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Why all this fuss about breathing?  Why should we care about how we breathe?  Because poor breathing strategies have real health consequences on a physical and a psychological level, and we tend to breathe rather often.  It is not like we can decide to stop breathing for a while, so changing to a more optimal breathing pattern can have a huge impact on the ease with which we live in our bodies.

Over breathing, or chronic hyperventilating is a very common breathing pattern that can have many significant consequences.  Hyperventilation causes a loss of carbon dioxide from our body which makes the blood more alkaline.  In this alkaline environment our hemoglobin, which are the buses that carry the oxygen that we breathe, now has a harder time releasing the oxygen to the cells.  As a result, the cells get less oxygen, and through feedback loops, the body signals a need for more air, so the person breathes more frequently, which usually leads to more loss of CO2.  The alkaline environment also causes more calcium to enter the muscles and nerve tissue, making them more excitable than they should be, and causes the arteries of the brain, heart and body to constrict, which means reduced blood flow to these tissues. Symptoms of hyperventilation include headaches, chronic muscle tension, chest tightness, cold hands and feet, digestive issues, dizziness, lack of ability to concentrate, irritability, shortness of breath, anxiety, fatigue and even low back or pelvic pain, as when the breath isn’t right, the other deep core stabilizer muscles have difficulty controlling the movement of the vertebrae and pelvis. (Some medical conditions such as diabetes or kidney disease may result in an acid environment, so hyperventilation may be the body’s way of trying to rebalance the blood pH).

Some hints that you may be hyperventilating include chest breathing, (place one hand on the chest and one on the side of the ribs – does the chest hand move more than the rib hand?), breathing more than 15 times per minute, breathing frequently through the mouth, using your abdominal muscles to force the air out of the lungs so that another breath can be taken quickly, not pausing after the inhale or the exhale, very shallow breathing that is more like the flutter of a butterfly wing than the slow rhythmical strokes of an eagle.

A good place to begin correcting this breathing pattern is to do the exercise mentioned in an earlier tip of placing the hands around the lower ribcage and directing a normal size breath of air deep into the pelvis, relaxing the abdominals and feeling the lower ribs expand all around slightly, and then allowing the air to slowly come out all by itself.  Notice if you are breathing quickly and actively slow it down by getting the air lower into the lungs.  Try to slow down your life – stop rushing about, and slow down your thinking, planning, worrying, mental rehearsing.  Physical, mental and emotional hurrying are linked to hurrying the breath.

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Aerobic training such as jogging or cycling is fantastic for conditioning the heart, but if your goal is FAT loss, most people will have more success with weight training combined with short bursts of high intensity cardio.  Charles Poliquin, a world renown strength and conditioning coach, noticed that his athletes adapted to steady-state aerobic exercise very quickly, and that they then had difficulty keeping the fat off.  He coined the term “Chunky Aerobics Instructor Syndrome”, relating to aerobics instructors that teach 5 to 8 hours of aerobics a week, and have surprisingly high body-fat percentages considering the amount of activity they do.  If you spend hours a week on a treadmill or exercise bike and find you are not losing the weight you think you should be for the time you are putting in, a change of program is in order.

Do some resistance or weight training two or three days a week, working in the 8 to 12 rep range. Reduce your steady-state cardio training to a MAXIMUM of three days a week for half an hour or cut it out all together. Too much steady-state cardio increases your cortisol levels, which is catabolic, meaning it destroys muscle tissue. That is why you would never catch a bodybuilder doing an aerobic workout – it is counterproductive. Your muscles are your most metabolically active tissue, so by increasing the amount of muscle tissue you have, you burn more calories per hour all day and night. If you design your weight-training workout in a circuit fashion, you can increase your heart rate sufficiently to get the cardiovascular benefits, without doing any extra aerobic training at all, and you will build muscle tissue to help you lose fat. Keep your exercise sessions to an hour or under. If weight training is not something you are familiar with, I strongly suggest you seek out a CHEK Practitioner or a well-qualified personal trainer to help you design the program and ensure you are doing the exercises correctly, and to be certain that the exercises selected are appropriate for you at this time.

If doing cardio, change the exercise very frequently to maximize fat loss.  For example, start on a treadmill, and five minutes later, get on the cross-trainer, then the bike, and then the rower.  Or if you are injury free, mix in interval training, where you run hard for a couple of minutes, then walk until your heart-rate goes back down to 120, and then run hard again, doing
1 to 3 sets of 2 to 6 repetitions, with a comfortably long rest between sets.  (Make sure you warm up thoroughly before your first high-speed interval!)  If you are new to this, only do it once a week, and take the next day off.  Over time you can build up to 2 to 3 times a week.  Interval training combined with weight training, and a diet that does not include sugar and flour can be very effective at reducing body fat.

When it comes to cardio and resistance exercise, more is not better. You actually get strong and more fit between exercise sessions, so value your rest days!

Related Tips:
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I just finished reading the most fascinating book called Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival   by Wiley and Formby, which discusses how light pollution is damaging the health of animals and humans alike.

You may have heard how the frogs and toads have been disappearing from swamps near lit soccer fields.  It has also been documented that during solar eclipses, animals go to sleep, thinking it is night time.  

When you return to nature by going camping, have you noticed how you tend to crawl into the sleeping bag soon after it is dark, as there isn’t much else to do when you can’t see anything.  

We too, are beings that evolved living by the rules of nature, and to be healthy, we still need to live that way.  It is not that long ago that the lights were turned on in our cities, and our physiology has not yet adapted to this new reality.  

Our bodies work in complex system of feedback loops that act like checks and balances. When systems get out of balance, our bodies don’t function optimally physically or psychologically.

Today’s modern lifestyle means we can keep the lights on all night, sugar is always available to us to eat, and things like sitting in traffic jams can cause our stress hormones to go through the roof, so hormonally most of us are WAY out of balance.

Just like the frogs, every cell in our body is light sensitive, and hormones are activated or deactivated and neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine are released daily according to the light or lack of light sensed by our cells.

The hormones that depend on a lack of light to function tend to be our “rest and repair” hormones, and the hormones that are activated by light tend to be the “coping with stress” hormones.

When we stay up too late at night with the lights on, long after the sun has gone down, we don’t get enough hours of tissue repair and immunity building.

And on the flip side, with the extended hours we spend in the light, the stress hormones that are supposed to be active during the day only, wind up working overtime.

There is no balance in the daily cycle between the day hormones like cortisol, insulin, and the night hormones like the antioxidant melatonin and the immune builder, prolactin. So we are stressed and tired, in a weakened state with poor immunity, and therefore we are sitting ducks for sickness and disease.

And when any hormone is overly elevated for long periods of time the receptors that take in that hormone become resistant, which leads directly health problems. The example I gave a couple of weeks ago was insulin resistance, which leads to type 2 diabetes.

In this case, treating the high blood sugar by giving insulin is not helpful, as the problem is not the lack of insulin, but rather the lack of sensitivity of the receptors. Balancing the hormones through adequate sleep, darkness time, and eating foods that do not raise blood-sugar levels would be a more successful approach.

The western medicine approach to dealing with the hormones that are too low, would be to supplement. Taking melatonin supplements (your night time repair hormone) each evening would unfortunately eventually result in your pineal gland shrinking and your body being unable to produce its own melatonin.

Dimming the lights and wearing rose-coloured glasses in the evening can increase melatonin production, but the bottom line is to get the critically important hormone balancing as well as the tissue repair and immune improvement, we need to get to bed in complete darkness at a reasonable hour, such as 10pm.

Any light leaks will shut down melatonin, which in turn, will shut down prolactin. In the summer when the light is long, we can stay up a little longer, but once the sun goes down, bed should soon follow.

Related Tips:
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Sleep, the dark of the matter
Early to bed, early to rise…

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How many “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts" do you have in your life?  He "should" help me clean the house; she "shouldn’t" react that way; he "shouldn’t" have told me to invest in that stock, because it went down and I lost a lot of money.  If there is a lot of emotion behind such statements, they have the potential to cause anguish.  If we devote a lot of energy to wishing things were different than they are, or that people were different than they are, we wind up stressed and unhappy.

The fact is, what is, is.  There is no point arguing with reality.  If it is raining, we don’t waste our time anguishing that it shouldn’t be raining.  Instead, we plan accordingly.  Many times “shoulds” involve other adults, and we think that we will be happy when the other person changes.  We may be waiting a long time.  It might make more sense to accept the reality that our partner may not be great at keeping the house clean, and instead, plan to have a cleaner come in to help out occasionally. This way, we are not dwelling on the problem, but rather, coming up with a viable solution.

Another way to look at it may be to figure out whether something is our business or someone else’s business. What another adult thinks, does or does not do, is that person’s business and we do not have any control over that.  What we think, do or do not do is our business, and we do have control over that.  Staying in one’s own business only can vastly simplify a life. So, get rid of the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” in your life by becoming clear on what is, and then if needed, come up with positive solutions that are within your ability to control and execute.  This will lower your stress and probably make you a lot happier.

These are a couple of the concepts come from the book Loving What Is, by Byron Katie, where she talks about a process called “The Work”, which consists of four questions that help you analyze your beliefs about difficult problems in your life, and allows you to find freedom from the heartache.