Ask The Experts

Why does one exhale on the hard portion of an exercise?

A good, controlled breath out during the part of the exercise that requires more exertion can help in several ways:

1) it helps you safely control your blood pressure
2) it will activate spine-stabilizing core muscles more during the more exertive portion of the exercise, and thus
3) it helps protect your spine. 

Now, I could give you a long winded description of how tucking in the abdominal muscles plays a huge role in protecting the spine during traditional weightlifting movements, and I can even explain that abdominal tuck can diminish the function of our diaphragm – our primary breathing muscle.  However, that’s not really going to help you much.  What will help (and what might interest you more) is an explanation of why we don’t really need to focus on breathing during weight training. 

Yes, I DID just provide three benefits to breathing during an exercise. And yes, I DID just say it’s not that important.  So, you might ask, “what gives?”
I’ll answer that question with another: why do we need to exert mental focus on breathing while we exercise?  Shouldn’t breathing be natural?  The answer to the last question is a resounding “yes”. 

The breathing practice in question applies primarily to isolation exercises, strength exercises that 1) train one or a few muscles in just one plane of motion, and 2) often relying on primary mover muscles to operate a joint.  Functional exercises do not require the same controlled breathing as isolation exercises because they always engage the core to support the spine. 
But functional exercises are not just different in regards to their recommended breathing patterns: our bodies love them.  They also train muscles responsible for the three types of muscle contraction as well as stabilizers and primary movers in the three different planes of motion, thus preventing injury through comprehensive stimulation of our muscular and nervous systems.  Isolation exercises, on the other side of the moon, can promote and cause injury through pattern overload. 

The difference in benefits between isolation and functional exercises leads us to two conclusions:
1)  Functional exercise is better for our bodies than isolated exercise. 
And, if functional exercise is better for our bodies, then
2) We don’t need to worry too much about breathing during isolation exercises.

How do functional exercises give us so many benefits?  Well, functional movements are complex, and our central nervous system is pretty much hardwired to develop better with complex, intermuscular movements that help us function.  Isolated motions don’t stimulate our nervous system as much as functional movement, so they neglect an integral part of our body’s communication system, thereby affecting our muscular system.  Given, if we can’t perform functional exercises because we have postural issues or because we have one or more particularly weak muscles that need to be attended to (which is the case for 90% of the working population), then we have to attend to these weaknesses with some sort of isolation exercise and stretches.  But, even then, functional exercise should be some part of our fitness routine, if not all of it. 

To learn more about functional exercise and its benefits, visit this article and its sequel.