The Power of Breathing

Breathing is one of the most overlooked tools in your toolkit.

A good breath can help build core strength, calm your nervous system, and help facilitate healing.  When you’re navigating postpartum, injury or illness, breathing is something you can DO when everything else feels off limits. However, since breathing is so innate to our biology, most people overlook just how powerful good breathing can be!

The simple fact is that most people don’t breathe very well. I mean, they are alive and that's great, but they're not actually getting the full benefits out of their system.  Things like weight stigma, poor posture, and lifestyle can all impact how you breathe and actually prevent you from breathing well!

Good breathing, optimal breathing, is about pressure at the end of the day.  Air goes in and pressure increases, air goes out and pressure decreases.  When the pressure system isn’t functioning well, a whole bunch of other things can go wrong.

Many people don't realize it, but things like back pain, shoulder pain, pelvic pain, and even neck pain can all be attributed to poor breathng mechanics. But this is an area that can be so easy to clean up in just a few short sessions.

So how can you start to breathe better?

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Good breathing is a great core exercise

The power of breath for core strength

Breathing is driven, primarily, by our core and support muscles.  When you’re breathing well - when everything is working optimally - the deepest layers of your abdominals, in combination with the pelvic floor muscles, are doing most of the heavy lifting.

The abdominals and the pelvic floor muscles activate to lengthen during inhale to allow the diaphragm to lower and the lungs to inflate.  These muscles then activate to shorten and return to their starting positions during exhalation. Like a very gentle bicep curl for your core.

When done correctly breathing can be a very effective, low-impact exercise.  In fact, it’s the first place many pelvic floor physical therapists start when working with postpartum women!

The piece that most people miss, including many pelvic floor physical therapists, is learning how to expand through your core so that all these muscles can move the way they’re intended.  The key to this movement is in the Transverse Abdominus (TVA) - it wraps around the belly to keep all your organs inside and this muscle expands outwards, in all directions as you inhale.  

The trick here though is understanding that the TVA initiates movement from the back, right next to either side your spine and wraps around to the front of the belly - like it's giving you a soft, warm hug from behind.

Take a moment and notice: What changes when you breathe while imagining your deep core muscles wrapping around you from the back?  What do you notice if you try breathing from the front towards the back?

This is such a simple fix, but it immediately brings a whole new level of movement through the core muscles that really allows everything else to function better.  If you lie on your back and simply focus on breathing into your lower back, you’re already doing some beautiful core work.

And when you work with me, we dive even deeper into how to fully activate your breathing to massively level up your core strength.  You can even use this type of breathing as a way to support your body when you’re powerlifting weights!

The power of breath for your nervous system

Good breathing = happy nervous system

The other benefit of proper breathing is the calming impact it has on your nervous system.  When all those muscles are happily doing their thing, this sends a message back to your brain that everything in your body is feeling groovy.

But when the breathing system is off - when those muscles are over-active or tight - that sends signals the brain that something's not right.  It becomes a bit of a double-edged sword: the brain gets the signal that something isn’t quite right and sends a signal back out to the body to tighten up. 

So the question becomes are you stressed because your breathing is tight? Or is your breathing tight because you're stressed?  Or both?  It can be incredibly hard to untangle!

Fortunately, when you can learn to breathe properly by allowing your core muscles to fully lengthen, you can actually change that stressed state to a more calm state so that the brain starts sending out those good vibes again.

Try it: Imagine your breathing down through your pelvis, like there’s a gentle balloon inflating down into the pelvis. Now try breathing up and into your ribcage.  What do you notice?  After a few breaths of high breathing, you might even feel your heart rate rising! What happens when you return to a lower breathing pattern?

The power of breath for healing

Breathing is a crucial component of healing

As I stated in the beginning, breath is about pressure and that continuous change in pressure actually helps move fluids through our body. Blood, lymph, and even cerebrospinal fluid are physically (and chemically) moved by our breathing.

You can see how when you’re dealing with recovery of any kind, ensuring you’re getting the best out of your oxygenated pressure system becomes a necessity!  If things aren’t moving well or if muscles are tight, your body won’t have access to all those healing fluids it needs.

Lots of people like to use modalities like lymphatic massage to help move fluids around, but there’s no evidence that healthy people need lymphatic drainage; if your respiratory and circulatory systems are working correctly, it's already doing what it needs to do.  Add to that the fact that there are places your hands simply can’t reach.  Good breathing is a more effective way of massaging yourself from the inside out!

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Hopefully now you see just a bit about how much I love good breathing.  Not only does it keep you alive! It can also be a simple and effective method for working your core, calming your nervous system and bolstering your healing.

When I work with clients, breath is always a foundational element of how to improve your quality of life.  When you can breathe well, you can move well.  And when you can move well, you are living well.

If you’re curious how your breathing could be improved, why not email me to schedule a free intro call to chat more?  You can also sign-up for my newsletter to learn more about upcoming workshops I'll be hosting in San Francisco and online.