Review: Deep breathing practice facilitates retention of newly learned motor skills
Yadav & Mutha: Scientific Reports: deep breathing benefits, motor memory enhancement, meditation and memory, motor skill retention, neuromotor rehabilitation, cognitive enhancement techniques.
Have you ever been to a combat sport practice where the “warm up” runs you ragged before the technique portion of the class? This is a fantastic article that illustrates why that is a very bad idea. The brain needs to be in a relaxed state in order to maximize learning — motor / movement learning is not different from cognitive / academic learning in this regard.
In this study, a group of 40 right-handed subjects (control group x14, breathing-immediate group x16, breathing-late group x10) were instructed to trace a perfect circle (learning) and then asked to repeat the drawing (test).
The expermimental (breathing) groups were asked to complete a 30-minute session of alternate nostril breathing (8-10 breaths / minute) either immediately after the learning portion of the experiment (breathing-immediate group) or 30 minutes later (breathing-late group).
“The breathing-practice group retained the motor skill strikingly better than controls, both immediately after the breathing session and also at 24 hours.”
More specifically, the breathing-late group conducted their intervention (breath practice) after the first retention test at 30 minutes. Notably, the breathing-late group did not perform as well as the breathing-immediate group on the 30-minute test, but they outperformed that control group on the 24-hour test.
The graphic above also shows us, importantly, that the number of tracing errors was quite high in the beginning and that it rapidly decreased in 5 training sessions. The reduction in errors continued, but at a much slower rate, from the 5th to the 10th training / learning session.
We can also see that the standard deviation / margin of error (the “whiskers” with the dots) also greatly reduced as the learning sessions progressed
“Our results thus uncover for the first time remarkable facilitatory effects of simple breathing practices on complex functions such as motor memory, and have important implications for sports training and neuromotor rehabilitation in which better retention of learned motor skills is highly desireable.”
Yadav, G., Mutha, P. Deep Breathing Practice Facilitates Retention of Newly Learned Motor Skills. Sci Rep 6, 37069 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep37069
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