Are You Breathing Correctly?

How Are You Breathing?

Are you a mouth or nose breather?  Ideally, we breathe in and out through our nose as it helps slow the intake of air and acts as a natural filter. It also helps for the better engagement of our diaphragm (key for our core and destressing). It is important to see if you catch yourself breathing through your mouth throughout the day. Being aware of it will help you make that switch from nose breathing to mouth breathing.  I’ve written about diaphragmatic breathing in the past if you want to learn more about it.

I am not by nature a mouth breather, but when I started to wear a mask all day for 12 hours in the office, I noticed that the pressure on my nose made me breathe in and out through my mouth. I could definitely see the effects of mouth breathing pretty quickly. 

Another thing that will give you a clue as to how you might be breathing and not even know it will be taking a look at your rib flare. There are two different ways that you can have flare of your ribs. One would be open scissors position. That would be if your rib cage in the front is tipped up and flared out. You can see that a lot with people who have an anterior pelvic tilt (big arch in the lower back). If that is exaggerated, we tend to come into that open scissors position.

If you think of your core as an egg, the top of the egg dome being your diaphragm and the bottom of the egg dome being the pelvic floor. We want the egg to be stacked. When we have that flaring of the front side of the rib cage, it cracks the egg and opens it up. Those two floors, the diaphragm and the pelvic floor, are not parallel if this happens. These two should talk to each other to have proper intra abdominal control or good core connection and movement. If you take a look at yourself throughout the day by looking at the mirror from the side, you can see if your rib cage is stacked over your pelvic floor or if it has that tipped up position.

The other type of rib flare would be if you are looking at someone from the front and you are looking at their angle of their rib cage or infrasternal angle. The ideal and optimal angle is 90 degrees although keep in mind that everybody is different. There is always room for a little bit of discrepancy.

What does that angle tell us? If that angle is narrower than 90 degrees, then we are looking at someone who might possibly have pelvic floor issues because they do not have that good room for pressure expansion. If you don’t have anywhere for the pressure to go as you inhale and as the diaphragm is trying to descend, where is that pressure going to go? It’s going to be all pushed down towards your pelvic floor. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but that could be a thing that is common with a narrow infrasternal angle.

If the angle is wider than 90 degrees, that might tell us that you’re leaning towards having some diastasis issues. That is the separating of the linea alba or the midline of the abs. When people come in with diastasis issues, we work on good rib mobility and being able to draw the ribs together and create that tethering down of the rib cage to help draw the midline back together.

If you have a wide infrasternal angle and you feel as though you’re really gripping onto your abs, that would be your internal obliques being tied down because of the way they are oriented. They will pull the rib cage down and wide.  If it is overly narrow, that is usually telling us that the gripping is happening from your external abdominal obliques. They are drawing the borders of the ribs down and are creating that narrowed angle.

I struggle with having one side of my rib flared – my left side. If I am lying on my back and I look down on my ribs, I can see that if I don’t kind of key in on it, that left side of the rib cage is flared.  If you think through what you do throughout the day asymmetrically, you can kind of change those patterns and help switch that rib flare. With my left-sided rib flare, my right shoulder tends to look lower because of that. This is a compensation that happens as the left side flares and the other side drops so as to create balance. The body likes balance even if it has to create it in an asymmetrical way.

What could be contributing to that one side, that asymmetry, that twerk in the rib cage so that it looks flared on one side and not on the other? Carrying a kid on one side all the time, or driving with one arm up, or leaning one way habitually as it causes one side to close down and one side to open up. One thing that you can do to create a huge amount of change is by altering those patterns. If you know that you lean into carrying your kid always on the left, we’re going to try to carry on the right and close down that right side and reopen up the left side. You can also go and see a practitioner (chiropractor or PT) and get myofascial release and work on the trigger points in the obliques, rectus, and TVA.  You can work on the side that is restricted. You can also do skin rolling, cupping, and all the other things we do at the office. However, know that you can do these at home and build it into your routine.

Belly Breathing

I think sometimes people get diaphragmatic breathing mixed up with belly breathing. For most, doing belly breathing forces the pressure down and out the front. There is minimal rib movement with this style of breathing.   If you have diastasis and you are told to breathe into your belly and lie on your back with your hand on your chest and on your belly, that is going to be way too much pressure out into the front of your abdomen.  This is where you have that weak spot. It does not encourage good rib movement. Good rib movement is very important with getting the diaphragm engaged, having good mobility of your shoulders, upper back, neck, and other things. We do not want to think of just our belly moving. It will happen at the end of the exhale, but it is not something we want to focus on. The exception is for people that are chronic belly sucker inners (usually for aesthetic reasons). For these people, if they lean towards really holding their belly tight, they do not want to let their belly go. Sometimes, belly breathing helps with that because they are having a lot of issues with releasing the belly and letting it relax.

A lot of times, when people are lying on their back with their knees bent, feet flat, or in that Supine 90/90 position, I have them put their hands at their rib cage or flip it so that their fingers are at the back side of the rib cage. I ask them to do this because I want them to inhale and feel the rib cage expand to the sides and back. With this technique, you open up 360 degrees without letting the front side of the upper sternum lift.

Know that the sternum will lift because we want that all the way around expansion. What we don’t want to happen is having the upper traps and neck to be pulling at the top of the rib cage to let that inhale expand. That’s what we want to avoid. We don’t want it all to be belly breathing. Most people who are stressed have chronic desk jobs and they can be short and shallow breathers. They are using the accessory muscles in their neck to draw up the rib cage and take short breaths. It changes your whole chemistry and it changes where we are at in parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. That paradoxical breathing is going to leave us with a tight and irritated neck, headaches, and poor shoulder movement. It’s also not allowing the rib cage to move fully in and out. We really need that to use our core well, strengthen and lengthen our pelvic floor, and get our hip flexors to have a good connection with our diaphragm.

There’s so much around it with trying to really get that nice, symmetrical, and 360 degree expansion of the rib cage and trying to get away from that short and shallow breaths of stressed out land or chronic desk land that we are doing. We also want to be careful with how we queue things like in yoga classes and workout classes. We should not cue belly breathing just because it is easier.  Take the time to cue 360 breath. 

Conclusion

What I want you to gather from this blog is that everyone’s specific breathing practice will be unique to them depending on a variety of things, rib flare, daily habits, pelvic tilt, stress level, etc. Part of making your breath better work for you is changing asymmetries in your day through some habit changes instead of just practicing breathing in a bubble. 

If you have any questions, you can drop it in the comment section or you can send me a message through Facebook or Instagram. I’d be happy to do another podcast about your questions. Also, if you want me to talk about something specific, let me know!

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