Breathing: What a Concept?

So, some of you may think “What is he talking about? I breath all the time.” Sure, we all breath enough to survive. Few of us breath in a way we can thrive. Most of us are holding our breath or breathing shallow and rapid through our chest. Stop for just a second and notice how you are breathing, or not breathing. Breathing has substantially more effect on your life than most of us realize. In this series I’ll attempt to show just how important breathing is, how it can improve your overall health, and how it can help you reduce or eliminate the pain you’ve been experiencing for years.

First let’s look at what the process of breathing is:

A movement-based process that involves your whole trunk.

A process that allows your brain and body to communicate

A process that helps the circulation in all of your organs.

A process that can affect your energy just by the method or technique you are using to breath.

A process that brings in the oxygen that is vital for our survival.

You may have notice that I listed what we most commonly associate with the function of breathing last. While it is true that is the most vital function because we couldn’t survive more than a few minutes without oxygen, I wanted to highlight first who the mechanics of breathing work and then the ancillary effects it can have on your body and your health. For the purposes of this article we’ll focus on number 1.

The basic mechanics of breathing are about changing the air pressure in your trunk by expanding your trunk and then relaxing/contracting it. When you are not breathing the air pressure within your lungs is greater than the air pressure outside of your body. When you expand part of your trunk the situation is reversed and air rushes into your lungs. When your trunk relaxes and reduces in size the pressure changes are reversed and air goes back out of your lungs. We don’t suck air into our lungs. Air flows in and out of our lungs because of that changes in the size, or volume, of our trunk causing changes in air pressure.

To expand our trunk and bring air in requires muscles to contract. When these same muscles relax our trunk reduces in size so the air in our lungs is exhaled back out of our body. During this process the fresh oxygen laden air in our environment is taken in when we breath in and is processed through our lungs so it can be distributed to the rest of our body through the blood. When we breath out the air containing carbon dioxide from our body's metabolism is released back into the environment. Those are the basics of what happens during this movement process.

A small expansion of our trunk via our chest facilitates this process and is all we need for survival. However, the movement process for breathing that our bodies were designed to go through is more involved. The main muscle for breathing is our diaphragm. It’s located just below our lungs and above our stomach and other internal organs. It attaches to both sides of our ribs, as well as the front and back. At rest it is dome shaped. When it contracts it flattens out pushing down on our internal organs expanding the space in our trunk length wise by creating an opening where our internal organs would normally be. That’s why our stomachs move outward when we breath with our diaphragm. If it didn’t then our internal organs would be crushed. Not a positive outcome.

At the same time muscles in between our ribs contract to expand our ribs and the top of our trunk. When this happens most efficiently our trunks move and expand to the front, back and both sides. You’ll probably notice more movement forward because there are bones that restrict that movement in the other directions. This is especially true for movement to the back because of our spines. The expansion in all of those directions may seem very foreign to you. Especially since most of us usually just feel a slight rising of our shoulders and expansion of our upper chest. The chest does actually lift of and expand near the end of inhaling a breath, but the shoulders wouldn’t lift.

Those are the basics of how our body works to take in a full and ultimately healthier breath than the shallow breathing most of us do now. Here’s a short video animation that captures the essence of the process that happens with the diaphragm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf8xTqfspp4. The expansions you see in the ribs and diaphragm would also produce corresponding movements in our body. The stomach would push out, the curve in the lower spine would flatten, the sides of our body would push out slightly and the chest would expand and rise slightly. When we breath out these changes to our body would be reversed.

Well there you have it. That’s how breathing is supposed to work. Next time we’ll take a look at the many benefits of breathing this way. Until then, notice how your body moves when you breath and how you can change it.