Rickson Gracie on The Importance of Learning to Breathe

What's your organ experience? The big change in my life was when I learned how to breathe. I started to bring in more spiritual possibilities, more mental possibilities. Because what is interesting about the breathing aspect is the brain and the heart are the only organs who can give and receive information. The other organs, liver, kidney, they cannot do that. But when you get upset with something mentally, you bring information to yourself immediately. Your brain is responding. Your heart, when you get depressed, immediately you feel in your heart. And your heart shows you, you said, show you, immediately connection. And what is amazing about that is the lung is the practical aspect within you who are able to control or help your brain and also help your heart. So through the proper breathing, you can control your heartbeats. Through the proper breathing, you can control your mindset and get calmer, control your panic, control your courage, control everything you need in the mental aspect and also spiritual, hope, faith, visualizations. So all the elements in your brain, all the elements in your heart can be much better guided, much better helped through the lungs. If you don't know how to involve your lungs in your brain, in your breathing, you're not able to favor your brain and your heart the way it's supposed to be. It's kind of amazing that everybody breathes. A relatively small percentage of people know how to breathe correctly. Yes. You're born, you get slapped on your butt and you think you live in well and you breathe for life. It's not like that. The first learning you learn about breathing is to move the upper body, the upper part of your lung. If you don't learn, if you don't practice, you're never going to use the diaphragmatic breathing which involves the full capacity of your lungs. So the diaphragm, when you learn how to move your diaphragm efficiently, you fill up your lungs in a different way. So if I breathe right or wrong, either more or less oxygen, up to me, the way I use the diaphragm or not. So when I learn how to use that, I'm able to help my body in whatever needs, mental, spiritual or physical. That famous scene in Choke, when you're moving your stomach around or the drum's beating, it's really crazy. People love that scene because you're using that control of your diaphragm. How did you learn how to do that? The Orlando Kanye. He taught you how to do that. He taught me, yes. How long did it take before you could move your stomach like that? I know that a clone can do that too, right? Yeah, it's not as difficult. You can learn this in no time. You just need the right instruction because it's all about, it's a quick learning. You have to put some attention because when you learn how to breathe, you start adding oxygen to your life. You can stay seven days without food, five days without water, but five minutes without the air, you're dead. So when you know how to hyperventilate, it's like it's double your life, triple your lifetime because you not get tired as you want. When you say hyperventilate, what do you mean by hyperventilate? I'm here, come. If I do this, I breathe. If I want to go dive, I need to hyperventilate. So I need to, because I increase the circulation of oxygen in my body and I increase the oxygen on the cells. So I do hyperventilation for a little while and I triple the amount of time I'm going to be under the water. Another important thing for people to learn about breathing is the idea of inhale. The inhale is not the cause, it's the solution. So if I need a full breath, I don't want to just do, if I want a full breath, I first need to, now I have a full breath. Because if I just start from here, I already have 30% of air inside which is not, which doesn't empty enough. So in order for me to put it all in, 100% of good air inside, my liveness, my attention has to be on the exhale. Now I'm ready to get there. The effort, the strength on the muscle. If I need to get a big biceps, I need to curl. If I need to have a strong breathing system, I need to exhale. The inhale is natural. Some people, they feel tired, they go against the flow because they try to bring in which is already claustrophobic. More I need air, more I, oh my God. So my liveness, my focus is to take the bad gas out of me. The good gas coming naturally. Some people say I need air, they need air but they're already full of bad gas. So and that's make a big confusion on the right way to the gas coming out. So my organization and my brain is to put the bad gas out of me. So when I'm training consistently, I, if I'm not effective on the exhale, I'm not going to be effective on the inhale. And the liveness of my muscle system is the contraction. The contraction is the diaphragmatic breathing. This is a contraction. If I do a curl for strong biceps, that's the contraction. When I do this, I relax, contract. So contract, relax. So and that's giving me a different edge to understand clear everything around me.