Andrew Huberman

If you've ever felt a lot of heaviness in your lower limbs, there could be a variety of reasons for that.

It could be related to something in your vascular system, could be because you trained your legs too hard.

Almost always, some of that is due to not moving around enough and the buildup of

lymphatic fluid in the interstitial space or within the lymphatic vessels themselves.

One of the best documented ways to improve lymphatic flow, to improve the rate and the extent of the lymphatic drainage is actually through breathing.

When I first heard this, I thought, oh boy, now we're getting into breath work.

My lab has studied breath work.

a.k.a.

respiration physiology, and it's known to be powerful, but the domain of breathwork oftentimes has naming of breathwork practices and stuff that can start seeming a little counterculture new age woo biohacking, which is not my flavor.

But get this, along the network of lymphatic vessels, some of those vessels are somewhat larger, and there's a particularly large compartment that sits within your abdomen

called the cisterna chyli, okay, fancy name, but cisterna chyli is an outpouching or a swelling of the vessels that contains a lot of lymph.

And we haven't quite gotten to how lymphatic fluid gets back into the venous supply and joins up with the blood, et cetera, but

The cisterna chyli is kind of like the sink or the drain for a lot of the lymphatic fluid that's made it back to your body, but has not yet made it back to the blood supply.

It hasn't cleared the lymphatic system yet.

So it turns out one of the best ways to encourage the movement of lymph fluid that's already been checked out for infections, et cetera, and that's been taken out of the interstitial space to go back into your blood supply, which is what you want,

is through what's called diaphragmatic breathing.

And the reason for this is that when you do diaphragmatic breathing, I'll explain how to do that in a moment, it's very simple.

The reason diaphragmatic breathing is so useful for encouraging lymph drainage and lymph flow is because when you do diaphragmatic breathing, which is,

having your belly extend as you inhale.

So you have this thing called the diaphragm, which is a muscle inside your body.