It’s Day 16 of the Mykidstime 21 Day Health & Fitness Challenge! If you missed yesterday’s video, catch up with Day 15 here.
Our health and wellbeing expert, Fiona O’Donnell, explains what’s involved for Day 16 in the video below. We want you to tell us during the challenge how you are getting on so tag us on social using #mkt21days and we’ll give you some encouragement!
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Mykidstime 21 Day Health & Fitness Challenge: Day 16 – Breathwork
I’d like to talk to you about breathing today. I would have always said ‘what’s the point in meditation, is there any merit to it?’, but actually the evidence tells us that the most effective intervention for managing blood pressure and high stress levels is meditation and breath work.
For that reason this is a move that is essential for health, so we’re going to talk about it today. There’s a number of different methods you can use to practice your breathing or to challenge your breathing.
There’s a triangle breath, there’s a box breath, and a 7-eleven breath and I’m going to go through these three with you today so you can decide which one feels most comfortable for you.
The first one we’re going to try is the triangle breath. We’re going to breathe in, breathe out, and at the end of the out breath we’re going to just pause. You don’t feel like there’s a panic coming in because we all naturally have a pause at the end of our exhalation anyway, so I want you to make sure you’re sitting comfortably and think about your breathing as you’re doing it.
I want you to take a breath in, and as you breathe in I want you to imagine that you are traveling up one side of a triangle; as you exhale, imagine you’re traveling down the other side.
Now pause for that breath at the bottom, and that’s the base of the triangle. Once you get into the far corner, take a breath in again, reach the peak, breathe out, and pause on the out breath, letting it travel all the way along the base of the triangle.
The next one we’re going to look at is a box breath. The difference with a box breath and a triangle breath is that in a box breath we have a pause on the inhalation and we have a pause on the exhalation. So we’re going to start in the bottom corner of the box – take a breath in, pause across the top, exhale down the side, pause across the bottom, and again inhale up the side of the box, and so on.
The last one I’m going to give you is a 7-eleven breath. We breathe in for the count of seven. When we breathe in we’re inclined to bring the shoulders up, but when we exhale we’re inclined to relax a lot more, so we want to extend the out breath and keep the breath in as short as we need it to be.
Not a quick one, because we want to lengthen our breath and not hyperventilate, so we’re going to breathe in for a count of seven and breathe out for a count of eleven. You might find that difficult, it might be that you do a five-nine or even a three-seven, just see what feels comfortable for you. I promise you – you will feel different when you give this breath work a go.
If you have any questions throughout the Challenge, email Fiona or send her a message on Instagram, Facebook and use hashtag #mkt21days to let us know how you are getting on with the Challenge!
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About the Author: Fiona O'Donnell
