Abs Move Air for Better Movement
The influences of gravity and our anatomy establish a path of least resistance of airflow to the lower front of the lungs and ribcage. Your ability to exhale effectively is dependent on your ability to expel the air from this area.
It is the abdominal muscles that strongly influence how well you move air out of the lungs and ribcage. As you complete the exhale and the ribs move downward, you’ll feel the abdominal muscles become active and firm.
Relaxing the abdominal muscles gives up control of lower ribcage, and it refills with air upon the next inhalation.
The abdominal muscle should be active to control the rib cage but not restrictive to inhalation. Without control of the lower rib cage, the upper and back portions of the rib cage cannot expand with air. This may limit your ability to reach fully overhead (airflow to the upper ribcage is required) or bend forward (airflow to the back of the ribcage is required) without compensating around a limitation.
To optimally activate the abdominal muscles as you breathe, we’ll further modify the instructions in the breathing retraining exercise to the following:
• Take a normal breath in through your nose and blow ALL of your air out through your mouth. To assure that you exhale fully, at the end of your exhale, attempted to sigh the remaining air out of your lungs as if to fog up the world’s largest window with your remaining breath.
• As you blow out all the air from your lungs, you should be able to feel your lower back contact the floor as the abdominal muscles become more active.
• Pause and hold your breath for a count of 5
• Follow this pause with a normal inhalation through your nose while you maintain your lower back in contact with the floor.
The chest and abdominal area expand simultaneously and evenly during a successful inhalation. You may find that the amount of inhaled air feels somewhat restricted at first. This is quite common and improves with time and practice.
This type of breathing sets the foundation of your ability to alter the air pressure and achieve comfortable movement during exercise.
It’s important to reiterate that there is not one best way to breathe just as there is not one best way to move. The goal is to restore and access your full movement capabilities. This breathing activity is merely the first step to break you out of limiting patterns of posture and movement.