0:01 - Intro 

Hello! And welcome back to Day 10 of our Daily Tips. I'm Shane from MATRIX. Now, that we're into double-digit Tips, I figured it's about time that we roll back to the beginning. If you remember, our first Tip was all about belly-breathing and using that to relax and reduce stress. Hopefully, you've been practicing it because it's going to come in handy again today.

0:26 – Straw Breathing 

What we're going to be doing today is working on strengthening your respiratory skills. What you're going to need to do this video is a straw. You'll notice that mine is reusable plastic. They're harder to find now since we've tried to get rid of the disposable variations. If you don't have a straw, you can just use pursed lips for this breathing activity. For starters, you can do this standing, you can do it laying down, or you can do it seated. It doesn't matter. What we're going to be working on is strengthening our ability to breathe by breathing through a straw. The way this is going to work is we're going to be using the belly breath for the inhale. So, you'll be taking a nice deep inhale with the belly. And then -- when you go to breathe out -- you're going to be breathing out through the straw. Or through pursed lips. Which will also act as a restriction to give you some resistance to breathe against.  The power of this is we're actually going to be strengthening the muscles that are helping you breathe.

1:36 – Try It Together

Let's give it a shot together. Again, with a straw or with pursed lips. We'll just do five reps. And I'm going to count for you. We're going to work on a 2-count inhale. And a 4-count exhale. So, they're not going to be big, full breaths, probably. Maybe you're able to do that with just that a limited amount of time. But you'll definitely get the feeling of how this is going to work. So, let's try together. First, we're going to breathe in using the belly through the nose for 2. Then out through the straw for 4. Okay? I'm going to do a countdown with my hands so we can do it together and we're going to do five reps. Here we go.

2:18 – [SILENCE]

2:47 – Do It On Your Own for Longer 

And relax. Hopefully -- in doing just those five repetitions -- you're able to feel how you were getting more of a squeeze using your abdomen, your oblique muscles, to help you with that breathing. Hopefully, you were also feeling the belly move as you were taking the inhales. Now, just from that little bit that you probably felt over five breaths -- you can imagine if we do this for a few minutes time -- it will become that much more powerful with the repetitions that you'll get in during that time. So, that's going to be your challenge for today. To start trying this breathing, to build up more strength around that.

3:23 – Advanced Straw Breathing 

What you can then do -- once you've learned the skill -- is you can transition this into doing it while you're moving. On the days -- it's actually looking pretty nice outside today -- the days where you want to go out for a walk, this is a great skill to practice during your walk. Let's say you're taking a 20-minute walk. Do your warm-up from Day-3 and then head on out for your walk. For the first few minutes of the walk, you're just walking around like you normally would. And then take a minute or two to do this resistive breathing. You can bring the straw with you or, again, you can just use pursed lips. While you're walking, you'll really feel the difference when you're adding that extra load of having more CO2 production in the body through exercise. Take a break for a little bit. And then try it one or two more times throughout your walk, so that you're getting a different feel as you're fatiguing as well. And this will really help increase your respiratory capacity and your skill surrounding breathing.

4:26 – Enhanced Exhalation-Based Breathing

The last thing I wanted to mention regarding this, is as you get better and better, you can start to expand the times that you're breathing. This is an exhalation-based drill. Meaning we have 2-counts in but 4-counts out. You can start to expand those durations to maybe being 4-counts in and 8-counts out. Or 12-counts out. What happens when you do that is, you'll get used to having more CO2 in your body. And that has really, really powerful effects that we'll talk about more later in some upcoming Tips. Start playing with it and practicing it now, so that when we get into more challenging things later, you'll be ready to go for that.

5:10 – Program Changes

I hope you enjoy today's Tip. I do have one more little side note for you. In the spirit of stress-reduction, and getting back to a sense of normalcy, I've decided now that Rhode Island has extended it’s in-person bans for my type of business into May, I'm going to give myself the weekends back. So, our Daily Tips are going to now be switching to being Monday through Friday. And then you'll get a break over the weekend. And we'll pick that up the following Monday for the next few weeks until the studio opens again. I hope you're okay with that. Thanks again for watching. Tune back in on Monday. We'll move into our next Tip.