Category: Breath

The Slumbering Diaphragm

Tibetans have known for a long time and Western science is now discovering that aging does not have to be a one-way process of decline.

The truth is – “Use it or you’ll lose it!”

And regarding breathing most of us spend our lives shallow breathing and not engaging the diaphragm anywhere near fully.

But you can increase lung capacity and two major long-term general health studies found that increased lung capacity was the one metric you could correlate with longevity.

Moderate exercise, walking or cycling, can boost lung size by 15%.

The upper part of our lungs are connected to our sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight mechanisms. When we are stressed we tend to breathe from the upper part of the lungs and breathe more rapidly. Good when you need to quickly run away.

The lower part of the lungs are connected to the parasympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic system is all about slowing down, nodding off, relaxing, meditating, chilling out – rest and digest, feed and breed.

In the next breathing blog we’ll cover some of the simple breathing exercises we can do during the day to connect with the parasympathetic chilled out nervous system – and increase lung capacity.

James Nestor’s book ‘Breath’ and why it’s so important

by Peter Crockett

This has to be one of the books of the decade. It explains why breathing through our noses is hugely better for us than breathing through the mouth and how to change if you are a mouth breather.

It has some fascinating stories about therapists who have found ways to help respiratory diseases including asthma and emphysema just with breathing exercises and tells you how to do them.

Below is a short video of James Nestor explaining some of the concepts in the book and if you do buy it and buy it through Amazon, please go through Amazon Smile and select Healthy Generations as your charity of choice. If you go through Amazon Smile each time you login to Amazon everything you buy generates a small donation from Amazon; it doesn’t affect the price you pay.

Enjoy! And happy nose breathing.

Breathing, Cold and Wim Hof

by Peter Crockett

If you come to any of my classes you would have heard me talking about doing Wim Hof breathing for months and more recently a morning cold shower….oooh! No ice baths yet though.

Last week I came across this video from Dr. Sten Ekberg, click here to watch, who explains what happens when you do both – breathing and the cold.

It is the best explanation of how the autonomic nervous system works – the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and how they balance us – I have ever heard.

And why doing the breathing and the cold is good for our bodies and when you should be careful.

Play and learn!