a rounded upper back which will make deep breathing exercises even more difficult. Oh, and bad posture doesn’t look so good!
Enough talk! It’s time to breathe.
The complete breath is a 3 part inhalation, using the full musculature of the breathing apparatus, in the correct, natural order. It combines all three methods of breathing (high, medium and low) in the right order to use the full capacity of the lungs.
While the instruction for the complete breath appear to be 3 distinct motions the breath is intended to happen in a smooth, seamless manner. At first, breaking it down into three parts and then putting them together can help teach the breathing musculature their individual parts. But then you want to smoothly integrate the three parts.
Practice, practice, practice. And when you have this down you can move on to the more weird, interesting and esoteric deep breathing exercises.
Without it, all your activities, the whole of your life, is built upon a shallow and weak foundation. That sounds like a pretty bold statement and it is… and it’s also true. Diaphragmatic breathing is the engine of your inhale and a strong inhale is going to properly feed your body.
