Specific exercises for abdominal breathing

Exercise 1: This exercise can be performed in an upright sitting position or in a relaxed lying position and does not require any aids. Place one hand on your stomach and consciously breathe deeply into your stomach and out again. Make sure that your chest does not cooperate as much as possible.

The conscious inhalation and exhalation alone, with the abdominal wall rising and falling, trains abdominal breathing. – Exercise 2: If you find it difficult to reduce chest breathing, you can use a belt that you fasten around your chest. Afterwards you can concentrate again on consciously breathing into your abdomen.

This exercise can also be performed in a sitting or lying position. – Exercise 3: If you already have experience with abdominal breathing, you can go one step further and inhale against resistance. Lie on your back in a relaxed position and place books on your stomach as additional weight.

Choose the weight of the books not too heavy at the beginning, an increase is always possible. Then breathe in and out deeply into your abdomen as in exercise 1. – Exercise 4: Instead of inhaling against resistance, you can also exhale against resistance.

To do this, pucker your lips and tighten them during exhalation. Breathe in through your nose and exhale through your tensed, pointed lips. When you exhale, notice that your belly contracts to breathe out all the air.

This exercise is called “lip-braking”. It is also used for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. – Exercise 5: This exercise is also used in yoga.

It is used to become aware of the process of abdominal breathing. Find a comfortable position for yourself, either lying down or sitting down. You can put your legs up while lying down, but you should adopt an upright position while sitting.

Close your eyes and breathe through the open mouth. As you inhale, make sure that your abdominal wall bulges out. With each breath, try to relax the abdominal wall more to give your organs the space they need. When breathing out, try to pull your belly button towards your spine. Concentrate and become aware of how your abdomen relaxes and tenses depending on how much you breathe.

Abdominal breathing during pregnancy

In the course of pregnancy, the position and proportions of the organs in the abdomen of the pregnant woman change. As the child grows larger and larger, other organs are partially displaced. This change becomes particularly noticeable in the last third of the pregnancy, when the child increases significantly in size and the pregnant woman’s abdomen expands more and more outwards to give room for the growing child.

This makes regular abdominal breathing considerably more difficult. Due to the baby, the space that is normally used by the diaphragm to expand becomes smaller, which makes abdominal breathing more difficult. Through the specific abdominal breathing training, which is often the content of many pregnancy courses, abdominal breathing can be trained even during pregnancy. Since the lungs are much better ventilated with abdominal breathing than with alternative breathing techniques, targeted training of breathing during pregnancy can be useful. Besides a better oxygen supply for both mother and child, abdominal breathing can also help to relax the muscles and stimulate digestion during pregnancy.