This Five-Minute Breathing Exercise Can Boost Brain and Heart Health by Dr. Joseph Mercola for Mercola
The way you breathe has a significant impact on your health, and various breathing exercises have been shown to improve your health and well-being in a number of ways.
Most recently, researchers have found inspiratory muscle strength training — a technique that strengthens your respiratory musculature — can improve cardiovascular health, as well as cognitive and physical performance.
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Inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST) involves inhaling through a hand-held device that restricts air flow. By making you work harder to breathe in, you strengthen the muscles used for inhalation. The inspiratory muscle trainer device was originally developed for people with respiratory conditions, and to help wean patients off mechanical ventilation.
As you might expect, your breathing muscles, including your diaphragm, will lose strength and atrophy from lack of use, just as other muscles in your body, and research1 shows that strengthening the breathing muscles improves weaning outcome in patients that have become too weak to breathe on their own after being on a ventilator.
How Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training Benefits Your Health
In the featured study, the preliminary results of which were presented at the annual Experimental Biology conference2 in Orlando, Florida, the researchers investigated how IMST might affect vascular, cognitive and physical health in middle-aged adults.
A previous study3 had shown patients with obstructive sleep apnea who used the device to perform 30 inhalations per day for six weeks lowered their systolic blood pressure by an average of 12 millimeters of mercury (mm/Hg).
As reported by Medical News Today,4 “Exercising for the same amount of time usually only lowers blood pressure by half that amount, and the benefits seem to exceed those normally achieved with hypertension medication.”
Intrigued by these findings, the researchers, led by Daniel Craighead, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory, decided to investigate whether IMST might be useful for middle-aged adults who resist exercise.5,6,7
Indeed, those who used IMST not only lowered their blood pressure and improved their vascular health, they also improved their exercise tolerance, assessed through treadmill tests, and cognitive performance, assessed through cognitive tests. Craighead commented on the results:8,9
“IMST is something you can do quickly in your home or office, without having to change your clothes, and so far it looks like it is very beneficial to lower blood pressure and possibly boost cognitive and physical performance.
High blood pressure is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which is the number one cause of death in America. Having another option in the toolbox to help prevent it would be a real victory …
I think IMST has slowly evolved from something used only by a very sick population to being something that people can adopt as a part of their everyday lifestyle. Maybe they won’t do 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, but perhaps they’ll do five minutes of this and get some benefits.”
Over Breathing — One of the Most Common Breathing Errors
When it comes to breathing, most people actually do it incorrectly, and the ramifications for your health can be significant. One of the most common errors is over breathing. By breathing more than necessary, you deplete your carbon dioxide (CO2) reserves. While it’s important to remove CO2 from your body, you need a balance of oxygen and CO2 for optimal function.
CO2 is not just a waste product but has actual biological roles, one of which is assisting in oxygen utilization. When your CO2 level is too low, changes in your blood pH impair your hemoglobin’s ability to release oxygen to your cells. This is known as the Bohr effect.10,11
CO2 also helps relax the smooth muscles surrounding your blood vessels and airways, which is why over breathing results in both airway and blood vessel constriction. You can test this by taking five or six big breaths in and out of your mouth.
Most people will begin to experience some light-headedness or dizziness. While you might reason that taking bigger breaths through your mouth allows you to take more oxygen into your body, which should make you feel better, the opposite actually happens.
This is because you’re expelling too much CO2 from your lungs, which causes your blood vessels to constrict — hence the light-headedness. The reality is that the heavier you breathe, the less oxygen is delivered throughout your body due to lack of CO2.
