Five myths about breathing that most people get wrong. Hey, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher
and a breathing coach. In this short video I'd like to clear up some of the common confusion
around breathing exercises, so that you can get the most from your practices. Myth number one
has to do with belly breathing, you'll hear people say that the only healthy breath is a belly breath
and that if your chest or your shoulders move that something's wrong, that something's dysfunctional.
This comes from a grain of truth, but it's also an oversimplification. In a seated position,
like I am now, if I'm doing a full yogic breath of course the majority of the work happens
from my belly, my diaphragm, my main breathing muscle. Let's say maybe 80 percent of the work
is happening from my diaphragm. However, a full yogic breath, traditionally as well as right now,
also involves my intercostal muscles, the muscles between my ribs. They contract to create a little
more space here for air to come in. It also involves what are referred to as your accessory
muscles of your chest, your shoulder, and your neck, and they contract to lift your collarbones,
your clavicles, just a little bit and then it reverses. Your clavicles drop, your intercostals
relax, and your diaphragm relaxes up. Now, where this myth comes from is that our diaphragm is
often weak and uncoordinated, in the same way that maybe your biceps are weak and uncoordinated. Like
any skeletal muscle it can atrophy from lack of use. We can train our diaphragm and we often do,
perhaps you've done belly breathing practices, I teach these, they're commonly taught,
they're very, very helpful. Where you can get into trouble is if you see a friend or a relative,
their chest or their shoulders are moving and you automatically assume they're a bad
breather or that something's wrong. That's not necessarily true. There are times when
people flip the script. Instead of 80/20 you will see 80/20 meaning they're in the grocery store
stressed out and anxious and they're breathing what's called high costal breathing,
with their shoulders and their chest doing most of the work. That's true,
that can lead to a nervous system imbalance. When I talk to people about breathing the number two
thing that people often say is they're worried that they lack oxygen. Most people assume that
their blood oxygen is low and that's why they have low energy and they're prone to illness.
This is categorically false. You can measure it using a simple blood pulse oximeter like I
have here and unless you have COPD, or asthma, or sleep apnea, or emphysema, a major lung problem,
you're probably walking around like me with blood oxygen level around 95 to 99 percent and I know
this because, well, I've tested hundreds of people, as have EMTs, as have doctors. It's
really the norm to have a full tank of gas. So, if we already have a full tank of gas, if all of us
watching this video today probably have 95 to 99 percent, why would we do breathing exercises in
the first place? Well, there are three reasons and the first reason is to affect your nervous
system. By affect I mean you can rev it up, you can slow it down, or you can find balance, you can
stimulate your sympathetic nervous system, you can upregulate your parasympathetic nervous system,
or you can modulate between the two. That's the number one reason. The number two reason is to
strengthen and coordinate those muscles we talked about earlier, your breathing muscles. Strengthen
and coordinate them just like you would any other muscle in your body, you can train them. And then
the third reason is to optimize our oxygen and our CO2 levels, finding a balance between the
two. Which leads me right into myth number three - CO2 is a toxin, it'll kill you. CO2 can be a
toxin but oxygen can also be a toxin. It's all about balance. As we'll learn from looking at
the Bohr Effect, your body actually requires a certain amount of CO2 in order to absorb the
oxygen that you already have. OK, what does that mean? It means if you breathe really, really fast,
you will absolutely fill up your tank with oxygen, 99 percent oxygen, 100 percent oxygen. However,
you'll also get dizzy, and light-headed, and your brain is not getting enough oxygen,
but your blood has 99 or 100 percent. How could that be? Without CO2 your oxygen is all bound up
and your body can't absorb it. What we're looking for with oxygen and CO2 is the right level,
the optimal level. We're not looking to just dump CO2. Before I move on to myth number four
and myth number five, just a quick announcement. I publish science-based yoga videos once a week. If
you find this video valuable, if you'd like other breathing practices and science-based yoga videos,
hit subscribe down below. Myth number four has to do with athletic performance and this is a strange
one, but there's a pop health rumor that if you want to win races, end up on the podium, and
win Olympic medals you should be breathing only through your nose. In fact, some people even claim
that Eliud Kipchoge, the marathon winner, record holder, breathes through his nose. This is just
not true. When your heart is beating in a zone four or a zone five, meaning a really high heart
rate, it's physiologically impossible and really, really dangerous to breathe through your nose. I
think more importantly, when guys who look like me are giving guys that look like this advice about
performance it should be a red flag. Probably not the best person to listen to. Professional
athletes, they make millions of dollars, tens of millions, sometimes even hundreds of millions of
dollars from their body and performance, you can assume that they're doing everything they
can to optimize their breathing for athletic performance. Now, for recovery sure, I can
share some things with you. For sleep, yes, I can be helpful. The breathing exercises that I teach,
traditional yoga breathing practices, these are designed for householders, for laymen,
not for professional athletes, and it's important to leave high performance to the pros. Myth number
five is super common as well. People assume their lungs are too small, they assume they need to
breathe to increase their lung capacity. Like they want to build biceps, people want to build their
lungs, but that's not how it works. Your lungs are not skeletal muscles. Your lungs are an organ
and you can move the needle a little bit in your lung capacity, but not so much. Most importantly,
it's not so necessary. If you imagine your lungs as two upside down trees with the trunk and then
the branches progressively, progressively smaller - they're called bronchioles - dead ending into
little, teeny, tiny oval-shaped sacks called alveoli, this is where the gas exchange happens
with the capillaries, these progressively smaller branches, little alveoli, there are 500 million of
these little sacs, so much surface area that were we to open them up and spread them flat they would
cover about half a tennis court, about a hundred square meters. Why am I sharing all this with
you? Because you probably already have enough, you've got plenty, you've got more than enough.
The name of the game with breathing exercises is not to expand your lungs, the name of the game is
usually about making the most of what you've got, which comes back to what we talked about earlier,
strengthening and coordinating the muscles of respiration, it comes down to balancing oxygen and
CO2, and it also comes down to choosing breathing practices that give you the desired outcome. If
you imagine your autonomic nervous system with two branches: your sympathetic, fight-or-flight, your
parasympathetic, rest and digest, we're constantly toggling between these and they're both really
important for our life. What breathing practices allow us to do is get rid of the autonomic,
the auto part of this response, meaning it's like having an automatic car that we can suddenly
switch to manual. Using breathing practices we can override the automatic response, we can help our
body to fall asleep, or we can help our body to prepare for exercise, or wake up in the morning.
This is the real power of breathing exercises that often gets lost with all of these myths.
Hope you found this video helpful. I'll put a PDF link down below to some of the breathing
practices that I have so you can explore what we refer to as water - balancing, whiskey - cooling,
calming, sleepy practices, and coffee - those stimulating practices we mentioned. If you have
questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you down below. You can find my teaching calendar at
yogabody.com. And, as I mentioned earlier, to support my work and also to get updates for
future videos, hit subscribe down below. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you in the next video.