Introduction
Breathing permeates every movement, and is as closely tied to your performance as your musculature, technique and attitude, and just like with the musculature, technique and attitude, if you lack it, your fighting is bad, no matter what else you got.
Yet despite this massive importance, breathing is often overlooked in training.
Why is that?
Perhaps this is mainly because the body adapts to what it does a lot, so your breathing, just like your musculature, develops naturally as you train, and you don’t really have to train your breathing specifically, for it to work.
So why do we train our muscles specifically, if not our breathing?
The answer I think is simple: We know how, and we know why.
However little training an instructor has, however short time his students train, there are obvious benefits to physical exercise. The more you exercise, the stronger, more enduring, more explosive your body gets, and pushing yourself physically increases your mental endurance as well.
You feel the need for stronger legs every time your knees buckle, and as soon as your legs are stronger, you’ll notice when putting weight on them.
This is not true for breathing.
Practicing breathing-reps 6h a day is not going to make you a monster fighter.
It won’t show on you.
If you don’t know what to use it for, you’ll never notice any difference in your training.
If you don’t train it, you’ll never feel the need for it.
So What Do I Use It For?
The most fundamental aspect of functional breathing is to breathe with your stomach, as opposed to your chest.
This is something everyone does naturally as a baby, and loses as time goes by, just like the ability to swim.
“Breathing with your stomach” is a way of saying “breathing in a way that makes your abdomen expand with each inhale, and collapse with each exhale”, opposite to what happens when “breathing with your chest”.
Learning how to “breathe with your stomach” increases the amount of air you can inhale in one breath, and how much air you can exhale in one breath, the first allowing us to capitalize on moments to breathe, as well as to inhale more rarely, the second allowing us to release bursts of energy/weight (depending on whether we use it to activate or relax the muscles in our core) for different effects used in both striking and grappling.
Breathing with our stomach also makes it a lot easier to lower our center of gravity than if we’re breathing with our chest. A point worth noting here is that breathing with the chest increases our balance when our center of gravity is high, with can be used for several effects in fighting, the perhaps most common of which is a light and quick footwork.
Breathing with your chest also makes your upper body swell, which with training can be used to increase pressure in some grappling-holds, or in combination with a sudden release of air, to create opportunities for escapes from certain grappling holds.
Pushing the breathing even further down however, into your lower abdomen, makes it possible for you to maintain a higher level of tension while breathing, not only allowing you to keep a constant stability in your core, but also decreasing the risk of a rogue body-shot knocking the air out of you.
Learning proper posture, to keep a straight back and proud chest, while pushing your shoulders forward, also increases the amount of air you can both inhale and exhale, since it eases the flow of the air, allowing you to maintain a strong physical structure even while taking deep breaths, something which your otherwise have to bend slightly to do when exhausted.
For a quick demonstration on these aspects of proper posture, see this video on static, mid-range impact defense:
Learning to open your sinuses increases the amount of air you can control through your nose alone, which is directly useful in ground-fighting, where you can easily find yourself in a position where your mouth is covered, but also in impact-exchanges, since it lets you to breathe well, while keeping your mouth shut, allowing you to keep your teeth consistently clenched, which decreases the risk of dental injury and knockouts, since the pressure supports your lower jaw.
Learning to control your breathing is in reality also a way of controlling your pulse. By changing your breathing from short breaths in your chest (stress, increased pulse and adrenaline) to long breaths in your stomach (calm), you can affect your state of mind, to a certain extent, while short breaths in your stomach decreases recuperation-time when you’re winded.
For a different perspective we can take a look at breathing for muay thai.
Learning how to use the muscles in your abdomen to press out large amounts of air can also relieve ETAP (an exertion-related abdominal pain), which increases your endurance.
Trained breathing-muscles can even allow you to get back in control of your breathing after having had it knocked out of you, with obvious benefits.
Finally, gaining control of your breathing can allow you to make smoother the acceleration of a technique, as well as transitions between techniques, making you harder to read, and letting you execute combinations more efficiently.
There are more advantages with mastering your breathing, but I’ll leave it here for now.
For “further reading” on breathing exercises to optimize physical training, listen in on this podcast by Joe Weaver.
Image credit: http://assets.fightland.com/content-images/contentimage/58293/the-curious-case-of-kurt-angles-nonexistent-mma-career.jpg
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