Dr. Sarah Petrich takes us through airflow and diaphragm mechanics of belly breathing, and why it is not the best way to breathe for posture or spine alignment. She explains the best way to breathe utilizes your core and diaphragm simultaneously for proper posture and spine decompression.
About Sarah Petrich, PT, DPT, PRC, NCPT:
As a specialist in Postural Restoration, Pilates, & Dance Medicine, Dr. Sarah Petrich provides physical therapy and Pilates training focusing on re-balancing posture, alignment and breathing for patients and wellness clients. When not in the clinic or on zoom, she's often traveling around the nation teaching educational courses to healthcare professionals, Pilates instructors and other movement specialists. You can find her and her courses on her website www.sarahpetrich.com or on Instagram at @drsarahpetrich.
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Speaker 1:
Just be happy with the air
Speaker 2:
I breathe .
Speaker 3:
Joseph Pilates said, above all, learn to breathe correctly. And I couldn't agree more. Uh, I am Dr. Sarah Petrich . I'm a physical therapist and a Pilates instructor that is a little obsessed with breathing. Um, and if you happen to go, ah , I know all about breathing. I've Googled diaphragmatic breathing. Well, we're gonna talk a little bit more in depth . So if you google diaphragmatic breathing, what you're gonna come up with is belly breathing. And it is the most common type of breathing style that there is. Uh , it's used by yoga instructors and voice teachers and also the majority of healthcare workers, if I'm gonna be honest. Uh , and in fact part of it is because it's well researched. There's a lot of research that looks at belly breathing and it's true. It does help you relax de-stress. It improves anxiety and depression and improves your sleep. There's so many benefits to , uh, getting better breath mechanics. It's innumerous. Now , uh, it is usually instructed this way. So when you breathe in, a belly breather will focus on really expanding their belly and really only their belly. And a lot of times they um , people will instruct them , instruct people to not expand their rim, cage or their chest in any way, which is always a little shocking to me because if you think about it, your lungs are in your chest and that's what should be expanding with air. What's happening down here when you belly breathe and expand down here is you're not getting air in your belly. What you're doing is you're pushing and you're using your diaphragm to push down, bearing down on your internal organs and you're pushing your internal organs out of your body. And guess what? Your abs definitely can't be on when you're doing that. And for some people you're even pushing down on your pelvic floor, which is not a good thing to be bearing down on your pelvic floor all the time. Can we say urinary incontinence, prolapse, hemorrhoids, hernias? Whew . You don't wanna deal with any of that, so you might as well not , uh, not promote that kind of belly breathing. Now, restful belly breathing, if you're just at rest and your belly expands a little bit without trying to push it out, okay, but remember our lungs are up here so we do wanna have air expansion that goes into your chest and it can go and expand front and back and it can go side to side and you can even get air way up in the top of your chest. In fact, if you are ever really concerned about your posture, which is a subject near and dear to my heart, and you happen to be one of these people that look like they're sunken in, in the top of their chest, if you get better at figuring out a different way to breathe that promotes air expansion to your upper chest without using your neck to get it there, we can actually improve your posture without having to do a bunch of shoulder blades, squeezes, and a lot of strengthening. We can just make your breath do all the work. So if you're getting excited about that, hold your horses. So we'll get to that and some breath mechanics and improving air flow for posture, but also for just better overall health in another video. Now why is belly breathing so popular though? Well, research does still support it. 'cause if you're thinking about breathing, it's gonna help calm your nervous self system down anyway, it's culturally passed down from um, really for decades and decades. People have talked about valley breathing 'cause it does help you relax. However, if you would like to have better performance , um, and feel a little bit more relaxed, we can have both. And why I bring that up is because you can uh, breathe with your diaphragm well and get good lung expansion and relax your nervous system, but also have the benefit of having core stability. Now if you're thinking, oh yes, core stability is important and if I belly breathe all the time, I'm not using my abs. I have to let 'em relax so it expands. I'm with you. You have not seen an athlete, an elite athlete perform and perform well while belly breathing and there's a really good reason for that 'cause they need their core stability to help them perform well. But if you can have good respiration and core stability at the same time, you're gonna have the best of both worlds. Now there's more dysfunctional breathing other than just belly breathing and that belly breathing, not , not super terrible but not the best. But there's a lot of people walking around trying to breathe a few different ways because they're trying to either have really good core stability all the time without respecting good diaphragmatic breathing at the same time. Remember we gotta try to have both, not one or the other. And some people like to walk around, I call 'em gut suckers and they're inhaling and sucking their gut in at that same time 'cause they're trying to look nice and thin. And what they do is they push their ribs forward and they're flattening their diaphragm so that it really , uh, it's contracted but it's not contracted in a good way. When a muscle contracts, you want the fibers to actually get closer together for that muscle contraction. If you push your ribs out and I've got this lovely rim cage model, if you push these ribs out here or outward that way you can , you're really flattening the diaphragms. So it does what I like to call splatting. So those fibers in here aren't getting closer together, but they're actually spreading apart, still contracting but spreading apart and it's not as efficient of a contraction, believe it or not. So you definitely don't want a splayed out diaphragm. So don't be a gut sucker. Plus it also starts , uh, putting you in the category potentially of paradoxical breathing. That is like the reverse mechanics of what you want your diaphragm to do. So if you're sucking your gut on inhalation and then when you exhale your belly goes out, we call that paradoxical breathing. That's a big no-no not good for your body. But then you also have one other type of breather and those are the people. And I used to be one of these so I can definitely make fun of them 'cause I am definitely, I used to be in this category as a former dancer. I used to think I need to have my core working super hard all the time, even when I'm just walking around in the hallways at school. So I would grip my abdominals and knit my ribs together. And guess what, I have treated a lot of Pilates instructors that do that just because we talk about core all the time and Pilates. So they're like working way too hard to try to overachieve. And what they're doing is they're really doing a disservice to their diaphragm and their breath. So they're actually starting to misuse your abdominals. Yes, you can miss your misuse, your abdominals. You can misuse them just to brace and create tension, which you know, tension, okay ? Um , and not use them for good breathing. And the first thing that you really want your abdominals to do for you is actually help promote better breathing, not just tension through your body. So way too , for our next video, we're gonna talk about good breathing mechanics, what they look like, and then we're gonna start to figure out how to actually attain this zone of opposition type of breathing that gives you both your core and good diaphragmatic respiration. Thanks everybody for watching and I wanna do an extra special thanks to Oxygen Plus I hope you learn something. And if you'd like to find me, you can find me@sarahpetrich.com. S-A-R-A-H-P-E-T-R-I-C h.com . Or if you wanna learn more about Oxygen Plus you can find them@oxygenplus.com.