Today's society places a lot of emphasis on healthy living by exercising at least three times a week and eating healthy food. However we probably don't realize that to achieve this, correct breathing habits must be involved as the foundation for this healthy lifestyle.

We are conditioned to believe breathing is an involuntary action and we take it all too much for granted. As well as commencing and ending our lives, breathing is the single largest component of our daily human process. We breathe an average 20,000 times a day, and how we breathe determines how healthy we are or are not.

You get your oxygen naturally from your skin, water, raw living foods and from breathing. The majority comes from breathing and incorrect instruction on how to breathe, increased preservatives, chemicals, toxins, and the combined stresses of our fast paced lifestyles all hamper our body’s oxygen stores and nervous system balance. I lost two dear friends to heart attacks, one from jogging and one from tennis. The heart must have adequate oxygen lest it goes into spasms we call heart attacks. Part of warming up is to get the natural breathing reflex to expand allowing the lungs to take in extra oxygen in the smaller air sacs towards the outer portion of the lungs.

If high intensity exercise is so good for everyone, then why don’t these exercisers reach 120 years routinely and without illness? Exercising with a striving mind and insufficient breath can prove anaerobic and sometimes fatal. Torn or sore muscles, stressful over-training and excess free radical production often result. In forced exertion, one should use the breath as a foundation for exertion and vary the body position so that the natural reflex occurs often enough without resistance. One exercise that affords both forced and easy breathing positions is Spinning®. http://www.spinning.com

Using a stationary bicycle to simulate level, climbing or downhill terrain, the Spinner can as one wishes, tailor the workout to a wide variety of states of anaerobic breathlessness or aerobic breathe-ability. The error most Spinners I have observed is to do more of the anaerobic then the aerobic body positions.

We can learn a little from the Chinese high handlebar upright bicycling position and are reminded that China is the world of Chi Kung or Qi Gong, a science of breathing for health and well being that may be some 2-3 thousand years old. When the body sits upright it breathes easier. The diaphragm is likened to a bicycle pump. It must rise higher in the chest so as to draw down and suck air into the lungs. The higher the diaphragm rises, the more air can be drawn in in one breath. This increased volume creates increased efficiency and we actually breathe deeper and easier. The heart works less as well.

The body position restricts, or from another perspective, directs the breathing. Looking at a top down picture of the diaphragm we see there are front, sides and back. When we bend forward we push breath into the low back and upper chest. And this is good for some. But most of the breathing volume is in the lower front and sides of the thorax. When we remain erect we allow breath to expand at and below the rib cage where much of the rib expansion and ease of breathing can be found. The error I see is when people stay too often in the forward bending position without developing the abdominal and side rib sections. Is your rib cage getting stiff near the top of your chest? The stiffer the rib cage the less the heart gets massaged during breathing. It stiffens.

Of course in our workaholic, fast paced, firstest-with-the-mostest, survival oriented lifestyles, sitting upright can seem to many as cruising or sloughing off and most certainly will not WIN THE RACE. Frankly, I think Spinning® has the perfect environment for letting go of competition and accessing internal rhythms while still staying in top condition. If you want to stay competitive think of the hare and the tortoise and choose the long races where endurance and pacing are senior to strength and speed. If you must have the strength and speed, you’d better do some serious non-Spinning®  breathing oriented workouts to offset the natural constriction stemming from forced inhalation.

We can get more power in the forward bending position. However, a client who was in the top seven national mountain biking champion a few years ago and could dead lift 800 pounds, came to be with significantly restricted breathing. I actually got him dizzy from extra energy in one session. His biking buddies now ask him why he no longer gets winded. He just tells them he learned to breathe. That was the end of the conversation as few people really get that they don't know how to breathe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Straining or breath-heaving actually locks up the breathing and you develop accessory breathing muscles that restrict deepest and easiest breathing, even while sleeping. Many champion athletes exercise properly "around" the breath. The ones that do not develop exercise induced asthma and are the happy patients of steroid dispensing MDs haven't a clue about healthy breathing.  These exercise induced breathing blocks lead to exercise induced asthma, chronic fatigue, heart conditions, and sometimes emphysema in later years.

Nose breathing is a good way to make sure you are not forcing the issue. Make sure you have nostrils that are open.  Some habitual mouth breathers  may want to keep their nose open and mouth closed with aids more about

If you want to see the possible damage you can do by over doing it then check out health benefits of better breathing.

But if you want to increase your efficiency even though you will probably not lengthen your life you can  improve power to the wheel of a bicycle by both improving pedaling efficiency and increasing muscle mass available to power the bicycle. 

My suspicion is that riding a bike bent forward is negative to breathing during sleep due to bent over position that carries over into sleep and invites closing of the airways.
I much prefer stationary recumbent bike along with www.breathing.com/oxygen-concentrator.htm

Or ride very upright, go at a medium pace, and do specific stretches and exercises to offset the damage from all that. Then you can have the best of BOTH worlds. Conditioning AND longevity.

How good is YOUR breathing?

Recommended Optimal Breathing Program to offset the damage of gasping and breath-heaving.