Are you aware of your default breathing patterns? Diaphragmatic (aka belly) breathing is the biggest way to improve your overall breath -- it is linked to improved relaxation, focus, energy management, emotion regulation, and MANY more. I include a quick and easy exercise to help practice belly breathing.
Do you know how many breaths we take throughout a day on average? I'm gonna show you how to improve each and every one of those breaths through a tool that I've used. Proper breathing, when done correctly, can help in certain areas, certain skills.
Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing, improves 0.1% of each breath. Use the training wheels right away, then over time, it becomes natural. This is the basis for a lot of other breathing techniques.
Question for y'all. Do you know how many breaths we take throughout a day on average? It's an interesting question, right? And I know the answer, but I'm not gonna tell you right away. I'm gonna make you earn it. Stick around to the end of this short video, and I'll let you know how many breaths you take. But in the middle of that, before we get to that answer, I'm gonna show you how to improve each and every one of those breaths through a tool that I've used. I tell athletes how to use, and it really helps them out.
As someone whose whole career is predicated on the question of how can I help improve people's performance, as you might imagine, there's a lot of tools that I can give you, and we're going to get over those over the next few months in some content. But the basis, honestly, of all those tools is proper breathing and how to be the most effective in your breathing. It's something that we can all control with our breath. That's why it's so important and critical. And it also, when done effectively, can be used for increased relaxation, better focus, better composure, also confidence, energy management, how to regulate our emotions.
There's so many things that proper breathing, when done correctly, can help in certain areas, certain skills. Also physiologically, when you do it in the right way or in the most optimal way, it can reduce your blood pressure and slow your heart rate down, which, again, promotes that relaxation response. So today we're going to talk about the number one way of how to effectively breathe, which is what's called diaphragmatic breathing, also known simply as belly breathing. Maybe you've heard of it, but the diaphragm is our breathing muscle.
It sits right below the base of our rib cage, and it's super helpful to use to effectively breathe. So what I want you to do is we're going to practice it a little bit, because I want you to sit up tall in your chair, or maybe you're standing up tall. Take one hand, put it right on your chest, right in the middle, and take the other hand and put it right in your belly just like this. And as you do that, I want you to take a few breaths. Take one or two as you normally would. Just notice what happens to your hands.
And after that second breath. Now, what I want you to do is really focus on your hands and really try to puff out that bottom hand a little bit more. Try to keep the top hand relatively still. So think about puffing out like a balloon as you inhale and then exhaling and deflating that balloon as you breathe out. So just taking a few calming breaths like that. Breathing in, trying to again raise that lower hand out. Then as you breathe out, that hand should come down nice and gently. So really focusing on breathing through the diaphragm, breathing through the belly.
So just finish up that last breath. Notice what you may observe. Maybe even after just those few short breaths, you notice that you feel more relaxed. Maybe you feel more focused and ready to go. A good way to explain how this should go about is think low and slow. You want to breathe from your belly nice and low and also slow. Sometimes we don't notice how quickly or shallow we're breathing, so this is a good way, being low and slow in order to improve the way that we breathe. The diaphragm is a muscle.
And just like any muscle, the more you practice with it, the easier it gets. So using this technique with our hands is a way to kind of have the training wheels on it be more intentional with our breathing. And then as you practice, those training wheels can pop off, and it just becomes natural for how you breathe. So if you're wondering what the answer was to my original question, the average is around 20,000 breaths that we take. That's counting both in and out throughout the course of a day. So, diaphragmatic breathing, let's just say an arbitrary number.
1% of each breath. 1% is a huge difference across your life. So it's something that, again, you got to be intentional with. Use the training wheels right away, then over time, it becomes natural. This is the basis for a lot of other breathing techniques and a lot of other topics that I just mentioned. But this is a foundation. So go ahead, go practice your belly breathing.
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