If you're interested in breathing exercises to relieve stress and anxiety, to sleep better,
to boost your digestion, to manage your blood pressure, or to even out your mood throughout
the day, but when you go looking around online you find different books, different gurus,
different techniques, and everybody says their technique is the best, and you can't figure
it out, well, this video is for you. Before we get into it, let's do a long slow breath
together. It's in through your nose for four, out through your nose for eight. Here we go.
Good. Now, my question is, how do you feel? Do you feel relaxed?
Do you feel balanced and centered? Or do you feel stimulated? These are the questions you
should be asking. It's not about brands or teachers, it's not about best-selling books
or hashtags. When it comes to breathing practices we want to choose practices that are going to have
the desired effect on our nervous system. Hey, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher, I'm a breathing
coach. Like a lot of people I got introduced to breathing initially through my yoga classes,
when I first started back in 2002 in New York City and my teachers, like all yoga teachers,
they told me to breathe through the nose. I thought okay. They told me to breathe slowly.
I thought okay. But when I pressed them for details, like why are we doing this? Or how
slowly? Things got murky very quickly. In this video I'd like to walk you through a
simple way to categorize yoga breathing practices. Whether it's a new technique or an old technique,
they can all be understood with a paradigm that I call water, whiskey, and coffee. Water practices
balance your nervous system, whiskey category practices, like the name suggests, they make you
sleepy, and coffee category practices, they rev you up and they wake up in the morning and get
you ready for exercise. I want to clarify here, I haven't invented any of these practices. In fact,
no one living has invented any practices. These practices have been around for thousands of
years. We simply utilize these techniques for our desired outcome and you're wondering: "Yeah yeah,
but Lucas should I do that really fast breath that those guys in the ice baths are doing?
Should I do that really slow breath, with long holds,
like the free divers or the spear fishermen are doing?
Or should I breathe slow and steady like my power Vinyasa teacher told me to do?"
And again, the answer is yes, yes, and yes. You choose the practice based on how you'd like to
feel. In this video I'll walk you through water, whiskey, coffee, and I'll also share with you
some simple practices so you can get started. If you'd like a PDF reference you can click on the
link down below. Let's start off by talking about water category practices. One way to think about
this is if you imagine you walked into a grocery store and you didn't know anything about food or
nutrition and somebody said to you: "Hey Lucas, just eat raisins all day long. Raisins are the
best. They give you energy, they taste great, you feel great." You say: "Great, I'm eating raisins
all the time." And you feel pretty good for about an hour and then you end up on the toilet,
right? Somebody says: "Lucas, you know what the best thing is? Meat. You should just eat meat all
day." When they start throwing steaks at you and maybe you eat a little you feel kind of satiated,
and then suddenly you've got the opposite problem, you can't go to the bathroom at all. When you walk
in the grocery store, if you're new to nutrition, it's important that you understand first and
foremost this is the big picture - macronutrients, fat, protein, and carbs. Do other things matter?
For sure. But the most important thing from a nutritional perspective is to understand fat,
protein, and carbs, how they affect your hormones, your body composition, your energy,
your metabolism. When it comes to breathing, same thing. We have three main categories that we can
think about and water is the first category. Water, like the name suggests, is always a
good idea. You can have water first thing in the morning, you can have water right before bed in
the evening. Water has a balancing effect on your nervous system, water category breathing practices
do the same. The way we define water category practices in breathing techniques is when we
take our regular breathing rate, which is around 12 to 20 breaths per minute, we cut it in half,
and then we double the volume. That sounds like a lot of math, but essentially we breathe half pace,
double the volume. So I slow it down, but I take deeper breaths. And what this does is,
if you're feeling low on energy, it'll help to lift you up just a little bit. If you're feeling
stressed and anxious, it'll help to dampen that down just a little bit. It's a very,
very moderate practice. This is is what my yoga teacher was hinting at 20 years ago in
my first yoga class. Let's do a couple of water category breathing practices together, with a
very simple nose, nose, four, four count. There are many other practices, many other patterns,
but let's just do three rounds together. We'll go in and out through our nose for four. Here we go.
So that's three rounds of a 4x4 practice. Are there other practices we can do with
that same rhythm, that same rate, that same volume? Yeah there are a whole bunch,
but they all fall under that water category practice. Just like if you went in the grocery
store there are lots of things that fall under the carbohydrate category - the bread, and the
fruit. You get the idea. There are a lot of different practices, but on a fundamental level,
when we're breathing at a rate of around four to six breaths per minute, which is what I was doing
there, that has a balancing effect on our nervous system. Let's put that one aside and let's move
on to our next category of practice, which would be whiskey category practices. The whiskey name
helps us to remember that these practices they make you sleepy, they relax you, they really
stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. Of all the breathing practices in the world,
whether it's yoga, or exercise, or whatever it might be, there are more variety of whiskey
category practices than any other practice. Just something to think about. So, if you're wondering
what something is, very often it falls under the whiskey category. In terms of definitions,
a whiskey category practice is something that falls at a rate of three breaths per minute or
slower. That means we're breathing very, very slowly. When people start to hold their breath
that also would fall under a whiskey category. To feel this, we'll do a practice of inhale four,
exhale eight, just like we did at the beginning of this talk, and we'll do three rounds. And the
goal is to slow, slow our breath down. Remember, when you're exhaling, to do it at half speed,
so you don't run out of air. Let's practice together. In through your nose for four.
And out through your nose for eight.
Good. Notice how you feel. Usually, with both our water category and our whiskey category
practices we would do around 10 rounds. So we do that 10 different times. You could do it less,
but usually, we do at least 10, if not more. When you practice that consistently, you'll
feel your body relaxing. The final category that we'll look at are coffee category, or stimulating
practices. Like the name suggests, these rev up your sympathetic nervous system. They're
most appropriate first thing in the morning or right before exercise, where we need that jolt,
we need that cortisol spike to get ourselves in a ready state for movement. There are lots
of different coffee category practices. The one I'll show you is kind of a quintessential
practice called kapalabhati breathing, or breath of fire. It sounds and feels like a sharp sneeze.
I force the air out using my lower abdomen and then I relax as the breath comes back
in. This backwards way of breathing - forced exhale, relaxed inhale,
which is backwards - it has a jolt effect on your nervous system and it's part of what impacts that
sympathetic nervous system response. When you exhale, it should feel and sound like a sneeze.
And make sure between each breath you relax completely. Let's practice 20
rounds together. Three, two, one, and we exhale, exhale, exhale.
Good. Allow your body to relax. Usually with breath of fire we do three rounds
of 20 first thing in the morning, before exercising, before a yoga class, to again,
put us in a ready state for practice. Hopefully these categories have helped you understand where
all of the world's breathing exercises fall, and then you can pick and choose exercises that best
meet your needs right now. If you'd like to fall asleep, probably a whiskey category practice is
best. If it's first thing in the morning, it makes sense to sit down and do three
rounds of 20 breath of fire or something similar. Throughout the day, throughout your yoga practice,
we usually come back to some type of water category, 4x4, balancing practice. Different
practices to choose from, but which category does it fall into? Hope you found that helpful.
I'll drop a link down below to a PDF guide. If you'd like more science-based yoga videos,
click on that link down below. If you have questions about water, whiskey, coffee,
or anything else we've talked about, you'll find a comments section down below. I'd love to hear
from you. You can find my teaching calendar at yogabody.com. And if you're looking for some book
suggestions to get a better overview about how all these different breathing practices come together,
I often recommend The Healing Power of the Breath by Patricia L. Gerbarg. She was on the podcast a
number of years ago. I'll drop a link to that down below. And James Nestor's book, Breath,
is also another great resource, not for one particular standout practice, but to understand
this whole world of breathing in general. Great to have you here. I'll see you in the next video.