Qigong abdominal breathing

How to do it

1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and your knees soft, or sit at the edge of a chair with your back long. Drop your shoulders and close your mouth.
2. Rest both hands, one over the other, on your lower belly, below the navel. Bring your attention there and let it settle.
3. Breathe in through your nose for 6 seconds. Let your lower belly open toward your hands, like a balloon filling slowly. Your chest barely moves.
4. Breathe out through your nose for 6 seconds. Your belly comes back in by itself, with no squeezing.
5. Move from one phase to the next without a pause, like a wave coming in and going out. The inhale and the exhale last the same.
6. Keep going for 5 minutes: that's 25 breaths. When your attention drifts, come back to your hands and the movement under them.
7. To finish, leave your hands where they are, take a few breaths at your own pace, then move slowly.

What qigong abdominal breathing is

It's a slow, even, low breath. Slow, because each cycle lasts 12 seconds: five breaths a minute. Even, because in and out take the same time and there are no pauses. Low, because you feel the movement in your belly and not in your chest.

Mechanically it's close to belly breathing and coherent breathing. The difference is where your attention goes. Here you don't count or measure: you rest your mind on one spot in the body, the lower belly, which qigong calls the dantian. That quiet attention is as much a part of the practice as the air.

Where it comes from

Qigong joins two Chinese words: qi, which means air or breath and is usually translated as vital energy, and gong, work or skill. The U.S. National Institutes of Health describe it as a practice developed in China thousands of years ago, within traditional medicine, that regulates mind, breath and body. A silk painting found in 1973 in a tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan, dating to the second century BC, shows figures doing exercises of this kind, called daoyin.

The name is far younger than the practices. The word qigong, in its current sense, spread in the late 1940s and the 1950s, when Liu Guizhen and others adopted it to present these methods with a health focus. His book on the practice of qigong therapy dates from 1957.

Dantian translates as "elixir field." Taoist tradition describes three, and the lower one, in the lower belly, is where the breath is centered. A third-century text, the Laozi zhongjing, gives the first detailed description. In Japanese the same place is called tanden, and Zen sends the breath there too. All of this is the language of a tradition: qi and the dantian aren't structures that anatomy recognizes.

What people use it for

To settle. Putting your attention low, away from the head, is for many people a simple way to slow down. It's used to open or close a qigong or tai chi session, standing outdoors, or in a break during the day.

In Chinese and Japanese martial arts it's the base the body moves from. Here it's mostly five quiet minutes.

What the reviews say

There's a lot of research on qigong and tai chi, and its limits are clear. A 2010 review by Jahnke and colleagues gathered 77 articles on randomized trials with 6,410 participants and found favorable results for balance, cardiopulmonary fitness and psychological well-being, more consistent when the comparison was doing nothing than when it was other exercise. A year later, Lee, Oh and Ernst examined ten systematic reviews: five were favorable and five were inconclusive, and the authors warned that the apparent effectiveness rests mostly on poor-quality research.

The National Institutes of Health summary, updated in 2022, runs along the same lines: promising results in several areas, and small studies. On blood pressure, for instance, it cites a 2021 review of 7 studies and 370 participants whose authors point to a lack of firm evidence.

There's one more limit, and it's the one that matters here: those reviews study qigong as a whole, with movement, breathing and attention together. They don't isolate the breathing. The closest thing is research on breathing slowly: a 2018 review of 15 studies in healthy people found higher heart rate variability and more reported relaxation at fewer than ten breaths a minute.

What it feels like and what to notice

At first your belly won't cooperate: your chest moves, or you shove your stomach out. Your hands help you find the spot. After a minute or two there's often warmth under your palms and a sense of weight in your feet.

Six seconds can feel long in the first days. If you run short of air, shorten the count. If you get dizzy or tingly, you're probably taking in more air than you need: breathe smaller, or stop and breathe normally.

Variations

• Shorter (4-4 variation): the same exercise at 4 seconds a phase, until 6 feels comfortable.
• Lying down: on your back, knees bent, hands on your lower belly. It's the easiest way to feel the movement.
• Standing, as in qigong: knees soft, weight spread across both feet, arms hanging or hands on your belly.
• With movement (uncounted variation): as you breathe in, your hands float a little away from your belly; as you breathe out, they return. Many qigong forms pair breath and gesture this way.
• Longer (10-minute variation): the same pace for twice the time, once you no longer have to think about it.

Common mistakes

• Pushing your belly out. The belly opens because air comes in, not because your muscles force it.
• Taking too much air. Slow doesn't mean huge. A small, silent breath is better.
• Locking your knees or arching your back. Standing, the knees stay soft and the pelvis neutral.
• Chasing sensations. Warmth or tingling in the belly may show up or not. They aren't the goal.
• Adding pauses. This pattern has no holds: one phase turns into the other.

How often and how long

Five minutes once a day is a good start. It's gentle, and you can repeat it whenever you like.

If qigong as a whole interests you, look for a class. The National Institutes of Health note that there's no single certification for instructors, so it's worth asking about their training and experience.

Before you start

• If you feel dizzy, tingly or short of breath, breathe shorter or stop and breathe normally.
• If standing tires you or you feel unsteady, do it in a chair.
• If you're pregnant or have a heart, lung or blood pressure condition, check with your care provider first.
• This is a wellness practice. It doesn't replace treatment and isn't a reason to put off seeing someone.