What is one thing you do every day but probably don’t pay enough attention to it?
It is your breathing.
As humans, we breathe over 20,000 times each day so I would say that is important.
If you don’t breathe, you die.
Therefore, you should learn to breathe properly.
Too many people are breathing incorrectly. They take shallow breaths into the chest or always breathe through the mouth. If you do this you are what L, from Stranger Things, would call a mouth breather.
Once you learn to breathe properly, you will see improvements in your training, sleep, conditioning, and everyday life.
What is proper breathing?
It is deep belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing. Start with a slow inhale through the nose and breathe deep into the belly, diaphragm, up into the chest. Think of this as 360-degree breathing. If you take a balloon and press down on it, it will expand in all directions, 360 degrees. That is what your belly should do when you breathe. Your belly, obliques, and low back all expand. Then it waves up into your chest.
As you exhale slowly through the nose, the air is released, and your chest and belly contract.
The more you can inhale and exhale through the nose the better. If you are training hard or performing hard work, you will need to breathe through your mouth once your heart rate speeds up. With practice, you will be able to nasal breathe longer.
Below is a video explaining some breathing drills you can do to practice.
It is a lot harder than you would expect to learn how to breathe properly. It will take time to learn, but once you do you will start seeing results in your training, recovery, sleep, and quality of life.