Your breath should be your best friend

Posted In: ChiRunning | Fitness | Me | Running divider No Comments »

And I’m not talking about your minty fresh breath with Scope! I’m talking about breathing in general. Along with shoes, breathing is one of the of the questions I get the most.

I found I learned a lot about breathing from yoga. Yoga teaches you to concentrate on your breath and to take it all the way inside your body to get away from the shallow breath. Some great advice that’s helped my running, my cycling, my swimming and even my golf game.

Danny (Dreyer, ChiRunning founder) talks about concentrating on the exhale when you’re running. To be, it’s similar to the yoga breath since the inhale is automatic and concentrating on the exhale usually slows things down. As long as you’re bringing awareness to your breath and making sure you’re staying within it, I think you’re doing well!

Your breath can really help with difficult situations as well. When doing some long distance cycling when I first started I would breath through pain and discomfort while I was riding. It worked every time! It also helped when I was holding tension somewhere. The same can be said when you get into a stressful situation. If I’m doing a big presentation and I get a bit nervous (it happens to me too!), I just take a few slow and deep breaths and it helps tremendously. Try it before your next big presentation or your next race!

***
And I get some questions about the Pose technique and ChiRunning. I don’t know much about Pose to be honest but check out this recent article, it seems to do a good job of highlighting the major differences between both. And let me know what YOU think!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *