Hello, it's Jason from Mr. Physio.
Today, we're going to talk about breathing.
We do it everyday, but not many do it correctly.
I will be focusing on how this can affect your posture.
Breathing starts with the diaphragm going down.
When you take a breath in, the air comes into the lungs and the diaphragm goes down.
This increases the abdominal pressure, and pushes the belly forward.
This is the first phase of breathing, but people surprisingly can't do this properly.
This is largely because of the tightness of the core muscles.
If you have tight core muscles, those muscles can't be stretched out as much they should.
This also means that the diaphragm can't come down, because of the high abdominal pressure holding their position.
Our diaphragm is also made of muscles and tendons.
This means that the diaphragm not being able to come down, is restricting contraction of the diaphragm.
I just told you that the diaphragm is also a muscle.
So, your muscle not being able to fully funtion at 100%, means it may lose that function.
The last 20-30% of that contraction.
Think of it like this:
The diaphragm can come down this much, but it is only contracting that much.
So, it is very likely that you will lose the last 5cm of that contraction.
That means, that your lung capacity will be affected as well.
The amount of air that can be taken into your lungs, will be reduced, due to the diaphragm not going down.
So you end up breathing from your chest rather than your belly.
This is why you need to loosen up the core muscles, to do the first phase of breathing properly.
You will be surprised at how tight your core actually is.
It can get tight for many reasons. Among many, just sitting itself.
When you sit down, you put those muscles into the shortened position, so they can get tight.
Check your core muscles, and see if you can do belly breathing.
The second phase of breathing, is the rib cage expansion.
When you do the first phase of belly breathing, your belly will come forward.
Your ribcage will also expand out to the side.
So that's my bottom rib cage expanding.
In this second phase of breathing, your core muscles also need to expand.
On top of that, you need one more thing.
It's the back muscles; especially your erector spinae and the quadratus lumborum and also your syritis posterior.
All those muscles are pulling your ribcage backwards to open them up.
I told you that your ribcage will expand if you look from the front.
But it is your back muscles pulling your ribcage backwards.
So it looks like it is expanding to the side from the front
Your diaphragm starts from the ribs on the front and they're going lower to attach on the backbones.
Your lungs are going a bit deeper onto the back as well.
When you take air in, those ribs will go like this to get air into the lungs.
The muscles attached on those two ribs like the quadratus lumborum and the Erectus spinae;
Will have to contract to lift the ribs a little bit.
So if these muscles are weak, that second phase of the breathing can be affected.
Again, if your ribcage doesn't expand properly, your lungs can't expand.
This leads to a vicious cycle I mentioned before.
Sitting can make these muscles weak, because when you sit down like this, these muscles will all be stretched out.
If you put a prolonged stretch on your muscles, they're not likely to contract properly.
It is hard for them to contract from a stretched position.
They can get weak when your posture is like this.
That's the second phase of breathing.
In the last phase of breathing, is the upper ribcage expansion.
This time, I'll put my hands on my chest, so you can see my upper ribcage expand.
You can see the distance between my fingertips increases a little bit.
Then, as I breathe out, it decreases.
The last stage is very similar to the second phase.
So what will happen to your back in the last phase?
It is also very similar to what's happening in the second phase.
You've got the Erectus spinae muscles attached on the upper back area.
You have the serratus posterior superior which is similar to this inferior muscle so they are attached like that.
So these muscles, again open up your ribcage from the back, and then it looks like it's expanding out to the side.
Again, these muscles can get weak if you hunch, because the muscles are stretched out, and thus tend to lose its function.
This function is important, because if you see my breathing:
As I take more air in, these muscles pull the ribcage backwards so my upper ribcage expands.
That will create a thoracic extension.
Which means it corrects my posture as well.
Of course, we don't do this last stage all the time.
The first and second phase of the breathing, is enough for our everyday activities.
However, we need this last phase to not lose the function of those back muscles.
And also for proper breathing pattern.
If you don't do this last step, which is used for exercises and deep breathing, you might lose the muscle function.
If your muscle function is impaired due to poor posture and not practicing the proper breathing pattern;
You might adopt poor breathing patterns instead.
That's why you need to loosen up those involved muscles if you need to;
As well as practice the proper breathing patterns.
I'll see you next time.