Are you breathing to your potential?
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TL;DR - Breathing efficiently has a specific posture associated to it. You can self-assess this posture at home along with some basic exercises to improve any findings with the self-assessment. Breathing dysfunctions are related to many health issues and have a variety of signs and symptoms. Managing your breathing has benefits such as: improved cognitive function, improved exercise performance, reduced pain and stiffness.
Why breathing?
Breathing is a hot topic at the moment with many workshops promoting the benefits of time spent training your breath potential. Why is the way you breathe so important? Breathing dysfunction has been linked with muscle irritability, trigger point development, reduced blood and glucose delivery to the brain, heart disease, headaches, facial pain, asthma and central sensitisation, to name a few!
What are some symptoms of a potential breathing dysfunction hanging out in the background?
Shortness of breath
Yawning, breath holding, sighing
A tingling sensation in the arms or legs
Reduced breathing mobility
Poor concentration
Short term memory loss
Irritable bowel syndrome
Excessive sweating
Acid reflux
Muscle clenching
Neck, shoulder or back pain
In this blog post we will discuss some of the musculoskeletal and physiological aspects to consider in how you breathe, along with some self-assessment and treatment tools you can use at home! The goals are that you will understand how to:
Self-assess yourself
Have an understanding of what your current breath mobility is and how all breathing is diaphragmatic.
Some ideas for self-treatment
Understand how to dial UP or DOWN your nervous system.
This has carryover to every position you adopt throughout the day; be it sitting, standing, walking, squatting, running, lying down etc.
Note!! It is best to think about these dysfunctions as a spectrum. Every process has a role to play. It becomes significant when you spend too much time at one end of the spectrum. What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with what you are doing, we just need more of the other end to balance the system out. This will be expanded on further below.
Self-assessment
Breath flexibility and position.
We have many muscles which help us breathe in and out. Breathing in is primarily done by your diaphragm but can get help from your accessory muscles. Some of these are at the neck and shoulder blade. Breathing out at rest is reflexive i.e. does not require muscular effort! When you need to blow off more waste (read carbon dioxide or CO2) it becomes an active process where your breathing out muscles actively empty the lungs.
When breathing at rest your expiration muscles should be able to lengthen and shorten without conscious effort. This is where most people tend to have some difficulty. The difficulty could be due to previous injury, respiratory diseases, postures adopted from work and sports or cultural and familial habits.
What is the most efficient position to be in to breathe? Your ribs and pelvis need to comfortably be in neutral along with a relaxed neck. This enables you to breathe 360 degrees into your stomach, side, back and ribcage. Without full LENGTHENING of your breathing out muscles your breathing in muscles cannot fully SHORTEN. As an example, consider your biceps and triceps. If your triceps cannot lengthen fully you won’t be able to maximally shorten your biceps. The same is happening with breathing. This is where confusion begins around terminology. EVERY breath is diaphragmatic. If your diaphragm wasn’t working while you breath then you wouldn’t be reading this blog!! The more relevant point is, is your diaphragm fully lengthening and fully shortening when you need it to. If you’re at rest you don’t need a 100% breath in.
Previous injuries
Old and new injuries can have a variety of effects on your breath flexibility and tolerance. Locally a contusion or broken rib, abdominal strain, or abdominal surgery might restrict your ability to stretch the surrounding tissue to get a full breath in! Globally if a movement pattern changes you may stop twisting, or bending enough through your abdomen. Over time this might cause changes in your flexibility. An example of this could be reduced ankle mobility. For example when you push off the ground with your RIGHT foot you need your toes/top of foot to get closer to your shin so your Achilles and calf can lengthen to then help push you forward. What is also happening at the same time is your pelvis and lower back are rotating to the right while your ribs and stomach are twisting to the left. If you don’t push off fully because your ankle is tight you may move excessively or not enough at your pelvis, lower back and ribs. Over time this may compound.
Assessment 1
This is your 1st self-assessment! Check out the video here to see how easy it is for you to get into a neutral pelvis, ribcage and neck position
Assessment 2
CO2 tolerance
As mentioned before, breathing has a role in both getting oxygen into your bloodstream and tissues along with getting waste OUT of your body. The feeling of air hunger or needing to breathe can be due to an increase in CO2 in your system. Solution? Blow it off. The issue is if you do this too often, such as in a hyperventilation dysfunction. A regular breathing rate is 12-20 breaths per minute at roughly 17,000-30,000 breaths per day. Arguably the most repeated movement we do during a 24 hour cycle. When you over breathe you blow off TOO much CO2 and over time reduce your tolerance to it, because, well it isn’t around to become tolerant to. Use it or lose it. What are some side effects of this? Some of the symptoms listed above are a place to start. Also your nervous system can get dialled up!
Nervous system
What can make you breathe more? Stress! Some examples of stress can be weight at a gym, sports, work deadlines, over committing yourself, anxiety, or fear. In the right context this is absolutely FINE and a natural response. The issue is if your response while at physical rest is to ramp yourself up! This leads to your nervous system being more excitable! I like to use the light dimmer as an example. Either your dialled up, down or in-between. Different lighting needs for different reasons. The optimistic side to this is you can control your response with your breathing rate and timing. Can you dial up when you need to? Can you dial down when you need to? Can you recognise if there is a mismatch for what you are trying to do? E.g. you’re sitting at a table, working on a blog post and sweating for some reason?
o Here is a quick way to test your CO2 tolerance along with a way to rank your score: https://shiftadapt.com/breathwork/
Breathing Flexibility Exercises
(Performing these 2-3x/week is enough to create a change).
Supine thoracic extension
Doing this exercise will encourage your stomach muscles to lengthen while creating extension in your thoracic spine. 3-5 minutes should do the trick.
Seated thoracic extension
Once you have thoracic extension in a lying position it is now time to build some experience in an upright position. Doing this exercise will encourage your stomach muscles to lengthen while creating stability along your spine. 2-3 sets of 10 reps with a 15-30 second hold on the last rep.
Hamstring mobility
Your hamstrings can restrict your pelvis mobility. This will limit movement that is needed for prone and 90/90 breathing.
Try this exercise for 2-3minutes. Look for an uncomfortable spot but not I am making faces uncomfortable spot. Once the discomfort reduces, job done.
Crocodile or prone breathing
This is a great exercise to learn lateral (sideways) ribcage breathing. By learning to create an anchor in the abdomen, mobility is granted at the ribcage. This is a necessary skill for any spinal extension based movements such as walking, running, kicking and reaching overhead.
90/90 breathing
This is arguably one of the most important foundational exercises as your diaphragm is now working against gravity due to your abdominal contents. Second to this, is that you learn coordination of breathing along with rib-cage, pelvis and neck position. This is a flexion based breathing pattern and as such should be utilised when you have want to restore capacity of bending forward, pushing and squatting.
Perform this for 3-5minutes
Box breathing – also known by other names (note: you can get a prescription specific to your tolerance test if you scroll down on the test page). This would be the prescription you give yourself for the above breathing exercises.
To dial down start with a ratio of 1:1:1:1 (breathe in : hold : breathe out : hold) – eventually building up the 3rd variable i.e. breathe out. Choose a time and see how you go. For example you could do 2 seconds. 2 seconds in, 2 seconds hold, 2 seconds out, 2 seconds hold. Over time you can increase your breath out to a ratio of 1:1:2:1. With the same numbers as above your breath out now becomes 4 seconds, while the other numbers remain at 2 seconds.
This is just one example of a breathing workout. There are many more, and each may have different goals and principles behind them. The focus on the example above is building tolerance to CO2 with the long term goal of a more sustained response to stress.
To dial up your system you would increase the rate and even out the in/out ratio. Specifically breathe at a ratio of 1:1. For example, 3 seconds in and 3 seconds out. This is great to do right before exercise or warming up for a sport. 60 seconds should do the trick. If you get light headed or tingly STOP. Have a rest and make sure next time you’ve set up your breathing position. You’re working hard but not too hard.
Re-test
An efficient way to check if what you are doing is having the effect you are looking for is to re-test! Check back in after a set of each exercise to see if you’re breathing flexibility or CO2 tolerance has improved. Can you breath 360 easier? Does your breath out last longer? Now the challenge! What happens if you try to maintain your breath position during all movements. Can you coordinate your breath with your walking? Breathe in for 2 steps, breathe out over 4 steps etc. Experiment. See where it gets uncomfortable. You’ve just discovered your rep max. Train just below this. You wouldn’t go into the gym and do 1 rep max squats every day. Typically you would train at 50-70% of this.
Summary
To keep it short. There is a posture which enhances your ability to breathe and get more oxygen to your blood, a long with a balanced amount of waste out. Can you demonstrate 360 breath flexibility? How tolerant are you to it? Can you do this in all the positions you want to be able to perform in your life? Have a go at these exercises and see if you can improve your breath mobility or your ability to recognise when you’ve lost control of dialling up and down your system. Keep it simple, don’t TRY to hard.
Stay inquisitive and do the basics well!
Ciaran
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