Training Idea's You've Never Heard Of Part 2 - Breathe Yourself Flexible

Last week I posted about diaphragmatic breathing and if your breathing patterns are not optimal, how they can cause joint and muscle tightness which WILL negatively affect your performance on a Saturday (if you're not already injured from them!)

To quickly recap when your breathing patterns, with the main culprit being a lack of diaphragmatic breathing, then 2 things can, and will happen.

1 - You'll tend to breath through your chest which will result in a lot of chest, neck and shoulder contractions every time you breath and with repeated contraction comes overactivity of all of these muscles which leads to chronic tightness. This will negatively affect your shoulder mobility. Massage or physio won't help here at all post 12 - 24 hours of treatment because you'll continue breath the way you do, and those muscles continue to work a very high rate.

and;

2 - Your diaphragm is one of the many muscles that is responsible for core stability. When this muscle is not being used to breath it's like any other muscle, and will become weak and unaccustomed to the roles that it's designed for. Again like any muscle, when it doesn't perform as optimally as it should then stress is shifted to other muscles to pick up the slack. In this case the muscles are hip, being closest in proximity to the lumbar spine, will become stabilisers and tighten up to provide that stability.

There's a fair chance that if you suffer from one then you'll be suffering from the other as well so both area's will need to be addressed.

Firstly you'll need to retrain your breathing patterns as described in last week's post linked above.

Secondly you'll need to integrate this diaphragmatic breathing pattern into stretches for the upper and lower body.

Over at my actual business website I have made up some home rehabilitation books with one each for knees, lower back and shoulders that has a step by step program for each. Head over to here to purchase through the Paypal link making payment to lange_troy@hotmail.com.

As a short case study I had a client who took a fall and developed a frozen shoulder about a week later because of it. He took a week off personal training from doctors orders then came back before he was meant to because he wanted to. His first session in he could only lift his hand off his hip about 10 - 15 degrees. In 10 - 14 days which would have accounted for 5 - 6 personal training sessions using the exact protocol from the shoulder book, we had him raising his arm all the way to the roof pain free but with a little discomfort.

These books works because it actually gets to the heart of the problem instead of treating a few symptoms and getting some very short term benefit only to fall back to your starting point in a day or 2.

If you have restriction anywhere then these books will go a long way to regaining that range of motion which will then set you up correctly to 'cement" that new and improved posture through strength training.