Breathwork for the Climbing

Looking forward to doing some more climbing in the weeks to come, and it’s got me thinking about all of the tools that have helped me get back here. One of them came from a book my brother-in-law recommended to me a while back. We seem to have a kindred curiosity about all things—climbing, nature, news, health—and as such, he told me about a book called Breath, by James Nestor. It was a relevant recommendation at the time because I was still well into my health recovery journey, but also because of our shared interest in improving our physical abilities for our recreational hobbies.

The Cliff Notes

There’s a lot of fascinating data in the book, but while there have been a lot of things I’ve done to get my body almost back to normal, there is this one simple trick I got from the book that is worth mentioning. Think of this as the super CliffsNotes for Breath, whether you’re looking for ways to improve your physical performance or just want overall better health.

Just do this: breathe in and out through your nose. That’s it. That’s the hack. It sounds stupid, but it’s so beautifully simple. And it works. In the book he discusses professional athletes improving their performance dramatically when they force themselves to breathe only in and out through their nose, despite resisting the idea. I went running with my daughter the other day, who is in much better shape than me, and when we went up a steep hill, I made a more conscious effort to employ the trick. She had been cooking me all run, but up the hill I was able to power past her, even though I hadn’t run in months, and she’d been training. The only difference? I only breathed through my nose while she gasped for air through her mouth.

Additional Benefits

Breathing in and out through my nose has also helped me tremendously with the nerve damage in the soft muscle tissue around my esophagus and lower back. When I get a strike of pain, which still happens daily—albeit much more subtly these days—I have a number of tools to help get me through it. I may crank out some push-ups or lift some weights, using exercise to reprogram my mind, but I also focus heavily on my breathwork. It not only increases my output but actually helps release a calming effect on the tissue in question as well. It’s not perfect, but there is no doubt it’s been a great contributor to the improvement in my physical strength and overall health.

There are a ton of other benefits as well. Training myself to only breathe through my nose during the day makes me far less likely to open my trap at night, reducing the chances that I’ll snore. And not being a mouth breather is good for, well, good breath. I think. It’s not like I go around testing that on people, but my kids never tell me I have a problem, and children are the first people to point out what you’re doing wrong, so…

On the Nose

But mostly, it just helps keep me calm. Before I was aware of the practice, I more or less did it anyway, and have always been pretty even-keeled I suppose. But knowing this trick helps me stay on track. When I’m running and start gasping for air, I now know to force myself to breathe in and out through my nose, and wouldn’t you know, it fricking works. Every time. The first breath in might even seem a little painful if I’m exerting a ton of energy, but the body adjusts and my body powers through. Similarly, when I get a nerve strike, rather than panicking that the pain is going to get worse, I breathe and exercise my way through it, and within twenty minutes it’s usually gone.

So, I should be getting more time in the mountains in the weeks ahead, and I’m excited. But if I get talking too much on the trail about how beautiful everything is, and start feeling a little winded, I’ll switch off the speech and initiate the nose-breathing with intention. It has powered me through so many tough moments, no mountain in the USA really concerns me now. Hmmm, maybe it’s time to start making some broader plans?

Buying the Book

Nobody paid me to do this review, and I don’t usually do book reviews. I just thought this book was helpful and worth mentioning. If you are interested in it though, you can find it on my online bookshop at Bookshop.org, where I just added a new category: Grounding Body & Mind. Buying it there as opposed to Amazon doesn’t really benefit the author, but it does help keep independent bookstores running. And that’s a good thing.