I just talked to someone today who is into breath training. This involves, among other things, holding your breath for extended times (3-4 minutes). I have the philosophy that forcing your body to do something that it’s telling you that it doesn’t want to do is probably bad for you. He said you have to resist the urge to take a breath after about the first 20 seconds. I said the reason you get that urge is your body is telling you there is an unsafe buildup of carbon dioxide happening. I said, “Why would you do that unless you’re training to be a pearl diver?” But I am open-minded.
Is this stuff real or woo? Here is a random site I googled that seems to echo the same benefits as I heard in my conversation this morning (i.e., lower blood pressure, relaxation).
I can kind of understand the benefits of diaphragmatic (deep) breathing just to stretch out your lungs on a regular basis but I don’t know if I’m buying any benefits from holding your breath for extended periods of time.
It may well be unhealthy (I am not a physician), but the fact that it’s uncomfortable isn’t sufficient evidence of that. After all, exercise is uncomfortable, too, but most folks agree that that’s good for you. Maybe this has the same sort of benefits as exercise?
By my way of thinking, if it’s some sort of thing where holding your breath in some certain way is similar to exercise and allows you to increase your lung capacity or something, then it might make sense.
But you’re not likely to increase your native ability to use oxygen or release carbon dioxide. Those things are basic metabolic processes that AFAIK don’t improve in situations like that, unlike a muscle which will grow to accommodate the load.
At best, you might get more accustomed to it and be able to endure it longer or something like that, but that’s not the same thing as actually doing anything useful for your body.
It is not completely woo but not completely kosher either.
Breathing exercises (both slow and fast) are part of yoga. Consciously controlling your breathing takes self discipline and releases you of stress. Slow breathing also reduces your metabolism, so if you eat the same you will gain weight but slow breathing also removes stress, so you don’t stress eat.
Here is a nice interview on the science of yoga - the risks and the benefits :
I didn’t use the word “uncomfortable,” I think we need to pay attention to signals from the body. Just the exertion of effort per se is not negative feedback, nor even uncomfortable. Cardio to get your heart rate up, weightlifting, yoga–I don’t find any of that uncomfortable, or any kind of danger sign. Running when you have Achilles tendinitis, now that’s uncomfortable. Probably bad for you too. Exertion to the point of rhabdomyolysis, that’s uncomfortable and definitely bad for you.
Not breathing when you feel like you need to breathe? Doesn’t seem good for you to me, but that’s what the question is all about.
I don’t know about holding your breath, but deep breathing - fully emptying the lungs and then filling them a few times - certainly helps with my asthma.
Sometimes I find that Willing Suspension Of Disbelief is good training for the mind, so I started reading the article linked in the OP, determined not to snicker for as long as possible. Then I read this:
“Breath Training can change the thickness of the Diaphragm. This means you will have a better ability of breath control when under any stress.”
Oh really? (looks for scientific journal article references, fails to locate any, struggles to control eye-rolling*)
I lost the battle completely with this one:
“Many respiratory related diseases, viruses and bacteria, even the likes of cancer do not survive in a highly oxygenated body, so your susceptibility to them taking hold can be dramatically reduced.”
To quote my brother-in-law (from an entirely different context): Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
*I’ve read so much demented woo in my time, provoking such uncontrollable eye-rolling that my extraocular muscles must have developed to an extraordinary extent, which would explain my excellent peripheral vision. And as you know, correlation equals causation (another excellent example is demonstrated in the following graph):
