STOP Using your Neck to Secondary Breathe - Diaphragmatic Breathing

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If you feel pain, stop.


Video Transcription:


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Welcome to the Foundation YouTube Channel. We’re going to talk about nasodiaphragmatic breathing. We recently put together a newsletter that generated a lot of questions about this topic so we’re going to show you how to work on that and make sure you are doing it right. Basically nasodiaphragmatic breathing is breathing in through your nose and your diaphragm drops down and creates a negative pressure. Your diaphragm is your primary muscle for breathing. There are also secondary muscles for breathing which are the guys that will make you shrug your shoulders and they actually come up and a lot of them attach to your neck. Problem there is if you’re using your secondary muscles for breathing more than your primary muscle then you’re going to choose to use those for breathing instead of helping to stabilize their neck or perform their primary function which can affect your posture and in turn causes pain. The other added benefit of nasodiaphragmatic breathing is that it is going to improve your VO2 max which is valuable for any endurance athlete because it is just going to improve your performance. So we’ll show you a drill to basically make sure you’re doing it right. All you need to do is lay down in a comfortable position, what you’re going to is place your hand on your abdominals or right over your belly and then one on your chest. What you want to train yourself to do is breathe in deep, and it shouldn’t be fast it should be just a nice slow breath and expand the stomach without raising up the rib cage this way. So again it’s here. And once you get to a point where you’re really starting to bring in a larger volume of air you’ll notice that the ribcage is going to move but you want the abdominals to expand first and THEN the rib cage to expand. Now once you get proficient at this pattern or if this feels really easy and you actually want to train your diaphragm your diaphragm to get stronger and get more efficient at breathing you can grab something of substance, some kind of weighted object whether it be a couple of heavy books or a small child. We’ll use a kettle bell just to demonstrate. You’ll place it on your abdomen and what you’ll do as you expand you’re going to really work on lifting that object up. We’ll demonstrate here. So I place the kettle bell here and it puts some pressure down obviously. Now as I breathe I try not to move the ribcage. And I would repeat that for maybe a minute or two then take a break. I think what you’ll appreciate when you do this is you do actually bring in quite a bit more air as you contract your diaphragm.
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