Proper Breathing and Your Health:

Is breathing properly important to your health? Let's take a look.

I hosted a fitness seminar this past weekend with chiropractor and personal trainer Dr. Evan Osar. The seminar was on conditioning for the hip and knee. He talked about balancing the muscles on the front and back of the hip for proper function and prevention.

He believes, as do I, that many of the hip and knee replacements that we are seeing, could be prevented with proper training. But we will focus on that at another time.

One of the points he made was on the importance of abdominal breathing - using your diaphragm to breathe better. He believes that for your other movements to be optimal, you need to breathe correctly.

We worked on breathing with our diaphragm to help stabilize our midsection. This can help to keep your hip and pelvis aligned properly. This alignment can obviously improve hip function and remove unnecessary stress that might be contributing to your pain.

While sharing this information with a friend, he recommended a program called Optimal Breathing. I checked out this website and found some interesting information there. You might check it out, if interested.

This site talked about the benefits of Optimal Breathing, such as increased circulation, enhanced immune function, and even help in dealing with chronic pain. Again, I need to explore this subject in greater detail before making recommendations, but if you can improve any part of your health with something as simple as breathing, its worth a look.

I do know of one study that looked at heart attack patients to see if they were a chest breather or abdominal (diaphragm) breather. All the patients happened to be chest breathers.

Hmmmm..... something to think about.

I'll finish with a video of simple things that can help relieve stress and take some tension off your spine in the process.