What does diving and yoga have in common?

/ April 13, 2014/ Yoga/ 0 comments

What does diving and yoga have in common? Breathing!

In my latest scuba trip, people on the boat joke that I always has so much air left because I don’t breath… the opposite is truth, I pay a lot of attention to my breath!

When I first started diving, I went out with very experienced divers and they told me don’t kick, move little, and stay relax. If you say you are out of air before 50 min., we’ll kill you! So I did that… move very little, stay a little above them, and used my breath to stay relaxed… how? using long exhales! My synchronized swimming coach taught us to use long exhales to get over panic… and guest what? yes, I always had enough air to keep up with them.

After all my yoga, qi gong, and reiki training, I was wondering how will this impact my diving? You know what i found? not a lot of difference because I have been working on the most important thing for years… breathing!

I recently starting to focus on my breath more during my yoga practice. Well it works for diving, right? and guess what… I can stay longer on the pose, I can do poses that I have not been able to do before, and I can meditate while in the pose! I should have known better… and I used what I knew for years.

Another link I found with diving… yoga is excellent for divers, the healthier your spine, the easier it is to deal with all that heavy equipment. Lets be honest, after 50, a little stretching goes a long way! After a Blackbeard’s cruise a couple of years ago, I spent a day at a yoga ashram in the Bahamas. After 6 days of 4 to 5 dives a day in close quarters with 18 people, I needed yoga in more than onr way. Went I got home, I felt like a million! they have the most gorgeous deck facing the turquoise water…

Long exhale exercise

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So enough blabbing, the tip for this post is the long exhale breathing exercise. Start seating comfortably, then start counting the length of  your inhales and exhales and make them even (same count)… then start increasing your exhale until the count is double than the exhale. If you are comfortable on doing double the count for exhales, then start increasing the count for inhale by one.

For example, if you find that your count is 3 for inhale, do a few breaths counting  to 3 for inhales and 3 for exhales. Then do a few breaths counting to 3 for inhale and counting to 4 for exhale and continue to increase the count for exhales until you reach 6. Once you are comfortable with counting to 3 for inhale and 6 for exhale, increase the inhale count to 4 and increase the exhale count to 8 and so on…

This exercise is great for helping you to regain calm and get over anxiety or panic. if you do it before bed, it will help you sleep like a parrot fish!

I found an excellent article for this exercise in the yoga journal website, see Healing Breath.

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