What is the Optimal Breath Rate at Rest?
Breath Rate is one of the vital signs of human body, along with Body Temperature, Pulse Rate, and Blood Pressure. More and more people have become aware of the importance of breathing and are eager to train for healthy breathing.
If you search the internet for a definition of normal breath rate for an adult, you may find the answer to be either 12 to 16 or 12 to 20 breaths per minute (BPM).
However, this answer can be very misleading and even harmful if used as a guide for healthy breathing without mentioning the tidal volume. The reason is that one could breathe at 16 BPM but leading to an adverse health issue due to over-breathing if the tidal volume is 1 L/Min.
Minute Ventilation (MV), which is the product of Breath Per Minute (BPM) and Tidal Volume (TV), is one of the vital breathing metrics to monitor. As you can see from the below table, a MV of 15 Liters at rest is associated with very sick people. It is a breathing volume contributing to hyperventilation, which is at least in part responsible for a range of chronic diseases, such as asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.?
On the other hand, a MV of 6 liters at rest is defined as the physiological norm that most of us should aim for, whether we breathe slowly or fast.
Now let’s come back to our original question, “What is the Optimal Breath Rate at Rest?”
Furthermore, does it depend on age, sex, height, weight, race, etc?
There appears a lot of medical research has been undertaken in the last decade on breathing techniques and their potential clinical benefits. This is in the context of the breathing retraining method for reduced and slow breathing pioneered by Dr. Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko and his clinical team started back in the 1950s, which appears to have been very effective in treating a range of chronic disorders, in particular, asthma, as well as a wide number of profound health benefits.
It turns out from the research that breathing can affect heart rate, in particular, during inhalation, it makes the heartbeats faster, and during exhalation, it makes them slower. In the physiological term, this is called Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
Higher HRV is desirable because it indicates a healthy heart and overall healthy physiological functioning, including a more balanced parasympathetic-sympathetic functioning. Research has shown that HRV peaks when the breath rate is 5.5 or rounded off at 6 BPM, which is common in healthy humans.
Coincidentally, research has also found further benefits at 6 BPM, such as:
Based on the above, it appears a 6&6 breathing pattern can be used by most people to train for healthy breathing, i.e. to breathe at 6 BPM AND with 6 liters MV at the same time.
You could try to breathe the 6&6 pattern at any time at rest, but especially do it via meditation before sleep to gain an immediate additional benefit of better sleep quality.
Now you may wonder how you could know your MV, assuming you could manage the BPM by a watch.
The short answer is that measuring without an advanced breathing measurement device is not straightforward.
The great news is that Aimwell’s AYO BT+ can do just that, plus many more functions to train for healthy breathing.
The image on the right is a screenshot from the App of AYO BT+ during a 20-minute meditation. By monitoring the BPM and MV from the App during the meditation, one can control the tidal volume and breath rate towards the 6&6 healthy breathing pattern.