Breathing
How to breath and why it's relevant for players
As we've mentioned in the "Enter the zone" article, knowing how to breath can change the outcome of your performance heavily.
We're not nearly aware of how much our physical interactions influence or brain performance and thinking process.
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Breathing well has many physical benefits such as lowering blood pressure and heart rate and helps you deal with stress and anxiety, but also sparks brain growth. Just breathing has a direct positive effect on the brain Informative research.
Although everyone is capable of intentionally do deep-abdominal breathing, most people automatically take short, shallow breaths that stem from the chest and rib cage when they're concentrated doing something else.
Breathing in this manner can make you feel anxious and decrease your mental performance, because it prevents oxygenated air from reaching the lowest portion of your lungs.
Why does all this help me play better?
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A number of clinical studies attest to the benefits of breathing exercises on improving mental performance.
A STUDY published in 1993 in the "International Journal of Neuroscience" showed that unilateral-nostril breathing out of the left nostril helped to significantly improve right hemispheric cognitive performance, especially in the area of spatial task performance.
A PAPER published in 2006 in the journal "Medical Hypotheses" reports that pranayamic breathing increases the amplitude of theta brain waves -- the brain waves that occur when you are feeling relaxed or in meditative states -- and increases parasympathetic nervous system activity, resulting in increased alertness and feelings of invigoration.
An additional STUDY, published in 2007 in the international journal "Teaching and Learning in Medicine," demonstrated that deep-breathing exercises helped decrease anxiety and feelings of nervousness and reduced concentration loss in medical students over the course of the nearly two-year study period.
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| Image rights to Ivan "Mushy" Prats |
If we concentrate better, avoid stressing or feeling anxious, improve our cognition, and do tasks more efficiently just by learning to breath correctly automatically, I think it's worth the try. Don't you think?.
I'll be going over this topic in a practical seminar via YouTube live stream this April 23rd (Saturday) at 12:00 PM (UTC +2). Here's a link to my YouTube Channel. Subscribe to watch interesting content about this topic and much more.
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