Improve Your Endurance In As Little As Five Minutes

Improve Your Endurance In As Little As Five Minutes

By Terrence Thomas

 

     Here are the cold hard facts. Any training technique that you use to boost endurance will be useless if one critical element is not in place.  It is the easiest, most obvious and the most overlooked aspect of endurance training. This very powerful method for boosting endurance is to improve your breathing mechanics.

     By optimizing your breathing pattern, you maximize your ability to bring oxygen into the body with each breath. Strong and efficient breathing will reduce your lactic acid build-up and you’ll be able to go longer, harder, faster.

The first step in improving breathing is to bring attention to the primary respiratory muscles. Your diaphragm and deep abdominal muscles are your primary respiratory muscles. If you watch an infant breathe, you’ll see they breathe perfectly. The belly is expanding as they inhale and flattening out as they exhale. They are showing you the ideal breath with should be about 70-80% use of the diaphragm and 20-30% of the accessory respiratory muscles. It is only in the presence of stress that this pattern gets reversed or “inverted”. An inverted breathing pattern is when the dominant muscles of respiration become the neck, chest and shoulder muscles. These are your accessory respiratory muscles, and if they become the primary breathing muscles, you are guaranteed to have health challenges at some point. Some of them include;

 

*Chronic Headaches

*Chronic Neck pain

*Increased likelihood of shoulder injury

*Lower back pain

*Constipation

*Chronic fatigue

*Poor posture, which will lead to multiple orthopedic injuries.

 

It is my experience has been that once the breathing pattern has been inverted, it does take considerable effort to correct the pattern. It is not impossible but it does take consistency to retrain the body into a correct breathing pattern.

 

Here are some quick tips to help you optimize breathing;

1. Do stretching exercises for the neck and chest muscles: This will allow the body to use the diaphragm easier.

2. Practice breathing through your diaphragm lying down. Doing this makes it easier to activate the diaphragm.

If you apply these techniques 10 to 15 minutes a day, set little reminders to focus on your breath during the day and do specific exercises to enhance breathing mechanics, you will be half-way home in terms of being able to boost your endurance. ###