How breath-work and sleep can keep you in pristine condition?

It’s no secret that sleep and recovery go hand in hand. Sleep is when your muscles repair, your energy stores refill, and your brain translates those hard hours of training into performance. (1,2)

Champions are built overnight - but many athletes struggle to get good quality sleep. The key to better sleep—and better performance—could be as simple as learning to control your breath.

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The hidden struggle of athletes:

Challenges with sleep can be a harsh reality for many athletes, shaped by the pressures of your unique environment. Rigorous training and competitive schedules are known to increase stress, hyper-arousal and anxiety in nights leading up to big games ^(3,4).

There can be a lot on your plate: the pressure of short-term contracts, injury fears, and the need to appear tough can leave many athletes feeling isolated and overwhelmed. Struggling in silence leads to disrupted sleep, further affecting their recovery and performance. ⁽⁵⁾

If that helps you to sleep at night…

As we’ve touched on in previous weeks, techniques like diaphragmatic and slow-paced breathing help lower stress and anxiety—two major sleep disruptors ⁽⁶⁾. By promoting relaxation and giving athletes like you better control over their mental state, breath-work makes it easier to transition into deep,restorative sleep.

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Science backs it up:

Your vagus nerve is an important part of your nervous system that among many other things controls your mood, heart rate,blood pressure and breathing. When you keep these factors under control, your body is better at shifting into recovery mode, allowing you to fall asleep faster and experience deeper, more restorative sleep cycles. This translates to better muscle repair, enhanced cognitive function, and overall improved performance (7,8).

What you can do:

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Down regulate your nervous system to prepare the body to sleep. Breath-work - in particular Humming Breath (Bhramari pranayama) - can improve this nervous system control (9).

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Here’s how you can practice

1. Begin by: Finding a comfortable seated position, ensuring that the spine is straight and the body is relaxed.
2. Take a deep breath in through the nose, allowing the abdomen to expand fully. As you exhale, gently close your lips and produce a humming sound, allowing the vibration to resonate in the head and chest.
3. This process can be repeated for several cycles, ideally at a slow and steady pace, to maximize the calming effects on the nervous system.
4. The ideal breathing rate for activating the vagus nerve is around six to eight breaths per minute ⁽¹⁰⁾

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This could get ugly...

Cut corners on sleep, and you’re cutting corners on performance—and even worse you’re more at risk of getting hurt. In a study of 112 adolescent athletes, those who slept less than 8 hours a night on average were 1.7 times more likely to sustain an injury. ⁽¹¹⁾ Therefore it is of paramount importance that you get the sleep that you need to keep yourself match-fit and ready to go. 

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