Slowing Your Breathing To Speed Up Your Balance

People are animals, too, and as such, breath and balance are keys to functioning in the world. Our species is complex; we do many things. Yet, underlying our behaviors there are seemingly automatic and often ignored functions, like respiration and postural responses, that rely on the integration of balance and breath in the brain.

Respiration flies under the radar

Unless we are deliberately holding our breath or have just done heavy exercise, we usually pay little attention to what we are doing with our respirations. If you are lying, sitting, or standing while you read this, you are probably breathing in and out about 12 to 15 times each minute. Each of those minutes pass with little awareness about your breath. Yet we know that controlling our breath in a way often found in meditative and martial arts traditions can affect our brain activity, feelings, and overall well-being. Although respiration is, indeed, automatic, we have the ability to deliberate, regulate, entrain, and train how we breathe.

The nose always knows

In addition to the act itself, another thing we don't often pay attention to is how we are breathing. Especially whether it's by using our nose or our mouth. While air helpfully makes its way in and out of our lungs regardless of how we breathe, we know that inhaling through the nose has a strong effect on rhythms within the brain.

Many meditative traditions, like zazen in Zen and yoga, focus on nasal inhalation, its timing, and its depth. Many martial arts traditions, from Okinawa, Japan, and Korea, use similar approaches, where nasal inhalation is often followed by forcefully controlled exhalation via the mouth. In Chinese martial arts, many forms of the so-called "internal" neija systems like T'ai Chi Chuan, Hsing i, and Bagua Zhang emphasize inhalation and exhalation through the nose.

It's time for a bit of balance, Grasshopper

A key feature of any martial art is the ability to react to the chaotic challenges inherent in actual fighting. Fighting involves numerous balance challenges, whether from push and pull perturbations from your attacker, or whole body motion you produce in defense. Nobody has yet done a nice study looking at martial arts practice, breathing, and balance perturbations, but a group at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada has done the next best thing.

In research published in the journal Experimental Brain Research, Patrick Siedlecki, Tanya Ivanova, Kevin Shoemaker, and Jayne Garland wanted to see if breathing rate had measurable effects on postural muscles when balance was perturbed. 27 women and men in their early 20s came to their lab and experienced balance perturbations using a treadmill belt. This kind of perturbation is a bit like the feeling you might have when a train or subway car starts or stops unexpectedly and is a bit like what you might also feel if you were pushed or pulled slightly off balance.

In addition to other measures and assessments, breathing rate and leg muscle activity were studied when perturbations occurred either with participants doing whatever breathing they felt comfortable doing or when slowed to six breaths per minute with four-second inhalations and six-second exhalations.

The key muscle responses related to the size of the activity and how quickly the activity started. The really interesting result was that, when folks deliberately slowed and did controlled breathing, the latency of muscle activity went down. This means reactions to perturbations were faster when breathing was slower. When I reached out to these scientists, they told me that the slower breathing was, in fact, nasal.

The researchers at Western University also said that this work has implications, and was inspired by, work on how folks breathe when they do balance training in physical rehabilitation. This work has a number of exciting applications for clinical rehabilitation.

The findings also have applications for martial arts because a key thing folks often train in is establishing a calm mindset driven by breath control. This produces a state where reactions are typically quicker, more fluid, and involve less over-reaction than when folks are breathing quickly and in a state of higher arousal.

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How you breathe affects not just how you move and function but also how you react to external perturbations. While the work described above is about breath and balance, it's worth considering an overall focus on breath and brain can have a helpful effect on all aspects of our behavior. The really good news is you don't need any special equipment and you can try it right now. It's literally at the tip of your nose. So why not give a bit of breathwork a try?

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2022)