Take a breath

I want to talk to you about one of the most important components of ANY workout. Its something we are all very familiar with, in fact we do it every day. Its all about our breathing, our breathing can make or break our workouts and I am going to give you some tips from my personal experiences that I have used with my clients to help you better your breathing and improve your workouts. Alot of times when we get into our workouts, we tend to focus harder on our form and just getting it done. During all of that we lose track of our breath control, during some sessions with my clients they continually hear me tell them “three seconds in three seconds out”. I preach this que all the time whether it was on the Paloff Press, Wall-Abs or even good ol’ Dead-Bugs. Now your probably wondering why three seconds, what makes that number so important. The reason is it gives you something to focus on and its a good enough of a time that is easy to count even during a high intensity workout. The focus of this is to regain control of your heart rate and to work the lungs as well. The way we breath has been shown to affect our effort, whether it be helping maintain proper posture during an exercise or even cranking out that last rep it all comes down to how we breath. Using the three in three out que can help you control and own the movement as well as allows the body to work our stabilizers and overall bodies even harder to help growth.  Now how do we really control that breathing pattern to get to most out of our workout? The key is, on the least strenuous part of the exercise, fill our lungs up with as much air as we can and when we are ready to push out the hardest part we slowly exhale giving our body that extra help on each rep. For example if we go to do a chin-up we start at the top of the bar and we would IN-hale all of the air into our body on the way down preparing our body to get back up, then on the way up we would exhale that air out of the body giving our body that little boost to help us up. These little steps can help us get the most out of our efforts and really help us become masters of breath control. Stay motivated my friends