Could working out five minutes a day, without lifting a single weight or jogging a single step, reduce your heart attack risk, help you think more clearly and boost your sports performance?
Preliminary results from a clinical trial of Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST), presented this week at the Experimental Biology conference in Orlando, suggest “yes.”
That’s how the write-up of a new study findings start out. If you want to you can read the whole thing here.
Now, my thoughts…duh!
Breath is far, far, far, far, far more important than most people realize.
I’ve been harping on this for a long time. And especially since writing Upgrade Your Breath back in 2015.
It’s great to see that this area is getting more research. And it’s great to see validation that only five minutes is needed to get amazing benefits.
Looks like I wrote about a five-minute breathing routine almost two years ago exactly.
Some benefits the group got:
• Lower blood pressure
• Improved artery function
• Better performance on cognitive and memory tests
• Ability to exercise to exhaustion on the treadmill longer
• Decreased heart rate during exercise
• Decreased oxygen consumption during exercise
Don’t know about you, but that looks pretty good to me!
Although it might be fun to, you do not require the inspiratory muscle trainer that they used in this study. Sure, they used a “sham device” for placebo control, but there are ways of upping the intensity of your breathing and making it progressive that doesn’t require technology. (Yogis have been doing so for millennia…Wim Hof is leading other science in the area today…)
Your breathing and the air required comes free.
You just need to USE your lungs in a variety of ways. Building deep breathing capability. Building low breathing capability. (Those two are different things.) Building breath holding ability. Building rhythmic breathing ability. And so on.
Want to find out how? Check out Upgrade Your Breathing.