If you'd like to learn how to use breathing exercises to reduce your blood pressure,
this video is for you. Hey, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher, I'm a breathing coach. There's
heart disease on both sides of my family, so this particular topic around blood pressure
and breathing is of interest to me personally and professionally. I'm excited to share with
you what I have learned. In this video, number one we'll talk about the research, what it shows. It's
really exciting. Number two, we'll talk about the hypotheses for why it works. And lastly,
probably most importantly, we'll talk about a five-minute routine, I'll guide you through it,
that you can do twice per day to consistently and pragmatically lower your blood pressure over the
next six weeks or so. A quick disclaimer here: I am not a medical doctor, I'm not a clinician,
blood pressure and heart disease are very serious conditions and please don't mess around, don't
change your medication. Go talk to your doctor before you try anything new. Let's talk about the
research. If you look at the clinically published research in journals going back 20 years, you find
really, really, great evidence that breathing exercises, whether it's fitness exercises,
yoga breathing, any style of breathing practices that focuses on slow and low breathing, we'll get
to this more in a moment, can really, in the short term, lower your blood pressure. Now this doesn't
come as much of a surprise, right? You know that if you go out running your blood pressure goes up,
you know that if you lie down on the couch your blood pressure goes down. Of course it's helpful
to have a tool like mindfulness, like meditation, like yoga, to lower your blood pressure,
but that's not a big surprise. What is a big surprise is in the past 10 years or so there's
been a lot of research around something called inspiratory muscle strength training. So training
your inspiratory muscles, your breathing muscles, in terms of reducing your blood pressure, not just
in the next 10 minutes, but long term, and lasting results. By strengthening your respiratory muscles
you can actually overall lower your blood pressure with results that are clinically significant,
like as significant as medication, and that's where things get really, really exciting. How
does all of this work? Why would breathing affect your blood pressure? Well let's take a step back
and talk about blood pressure in general. Why does your blood pressure go up? Why do
we have high blood pressure? The reality is the exact causes are not known. For most people it's
multifactorial. It could be weight gain, bad diet, drinking too much, stress, poor sleep,
there are genetic factors, multifactorial causes. Now what makes your blood pressure go down?
Medications do an okay job, they can lower your blood pressure a little bit. The biggest effects,
of course, are going to be diet, and lifestyle, and exercise. You already know that if you eat
better and exercise better your blood pressure will lower, but that's easier said than done,
and here's why. We get caught in these negative health spirals, maybe you're in one now. I've
certainly been in them in the past and it goes something like this: you're working too much,
and your stress level's through the roof, and you just don't know what to do. You get into bed
at night, you're wired but tired, so you drink a couple of glasses of red wine and that makes
you fall asleep, but you don't get a good night's sleep. You wake up the next day and you're groggy.
By 11am you need a sugary snack just to keep your energy going, and that works in the short term,
but within a month you've gained a little bit of weight. So now you've got weight gain,
you've got a sugary snack habit, you've got a red wine habit, and your stress level's still through
the roof. That's a negative spiral. It's very, very, hard to break from that, and you don't need
someone like me to say "eat better" or "stop the red wine", "sleep better". What you need is some
sort of tool to get you over that hump, to get you out of that spiral. Hopefully yoga breathing,
hopefully these breathing exercises I'll share with you, can be at least one of a set of positive
dominoes that shift you in the right direction. So what is the deal with inspiratory muscle strength
training? Why does it work? The hypotheses go like this: when we improve our respiratory breathing
muscles' strength, we breathe better. When we breathe better, we're mimicking the effects
of exercise. Let's imagine you were doing hill sprints. Let's imagine you're doing high intensity
interval training. Let's imagine you were doing steady state zone 2 cardio training for three or
four hours a week, something like that. Your inspiratory muscles, your breathing muscles,
would get stronger from firing, firing, firing. Well, you're not doing that right now and when
you're not doing that, of course if you could do that that would be great, but since you're not
doing that, what if there was a hack that could again help us to tip those dominoes in the right
way? Inspiratory muscle strength training seems to be pushing you in the right direction. Here's what
we think is happening. Number one, you breathe better and your endothelial cells release more
nitric oxide. Endothelial cells are inside your blood vessels, nitric oxide is a very important
vasodilator. Okay, so I've got better circulation, I've got dilation of my blood vessels, that makes
sense. What else does it do? Well, it seems to lower your reactive oxygen species, it seems
to lower your C-reactive protein, your overall inflammation. All of these things have very, very,
positive effects on your blood pressure. When we breathe slow and low, like I'll show you in a
minute, it also reduces your stress hormones like cortisol, and that has a cascading effect on all
of your hormones, it can improve your sleep, and again, instead of getting in that negative spiral,
hopefully we can flip that spiral around and start to spin up towards a more positive healthful
future. I don't want to present this as a panacea, but the clinical results are very, very,
promising. What are the clinical results? Well, lots of different tests, most of them are working
with five to ten minutes per day of resistance breathing, and the results are anywhere between
four and nine and millimeters of mercury change in the systolic number of your blood pressure,
the one that most people are worried about. That is almost as powerful as a medical intervention,
without any of the side effects. In fact, the side effects that you will find from this resistance
breathing are almost all positive, like stress management, like focus, like mental awareness, and
peace and tranquility. So hopefully this will work for you. Before we get started with our practice,
you will need one of these devices. This is not a brand sponsor, this is not a product placement.
You need any kind of resistance trainer. I like the cheap ones. This one costs about ten dollars,
there are devices that cost five hundred dollars. I would encourage you to buy the simplest,
cheapest one you can, because then maybe you can buy a couple, leave one at home, one at work,
I like to keep one in my bag. Here's what it does. You put it in your mouth, you set
the resistance, and when I inhale, remember the inhale that's when my muscles contract,
my breathing muscles, specifically my diaphragm, has to work harder. Let me give you an analogy.
If you were going to the gym to build biceps and you started doing bicep curls just in the air
without a weight in your hand, would that work? I guess so, if you did enough of them. Is it going
to work very well? Not really. What if you put five kilos, seven kilos, 10 kilos of weight? Yeah,
that resistance is going to fatigue your muscle and your muscle will grow a lot faster. When we
think about our breathing muscles, your main breathing muscle is called your diaphragm,
it's a dome-shaped muscle underneath your last rib and it contracts down to create a vacuum. We have
secondary breathing muscles, like our intercostal muscles, and the accessory muscles of our chest
and neck. But primarily, for our exercise today, we want to focus mostly on that diaphragm,
that contracting. When we use this device, or any device that creates resistance - you can
even do this with a straw at home, but the resistance does matter - what we're able to
do is build that muscle in a much, much, faster way than we could normally walking
through our day. How much resistance should you have? The research suggests that we should be
at about 75 percent of our maximum. How do we figure this out? Well if your maximum is
can't breathe, loosen the device to the point where you can breathe at 75 percent of your
maximum. Now this is a little bit subjective, but you can get close, and close is good enough.
If we went to the gym and I said pick up your maximum weight that you can do a bicep curl,
you would find it. Now I said ratchet back to 75 percent, you could take a guess. This is the most
important thing, get somewhere in that range, about 75 percent of your maximum. Next thing
that we'll do is we'll practice these in sets over five minutes, and we'll be inhaling to the count
of eight. We'll keep the breath through our nose in between sets and we'll try to do two resistance
breaths per minute for a five-minute cycle. And your objective is to do this cycle two times,
so five minutes once in the morning, once in the evening, throughout your day. Let's get into the
practice and I'll share with you more. I have a timer, I have my resistance device, I'm going
to inhale with resistance, I'm going to exhale through my nose, and rest between sets. When I
inhale, I'll count up to eight. In between sets I'll take as much time as I need to. If you get
any dizziness, any headache, any breathlessness, back off. Instead of doing two breaths per minute,
do simply one breath per minute. Don't be a hero, don't try to rush this, you will build
strength here in your breathing muscles much, much faster, than you would think. Let's get started.
Keep your mouth closed, breathing through your nose. About every 30 seconds I'll
attempt to do an eight-count resistance inhale through my mouth. Second set.
Keep your mouth closed, you're breathing through your nose, you will feel your muscles of your neck
here, and you'll feel a little bit in your chest, but as much as possible try to keep the work,
the muscle contraction, down low in your diaphragm. Let's go again.
Remember, your exhale is passive, the inhale is the active. That's where we're building
our muscle strength, inspiratory muscle strength training. Let's do another one.
Remember, if this pace is too fast, dizziness, headache, light head,
you back off. Do one round per minute instead of two. Let's go again.
Think about belly breathing. Of course,
it's not actually your belly, it's your diaphragm, but slow and low. Let's go again.
As you practice more you'll find yourself falling into a rhythm.
Allow your body to be quiet, and soft, and still.
Final round.
I was attempting to do two resistance breaths per minute. Don't worry about hitting the mark,
don't worry about getting exactly there. Just like if you went to the gym and your trainer told you
to do five sets of 14 but you did four sets of 12, just get in the general range. Remember,
we're training a skeletal muscle here. We're not attempting to increase our lung capacity,
we're not attempting to increase our VO2 max, we're focusing specifically on those inspiratory
muscles, strengthening them so we get those cascading effects. Your objective is to work on
this for at least six weeks. At the six-week mark, start to see if you're getting results. If you
don't have a way to measure your blood pressure at home, I would encourage you to get a device,
they're relatively inexpensive. If you don't have a resistance breath trainer,
I would encourage you to order one online, and don't get seduced by the bells and whistles,
and digital ones, they're all pretty much the same. Buy one that's in your budget and work
from there. I hope you found this video helpful. If you'd like more science-based yoga videos,
hit subscribe down below. You'll find a PDF reference guide to everything we talked about,
along with research in the PDF link which is down below as well. You can find my teaching calendar,
I teach online and in person, at yogabody.com. I'd love to hear your feedback and your comments
down below, especially if you start to get some results or challenges. I'd love to hear
how it goes. Thanks so much for joining me and I will see you in the next video.