I was with my doctor and he said to me, your breathing is almost not there. Your breathing is shallow. You even sometimes skip breathing.

I was a “vertical breather”.  Breathing from the bottom of the lungs to the top of the chest. This is like most adults breathe, with shoulders also moving upward.  I was only using fraction of my lungs to take in air, and straining my shoulders and neck as well.

Shallow breath gives the signal of stress to the body that go to the brain. This raises hormones related to weight gain, poor sleep and other bad things.  The body is getting the signal to be stressed out.

The right way of breathing

Horizontal breath, the right way, uses the the diaphragm. Which is the muscle in your body made for breathing. This allows you to expand out, filling the biggest part of your lungs with air.

When taking a deep breath, your entire abdomen expands outward like a cylindrical ballon. A balloon slowly filled with helium, and then defeats until every last drop of air is gone.

Oxygen is everything

Why is this so important?  Dr. Vranich is a breathing educator on how to get their most basic function right. She has worked with elite athletes to expecting moms. Not getting enough oxygen is hurting our health in more ways than we can imagine. An observation she references is from Arthur Guyton, MD.  A researcher at the frontier of research related to the body´s need for oxygen, said:

“If you look at any emotional suffering or physical pain under a microscope at a cellular level, there´s always a lack of oxygen.”

Everybody thinks, ‘I get winded, I have to do more cardio. Why not just put more oxygen in your blood?  The whole reason your heart is pumping is to get more oxygen throughout the body.”

I found my rhythm of the “belly breathing” instead of my former shallow breathing. I could feel the calming sense in my body.  I tried to use the same horizontal breathing on my runs. It gave me a better endurance in running.  It´s hard to get there but it´s worth the exercise and focus. It changes your breathing for the better.

One side note, sometimes it makes you a bit aware of yourself. People can see you sticking the stomach out over and over again.  This is one of the reasons why we always feel that we should keep the stomach in. Unfortunately we end up using the wrong breathing.  But there is a silver lining.

Once I started to breath from my lower part of the body, my core and abs got stronger. At worst, toned abs is something everyone would be willing to achieve.