Training Idea's You've Never Heard Of Part 1 - Diaphragmatic Breathing

Last month I posted about my up coming series on "Training Idea's You've Never Heard Of", and now that I  have finally filmed the videos I needed for them, let's get rolling.

First I'm going to teach you how to breath. Yep, you read that right.

Not having correct patterns can be hazardous in a shitload of ways. For the athlete the main one's is that your oxygen circulation will not be as good as it could be limiting endurance and it can lead to chronic muscle tightness.

As always the first thing to do is an assessment of your breathing so set up your camera phone, press record and take a video of you taking 3 big, deep breathes while lying on your back. Make these the biggest breathes you can take.

I'll wait for you to do that before I go on..................................................................................................

OK now have a look back at that video and see if your chest rises up more then anything when you take a breathe in. Am I correct? I probably am as I haven't seen anyone not breathe through their chest who I've tested this on which includes probably every client that has come through my studio in the last 6 months as well as friends and family I used as guinea pigs to put this into action.

So why is chest breathing so bad? Well it means that your not really using the muscle/s that are designed to actual perform your breathing with the biggest one being your diaphragm.

Being a chest breather is very uncool in 2 major ways.

The 1st way is that when you breath through your chest then you are contracting your pecs, front delts, upper traps and various neck muscles 20,000 times a day. Coincidentally it's these muscles that are chronically tight from sitting in front of a computer all day, driving and terrible programming with your gym program.

The 2nd way is when your diaphragm is not being used it becomes weak like any muscle. Being a member of the core muscle family, and a pretty damn important one at that, if it is weak than your core stability is not going to be as good as it could be either. What happens here is that because your core muscles are there to support the lumbar spine and pelvis above all else, when they can't because of weakness then the muscles in and around the hip will provide the stability instead which means they tighten up like North Melbourne in a 4th quarter.

That tight groin you have is probably not going to go away with some rest and massage because if you're still breathing, which is advantageous in regards to living, then those muscles are still being overworked.

Here's a video of yours truly with the first 2 breathes of each variation being purposefully bad ones, and the last 2 breathes being correctly demonstrated. Archie is also pretty good at it too but if you look at infants, they all are.

Notice how I breathe heavily through my chest on the first 2 breathes then strictly through the diaphragm on the last 2.

When practicing diaphragmatic breathing there are some rules to abide by.

1 - Breath in through your nose taking as much air in as you can in a controlled manner, we're not sniffing a mate's fart here.

2 - I instruct clients for the first half of the inhalation to fill the top part of your belly and then for the second half to push it down to your lower belly, essentially filling your entire belly.

3 - At the midpoint of the breathe your looking for 360 degree expansion of your core so you should feel pressure in the front, back and both sides of your belly. If you were a weight belt then that's what your aiming for.

4 - Hold that breath for about a second

5 - Through purst lips, exhale the breathe slowly and controlled. Again don't be in a hurry here.

6 - Each breath should take about 7 - 8 seconds to complete.

Perform a set of 10 breathes at the start of each gym session and actually the more you can practice this the better.

Going back to the video, I do breathing on my back (supine) and on my front (prone). I suggest starting off in a supine position and once you can do all 10 breathes without your chest moving at all, then roll onto your front and try the prone variation. The progression here is that you now are working against some resistance to get the 360 degree expansion in the form of your body pushing against the ground.

Have a crack at this and let me know how you go. Next week I'll post about using this diaphragmatic breathing to improve flexibility and mobility, a thing most of you can probably use.