Breathing exercises can help improve your health, but can be difficult to learn.
Breathing exercises can help relieve tension and anxiety, and even improve certain medical conditions. The exercises entail learning to breathe in deeply, feeling the belly and ribs expand, and exhaling fully, feeling the chest, belly and ribcage fall. Certain obstacles can present themselves when learning breathing techniques.
Poor Posture
One of the most common limitations to learning a breathing exercise is posture. To take a full breath in, there needs to be space for the rib cage to expand. If the shoulders and spine are rounded and the chest is caved in, there is no room to breathe deeply. Try sitting with your back up against the back of your chair to help lengthen the spine. Breathe in and let your belly, rib cage and finally chest rise. Exhale to release. Try this 10 times.
Bad Habits
When an infant breathes, she does so by instinct only. The belly fills on inhalation, and the rib cage expands. On exhalation, everything lowers and empties. As you grow older, it is common to shorten your breath and reverse the pattern. You lift the chest and draw the belly in on inhalation, and let the chest drop and the belly relax on the exhale. When you start to learn breathing exercises and techniques, this can be a difficult habit to reverse. Try lying on your back. Bring one hand to your hands to your belly. On the inhale, feel the belly rise and on the exhale feel it fall. Try this for 10 breaths.
Hurried Breathing
In today's culture, you may often running from one task to the next in a flight-or-fight response. This causes the breath to become shorter and more rapid. You keep breathing, of course, but it's not deep and efficient. This can make learning breathing exercises difficult, because taking a deep, full breath in and out is not the norm. Try breathing in for five counts and out for five counts. Then slowly work up to seven on each part of the breath.
Medical Conditions
Although in the long run breathing exercises help you breathe deeper and clearer, if you have medical conditions, such as asthma, bronchitis, cancer or allergies, breathing exercises may initially be more difficult. For most of these, it is difficult to take a deep breath and especially difficult to fully exhale. A study published in 2009 in the "International Journal of Yoga" found that pranayama, or breathing exercises, helped to improve the overall breath, especially on exhalation.
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