The very idea of shortness of breath strikes fear in everyone. It has become a stark reality for many individuals. In these challenging times, it has become harder to maintain good lung Yoga Pranayama health.
Healthy lungs help ease your body’s ability to exchange gases during the process of respiration. When you inhale, oxygen from the incoming air enters the blood. On exhale, carbon dioxide leaves your body. Fortunately, you can include yoga breathing exercises for beginners to keep breathing problems at bay.
Pranayama – The Ancient Yogic Breathing Technique
Pranayama is a powerful yogic breathing exercise that keeps your lungs healthy and functional. It helps change your normal pattern of breathing. This is how yogic breathing helps you keep many breathing problems like asthma and COPD away.
How Can Pranayama Strengthen My Lungs?
The majority of Pranayama techniques promote deep breathing to help your body receive sufficient oxygen.
Daily practise of this yogic breathing exercise has the potential to:
- Increase the flexibility of your respiratory muscles to increase oxygen intake.
- Clear respiratory passages and lung airways of phlegm and mucus.
- Clears respiratory passages and lung airways of allergens and toxic irritants.
- Stimulates autonomic nerves to generate improved neural respiratory response.
- Improves your lung capacity to oxygenate blood.
Daily practice of yogic breathing exercises for beginners also increases your depth of breathing. With deeper breathing your lungs expand to include inactive alveoli. The process increases the surface area of the respiratory membrane.
It also helps expand your chest wall, minimizes airway resistance, and overall compliance of your lungs.
Can Pranayama Help Me Tackle COVID-19?
COVID-19 is a respiratory health issue. It affects the sinuses, nose, throat, windpipe, and lungs. If you suffer from poor immunity due to any underlying health condition, the COVID-19 infection can lead to ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome).
With Pranayama you have enough to train the respiratory muscles and clean the lungs.
That said, given below is how Pranayama can help you prevent a respiratory problem from getting worse.
Handles Oxygen Crisis
A major crisis that occurs during COVID-19 is rapid decline in your body’s oxygen levels. To prevent this from happening you should include Pranayama in your daily schedule. Deep breathing in Pranayama expands your chest walls and engages the alveolus in your lungs.
This increases the intake of oxygen. It also fastens the replacement of CO2 with oxygen in your blood. In short, Pranayama increases the availability of oxygen to your lungs and its oxygenation.
Offers Anti-Inflammatory Relief
Do you know that COVID-19 has the potential to activate a maladaptive inflammatory response? This response leads to Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, and multi-organ failure.
Inculcating Pranayama as the yogic breathing exercises for beginners offers anti-inflammatory relief. It makes it difficult for the virus to trigger the maladaptive inflammatory immune response.
Optimizes Stress Response
Just the stress and panic of COVID-19 is enough. In a burst of anxiety, your body undergoes a steep stress response. This has an impact on neural stimulation and muscle contraction.
But, the slow and deep breathing of Pranayama helps relax the somatic muscles. It also optimizes the neural firing on the autonomic neural pathway. This keeps you away from respirtory constriction.
Helps Sheild Against Lung Damage
The worst impact of COVID-19 pandemic is the damage to the alveolar cells of the lungs. These cells oxygenate the blood. Your lungs always spare and inactive alveolar cells.
The breathing you do in Pranayama helps unlock and activate these dormant alveolar cells to subtitute the old ones. These ease the decreasing oxygen levels and give the immune system enough time to fall back.
Even as a safety measure, the more the number of alveolar cells the more chances your body has to fight the infection.
Do you want to keep breathing probems away? Make sure you practice yoga Pranayama daily to increase your lung capacity and expand the chest muscles.
Conclusion
Want to keep respiratory problems away? You should make yoga breathing exercises for beginners a part of your daily life. Enroll in a certified yoga school to learn Pranayama techniques from experienced yoga teachers.