What Are Breathing Exercises
Breathing exercises don’t have to take a lot of time out of your day. It’s really just about setting aside some time to pay attention to your breathing. Here are a few ideas to get started:
Jackson Sayers, B.Sc. (Kinesiology), discusses weight-assisted breathing drills.
Debra Treloar, BSR, FCAMPT, Physiotherapist, discusses breathing & physiotherapy.
Weight Assisted Breathing Drills
This is a great breathing exercise. One of the problems we’re having in society today is our posture of our upper body is getting into a very forward, rounded position. This is really limiting our lung capacity. This is a good exercise to increase our lung capacity.
We simply put a nice weighted ball onto our stomach, and we get into the concept of how do we more that ball up and down through using our breath. So if we simply get our head into a nice little cushion, so that our body’s nice and square, and we take a big breath in, we pause, we blow it all out, and we pause again.
The most important part of this exercise is the pause at the bottom and then the pause at the top, and we use our breath to move the ball up and down. So we can start with a very, very light ball, and we can take a big breath in, have a pause, blow it all out, and have a pause at the bottom.
As you get better at this drill, not only can you gravitate towards a heavier ball, but you can gravitate towards having more and more motion in it.
Presenter: Mr. Jackson Sayers, Kinesiologist, Vancouver, BC
Local Practitioners: Kinesiologist
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