Improving your breathing can lead you to a greater sense of relaxation throughout your day, more energy, and a calmer mind.

Building a breathing practice takes a little effort at first, but you will definitely enjoy the results.

Let's start by exploring a couple of principles for a breathing practice.

The answer to the "how to improve breathing" is really "how to practice breathing." Before we get into specific exercises, techniques, and more detailed theory, let's talk about the 20-20-20 Rule. If you follow this one rule, you will improve your breathing and lay the groundwork for deeper practice in other areas as well:

The 20-20-20 Rule

In the following video, I reference some of the breathing exercises that you are going to learn later in this series. What I want you to pay attention to for now, though, are the practice principles. As you get into a practice rhythm, you will need to develop awareness, not only of the specific techniques, but how hard you are working, how much focus and energy you have for practice on any one day, and how you feel before and after your practice.

To me, one of the most important benefits of practices like breathing (or later, qigong, tai chi, or meditation) is that you are fine-tuning your sensitivity. Once you have an awareness practice, you start to tune into sensations in the body beyond pain and discomfort. Most people never get out of this stage, but by focusing on how you practice what you practice, you can.

How to improve your breathing with the 20-20-2o Rule:

Standing Breathing Alignments

I encourage you to practice these breathing exercises standing up. While you can do them seated, standing breathing creates internal pressures that tone your organs and strengthen circulation throughout the entire body.

As you're getting a feel for the internal mechanisms that drive good breathing, sitting will tend to close things down. By standing, you may feel a little stiffer at first, but as you practice for longer periods, you will actually loosen up more, because of the way that everything in your body is connected through your center.

Here are some guidelines for how to maintain proper standing posture:

Want to learn more about "standing"? Download 5-, 10-, and 20-minute guided practice mp3s here.

How to Improve Your Breathing with The Stopwatch Experiment

Since we're just getting started, I want you to play around with these body alignments and try the stopwatch experiment.

All you need do for the next few days is figure out your breathing baseline.

Take stopwatch and set it running. Then, close your eyes, settle into your standing posture and focus on gentle breathing for as long as is comfortable.

Note the time when you get bored, fidgety, tired, or too restless to continue. There's no need to strive for a specific time. Instead, notice over 3 or 4 or 5 consecutive days if you have a natural baseline.

Good Luck!

This page is part of a series of free breathing exercises. If you found this page somewhere else and you'd like to learn more about the entire series, you can sign up here.