Written by Irene Well

I write about the ways of keeping healthy in modern life.

Do you find yourself tired easily for a weekend hiking, run out of breath for a 10 minutes jogging, or hit the bottleneck for a sport? Breathing may be your biggest barrier to cross.

Breathing keep us alive. It can not be more common as we breathe all the time. So, usually we don’t pay attention to it. However, have you ever thought you may not experience a real breathing in your workout?

There was a study at the University of Portsmouth testing 12 runners over a six-week period in 2011 and it turns out the athletes who took breathing exercises as part of their training increased their speed by 5~12 percent. This is because the proper breathing ways can improve your lung functions, boost your endurance, make your more focused, help calm your nerves and so on.

A breath can changes a lot. Try the following deep belly breathing and you will benefit from it.

Deep Belly Breathing

Deep belly breathing has a lot of benefits for the body and mind. But most of the time, we adults just do shallow breathing, drawing air into the chest area instead of throughout the lungs, which is the opposite to that of babies.

How to do it:

Sit upright in a chair with your back supported, or lie on your back on a flat surface with your knees bent.
Place one hand on your upper chest and the other on your bellybutton.
Breathe in slowly through your nose, and note how the air go deeply towards your lower belly. Your chest should remain still, while your belly should rise.
Breathe out through your pursed lips, tighten your belly muscles and let them fall inward while you exhale. Try to exhale 2~3 times longer than inhale.
You can begin with 5 minutes a day and increase your time to 10 minutes, several times a day, as the exercises become easier and more comfortable. If you feel 5 minutes is too long to start with, just try from 2~3 minutes.

What you can benefits from it:

Enhance your lung functions
Boost your endurance
Counteryour anxiety
Improve your immune system
Ease your tension and stress
Increase your inspiration capacity
Although you have known belly breathing do good to your sport performance, you may wonder if you do it in the right way? How long should you practice in one day? How well does it work? OPUMP can be the breathing-improvement solution for you. OPUMP is a smart breathing exerciser, which can capture instant flow rate and volume of your breathing with its breakthrough MEMS technology. By that, OPUMP can test your inspiration capacity, give your training suggestions and provide various courses (including but not limited to belly breathing) per your need.