Breathing and Relaxation Techniques
A brain that is excessively stressed out on or off the field negatively impacts your performance on the field.
It’s important for athletes to have relaxation techniques that act as one piece of the puzzle in managing stress throughout a career.
Many relaxation techniques come back to breathing. Keep reading to learn about different breathing exercises that can help your mind de-stress so you can feel your best.
Breathing and the Nervous System
Humans used to think that certain things the body did were completely automatic - we had to just hold on for the ride as our heart rate would spike. Through research, however, there are ways that we can leverage control over these once thought to be involuntary, automatic functions of the body.
The way you breathe changes how the nervous system behaves.
The autonomic nervous system is the branch that handles things we consider mostly automatic, like breathing rate, digestion, and heart rate.
This autonomic system has two important parts:
The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS): the rest and digest system that slows down activity, including heart rate. It’s like the gas pedal of your body.
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS): the flight or flight system that ramps up activity in the body, including heart rate. Think of it as the brakes of your body.
The way you breathe affects which branch of the ANS is dominant at any given time.
Slow, deep breathing promotes PNS activity, which has a calming effect on the body.
Rapid, shallow breathing facilitates the SNS, activating the body’s stress response, increasing the rate of your breath and heart beat
When you practice slow, deep breathing techniques, such as belly breathing, you can stimulate the PNS and promote a relaxation response in the body. This can help reduce stress, anxiety, and tension, ultimately improving overall physical and mental well-being.
Conversely, when we engage in shallow, rapid breathing, you can activate the SNS and trigger the body's stress response, which can lead to increased anxiety and tension. But, most of the time, athletes are looking to manage their stress response that kicked into overdrive.
Now let’s get into some specific breathing exercises so you can trigger the PNS, and a sense of calm, no matter where you are.
Ratio Breathing
One of the most effective ways to activate the calming system of your body, the PNS, is through ratio breathing. This simply means you change the ratio of your breath. Typically, when you’re not thinking about your breathing, the ratio is 1:1. Your inhale and exhale are the same duration.
Making your exhale longer than your inhale is one of the most research backed ways to stimulate the PNS.
Focus on extending your exhale to be longer than your inhale. Start with about 4 seconds for your inhale and 6 seconds for the exhale. These numbers are not locked in though. Experiment with them to find your comfortable ratio. As long as your exhale is longer than the inhale, you’re activating the brakes of your body, inducing a calming effect.
Diaphragmatic (Belly) Breathing
You can increase the effectiveness of your breath when you engage the diaphragm. It’s a muscle that, at rest, pushes up against the lungs.
When you contract the diaphragm, it moves down so the lungs have more room to expand, taking in more oxygen.
It’s possible that you go your whole day without engaging the diaphragm because, due to so much sitting, people are prone to chest breathing.
Chest breathing is less efficient in making use of oxygen, which your muscles and brain thrive on!
So, as you engage in breathing exercises meant to calm you down, engage the diaphragm.
Many athletes make a huge mistake:
They don’t practice their breathing exercises. They think “if I feel panicked or really stressed out, that’s when I’ll do them.”
This is a huge mistake because that breathing exercise will likely have zero impact on your nerves since you’re not comfortable with it. You also may not trust it as much to mitigate the stress you’re feeling since you’ll have little proof of it working in the past.
It will be even more difficult to remember and execute breathing exercises properly considering you may be ruminating about something that has happened or may occur in the future.
Practice is key so you can reliably focus on your breath when you need it most.
Interested in having your own sport psychology coach walk you through breathing exercises for your unique circumstances? Click the button below to schedule a free call with me to get started!