Breathing we can just let happen, like a wild human would, but we can also control it (like a super wild person). We can learn how to use our breathing to gain powerful effects on the body: to switch us into a deeply calm state, to bring in more oxygen to our cells and to help us when we run or exert ourselves.
To relax
Most of us don’t get much time to stop and chill. We live in a blue-arsed fly state – going from work, to the gym, to the pub or we run round after our kids. Breathing can chill us out.
Breathing & free-diving
I have been interested in the effects of breathing for many years. Yogis are renowned for breath control, but of all the testing grounds for breathing techniques, free-diving is the most dramatic. Free-diving is where people dive to depths on a single breath:
Diving depth record for humans
(without fins) – men 88 meters, women 60 meters
(with weights to get down and balloon to get up) – men 214 meters, women 160 meters
Breath holding while static record for humans
Men 11.35 minutes
Women 8 minutes
Free-diving doesn’t have to be extreme and you can learn a lot from it about breathing and switching your body into a parasympathetic (calm) state. The art of free-diving exists not just in competitive sport but goes way back as an ancient art used in pearl diving and spear fishing in many cultures. We are the only primates who can hold our breath and we also share with aquatic mammals the ‘mammalian diving reflex’. This is a reflex that slows our heart rate and oxygen consumption when we hold our breath or dive down in water.
Enthralled by this information and by the human dolphins who swim to such depths, I took a course in free-diving and loved it. After a few days of learning breathing techniques I could get myself into a state of calm and could saturate my system with oxygen so that I could hold my breath for over 4 minutes and dive down to almost 30 meters. This was an average achievement for my group (one of the best in our group was a heavy smoker!!… though I’m not recommending this by the way). Breathing is powerful stuff! You can ‘feel’ that controlling your breathing works; you feel more relaxed without a doubt, but the breath-hold provides real tangible evidence of how breathing effects your body.
How to do it
Making the most of your breathing is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, the main points are:
- Fill your whole lungs – stomach and chest (most people shallow breath in to just their chests)
- Increase the length of your out-breath compared to your in-breath
- Breath more slowly and more evenly
That’s kind of it. (Check out the post on Augusto’s Breathing Exercise for more details). Like any new movement it takes a bit of time and some pointers to improve. Free-diving is a great way to play with and test this new capability, but the most useful thing is that if you are in a stressful situation, one breath can switch you into a calm state. You can also use these techniques to help you sleep or before you eat, which helps your digestion. Once you’ve discovered the full capacity of your lungs you also start using them more fully all the time and generally have more oxygenated blood. This helps to prevent disease. Skilful breathing also helps when you are training – particularly running. From this year, breath coaching is an integral part of the Wildfitness course.
Tara Wood. January 2010.
A great article Tara, and nicely timed I must add. I myself have recently found the love for freediving, I live in New Zealand so the open ocean is never too far away. I am impressed that one of the best in your group was a heavy smoker! (probably as the lungs are so used to being oxygen deprived perhaps?!;) I find it helps to be totally relaxed, i think this is vital along with the breathing techniques you mentioned.
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