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"Shut your mouth" usually sounds like a rude thing to say to someone. But trust me, I'm doing it out of care!

In our last post, we discussed how important nasal breathing is to the response of your immune system. Here we are going to give you a few tips to practice during this odd time in order to make breathing through your nose a lot easier.

Often the reason we want to mouth breathe is because it's easiest to exhale large amounts air that way. To combat that desire we want teach our body to quell the desire to exhale so much. Here are some ways to do just that:

Swallow Your Sighs

If you find that you take big sighs throughout your day as you walk around, try two things. First, stop before you actually let go of that big exhale and attempt to breathe normal. Or, second, after you sigh hold your breath until you feel moderate discomfort and then begin breathing normally again.

Mini Breath Holds

Try this either first thing in the morning or while out for a walk. Breathing only through your nose, take 3 normal breaths, exhale, and then hold your breath until you feel moderate desire for air. Take another 3 breaths and repeat. When you breathe in after the hold you should not need to take a huge gasping inhale. If you do, you held your breath for too long. Repeat this process 3-4 times and you should feel the desire to mouth breathe diminish.

The above practice also works great to open your sinuses, especially when your nose feels stopped up even in the absence of mucus.

Exercising with Your Mouth Closed

For most of us as soon as we begin to perform anything resembling exercise we think we need to open our mouths. Not so. With the workouts we are programming online for you, you should be able to keep your mouth closed the entire time. (Don't think so? Watch the videos our athletes are posting on Social Media. No one wants to be a Mouth Breather at our gym!) Attempt to keep your mouth closed while you workout and then keeping it closed during the rest of the day will seem like a cinch. Note: you will not be able to push the workout like you could before until you get some practice and that is okay. Your surefire CrossFit games bid is likely delayed anyways.....Let your breath dictate your intensity.

Taping Your Mouth While You Sleep

This one sounds the weirdest, I know!! But think about it. If you spend all day trying to breathe through your nose and then at night turn into Uncle Eddie the snoring mouth breather are you really getting anywhere? It just turns into 2 steps forward 1 step back..maybe. Check out these mouth taping strips if you are nervous to try. They have a slit that pops apart to let you mouth breathe if you feel the need to. I call that function "freak out mode," but you won't need it once you're fast asleep.

These practices are all super simple and easy to add in to your daily life. Pick one to start with and build a new habit by implementing it at the same time every day. As you tack on more nasal breathing habits, you will feel a greater difference. If interested in following our immune-system-endorsed, at-home workouts, head to trinitystrength.org/athome and let's chat!

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"Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life"

In 1869, George Catlin published his book by this title. These words may be more relevant now than ever. Nasal breathing, as opposed to mouth breathing, has significant health advantages. During this global pandemic, we need to take advantage of every healthy practice readily available to us, including nasal breathing.

Yes, of course we have the ability to breathe through our mouths and this is an important tool we can lean on when needed. However, the human face is designed to inhale and exhale through the nose. One of the primary reasons we breathe through the nose is to activate a host of defenses by our immune system. These defenses are not activated when we use our mouth to breathe.

The first way our nose protects us from pathogens like bacteria and viruses is simply through its physical structure. Nasal hairs and mucus are the first line of defense as they can catch bacteria and viruses and stop them from going any further into our system.

Lymphoid tissue associated with the nasal passage also plays a large role in our immune system. This tissue is one of the first detectors of pathogens and releases defenses both locally within the nasal passages and throughout the entire body. This structure activates the entire immune system so well there is research currently underway to create nasal spray vaccines as an alternative to injections.

When we breathe through our nose we not only use the physical structure to defend ourselves, but our body begins to release chemicals such as nitric oxide. Yup, the same nitric oxide in your favorite pre-workouts like NO Explode and C4. Unlike this use though, which opens up blood vessels, nitric oxide is a crucial messenger for our immune system during times of potential infection. As it is released into the body it causes a response from other cells important to the immune system and in turn helps inhibit the replication of pathogens in the body.

The last immune response within the nose we’ll discuss, though not the end to its response, is exosomes, or tiny fluid filled sacs, which attack pathogens when they enter the nose. Once a pathogen enters the nose it automatically releases billions of these exosomes into the mucus and begin fighting it off. Not only this but once those exosomes are in the mucus the mucus moves towards the back of the nose automatically defending cells further in the body. The cells are alerted before the pathogen even reaches them in order to create a defense.

During this time of staying healthy, pay attention to how you are breathing and try to breathe in and out your nose only. Give it a try! It may feel difficult, but what in life worth achieving isn't?! Hopefully, you are following along and exercising at home during this time too. If you are following our workouts, you know we aren't doing really high intensity workouts because we really want to keep our immune system strong. This also creates a great opportunity to attempt nasal breathing only workouts.

Don't worry, in our next post we'll give you some practices and tips that will help!

Stay Healthy!