Breathing 101 - A guide to effective breathing for wellbeing.

1. Breathing 101 intro: Welcome to breathing. When I won, my name is Stephanie ribo and I'm a health coach and thanks instructor. I created breathing one-on-one because I believe that it's important for us to tackle the foundations of our health and well-being in order to make any long-lasting changes. Oxygen is our currency for life and every single mechanism in the body relies on it to work effectively. The way that we breathe determines the quality and quantity of voltage. And we take in atoms how well we're able to release toxins from the body. Breathing doesn't just affect our physical health, but our psychological health and our well-being as well. Throughout this course, we're going to work on proper technique and posture and methods for everyday life situations where we need effective breathing. I want you to do one thing for me right now. Take three deep breaths. Then write down three things you notice about those deep breaths. We're gonna do this activity again at the end of the course and compare. Let's get started. 2. Technique and Posture: Let's start by technique. Our technique is really important as it's what helps us to bring power through outbreak. It's really easy to pay no attention to our technique at all and have more technically out of whack, which means we have breathiness out of whack. But technique is the staple points. So that's why we're starting here because it will help us throughout the rest of the course for our technique, hands together, Classic fingers on our belly, which is where we're going to brief on my breathing from the diaphragm we want to throw out by expanding as we inhale. And going back to normal as an Excel. Do that with me. Breathe in through your nose, your belly expanding and out through your mouth? And feel your stomach going back to normal one more time in through your nose. Expand out from the mouth, stomach back to normal. Another part my technique is the timing of our breathing. We want to make sure that where possible we have the same amount of time inhaling as exhaling as it's just keeps the balance is great for the circulatory system and all the things going on inside our body. We're going to do that again, but practicing timing, it again has class fingers together. The stomach. And this is just a measure that as our stomach is expanding so we can feel for my fingers as I think as separate, the assignment is explaining hands on the stomach one more time. I'm going to breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth for four nights before. For, for now, for posture as well as technique. I'll push is also very important. Depending on who you are, what you do, you may find yourself at your desk or sitting down and not at the time, hunched forward or traveling hunch board stuff on your back or on the tray and on the bus just hunched forward. And this can be our general demeanor these days, but that has a real big impact in the way that we breathe is it doesn't allow enough space for just the kind of power that we need to have real effective breathing. Going to work on our posture. We want our shoulders roll all the way back. I'm going to make a conscious effort to do that. I'm going to find a focal point and look straight ahead. Now obviously we're not gonna go buy a daily life like this, but pushed as closely, this is great. When we're practicing our breathing, we want to take the time to really pronounce our chest and look straight ahead and just be really intentional about what we're doing. Do that with me one more time. Roll your shoulders all the way back, find a focal point and look straight ahead. This is how we have the most effective breathing. Keep practicing that as you go throughout the course because that's really going to underpin all the rest of the things that we do. 3. Breath Focus: We're going to focus on breath focus. Breath focus is important because it's the foundation of everything else we're going to do. It's important to note though, that there are some conditions that affect your breathing, both physical and psychological conditions that you need to seek professional advice in order to rectify. This is strictly for general well-being. Let's get started. Focusing on our breathing. We start by lying or sitting down and I'm gonna lie down because it's more problems for me. But you can sit down if it works for you. And he wireline down, you can play something in-between your shoulders just to release any tension pressure. Then we're going to place our feet flat on the floor. This is just a lateral curvature in our spine to touch the mat. I'm going to take some normal breaths. Let me do this because we're focusing on abbreviates and we want to find out what our breathing is doing first and foremost before we welcome any adjustments that might be necessary. So just take a few deep breaths. Pay attention to what is going on with a really shallow is it D visit rapid, slow. We're gonna take our hands on our stomach. And classical thinkers together. Let me do this because we're gonna brief from the diaphragm because that's where our breath is most powerful. In order for us to breathe from our diaphragm, we're gonna take a deep breath. And so as we inhale, we are going to feel our stomach is expanding. Exhale. We're going to fill out someone's getting back to normal. Let's see that again. Inhale, size, expanding, exhale, long time. Inhale. Some expands, exhale. Just making sure that our shoulders often on the mat as well so that there's no temptation to brief on the chest instead of from the diaphragm. Now you can take that with something called roll breathing abroad breathing. We're going to make sure that not easily brief on my diaphragm, but we actually allow the air to travel from a diaphragm all the way up and out. And also do that in place. One hand corner, stomach, one hand on your chest. Take a deep breath. Family inhale. Started expanding. Let me go deeper. Chest expanding. Then we exhale via chess going down, going down back to normal. Again, inhale. Philosophes expanding. How even more? Logistics binding. Exophilic, just going down. One more time. Inhale, expands, just expands. Exhale, chest goes down, it goes down. Back to normal. You can play around with taking deep breaths and numbers because it lets you know what the difference is and also gives you something to work towards. Because in everyday life we may not take super deep breaths as we're going about everyday life. We do one, we did want to have effective breathing and 3M taken as much as possible as we're going through our day. So as usual, practice makes perfect. So if you can do acidities at least once a week, it just gives you the opportunity to welcome that method and have the most effective breathing effects of breathing is the aim of the game. 4. Good Morning Breathing: First thing in the morning is really helpful to just check your breathing pattern and figure out what's going on and nobody. It's also helpful to relieve any muscle stress, any tension or anything that will hinder you from breathing at your best throughout the day. To do this, we just take a few deep breaths, begin to just relieve any most attention by stretching out the neck, shoulders, and the back. Now we're almost ready for the day. But first we're gonna do some standing stretches. We do a quick stretch and activities to help us to get into the swing of the day. Just open up for everything and help us to do this. We raise our hands out to the air. As we inhale, exhale the powerful breath. As we reach all the way down to the floor. Exhale until there's no more land for a few seconds, inhale. As we reach all the way up. Hold and exhale. Lay down. Inhale, stop midway and stretch all the way out. Exhale. We'll do that 11 more time. Inhale, inhaling, stretch. Exhale all the way out. I'm bringing it up. Now. You wait for the day. 5. On the go breathing: It's really easy to forget about good breathing techniques, especially in a busy amendments were on the move. But these are the moments where we need to pay even closer attention to our breathing. Because in the busy amendments were more likely to be stressed. And stress can trigger a response within us, could fight or flight. You know, your body is in fight or flight mode. When you're breathing is rapid and shallow, your muscles are tense, you have palpitations. Fight or flight is a helpful response that lets us know that there's danger ahead and advises us to be on the moon. But when we have this response emulation to everyday activities and will often than reshoot, it can put us at risk of serious disease or discomfort. The good news is that awesome ways to keep our breathing and check even in these busier moments. One of these ways is managing our checkpoints. Checkpoints are helpful indicators of what our breathing is doing at any given moment. And it gives us the opportunity to reset. The checkpoints aren't as followed. Breathing, muscles and heart rate, we ask ourselves, what is my breathing doing right now? Is it rapid and shallow or am I breathing normally? While my muscles doing? Are they tense? I my shoulders up to my ears, my stomach sucked into tightly is my jaw clench my teeth grinding. And what is my heart rate doing? Is it flattering? Do I have palpitations? Do I feel on edge? If after you've done these checkpoints you realize that you're breathing isn't where it's meant to be, but it's time for a quick breath reset. Breath reset involves taking a deep breath in through the nose and exhaling with three breaths. This is just a helpful method to help refocus your breathing and play it back where it needs to be. Helpful. Methods involve having a relaxing playlist you can play while you're on the dial. That helps you to practice your breathing methods. Also taking breath breaks, which involves taking a step away from a business situation in order to just practice your breathing, a reset. And also reminders that pop up on your phone at the busiest times of the day that remind you to breathe. These are things that may take some effort to do at first, but the more that you do them, they become second nature and you'll feel the difference with every single deep breath you take. 6. Breathing for Fitness: In this section we're focusing on breathing for fitness because great reading technique makes our workouts even better. The aim is still the same deep breathing that comes from the diaphragm. However, the method differ slightly depending on the exercise style. We're going to go through different exercises styles and how to be the most effective before them. For the homework, I want you to try all these techniques and put your own work out together using breathing cues. I'll give you some resources to use cognitive exercises. Deep breaths may not be possible. The focus shifts in quality and consistency in your brain. You want even paced breathing, which is the same as you exhale. It also mentioned that this happened. You can count progressed and attitudinal activity. For instance. 3d. Same amount of time and having as you exhale, this will help her spec next resistant, I guess whatever optimum network keep you didn't got the best way for the German Space exercise. Treadmill. Your breath, maybe me and paste. Same thick consistency in and then avocado, I stopped moving, whereas it may be shorter the second time, three seconds in anything exciting, you could have your rest of your positivity wherever you are to be. Strength-based exercises where breathing, power and pressure release, the brakes are slower and more concentrated. The June criteria to help them muscles, pack of the challenging parts of the movement. Effective way of breathing for strength training is the inhale during the rest conflict exercise, an extra during the hottest pop. This helps us to defeat the challenge. I keep on posture. Perfect. For instance, breathing, exercises or feckless, of course, the Bayesian balance, because back to the deep breaths are slightly more focused. We focus on how opera interact with powerful muscles. When we breathe in, breathe out. We get off the muscle in the Excel. This helps us what balance, stability, pressure release, tension hippies and helps us to withstand crash. All these hepatocytes is biloba. 7. Comfy Counting: Throughout this course, we've been talking about even deep breaths. And today we're gonna focus on the even part of it. Even breaths basically mean the same amount of time inhaling as we exhale. And this is important because it helps us to regulate our breathing pattern. It helps us to bring power through our breath. And it also helps us to de-stress, to calm down, and to just relax. In order to practice this, we're gonna do something called comfy counting. And that basically means finding a comfortable space wherever you walk, getting uncomfortable and practicing our breathing. We're gonna count and fives, which is five seconds inhaling, 5 second hold, five seconds exhaling. Now if you're not used to inhale for five seconds or x over five seconds, we're still working on having full of breaths. They just start where you're comfortable. That might be two seconds, three seconds, four, and work your way up accordingly. Pressure on yourself. It takes away from the whole activity. So just do what you can and then just work your way build. We're going to inhale for my notes for five seconds and remembering all that we've learned, we're going to roll our shoulders back. We're going to have our hands on our stomach if that's helpful for us so that we remember to breathe from the diaphragm and have a bait expand as we inhale and as we exhale, asana goes back to normal. Let's start. We're going to inhale for five seconds. Hold for five seconds. Exhale for five seconds. And again inhale for five seconds. Five seconds. Exhale for five seconds. I will do that again. Inhaling professor comes from the nose. Fossa can hold, exhale. That's coffee counting. Practice that when you can just as an opportunity to relax and welcome your breathing pattern. 8. Green Breathing: If like me, you live in a busy city, then you may not get the opportunity to be surrounded by greenery that often, and you might not even find it necessary. But wherever you live, room spaces can have amazing benefits and their health and well-being and on your breathing in particular, scientifically, greenery like trees, parts and shrubs improve air quality by absorbing some of the harmful pollutants in the air like smoke, dust, carbon dioxide, and several other irritants. It's been proven by several health studies that are amazing health benefits, which include reduced incidences of asthma, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, improved heart rate and blood pressure, reduce stress, anxiety, you name it. It's recommended that we include in spaces into our everyday lives where possible, whether that be on the way to work, on the way to school during your break early in the morning, on the weekend with friends by yourself. However, however you add it adds it because the benefits are just too great to miss outline. And when you are out in these green spaces, just got a little bit deeper with your deep breathing. 9. Natural hacks to aid good breathing: It was what his great breeding technique. They are awesome natural hats that can help us agreed wealth and time to time. And I wanted to talk to you about a few of those today. That's something we have steam. Now seeing is a natural decongestion, which means it can help to clear the nasal passages of an excess mucus that may build up and that may be causing us to breathe ineffectively. You can use steam for many natural sources like a really hot shower or even this was sewn up. They can also use machine like this one in the heap, which is a facial steamer, which helps you to inhale and exhale to steam. We effectively, if you don't already use steam, I would definitely recommend it. Next we have essential oils. Essentially, you will have so many amazing properties, but specifically for breathing, they do quite a few interesting things. They are really good at permeating the blood-brain barrier. So when they inhaled air taken from our nasal passages to our brain and they trigger a stress release for sports, What's the trigger that response hormones are released, which creates balance and help us to deal with stress better. Now we know that when we're stressed we don't read this well, this is a really helpful thing. Also the awesome signs that show that the mental base, essentially it can be good at also clearing mucus from nasal passages bought more evidence is needed. Next we have tease, tease out great for boosting relaxation and helping us to combat stress, which means we can breathe better. But also they do a few other things. They can trigger a block of histamine. Histamine is what is released which makes us react to things. It gives us our allergic reactions to things like dust particles and stuff like that. So it can be blocked using T's, specific T's. And this means we're able to come back antigens even better and more naturally, if you're something that's selfish woman dead reactions, this can be really helpful for you. Next, we have plants. Now, as mentioned in the green breathing video, plants are really good at improving equity. They can remove the toxin from the air that can be harmful for operating. However, not all plants do this. If you are going to get some plants and incorporate them into your everyday hope life, make sure you check that the plants do exactly what you need them to do. Finally, humidifiers, F humidifiers are great at helping us to control the moisture content in R. Now we need moisture in the air because we made is to drive on nasal passages are not happy and so our respiratory system is not happy. It's sometimes known when you wake up and feel dry, you might feel a bit course it can be because there's not enough moisture in the air and humidifiers can help us to come back. This is recommending that we had between 13, 50% moisture content in the air. And we can check this using professional services and nickel in combat is using air humidifiers. Those are my natural heights for today, we often describe as an unnatural hacks in future courses. But for today I just wanted to bring you a few to use if you can and if you decide to incorporate them in, let me know how they go for you. 10. Breathing for relaxtion: There are a few methods that involve using our breathing pattern to help us relax. One of those methods is progressive muscle relaxation. Progressive muscle relaxation is a mouthful, but it's essentially what it says on the tin, is progressively relaxing each muscle side from the feet and working our way up to the head. But using our breathing pattern is the moment that's usually done just before bed. But if you do it any other point during the day, you just want to try and create the most relaxing atmosphere as possible. And you can do this with things like essential oils like lavender, low lighting and sleep sounds if that's necessarily for you. Now this is something that we do where we tense muscles that we don't normally temps and so it can feel a bit weird at first, but as I always say, practice makes perfect. We're going to cover the basics in today's session. I'm going to put links to resources that will help you to do this method as effectively as possible at home. And the homework is to try this method out at least once. Let's get started. Go ahead and find a comfortable space on your bed, chair or mat. We're going to start by taking some deep breaths in just to help to regulate our breathing and help us relax. Now I'm going to start from my feet and work our way all the way up to our heads. And we're gonna take a deep breath in through our nose is usual expanding our diaphragm. But this time when we take our deep breath in, we're gonna tense the muscle that we're working on. It starting with coffee, we're going to inhale through your nose. Expand our diaphragm and tense to think. Muslims. Then exhale and release the awesome's. Inhale. Tends the cuff muscles. Exhale, release the causes. Inhale. Tips and thigh muscles. Exhale. Nice appendices. Since the glute muscles exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale, tends to chest muscles. Exhale and release. Inhale tests the arm muscles that you basically have to exhale, relax the shoulder muscles, exhale, inhale, exhale, relax the muscles of the head. Eyebrows have goals. Everything go. You can work on one part of the body more than twice, as many times as you need to. And you can do the whole process again, as many times as you need to do. The actual process is a loss lower butt taking you through it upwards, speed up a little bit. As I mentioned before, all the resources to help you find ways to do this at home, I will include in the homework, but essentially that is progressive muscle relaxation. 11. Breathing 101 outro: Well, we've come to the end of reading 101. I will use to do one thing for me to take three deep breaths. Now write down three things you notice about those breaths. Is it any different from when he first started this course? I hope so. The causes here for you to use at your leisure and how you see fit as many times as possible in order to work on your breathing and have the most effective breathing possible, you can stay connected with me by subscribing to my mailing list, are following me on Instagram at step two, it look out for more courses and I'll see you next time.