Hi everybody, Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness personal training studio. And my, aren’t things crazy?. It is time to take a breath, just to breathe. Not too close to anybody, keep your spacing and all. But breathing is actually one of the so-called system files, if you will, that was originally downloaded into your brain, our greatest piece of technology at the time that we were born. And it’s not just that we were told how to do it to survive, but we were actually programmed with the ability to do this in a way that can help us to thrive and help us to find more and more benefit from it. So breath is one of those things that if it gets out of control, you lose control of your body, right?
So I tell that to a lot of clients. A lot of times as they’re working out, they’ll start losing their breath, start feeling they’re fixing to hyperventilate if they don’t breathe, or they’re holding their breath during a movement. What ends up happening is that it actually affects the way that muscles are working. It affects the way that their energy is flowing and they ended up not getting as great a workout. So what we want to do is take some time to breathe, take some time to relax.
Now in the situation going on around us, we certainly need to take some time to breathe and relax because we’re all very uptight, anxious, we’ve got a lot of fear of the unknown, fear of what we do know, fear of what we’re hearing. So what we need to do is just take the time to work through that breath.
So I’ve done yoga and Pilates for years and years, and that’s where a lot of my breath work has come from. But your breath can actually initiate for you either a state of calm and relaxation in the body, or it can initiate the fight or flight response telling you that you need to either fight a mountain lion that’s on your back or you need to run away from it.
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to use that breath to our benefit. We’re going to use it to help our bodies and our minds to become better humans, to become more efficient, more energetic, to feel better, to stop living in so much stress and anxiety because we have the control within our brains to be able to calm that down.
So I wanted to teach you three different breaths today that you can use anytime, anywhere to be able to help your body come into a state of calm and less panic. Because I know as a person myself who’s dealt with anxiety through the years, these three have really been beneficial to me in helping during certain situations to calm the anxiety, bring those levels down.
So the first breath is an equal breath. And so a lot of times you may be sitting and you don’t even think about your breath. You’re breathing, you know that, but you’re probably not paying attention to what you’re doing while you’re doing any of that good stuff.
If you’ll just find a peaceful place, feet on the ground, feeling grounded through the floor, feeling all of the Earth’s power coming up through you and sitting up nice and tall. So you’ve got good posture which means everything’s lengthened and elongated. The equal breath is where you would take in a breath for three to four counts.
Now notice these are not in seconds. This is your count on how long you feel comfortable with this. But breathing in for three to four counts and then breathing out for three or four counts, and doing that over say anywhere from a two to 10 minute period of just breathing in and then breathing out. So you’re almost, it’s not really holding at the top, it’s just flowing through. So you’re just breathing it in and the letting it right back out, but just as slowly on the way out as she brought it in.
The next one is a three second hold breath, and that actually triggers your brain to go into a different state to really bring it into more of that relaxation state. So we breathe in and we take a slow breath in, and then we hold for three counts there. So you just take that inhale, you hold three counts. That’s really pumping that oxygen through the body, giving it time to do its magic, and then we exhale out nice and slow. There’s no count on the exhale. It’s just a matter of taking it to your body’s ability to breathe in, and we hold it for three, two, one and then we slowly exhale. And again anywhere from two to 10 minutes with any of these breaths is going to help you to realign your body and rebalance things, get everything back into working order.
All right, so the last one is one of my favorite ones for when I can’t fall asleep very well, or whenever I’m trying to, maybe I’m at the height of coming close to a panic attack and trying to bring that down. It’s called a four-seven-eight breath and that’s where we breathe in for four counts, your counts, not seconds. Breathe in for four counts, hold it for seven counts, and then let it out for eight counts.
It’s harder than what it sounds like but with practicing over time you’re able to get that pattern down and it starts to relax the brain into more of a calm state where you can either help yourself to go to sleep, or calm down out of anxiety or whatever it may be.
I want you just to try those out, let me know how they’ve helped you. If it’s something that benefits you, and if there’s something that you would like to hear about, especially in all of this chaos going on, I’d love to be able to educate you on that and help you out there.
If you are that person who is at home or not sure what to do, but you’re still wanting some help with nutrition, with fitness, with health, with mindset, any of those things, we are still open right now. The studio is still open.
We are a one-on-one environment. We are not a big gym so we can do one-on-one. We can do small group, which is less than 10 people. We can do semi-privates, but we also do phone coaching. We do virtual coaching through Zoom calls, so we’re able to help you out in multiple ways, whether that is online training, or it’s in-person training for nutrition, fitness, health mindset, you name it. Basically life coaching all put together.
So if we can be of help to you, feel free to give me a call, 322-3188. We’d love to help you out and just get to know you better, and see if we can give you something to help you relax a little bit. Have a great day, and I hope that it’s full of many blessings.