Breathing in the Gaps: How to Recover Better and Live a Less Stressful Life Now

If you’ve been curious about how you can incorporate mindful breath into your life, I’ve got the one thing you can do to change your health and performance immediately. That one thing is specifically how you breathe when you’re not training. That’s right, you can do more in the gaps between sets and between training sessions than you’d ever imagine. 

Breathing through your nose exclusively when you’re not training will change your life. 

Whether you’re a beginner or identify as an advanced athlete, the first best breathing strategy you can adopt indefinitely is to breathe in and out of your nose only when you’re walking to your car, brushing your teeth, using the restroom, or anything else that isn’t exercise. The reason for this is simply that nasal breathing supports a parasympathetic state. This is a state that promotes rest, recovery, and rejuvenation.

Your training will undoubtedly be stressful (that’s the point), but we all can recover better in the moments when we aren’t stressing our bodies. Breathing through your mouth when not training intensely extends a sympathetic tone that is disruptive to important recovery moments and is associated with a cascade of medical problems. 

We’ve been so blessed for so long having Breath & Exposure leading the conversation around breath as it pertains to performance. Those of you who have been fortunate enough to attend the Breath & Exposure Seminar, taken Breath & Exposure 101, or even popped-in for B&E Office Hours know by now that the human body has gears.

These gears link our output to naturally occurring breathing patterns. Depending on your fitness level, training context, and desired outcome, you may find yourself breathing short, quick breaths or longer, slower breaths. Depending on these variables, you might be breathing out of your nose or mouth or alternating between the two. Some training environments are best endured while holding your breath! Training these gears to the extent that we do in Breath & Exposure is a rabbit hole that is both deep and worth exploring. 

That said, if you want incredible changes in how you feel and perform, breathing through your nose during the gaps between training efforts may have the biggest return on investment. Happy breathing!