Try This: Breathe in 360 Degrees

A few years ago I took a course on Pelvic Floor exercise and corrective movement from Dr. Sarah Duvall. I highly recommend you check her out. My initial intention was to bolster my knowledge and support of pregnant and postpartum clients, but it ended up revolutionizing how I think and teach about breath. A critical component of a healthy pelvic floor.

In Yoga we often refer to “belly breath”. And as someone who takes things a little too literally, that’s what I thought deep breathing was: Letting your belly expand on your inhale. Something about it didn’t quite make sense to me, but at the time I didn’t really see any threads to pull.

As it turns out this is absolutely 100% completely the wrong thing to do. In order for our inhale the have all of the calming effects claimed by every Yogi out there, we need to expand our diaphragm. And in order to expand our diaphragm, our rib cage needs to expand 360 degrees.

If we let just our belly do the expansion, there’s no need for the rib cage to expand. Or, if we let just our shoulders lift up and down, there’s no need for the rest of our rib cage to move. I would venture to guess, most of us have some part of our rib cage that is a little less mobile than we’d like it to be.

So how should we breathe? For a regular passive breath, we want our rib cage to expand 360 degrees, which will cause our belly back and sides to also expand a bit. The key here is we don’t want one part of the torso to take the majority of the breath.

Try This:

Lay on your back with your feet on the floor and your arms relaxed by your sides. This should feel fairly relaxed. You’re not doing any work or stressing anything here. Notice the parts of your body that touch the floor. Your upper rib cage. Does your middle back relax down to the floor? How about your low back? What part of your hips are touching the floor? This will be different for everyone based on our individual anatomy and life movement patterns.

Now notice what happens when you breathe. Do your shoulders move up and down by your ears? Maybe your low ribs rock up and down, or perhaps your low ribs are locked down without a lot of movement. Maybe your belly expands a lot compared to other parts of your body. If you can be kind to yourself, it can be really helpful to film yourself on your phone. Just a reminder that we’ve adapted these movement patterns because they served us at one point. It may be time to re-evaluate whether or not they are still serving us.

Once you think you’ve got an idea of where your rib cage is not moving, use your inhale to expand that area. For example: I tend to flare my ribs because my mid back is a bit stiff. So I will inhale into my mid back so much that I can feel it press against the floor. Let your exhale be relaxed.

Keep practicing this and notice what has to happen in order to expand the stiff parts of your rib cage. Do you have to engage somewhere else? Do you find yourself gripping? If you’re gripping try to relax a bit.

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