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#Post#: 31--------------------------------------------------
Strength Training Your Breathing Muscles Can Improve Heart
Health, According to a New Study
DIR By: LightMove
Date: October 28, 2021, 3:30 am
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Strength training can improve your bone mass, lean muscle mass,
cardiovascular fitness, strength, and enhance your sense of
well-being. But how often are you strength training your
breathing muscles? There's no right or wrong answer, but
according to a new study in the Journal of the American Heart
Association, doing high-resistance inspiratory muscle strength
training (IMST) for five minutes a day can help aging adults
prevent cardiovascular disease.
The study recruited 36 adults ages 50 to 79 that had above
normal systolic blood pressure (the number that measures the
pressure in your arteries when your heart beats). Half of the
group did high-resistance IMST for approximately five minutes a
day and the other half completed a placebo protocol with a lower
resistance level.
"So what we did in this study was 30 breaths a day, six days a
week for six weeks," says Daniel Craighead, PhD, assistant
research professor at the Integrative Physiology of Aging Lab at
the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the study.
"And what we saw was a reduction in systolic blood pressure of
nine millimeters mercury." According to Craighead, if this was
sustained in the long-term, it "would decrease someone's risk
for cardiovascular disease and heart disease substantially."
The benefits of breathing exercise
The benefits of breathing exercises for overall health and heart
health aren't new, and deep breathing signals to the brain to
calm down, positively impacting the parasympathetic nervous
system and the rest of your body, according to Sofiya Prilik,
MD, clinical director of cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation at
NYU Langone.
Additionally, deep breathing positively impacts your blood
vessels."It's a new area of exercise, so we don't know exactly
how it's doing it, but we saw evidence that it's improving the
health of people's blood vessels," says Craighead.
When you practice deep breathing or IMST, your blood vessels
open in response to a substance called nitric oxide, which is
released when deep breathing against resistance, explains Dr.
Prilik. This action changes the structure and function of the
blood vessels, she adds.
Tighter blood vessels equate to higher blood pressure and blood
vessels that are more open lead to lower blood pressure,
explains Dr. Prilik, which helps to explain why researchers saw
a lowering of blood pressure in those who did IMST.
How to strength train your breathing muscles
If you're inspired to start strength training your breathing
muscles, first check with your doctor to make sure this is a
good option for you. It will be hard to stimulate lung effort
with any other type of breathing aside from IMST, says
Craighead. But that doesn't mean deep breathing doesn't have
health benefits.
"So doing slow, deep breathing without resistance can lower
blood pressure similarly. The main difference is that takes 30
minutes a day or so. The advantage of ours is if that people
don't have time for that, they can do this in five minutes a
day," says Craighead.
"If you imagine how hard you're breathing at the hardest you've
ever run in that sort of effort, the intensity that people have
to inhale against for this training is two to three times higher
than that. So it's really a resistance to breathing that's much
greater than anything people would ever come across in just
daily life," explains Craighead.
But there are similar devices that are more affordable than the
one used in the study that should work just as well, he says.
"The key is that they have to provide this high resistance to
inspiration. And because it's something that you can't really do
with exercise, it's going to be hard to do without some sort of
device."
Craighead advises using a device that reaches a resistance of at
least 100 cmH20 to see the benefit, he says, and recommends the
OPUMP.
HTML https://theopump.com/
Although this study has many positive impacts on blood pressure
and cardiovascular health, it didn't improve every measurement
of cardiovascular health such as cholesterol and blood glucose,
which is why Craighead advises not cutting out other forms of
exercise like running and walking. "I don't think it's a good
replacement if you are already doing things that are healthy for
you, but it's a good thing to add on that can give you extra
benefit," he says.
Cardiovascular health tips
Although it may be challenging to mimic the results of this
study without a device with a high level of resistance, Dr.
Prilik says taking deep breaths is considered an exercise
against resistance because your rib cage provides resistance to
the lungs. "And it's quite a bit of it, in fact," she says.
Taking a few deep breaths throughout your day can "potentially
provide some benefit I'm thinking," says Dr. Prilik. She also
agrees with Craighead to continue doing physical activity as
"any activity is better than no activity."
Additionally, Dr. Prilik recommends trying to manage and reduce
your stress levels which can decrease your risk factors for
heart disease. Getting more sleep, meditating and doing
breathwork, taking movement breaks, and making sure you're
fueling your body properly can also help improve your well-being
and reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease.
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