So you’ve done your training. You’ve runned a thousand miles and you’ve trained your lower body, as well as your upper body. Man, you are ripped and ready to reach that summit, easily.

But, what about your breathing? Have you been training that as well?

If the answer is: No! What the heck?! I’ve been running like crazy, isn’t that enough?

The answer is yes, of course, that should be enough, but… there’s something you could do that’d make you better, 5% better. Trust me, just like how carrying 1 liter less of water feels like 10 liters less, being 5% better up in the mountains feels like 50% better, anything helps.

So, let’s get on it.

The technique is called belly breathing.

Just like the muscles on your legs and in your arms, you have muscles that help you to breathe as well. They are called the diaphragm and intercostal muscles.

If you observe the picture, you can notice that the muscles are located between your stomach and chest.



Let’s do a quick experiment. Take all your air out, now, push, push, keep pushing until there’s nothing left. Good! Now inhale. Feels nice, right?

Did you noticed how you used your stomach to push it all out? That’s the diaphragm working. So yes, it is a muscle and you can work it and develop it to make it stronger.

Why belly breathing works

Most people breath with their chests, fast and shallow.

What happens when you do this is that you are wasting all the space that’s between our abdomen and chest, closer to the stomach. With this, less oxygen comes in and more carbon dioxide stays in the body. With more carbon dioxide in our bodies, the PH in the blood filled with CO2, acidifies. Acidification of the blood is linked with lower muscular performance.

Experiments made by Canadian doctors proved it by testing this in the laboratory. They wanted to know if by training your diaphragm, your with athletes. The test group trained their diaphragm for better performance while the control group just trained as usual. The test group showed a 5% increase in performance compared to the other group.

How to train your diaphgram

Training your diaphgram is easy. If you are a total beginner and you don’t know the difference from belly and chest breathing. Do this so you wrap your head around it.

Lie down and place bought of your hands on your belly button. Now without pushing with your hands, take all the air out and watch how your hands go down. Now inhale and watch how you hands go up, make them as high as possible with your belly.

There you go, now that you have the idea of how to breathe correctly, practice it until it becomes normal. You can do it anywhere.

When your standing up. You can exhale until you’re sure there is no more air inside of you, then, inhale, but do it filling your stomach first and then your chest so you can feel how it feels to use the entirety of your lungs.

Now you are better. Plus it’s good for reducing stress as well. Ah! it’s so good to take a deep breathe, isn’t it? If you have the time to do another exercise, I recommend watching, better doing this video with Wim Hof.

Try to do this in the mornings, you’ll see your energy levels go up.

Thanks a lot for reading! I hope you’ll be able to take your brand new skill to the mountains this weekend.

Until next time!

Ricardo Guaderrama

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