[knaik94]

I found that doing breathing exercises in isolation were very boring and I couldn't get myself to care. But using structured breathing while exercising made it way more enjoyable. Having physical cues for the different steps helped make it more of a measurable skill where I notice improvements over time.

Musicians and athletes practice structured breathing as a way of building cardio and increasing lung capacity. Your lungs don't change, you just learn to control airflow better. The way "ancient traditions" are frequently framed makes me avoid and treat them like pseudoscience. Framing it from the persepctive of an athlete helped me evaluate it more seriously. Mindful meditation is beneficial but completely indepedent from breathing exercises and you don't need the former to get benefits from the latter.

I am not arguing the value or validity of "ancient techniques", I am sharing my initial bias when I was first introduced to pranayama, and how it's taught as if it exists in isolation. This post doesn't mention sports or singing/musicians once.

There's many techniques but box breathing where you take extra air in after you feel like your lungs are full, and a longer period exhaling than inhaling, is the primary technique I was taught for marching band/trombone. The "cyclic sighing" described in the paper, but with a longer inhale and exhale. We did, at ~80 bpm, 4 counts for inhale, 4 counts of holding, and 8 counts of exhale, with whatever extra "sip" of air we could manage to inhale during the hold. If you're not used to breathing exercises, doing 4+4+8 a few times can leave you light headed. It's normal to cough from the extra sip of air.