Belly Breathing vs. 360 Breathing

For this blog, I wanted to write about belly breathing versus 360 breathing. I haven’t shared about it in a while so I thought I would do a blog about it as it is something that I do with every single patients who comes to my office. I deal with a lot of people who are stressed, have pelvic floor issues and learning to breathe better is going to help anyone.

Belly Breathing – Its Effects

I wanted to go over the 360-degree breathing versus belly breathing that sometimes we get cued through in exercise classes and yoga classes.

I love yoga, I've taught yoga for years, and it is much easier to cue belly breathing to help get people out of that anxious, shallow breath pattern - we call it paradoxical breathing. And that is essentially where instead of your diaphragm contracting and flattening down and pushing your organs down and stretching your pelvic floor, getting that cornerstone of your core fired up, we use the little muscles in our neck to pull our ribcage up and take our inhalation that way.

So that is not good for a few reasons because it keeps us in fight or flight mode, it does not engage our diaphragm, so then, in turn, it doesn't push our organs down and act like that pump - and that decreases circulation. It results in the worst blood flow to our pelvic organs.

Now, when you think about the organs in your pelvis, there's a lot going on in your abdomen, not just the pelvis. We've got our liver, our kidneys, our pancreas, our intestines, bladder, uterus, and sexual organs for males as well. So to have everything function properly and well, blood flow is a huge, huge thing.

I see a lot of people's health histories every day because as I do new patient intakes, I see what kind of surgeries they've had and what kind of medications they're on. And a lot of people have had abdominal surgery of some type. Even if it feels very insignificant, like laparoscopic removal of an appendix or a gallbladder or just an exploratory procedure, when you have those kinds of procedures done, it creates scar tissue within your abdomen. And if you are already a paradoxical, short, shallow breather, that is not moving your organs, and you have really decreased blood flow. That is a snowball effect of decreased blood flow - scar tissue in your abdomen, your organs or abdominal organs get so stagnant, and they need good blood flow to be healthy.

The other main fluid in our body that is super important to decrease inflammation and health is our lymph fluid. And when we don't have that diaphragm properly moving as a pump, it does not pump the lymph fluid around your body easily. That is your pool filter for your body so you have disgusting, nasty pool water in your body if your diaphragm is not doing its job and not contracting and relaxing easily.

I just listened to a podcast that kind of touched on this. I have a ton of patients who have PCOS and endometriosis. As they finally learn more about these conditions, they found that people can have endometriosis not just in their uterus but on their diaphragm. They found endometriosis in patients’ bowels and diaphragms and other places. So obviously, a hysterectomy is not always going to solve everything for someone. So good blood flow and movement help with those pelvic organ movements on your lymph and keep everything vascularized.

This is not just for women, it's for men too. There are lots of men out there with GI issues, and erectile dysfunction, and proper blood flow and lymph movement are vital.

So trying to get people to switch from the paradoxical, short, shallow breath is very important for that movement and that really good abdominal health. When we switch from the short, shallow, paradoxical breath to 360 breathing, we stimulate our vagus nerves because those run through the diaphragm when we're using that diaphragm appropriately. It’s going to rub on those nerves and help to physiologically switch us from fight or flight to rest and restore.

We need to be in rest and restore to help with our crazy stress levels and all those things. We spend too much time on screens, we spend too much time with blue light, we spend too much time indoors, and we spend too much time not physically touching the ground. So all of those things are contributing to a very stressed environment.

As I’ve realized throughout my many years in practice, the toughest part of the job is getting people's nervous systems into a safe enough space to actually heal long-term. Just doing the manual physical work is a band-aid, and it will keep reoccurring and coming back if we don't fix the underlying stressors that are contributing to the problem. And that is a very tough, tall order.

I’m trying my hardest to implement new things, and that's why breathing is one of them. I try to give people a tangible way to get better vascularization, get better lymph flow, decrease that inflammation, and stimulate your switch from fight or flight to rest and restore - all very important.

Belly Breathing And Diastasis Recti

So now, when people cue in a yoga class, for example, breathe into your belly, it's easier, and it helps people take it out of their neck, and that's great, but it's not the full package. Especially for my postpartum moms and a ton of my male patients who have diastasis recti, which is the splitting of the abdomen where you get that doming effect when you exert pressure, that is going to be bad for belly breathing.

Naturally, your body likes to go to the path of least resistance, and you got a big hole in your abdomen, and then you’re belly breathing, you are actually pushing more pressure out into the hole, and you're never going to heal it. And that's just one part.

For postpartum belly breathing, you may ask if the pressure eventually gets to the belly with 360 breathing. The answer is, of course, it definitely does. But that shouldn't be the focus. We want to direct the pressure from your inhalation all the way around so that it equally shares the force, so that the ribcage expands 360 degrees, like you're opening an umbrella, nice and even.

So if somebody has a really difficult time breathing laterally, they are very self-conscious about their middle, and they have held in their abdomen chronically for years, and they've drawn their belly button in for years, I'm going to cue them and give them certain breathing exercises to open up laterally, get that expansion on the inhalation and then allow it to come back together.

If somebody has diastasis recti, I might even have them brace the front of their stomach so that they're like plugging that hole up with a pillow or a bolster or be in a child's pose. And then I want them to direct the breath into the backside of the ribcage and really feel if the ribs are close together on the inhale - we're thinking expanding each rib far away from itself.

So it depends on the person and what their bias is, but we don't want to think straight belly breathing. We want to really hone in on being able to get that equal 360-degree expansion of the ribcage all the way around. And it's very important, it's harder to cue.

People haven't breathed like this, maybe their whole life, so it's a difficult concept to get and very difficult to do in one yoga class. It takes my patients weeks and weeks to be like, “I felt it, I felt my ribs out to the sides on my own.”

So I encourage you to not take the path of least resistance and do the easy route but really focus in and spend a couple of weeks doing the 360 breathing religiously daily. Your brain is a moldable, wonderful organ, and you can make new patterns for your muscles, new brain connection, and new memories, and then that will become second nature to you as you breathe throughout the day.

And the other, as I mentioned, with the people that hold in real tight at their belly button, they're trying to keep that flat stomach all the time, or they were very tight pants, or I had patients who wear those very tight spanksy kinds of tank tops - that is bad for your breathing. This is because it really restricts your ribcage motion.

So if you want to wear those kinds of garments for date night or a wedding or something like that, great! But I would not wear it on a day-to-day basis because it is giving your brain a different pattern that we don't want it to follow. We want that expansion and relaxation of the ribcage. We don't want to train it to be continually constricted because you're going to get stagnant, gross, non-pool, filtered lymph, and no blood flow. It's just a series of bad things that happen from that.

So I definitely recommend not relying on those garments. Think of it as a tube of toothpaste. If your abdomen is a tube of toothpaste and the top is the end of the toothpaste, and the bottom is where you squeeze the toothpaste out, if you squeeze in the middle, you're going to get pressure up and down. And it's going to be forcing up towards the diaphragm but also forcing down towards the pelvic floor. So that happens on the exhalation.

Now, if you have really overactive upper abdomen when you exhale, if you think of it like that tube of toothpaste, if you're squeezing from the ribs down on the exhale, you're putting all the pressure down onto the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is not going to like all that pressure, and that is bad for things like prolapse, which is when either your bladder, vagina, or rectum gets pushed out of your body - nobody wants that. It's bad for hemorrhoids, it's bad for all those kinds of things that we don't want that increased pressure on the pelvic floor. So we don't want to exhale and immediately pull the ribs in and then squish all the pressure down towards our pelvic floor.

Proper Breathing Pattern

Your proper breathing pattern should actually happen from the pelvic floor up - so we're squeezing the toothpaste up, towards your diaphragm. So the pelvic floor should initiate that contraction, and then we zipper ourselves up and squeeze the toothpaste up on the exhale. So the ribs are the last thing to close.

So it's very subtle, and with my patients who have issues with the pelvic floor, prolapse, incontinence, those kinds of things, it just takes time. It takes time and repetition and making good habits and good patterns to train yourself to breathe that way. And so try not to take the easy route.

Conclusion

If you have a diastasis, do not do your belly breathing. There's a time and place for all different types of breathing. There's Lion's Breath in yoga, and there are all sorts of different things. But as a general rule, when you're doing, learning how to repattern your breath so that that's what it is for your day-to-day normal, baseline breathing, we want that 360-degree breathing. We do not want the paradoxical short, shallow breath and not the belly breathing.

So if you have any questions, feel free to ask. I think next week I'm going to share a little bit of diaphragm vacuum, which is a style of breathing that is a little bit different, but we'll get into that next week. So have a good one!

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 blog about your questions. Also, if you want me to talk about something specific, let me know!

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