LMA Approach to Breathing (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Why is there such a long introduction to Liberation Martial Arts and so much time spent on breathing, priming, and the eyes? Because many practitioners come to Liberation Martial Arts with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, trauma, debilities, and disabilities (including me). Trauma and pain inflame and enflame, agitating our nerves. LMA is an approach to movement that soothes and eases us.

We spend a lot of time on our eyes, breathing, and priming for the sake of our nerves and our past experiences. We've also been and continuously are being indoctrinated to tense up, exert, force, destroy, and go harder.

Promoting ease requires a shift in our thinking; otherwise, we'll revert back to the conventional Western model of tension, over-exertion, disassociation, and movement as a shock rather than lubricant to our system.

The introduction to LMA is lengthy because we have to invest in shifting our paradigm. It's not a one-time decision because settler-colonial Western hegemony will continue to push us to revert.

Learning the Liberation Martial Arts approach is like learning a new language. This takes dwelling in LMA. Commit to reading at least five to ten minutes a day, every day. Consistency is the Way. Go in order. Understanding the Way is necessary before finding the Way. ("Why" before "what.)

Habits to carry are steady gaze, steady breathing, and ease. See the entire horizon to find the Way, breathe into your movements, and navigate with ease.

Attuning to your breath means attuning to the times you hold your breath and the things that cause you to hold your breath. Capitalism and oppression make me hold my breath, but the last thing I want is to allow them to suffocate me further.

Holding your breath suffocates yourself and your movement. You can't play or defend if you can't survive, and you can't survive without breathing. Holding your breath, especially under tension, can also have long-term health ramifications. In the LMA approach, we avoid mortgaging our future.

As you attune to your breathing, you'll also develop your auditory perception. Hearing and sensing other people's breathing starts with hearing and sensing your own.

Perceiving timescale and exertion can be challenging, but by attuning to our breath, we can better perceive them and regulate our pace and effort. The steadier our breath, the better we can regulate pace and effort and sense the passage of time.

For the most part, focus on breathing out during work and on breathing in during recovery.

Approaches to breathing

Brute-force breathing

Exertion breathing, brute-force breathing, mechanistic breathing, power breathing, or Valsalva breathing couples your exhalation with exertion independent of movement. Regardless of movement, you exhale in the direction of force. It imagines the human as a hydraulic system.

Brute-force breathing often involves holding your breath to increase internal pressure for more forceful exertion. We tend to resort to this type of breathing when our fight-or-flight response is triggered or when faced with high-stress demands or struggles. Likewise, brute-force breathing also escalates stress, blood pressure, adrenaline, constriction of blood vessels, hernia risk, and fatigue.

People walk into the LMA Learning Lab already breathing like this, and it's encouraged in most fitness spaces. However, in LMA, we discourage stressful breathing. Health risks associated with brute-force breathing are worsened with dynamic movements.

Water breathing (LMA breathing)

Water breathing embodies breathing with your movements. Rather than increasing tension, it releases tension, stress, and fatigue. It decreases the workload needed for breathing. It seeks efficiency rather than brute force and relaxation rather than tension, which goes against the grain of coloniality.

Exhale whenever you feel tension. Breathe out to decrease blood pressure. Rather than adding unnecessary tension, trust the body to find the necessary tension imposed by the demand.

Since the goal of LMA is proficiency through game time, you never want to sacrifice game time for the sake of one explosive or powerful movement. Breathe to last indefinitely. Breathing for maximum force increases time for recovery or time off for injury, reducing game time and proficiency.

Yield like water, be soft. Breathe and move without gap. Be seamless. The inflexible and unyielding break, the soft and yielding endures.

Like a flexible sapling, breathe as you bend and breathe as you grow. Breathe into direction changes. Use momentum to aid your breathing and your breathing to aid your movement.

We want stability, pliability, and buoyancy in our movements and breath, which exhalations provide. (Stability also includes heart rate.) Our lungs, diaphragm, and muscles need to be relaxed for endurance and speed. For example, people often feel the least stable, flexible, and buoyant at the bottom of a push-up or bodyweight squat. Additionally, their faces become red, and their movements become erratic. Exhale.

Try not to overthink it. You're in the ballpark so long as you're not holding your breath or feeling your blood pressure rise. Water breathing is flexible.

Natural breathing

Natural breathing couples our breathing with need or what feels appropriate. Rather than placing force production or movement first, it prioritizes mental and physical recovery and ease.

If you are out of breath or are moving faster than you can sync your breath to, go with whatever feels natural. Synchronizing your breathing with rapid movement can sometimes lead to hyperventilation or loss of breath. Let your breath recover, and avoid breath-holding.

Natural breathing doesn't mean breathing to what is natural under coloniality. You must find your breath, which is a part of finding your Way (wayfinding). Natural breathing is skillful breathing and takes time to develop.

However, as long as you're catching your breath and not holding it, and your heart rate is not rising, you're in the ballpark.

With any LMA movement, there is no exact place you should be. You only need to be within the ballpark. LMA is flexible.

In grappling, you rarely maintain mechanistic breathing or a straight back, even when exerting tremendous force. This is not only acceptable but also recommended. Maintaining a straight back and breathing like a hydraulic system during grappling not only decreases performance but also increases the risk of injury.

Furthermore, what is a submission? Creating maximum tension. What is a strangle? Deprivation of oxygen. (What is coloniality? All of these things.)

Avoid submitting yourself. Breathe naturally and adaptively to suit your movements and conditions.

– Sam