What kind of breather are you?

What’s wrong with my breathing?

A focus of last night's class was developing awareness of our breathing.  For optimal health we should breathe diaphragmatically. Breathing is a natural expansion and contraction within your body. Babies automatically breathe with their diaphragm. By breathing with your diaphragm, your lungs expand and expel waste more efficiently. Diaphragmatic breathing slows your breath, relaxes your nervous system, detoxifies your organs, aids circulation and digestion, improves your immune system, reduces high blood pressure, builds stamina and heightens your sense of well-being. 

Despite this, many of us don't do it!  I found a great website which suggests why we don't breathe diaphragmatically below.  Have a read and see if any of those reasons apply to you.  So if we're not breathing diaphragmatically, what are we doing? Have a read of the article by Barbara Benagh from Yoga Journal and assess whether your breathing fits into any of the sub optimal categories.

 

Dru Yoga’s Pigeon Breath

We will practice a variety of breathing exercises (pranayama) as we progress, but the pigeon breath that we practised in last night's class is a great foundation breathing exercise. It can help release spasming and tension from the diaphragm and strengthen and rebalance the muscles of breathing.  It is particularly beneficial for asthma sufferers.

 

• Sit in neutral spine, or stand in Tadasana (Mountain Pose). Interlock your hands under your chin.  Your head faces forward.  Breathe in and raise the elbows sideways. (Pigeon wings).  

• Breathe out through your mouth, slowly and evenly, as if blowing out through a straw. (Pigeon coo). At the same time, bring your elbows together in front of you as you gently push your chin up.  (Do not force your head back).  

• Hold this position as you breathe in, feeling the chest inflate. (Pigeon chest).  Focus on the sternum.  

• Breathe out, returning your head and arms to their original position.

 

How Healthy Is Your Breathing?

Poor breathing habits are easy to spot. These tests will help determine if you can benefit from breath exercises. 

Upper-Chest Breathing: Lie on your back, placing one hand on your upper chest and the other on your abdomen. If the hand on your chest moves as you breathe but the one on the abdomen does not, you're definitely a chest-breather. Anything more than slight movement in the chest is a sign of inefficient breathing. 

Shallow Breathing: Lie on your back and place your hands around your lower ribs. You should feel an effortless expansion of the lower ribs on the breath in and a slow recoil on the breath out. If your ribs remain motionless, your breathing is too shallow, even if your belly moves. 

Overbreathing: Lie down and take a few minutes to let your body establish its relaxed breathing rate. Then count the length of your next exhalation and compare it to the length of the following inhalation. The exhalation should be slightly longer. If not, you are an overbreather. As a second test, try to shorten your inhalation. If that causes distress you are probably an overbreather. Because it is easy to manipulate the outcome of these two tests, you may want someone else to count for you at a time when you are not paying attention to your breath. 

Breath Holding: Holding one's breath after inhaling may be the most common poor breathing habit. To determine if you do this, pay attention to the transition from inhalation to exhalation. A breath-holder usually feels a "catch" and may actually struggle to initiate the exhalation. This tendency is particularly noticeable during exercise. You can reduce the holding by consciously relaxing your abdomen just as an inhalation ends. Many years of habitual shallow breathing causes the diaphragm to spasm. It’s similar to a hand that tenses and spasms. The diaphragm for most people isn’t a smooth running muscle. Instead it’s under immense tension, and very often it flutters.  When the diaphragm flutters it causes you to involuntarily hold your breath. Most of the time you don’t even know you’re doing it.

Reverse Breathing: Reverse breathing happens when the diaphragm is pulled into the chest upon inhalation and drops into the abdomen on exhalation. Lie on your back and place your hands on your abdomen. The abdomen should slowly flatten as you exhale and rise gently as you inhale. If the opposite occurs you are a reverse breather. Since reverse breathing may only occur during exertion, this test is not completely reliable. 

Mouth Breathing: It's fairly easy to notice if you're a mouth-breather; if you're not sure, ask your friends or try to catch yourself at unguarded moments.

By Barbara Benagh from Yoga Journal

Eight reasons people don’t breathe diaphragmatically

If breathing diaphragmatically was good enough for Buddha and is a key to vitality, why doesn’t everyone do it?

1.     Monkey see, monkey do — no else does, so we don’t. Shallow breathing is a pattern that we start imitating when we are infants.

2.     Breathing is emotionally stimulating and expressive, and most people avoid emotions and expressiveness as carefully as they steer clear of pot bellies.

3.     Men and women alike are afraid to have little pot bellies like Buddha, even for a moment. Belly sucking-in may be the most popular postural habit.

4.     Life in chairs — with the hips flexed and the belly compressed from below — makes diaphragmatic breathing mechanically difficult.

5.     Rat racey stress tends to accumulate high in the body: face, jaw, neck and shoulders. Many of my clients are too busy grinding their teeth to breathe from the gut.

6.     A churning, tight belly is another common consequence of stress, and obstructs abdominal breathing even more effectively than facial tension distracts you from it.

7.     Once lost, diaphragmatic strength is difficult to regain. It is one thing to be out of the habit of breathing abdominally (at age ten, say) and quite another to have lost the diaphragmatic strength and coordination for it (by age twenty-two, for instance).

8.     It's not like you can't breathe without strong diaphragmatic contraction — it’s just more difficult. So perhaps the most insidious reason that people don't breathe with their diaphragms is because they can. Most people would rather stick with an understated respiratory style rather than work harder. They can get away with it, so they do.

from  
(http://saveyourself.ca/articles/respiration-connection.php)