Breathing, Part Two

I've added a second part to last month's article on breathing on my website Member section. Here's an excerpt.

Getting a sense of just how much more deeply you can breathe using both does the same as using maximum range of motion for learning a punch. You start to know how much you have and can get through “big” moves and then learn to condense them. You get the same amount of power in a shorter stroke. Now you can start to see what your lung capacity is and then begin to control your breath. This will be handy when you exert yourself and need to resort to a breathing technique to recharge yourself as you tire. In other words, you can use partial capacity for some of the exertion, enough to get the job done, and when you need more you change the breathing. This relates to the “second wind”. It’s part of a series of metabolism changes. It’s pretty complex and I’m not the guy to talk to about it. You can watch this to see the metabolic changes. It’s a little lame and has ads in it but you’ll get the idea. http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hsw/10323-matter-and-energy-glycolysis-and-cellular-respiration-video.htm



Let’s talk about reverse breathing. This is a complicated subject and I’m going to address it briefly. Normally you read about it in relation to internal martial arts. What they want to get you to do is instead of letting your belly stick out as it does with diaphragm breathing, they want you to keep it in. Very simply, this tends to pressurize air in the lower lung and cause it to permeate cell membranes and force some oxygenation. It’s way more complex than that and beyond what I want to cover here.

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