Daily Breathing Exercises Can Help with a Healthier Lifestyle

Research has discovered that using specific types of breathing exercises – such as inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST) – these age populations can more easily transition into healthier and more active lifestyles.

The research findings were presented at the recent American Physiological Society’s annual meeting, which took place at Experimental Biology 2022.

What the researchers suggested that by using high-resistance IMST, it could help middle-aged people and seniors to better adhere to a number of different healthy lifestyle habits such as regular physical activity, said the lead researcher Kaitlin Freeberg, Ms.

Why These Age Groups?

Even though regular exercise is known to help reduce the risk of the development of chronic illness over time, a study conducted in 2016 found that more than a quarter (28%) of American adults aged 50 years and older were physically inactive. This meant that more than one in four people in the United States aged at least 50 years was sedentary and didn’t meet even the minimum recommended physical activity requirements, substantially increasing their chronic disease risk.

Providing a technique that can help to build the physical activity in these groups that are struggling to do so could help to make a meaningful difference in chronic illness risk.

Daily Breathing Exercises with IMST

While many forms of daily breathing exercises are considered to be beneficial to physical and mental health, IMST involves the use of a manual breathing trainer, which is a handheld device that boosts the breath’s resistance.

The participants in this study were split into two groups. There were 35 people in total, all over the age of 50 years. One group used IMST and the other used low-resistance daily breathing exercises. Each group used an appropriate form of manual breathing trainer device for 30 breaths per day, a practice that took about five minutes to complete. They did this for six weeks. Both groups were able to complete the program.

At the end of the six weeks, the group using IMST daily breathing exercises showed a 12 percent improvement in their treadmill time to exhaustion tests. There was no change in the low-resistance group, which was the control group. The improvements recorded in the IMST group also involved changes in 18 different tested metabolites, especially ones that “play key roles in energy production and fatty acid metabolism,” said Freeberg.