Power Breathing
While sports scientists from the former Soviet Union emphasize special exercises for respiratory muscles and recommend state of the art breathing patterns to be employed during exertion, all the Western breathing wisdom can be summed up in “inhale as you go down, exhale as you go up”. This advice got around in the days of the Boston Tea Party. There are two types of exhalation which are worlds apart: active and passive. A pagan Russian berserker’s war scream, or the grunt of a strongman bending a horseshoe are examples of the former. The sigh of relief you give out after a successful job interview is a latter example. The profoundly different effects these breathing patterns have on your physical performance are known in Russia as the pneumomuscular reflex.
