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Breathing Exercises for Smokers

Smoking damages the lungs and alters the way air moves through them, according to the medical pathology book "Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease." This is evident in people who have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), which makes it hard to exhale fully. Healthy people breathe without thinking about it, but people who have cigarette damage to the lungs may have to alter the way they breathe to get a sufficient amount of air in and out.

  1. Pursed-Lip Breathing

    • Sometimes people who have chronic lung conditions purse their lips when they breathe. This seems to help ease the burden of breathing out that COPD can cause. As an exercise, Johns Hopkins recommends inhaling through the nose for two seconds, pursing the lips and exhaling through the pursed lips for four to six seconds. According to the Merck Manual Home Health Handbook, pursing your lips helps to stop abnormal airway collapse and create a beneficial air pressure to help empty the lungs properly.

    Diaphragmatic Breathing

    • One main muscle controls breathing, with several ancillary muscles contributing. This is especially true in situations when breathing becomes difficult, such as during exercise. If you make the main muscle, the diaphragm, stronger, breathing might become easier. Johns Hopkins recommends training your diaphragm twice daily for 20 minutes. This involves lying flat, with a hand on your abdomen and breathing deeply through your diaphragm so your hand moves upward on inhalation and downward when you exhale. If your breathing improves after this training, then you can practice it in a sitting position.

    Coordinated Breathing

    • According to National Jewish Health, if you retrain your breathing to coordinate with exertion, your muscles can get more oxygen and you may find yourself short of breath as often. This technique involves inhaling through the nose before exerting yourself, then using pursed-lip breathing to get through the most strenuous part of the exertion. This will stop you holding your breath as this affects oxygen delivery to the muscles.

    Variations

    • The Merck Manual Home Health Handbook says that people with COPD can adjust their pursed-lip breathing technique by leaning forward with arms outstretched straight, leaning on a piece of furniture. This allows the diaphragm to contribute more to the pursed-lip breathing technique. According to Johns Hopkins, this benefit is possibly due to extra expansion ability for the diaphragm. If you have access to an incentive spirometer, which is a piece of equipment that you can exhale into and a ball rises depending on the strength of your exhalation, you can use this to see how your exercises are improving your breathing.

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