Italy: Time to Breathe

I first discovered breathwork through meditation, when I was still playing rugby. As a professional athlete with a background in physiology, I spent years learning to optimise my mind and body. I used to get anxious before big games, thinking of all the different outcomes and worrying about whether I’d make the team next week. So I would meditate to calm my nerves. I found myself using breath to centre the practice, although at the time, I didn’t know the science behind why it made a difference. What I did know was that by controlling my breath, I could control my nerves. I found it so helpful that after my rugby career, I trained as a strength and conditioning coach, deepening my research and understanding of how breathwork can benefit both mind and body.

There are many definitions of ‘flow state’, but it generally refers to a mindset where you’re fully present in the moment, confident in your capability to achieve whatever task is at hand. When I was still playing rugby, I found a flow state when my mind got out of the way of my body and just let it perform. I wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen or whether I could do it — I just accepted that I’d done the training and let my body do the rest.

Breath is the steering wheel to the nervous system, but it’s also the indicator that tells you how your body is doing. For example if you’re stressed and breathing to the point of hyperventilation, it’s a reflection of your emotional state. By controlling breath and manipulating the way we exhale, we can attain emotional balance. Essentially, the way you breathe can kick the body back into restoration mode, instead of a stressed-out one that’s preparing for a threat. It can slow your heart rate, stimulate the vagus nerve (which activates the body’s ‘rest and digest’ recovery state), and reduce blood pressure. From a performance perspective, breathwork can also enhance athletic output. Slowing your breath helps ensure that oxygen gets to your muscles efficiently, helping you succeed.

We have more control over our internal systems than we think. If you’re feeling a bit low or sluggish, you can use your breathing to bring energy into your body. If you’re very stressed, or there’s a situation that needs you to act with resolve, the fastest way to calm yourself down is using breath.

The physiological sigh method is a speedy way to calm yourself. It’s especially effective in a work setting, if you’re in between meetings and you need some time to yourself. You should place a hand on your chest or ribs, then take a double inhale through the nose, followed by a long exhale through the mouth.

Different ways of breathing can be used in strength and conditioning. A lot of what I’ll be doing at COMO Alpina Dolomites will be focusing on recovery speed — helping people get up and go again. A huge component to that work includes retraining people to breathe through the nose instead of the mouth. Each breath you take requires energy from the body, so the more efficiently you can breathe, the less you’ll fatigue yourself. And you’ll increase aerobic threshold as well. 

Of course learning control over your breath isn’t just relevant for sports and training. It teaches you regulation in real life too. High-intensity training is a helpful conduit for techniques that you can apply to every encounter both in and outside training. It teaches rational, calm and confident responses — something everyone can benefit from.