Strength Training Breath Control
The quality of our breathing is one of the most overlooked aspects of mental health, and physical fitness. It’s received more focus in the last decade with meditation and breath work emerging into mainstream conversations, but its importance in strength training is often not discussed enough. There are three key points to remember regarding your breathing while lifting weights:
Effort = Exhale
Relaxation = Inhale
Maintain Rhythm
Here’s a little more detail on each…
When we are exerting ourselves, or lifting the weight during the exercise, we want to be breathing out. This stabilizes your core and allows your body to avoid tensing up. Think of it like swimming, if you just hold your breath while your head is underwater, you’ll run out of air and be much less efficient than if you had blown out a continuous stream of bubbles. The same logic applies to strength training. We want to be loose and relaxed to maximize our performance, and exhaling during our effort phase helps us achieve that.
ex. Barbell Squat: Exhaling while we are actively squatting the weight up
Once we’re back at the starting position of an exercise, we want to be inhaling steadily. This allows us to fill our lungs back up, and get a fresh dose of oxygen to exert ourselves again.
ex. Barbell Squat: Inhaling at the top of the movement (legs extended, preparing to lower down)
Those are the two biggest things to remember. However, even if you’re breathing isn’t perfect, just make sure it’s consistent. If focusing on your breathing pattern too much is causing your form to deteriorate, then bring your attention back to the lift itself. Breathing technique isn’t complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement if you’ve never done it before. If you start to have trouble with it, then it’s a good idea to circle back once you feel more confident with the lift itself.
Breathing efficiently during strength training will help you get the most out of your time in the gym, and keep you feeling refreshed and powerful during your lifts.
