Don't Forget to Breath

This is a phrase I use constantly when working with patients, whether it be active rehab in the gym or treatment on the treatment table. Breathing is important! But breathing properly is the key. If you have worked with my in the past, I would constantly talk about diaphragm breathing. Deep breathing into your diaphragm is great. When you take a deep breath in and your diaphragm contracts down, it stimulates the vagus nerve. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, this sends a message back up to the brain telling you to relax. And wonderful things happen when we relax, however I was missing a huge component of breathing. RIB MOVEMENT!

Don't ask me why I just forgot and decided to ignore proper rib movements. As we take a breath in our chest should expand and our ribs move out to the side. Shoulders should not rise. I was taught this in school, I was tested on it. But somewhere a long the way I decided to just focus on the diaphragm. Then we went into lock down due to Covid-19 and I took that time to expand my knowledge try and become a better therapist. One of the topics I concentrated on was pelvic health which is directly related to proper breathing mechanics. And that my friends is when the light bulb turned on and I face palmed myself for being so dumb.

Let me clarify I was not completely wrong. When we look at shallow vs deep breathing we do want to focus on deep breathing. When we are constantly shallow breathing, meaning the top of your chest and shoulders are rising with every breath we are increasing our bodies cortisol levels. Our bodies stay in a fight or flight state. Life is stressful enough, we do not need to add to it. So diaphragm breathing sounds great, it causes relaxation. It is how I was cueing the breathing that was improper. I would cue my patients to take a deep breath and allow just their tummy to expand. Well now I know better, I was causing them to let their abs go, causing instability and tight para spinals. This cueing was also causing unneeded increased abdominal pressure.

Now when I am cueing deep breathing I am using a full 360 degree approach. We want the chest to expand as the lower ribs and area under your ribs moves out laterally, a little tummy expansion as the diaphragm expands down and into the back.

Take a minute and test your breathing mechanics.

Place your hands surrounding the bottom of your rib cage and take in a big breath of air. Your ribs should move out in the front, sides, and back. Did you feel them move? They should move a lot! Maybe you only felt some of your ribs move? Did the ribs on the back right side, under your thumb not move as much as the left side? No? Then there's the source of that neck or midback tightness you've been feeling.

Stay tuned my next blog I will be showing you one of my new favorite exercises for breathing that I have been using in patient treatment plans.