The beginning
Let’s start with the warm moist facts of breathing. Most experts agree that it starts at the nose, a sort of ant hill in the middle of your face.
Like an ant hill, it’s filled with cavities, though these cavities aren’t made in dirt and sand – they’re made in our heads and lined with sensory cells, tiny hairs, and mucus. It’s very romantic. The breath. Take a second to just smell the oxygen rich atmosphere that you’re drawing into your face.
From the nose, unless you sneeze it back out, that atmosphere is pulled down through the throat, to the larynx. That’s where your vocal cords are, and thus the source of Beyoncé’s powers as well as your brother’s tobacco infused cough.
Now you need oxygen to survive, and your lungs evolved to give it to you. When you inhale, the air around you is pulled down hundreds of kilometres of pipes designed to transfer oxygen from your habitat – for me, my 1980s suburban townhouse – to your bloodstream. When you exhale, those pipes mostly let out carbon dioxide (CO2), an odorless, colourless chemical, also found in your car’s tailpipe, volcanoes, and Coke.
So, you top up on the natural gas, oxygen, within the bony grasp of your ribcage, and around your incessantly beating heart, but what’s the breath got to do with Pilates?
What’s it got to do with fitness?
Pilates Instructors don’t just talk about breathing because we need oxygen to move our bones. But how you breathe affects how much oxygen you feed to your muscles, and how safely you can move about (how stable your core is).
Only breathe in as much as you need to
Imagine that a 250 pound ball of black fur is chasing you along a rocky riverbank at Algonquin Park. You need to feed your bloodstream even more of that yummy oxygen to fuel your run.
Finally! You reach your campground, jump into your car, and drive away, being careful not to smoosh any turtles on the road. You park at a Tim Hortons, have a camomile tea, and drive back home to watch the Last of Us. But you’re still breathing too fast and now your chest muscles are starting to hurt. Your heart is racing, and your fingers are tingling. You’ve been taking too much air in for too long.
Unfortunately, it’s been a week and you find that you can’t fully return to your usual breath pattern. You’ve been overbreathing.
Breathing too much & hungry muscles
When you take more O2 in than you need to, you also tend to let out more CO2. This is okay when you’re running from that bear, because your muscles are producing more CO2 waste when they jolt your bones around. This keeps the level of CO2 in your bloodstream level enough.
But if you let out too much CO2, say when you’re scrolling through bewiskered Instagram reels on the toilet, that CO2 level in your bloodstream will start to drop, and this can change your blood’s pH. Your blood will get more alkaline. This ends up making your red blood cells cling onto your O2 more tightly.
Even though you have more O2 in your blood, you start feeding your brain and muscles less of it! Breathing more than you need to then is like using a credit card. You feel like you’re getting more, but every time you use it, you actually get poorer and poorer.
Stiff diaphragms and lower back pain
It’s been a month. You’re eating breakfast far from any bears, but you notice that you’re still overbreathing. You decide to shake it off with a jog before work and notice your lower back aching when you lift your legs. Even worse, your neck and chest are starting to feel tense when you sit at your desk at work!
Why?
Your breath is produced by rhythmically contracting and relaxing muscles. And some of these muscles also help you hold your bones up in space safely.
For example, your domed-shaped diaphragm, inside the bottom half of your ribcage, is your number one breathing muscle, but it also supports your spine.
Normally, the diaphragm presses down when you inhale and stretches back up when you breathe out. If you’re working out lightly or heavily, it presses down and stretches up more. It moves more in your ribcage. At least it should.
But since that cuddly and carnivorous bear decided to chase you with his big furry paws and powerful, drooling jaw, your particular form of overbreathing has been shallow and fast. Your diaphragm is moving less. It’s not helping you support your spine much when you’re moving about.
The stability of your trunk is suffering.
Your Pilates instructor’s obsession with your breath pattern
After work, you sign up for a private Pilates class and let your instructor know all about the bear, your overbreathing, lower back pain and chest tension. Your instructor nods, takes another sip of her chai tea and says, “Let’s address your breath pattern. That way we can move towards optimizing your core stability.”
“Great!” you eagerly exclaim, feeling slightly out of breath.
Your instructor then runs away and comes back with a dusty old model skeleton. There’s a dome made of fuzzy pink wire inside the bottom of the ribcage. In the front of the skeleton, the wires are hooked under the breastbone, as well as a stretchy Rorschach-inkblot-test looking structure, connecting some of the lower ribs on the side, to the bottom bit of the breastbone. At the back of the skeleton, some of the fuzzy wires are hooked on the bottom two ribs. These ribs aren’t connected to that stretchy, funny structure in the front. Instead, they look like two fingers pointing out to the sides and down diagonally. Some of the back wires are also connected to the spine right below the back ribs.
“These tinsel stems,” says your instructor, “are the fibers that make up your diaphragm. When you breathe in, the dome flattens. This pulls your lungs down and sucks in air. When you’re resting, it only moves about 1 or 2 centimeters. But when you’re doing something active, it can move 6 to 10 centimeters, unless you also contract your pelvic floor. Then it moves slightly less. We actually want that, but we’ll circle back to your pelvic floor.
As you listen, you begin to poke around under a layer of your skin, fat and muscle. You feel that your lower ribcage runs from your spine in your back, down to the side of your body, across the front, then back up to the breastbone. You imagine your diaphragm flattening and ballooning up, so the top of the dome moves the length of your index finger.
Your instructor then starts hinging some of the bottom ribs out to the sides and up like bucket handles attached to the middle of the spine in the back and to the stretchy upside-down-wings shape in the front. “These ribs,” she says, “normally move slightly out and up to your armpits when you take a breath in. Then they hinge back down when you breathe out.”
She runs her fingers down the second rib to the fifth rib. “When you breathe in, your upper ribs also move. They stretch your breastbone away from your upper back. You can think of your sternum moving like a pump handle. All this ribcage movement happens while your dome-shaped diaphragm flattens down then relaxes and domes back up. Let’s try a breathing exercise!”
“Lie on the mat. Get comfortable. Notice your breath. Can you feel your diaphragm and your ribs in your body? Is your diaphragm moving a little or a lot? Are your ribs moving? Let’s use your hands to get a better feel for it. Take your fingers to your lower ribs. Are they hinging out and up like bucket handles when you breathe in? Are they hinging down and together when you breathe out?”
You wrap your thumb around a rib in the back, and your fingers around your ribs in the side and front. “Now that you mention it,” you say, “I think they are!”
“Cool beans. Scary bear? What bear? Let’s address your core,” your instructor says. “Now that you know that your ribs are moving, the next step is to connect your breath to your pelvic floor. Your breathing muscles need to work in sync with your bottom.”
Your instructor then disappears into a closet and returns with a pelvis.
There’s more tinsel wire attached to the inside, making a fuzzy leaf-shaped bowl with a hole in the middle.
“This is your pelvic bowl,” she says, taking another sip of chai tea. If you slightly contract your pelvic bowl, some of your abdominal muscles will also contract. That’s good when you’re being active. We don’t want to be too loosy goosy in our core. We want to comfortably stabilize our joints to protect them from injury. When you contract your pelvic floor and trigger some of your abs to contract, your organs get lifted up and in. This makes it a little harder for your diaphragm to move down since there’s more resistance. On the other hand, if you compare how much air you can voluntarily breathe in with and without contracting your pelvic floor, you can actually pull in more air when that pelvic bowl is slightly lifted. We want to find the sweet spot when we’re active. Not totally relaxed, but also not too lifted. Let’s try a pelvic floor exercise!”
She points to a sticky-outy part at the front of each pelvic bone. “These are your ASIS. Can you find them?”
You press your palms into your lower tummy and find two sticky-outy bones.
“Now, can you walk your fingers an inch toward your midline? Totally relax your core. Breathe deeply. How does it feel?”
“It feels soft and squishy,” you reply.
“Great! Now lift your pelvic floor just a little. You can imagine that you’re sucking a little lemonade slowly up a straw through your pee-pee hole. What happened?” she asks.
“My stomach got harder.”
“Great! For the rest of today’s class, I’m going to challenge you to move your diaphragm, move your ribs, move your breastbone, and keep a slight lift of your pelvic floor.”
Fifty minutes of essential Pilates exercises go by in a flash, you wipe sweet off your brow, and she says, “You did a great job breathing today! Did you feel any lower back pain?”
Thinking back, you say, “I don’t think I did!”
“Great! You’ve made it to stretchy-time. Let’s use this time to address your neck tension. Sometimes how we habitually breathe can cause tension in the upper trunk too. For example, if you use your neck muscles to pull your upper ribs up to inhale, the muscular and connective tissues in your neck can start to adapt. They can shorten leading to postural changes, but that’s another story. Let’s spend some time stretching your neck and chest muscles.”
She then disappears into her closet and returns with a model showing the deep muscles of the head, neck, and chest on one side, and the outer muscles on the other side. For the next five minutes, she throws around latin names like levator scapulae, scalenes, sternocleidomastoids, pecs and upper traps as she has you contort your head and neck until the muscle fibers running across your chest and up to your skull feel wide and long.
“Your homework,” she ends with, “is to practice the kind of breathing we worked with today in class when you’re active. And to avoid using your neck and upper chest muscles to breathe unless you need to run away from another bear, and hopefully only for a short time! Have you thought about buying bear spray? ”
Mastering your breathing habits
After class, you jump back on your couch to read Harry Potter and notice yourself breathing into your upper chest as Lord Voldemort hisses to Harry, “There is no good and evil. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”
You hear your Pilates instructor’s voice in your head, and soften your neck and chest muscles. You let your diaphragm fully flatten down, and release it up to your heart. You lift your pelvic floor, toss your book onto the coffee table, and spend the next ten minutes voluntarily controlling your breath.
When you get up to make a cup of tea, you notice how relaxed and focused you feel. You’ve begun to master your breathing habits.
References
How Your Lungs Get the Job Done
Diaphragmatic Breathing: The Foundation of Core Stability
Postural Function of the Diaphragm in Persons With and Without Chronic Low Back Pain
Stabilizing function of the diaphragm: dynamic MRI and synchronized spirometric assessment
Gray’s anatomy: the anatomical basis of clinical practice
Assessment and Treatment of Muscle Imbalance: The Janda Approach
2 Responses
Great article! Very Informative, there is a lot of useful information, thanks for posting this!
Thanks Kevin!