by joeblast » Mon Dec 21, 2009 12:59 pm
the chestiness is misleading - you're actually putting more of your energy into breathing that way. its much more efficient to let your soft tissues move instead of your ribcage! try lying on the ground and breathing with your abdomen, then try and breathe with your chest, that will make the difference feel more pronounced.
also chest breathing does absolutely nothing for the lower 1/3rd of your lungs. its why old people that breathe almost exclusively with their chests are much more susceptible to pneumonia - prolonged chest breathing actually winds up sticking the alveoli in the lower lungs together (they sorta naturally do this but abdominal breathing inflates then and..."keeps the stream moving" )
there's lots of good releasing breaths you can do, lots of which have to do with chest breathing. all good for you. but you need a complex strategy for this so that all angles are covered, and abdominal breathing is certainly the "main course."