Diaphragmatic breathing is important for your health and wellness. However, many people seem to have difficulty in doing it. In this article, you will learn how to master diaphragmatic breathing.
Breathing is very important. If you stop breathing for a while, it will be threatening your life. Basically, breathing helps you to take oxygen into your body. All cells in the body need oxygen to function and to survive. Diaphragmatic breathing allows you to get plenty of oxygen and effectively removing carbon dioxide out from your body. It should be your standard breathing technique. Actually, healthy people do it naturally. However, based on my 20-year experience in the clinic, there are so many people who tend to do chest breathing instead. By chest breathing, you are not able to expand the lungs enough so that you have less oxygen intake to your body.
What happens if you don’t breathe with the diaphragm?
With diaphragmatic breathing, you take enough oxygen into your body. If not, you take less. If you have less oxygen coming to the body, the cellular activity of your body is affected and the entire body function as well. The followings are possible outcomes.
Low energy
Feeling tired even you sleep for 7 to 8 hours
Feeling groggy
Not able to concentrate
Weight gain or difficult to loose body fat
Constipation
In my clinical experience, I’ve found most of the patients suffering neck pain and tightness have bad posture and do chest breathing instead of diaphragmatic breathing. For all of those cases, bad posture and inability to perform diaphragmatic breathing need to be addressed in their rehabilitation plan for them to reduce neck pain and tightness. If you tend to have chronic neck pain and tightness or tension headache, you may need to change your breathing technique.
Benefits of proper diaphragmatic breathing,
By properly performing diaphragmatic breathing, you can maximize the lung function and take more oxygen into the body. Also, it helps to correct your posture. Here are some benefits.
Increase your metabolism and energy level
Reduce the stress level
Support digestive function
Improve core muscle function
Improve posture
Easy Anatomy and Physiology of the Diaphragm
The diaphragm is like a dividing wall between the chest cavity and the abdominal cavity. Imagine that the ribcage is a birdcage. The diaphragm is the bottom floor of it. The diaphragm is a muscle. It is quite a large muscle because it takes about a whole cross-section of the trunk. When the diaphragm is relaxed, it caves in upward to the chest cavity. When the diaphragm muscle contracts, it moves down toward the stomach cavity.
between the chest cavity and the abdominal cavity.
That downward action of the diaphragm increases the volume of the chest cavity. That creates negative pressure in the chest cavity so that air can flow into the lungs.
Also, the downward movement of the diaphragm to the abdominal cavity pushes the stomach out. If it's done appropriately, you should see the expansion of the stomach. That's basically why diaphragmatic breathing is also called belly breathing or stomach breathing.
Another breathing technique — chest breathing, not so good one
If your chest rises before the stomach expands, or if the stomach doesn't expand with breathing in, you are chest breathing. If you are a chest breather, you probably have chronic stubborn tightness in the neck especially at anterolateral aspects. It is where you have scalene muscles. Scalene muscles attach to the outer sides of the cervical spine. From there, the other ends of muscles attach to the first and the second ribs. Scalene muscles connect the outer side of the neck to the top of the ribcage.
When the scalene muscles contract, it pulls the ribcage upward to expand the chest cavity to breathe in. That’s what’s happening with chest breathing. Therefore, for taking each breath, you are tensing scalene muscles. Scalene muscles tend to be tightened up easily anyway for supporting the head. Scalene muscles become so tight by regularly performing chest breathing. Once they become tight, trigger points in those muscles are activated, and it causes annoying pain in the neck. If you breathe at the average rate, you breathe about 25,000 times per day. You have that many times to tighten your scalene muscles.
If you have bad posture with the back rounded, rounded shoulders, and the forward head, a typical posture of people using a computer, you tend to do chest breathing. In that posture, your lungs are squished and there is no room for lungs to expand downward. It forces you to do chest breathing.
By taking chest breaths, you can’t fully expand the lungs. Therefore, you have less air intake to the lungs, less oxygen intake to the body, and less carbon dioxide removed. With less oxygen in the body, your cellular activity level decreases and the metabolism goes down. Your energy level is affected negatively.
How to check if you do chest breathing
Put your fingertip of each index finger on each side of the neck about the same level of Adam’s apple. Move fingertips about a half-inch forward from there. Scalene muscles are located behind the sternocleidomastoids that are thick cord-looking muscles attached from the bump behind the ear to the top of the chest bone. So, when you move your fingers a half-inch forward, it is good to push the sternocleidomastoids away. Then, push into the scalene muscles.
Then, take a deep breath in and out. Repeat for a couple of times. If you feel the muscles moving under your fingertips, those are scalene muscles. Then, start taking normal breaths and observe what you feel. If you still feel the contraction of the scalene muscles, you are a chest breather.
Let's master how to perform diaphragmatic breathing!
There is a method I have been using to teach my patients how to master diaphragmatic breathing. So far, 100% of patients have successfully master diaphragmatic breathing in the clinic. I will try my best to explain here as same as what I do at the clinic.
Here is how you practice:
Lie on the back on a bed with keeping knees up. Keep your arms resting on the bed with palms facing up. It helps to roll your shoulders down to the neutral position.
Use a comfortable pillow to support your head.
Put a stable not too heavy, not too light object on the abdomen between the belly button and the tip of the chest bone. A square tissue box works well.
Then, start taking deep, long breaths in through the nose and breathing out through the nose. Make sure not to make noise with both breathing in or out as much as you can. Don't tense any muscles to force yourself to breathe in or out. Focus on taking quiet, long, deep breaths without minimal muscular tension.
Observe the tissue box or whatever object on the abdomen is moving upward with inhalation. The box should move down as you exhale. Make sure not to tense muscles. Focus on relaxing.
Keep practicing until it becomes natural to see the up and down motion of the object. It is also important to keep the tongue on the roof of the mouth. It helps you to breathe through your nose better. Also, that is a physiological neutral position for the tongue. It helps to relax the wrong neck muscles. When you swallow, the tongue moves up to that position naturally. The most surface of the tongue, not just the tip, should be lightly pressing against the roof of the mouth. That is a position of the tongue you should keep for most of the time including sleeping.
As it becomes even easier and more natural, keep taking good diaphragmatic breathing. Make sure not to force to breathe nor intentionally push the abdomen out. Just focus on relaxing. Take long, deep breaths quietly as possible.
Actually, if you take a short, quick breath, that usually makes forceful breathing sound, you are doing chest breathing.
If your nose is stuffed or it is difficult to breathe through your nose due to the diverted septum or other conditions, you may need to breathe through your mouth. Just make sure not to open the mouth widely. Everything else should be about the same — keep the tongue on the roof of the mouth and taking quiet, long, deep breaths in and out with the minimal muscular effort.
As you keep taking diaphragmatic breathing, you will see that you are relaxing more. You may feel like you are ready to sleep. If you get up after practicing it for 5 to 10 minutes, usually you will notice you can see things more clearly, literally. Your vision becomes brighter. You have more oxygen delivered to cells in the whole body.
Some of you may feel kind of dizzy by practicing diaphragmatic breathing. If you’ve had limited oxygen intake for a long time, practicing diaphragmatic breathing delivers more oxygen to the body than your body can handle because your metabolism was suppressed by being adjusted to fewer amounts of oxygen you have been breathing in. If you get too dizzy, stop it for a while and do it again later. As you keep practicing, your metabolism will be raised and adjusted to able to handle pretty of oxygen you breathe in. With a higher metabolism, functions of organs in your body will improve and you will have more energy.
As an exercise, practice diaphragmatic breathing for 5-10 minutes every night when you go to bed. As it's done, you can fall asleep there. Also, you can practice diaphragmatic breathing in a regular upright position of sitting or standing. If it is still difficult, practice in a lying position. It is easier because it helps to focus on using the diaphragm while the other trunk muscles are relaxed by eliminating gravitational stress.
To maximize the effect of exercises, imaging and your intension are important. Let’s say you are doing biceps curl. You can improve overall effect of the exercise by focusing on using your biceps and feeling good muscular contraction with each movement, instead of just moving weights up and down casually. When you are practicing Qigong, you may need to imagine bright light coming to your body with inhalation and gray smog moving out from your body with exhalation for maximize the effect of the exercises.
You can do the same thing with a practice of diaphragmatic breathing. It is good to imagine and visualize something good happening in the body. Here, let’s review the benefits of diaphragmatic Breathing.
You can take more air to the lunges that means more oxygen taken to the body. By increasing the amount of oxygen intake, you can boost your metabolism up. Your body is capable to create more energy by having plenty of oxygen. It helps all the organs in your body to work better. It will help to maximize healing process in the body so that you can recover from pain or injury better.
Taking diaphragmatic breathing helps to send a signal to the brain to calm down. It helps you to be more parasympathetic nervous system dominant, so that it helps to reduce stress. Also, using the nose for breathing in and out is know to the same — relaxing and reducing stress. A combination of diaphragmatic breathing and nose breathing is a powerful tool to reduce stress and it’s known as one of the effective methods of meditative breathing. Everybody nowadays would be benefited because most of us tend to have issues of too much stress.
Downward movement of the diaphragm massages your digestive organs. That natural visceral massaging helps to support the digestive function.
The diaphragm is one of the major core stabilizer muscles. A group of core muscles specifically working to stabilize the spine and the pelvis is called inner-unit muscles. Inner unit muscles are the diaphragm, the transversus abdominis, multifidi, and the pelvic floor muscles. Therefore, taking good diaphragmatic breathing is important for supporting the spine, especially when you are lifting something heavy.
Your goal is to be able to do diaphragmatic breathing naturally all the time, even when you are sleeping. By practicing the same thing over and over, you are establishing a kind of muscle memory. Then, it will be your second nature to do it.
Also, because diaphragmatic breathing is a good effective technic to reduce stress levels, when you feel stressed or nervous, take deep breaths in and out through your nose. Take long, deep breaths without tensing muscles and without making breathing sound. Keep your tongue on the roof of the mouth. You don’t have to lie down. You can be standing or sitting. Just relax and relax...
You will realize the power of breathing!
Comentarios