You’re not alone if your yoga instructor or lifting trainer are constantly reminding you to breathe. It happens to me all the time.
Before you can practice your training with good breathing technique you’ll need to understand the what and why. When you exert yourself to lift a weight, or lift your body, you raise your blood pressure. If you hold your breath, you raise your blood pressure even higher. Not only is it an additional strain on your body, but it makes you weaker.
At the most basic level you should simply remind your self to breathe at all. Some breathing is better than holding your breath. But for optimal training you’ll want to breath *OUT* while doing the hardest part, the “positive” portion of the exercise. For a pullup this is going up, for a pushup, it is when you lift your body off the ground. For a bench press it is as you lift the weight away from your body. Conversely, you’ll want to breath *IN* while you’re doing the release part, letting yourself down from the pullup bar, allowing the barbell to come down, or easing your body towards the floor - the down phase - of a pushup.
If you’re doing yoga it may be less obvious when to breathe in and when to breathe out. Luckily most yoga classes provide the constant advice and direction that will keep you on the path to optimal breathing technique.
It is also worth mentioning that proper breathing is important to stretching and running as well. But I’ll leave those discussions to future postings.