Breath Yourself to Better Health
James Nestor, author of ‘Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art’ and myself, both believe the answer is YES.
I recently read the book “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art” , by James Nestor, and found it interesting how he delved deep into the long history of how we breathe and how it has changed our human skeletal structure as a society over the centuries.
I use the power of breath in ALL of my physical therapy sessions. and firmly believe that where, when and how you breathe is key to improving your posture and decreasing pain.
When you take a breath in, you create pressure, and pressure = strength. By improving how we breathe, we can, in fact, both decrease pain and strengthen our core without doing loads of traditional sit ups and painful burpees!
Plus, in Chapter 4, Nestor explores briefly how Katarina Schroth used breath to invent the innovative Schroth technique that I use in the clinic to help treat scoliosis.
” Schroth had been diagnosed with scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine. …At age 16, Schroth began training herself in something called ‘ orthopedic breathing’… She spent 5 years doing this. At the end, she’d effectively cured herself of ‘incurable’ scoliosis; she’d breathed her spine straight again.”- James Nestor, Breath
**Note: I advise you to read this book through a ‘thoughtful lens’, as the author trails off onto some tangents and inserts gratuitous expletives from time to time **
(the following is an excerpt from Amazon:)
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020
Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR
“A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly.
A New York Times Bestseller
“There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.
Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.
Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.
Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.” – excerpt from Amazon
A special shout out and thank you to both my husband, Craig, and my friend, Collette C. for recommending this book to me.