Breathing Exercises: A Simple But Effective Guide To Strengthening Your Core
Breathing is an unconscious act we do every day without fail; however, did you know that how you breathe can profoundly affect your overall health and well-being? Proper breathing helps to strengthen your deep inner core, improve pelvic floor function, and heal rectus diastasis. Here are three reasons you should start paying attention to your breath today:
1. Proper breathing helps strengthen your deep inner core.
2. Proper breathing helps to improve pelvic floor function.
3. Proper breathing helps to heal rectus diastasis.
Before we dive into correct breathing, let’s look at what happens when we shallow breathe:
When you shallowly breathe, your chest and shoulder muscles are the primary muscles that move. This triggers the flight-or-fight stimulus causing your Cortisol levels to rise. Let’s face it, being a mom is stressful enough; we do not need our breathing to add to the stress. The answer to this is not belly breathing. So, how do we breathe properly?
We need to learn how to activate our diaphragm. The diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that sits at the base of our lungs and is the primary muscle of respiration. When we inhale, the diaphragm contracts and moves downward; this action creates negative pressure in the chest cavity, which causes the lungs to expand and the diaphragm and pelvic floor to move downward.
How to breathe:
Inhale:
When you breathe in, your chest should expand because you fill your lungs with air.
When you breathe in, your diaphragm should expand, causing your ribs to grow in the front, side, and back (360-degree expansion). When your diaphragm expands, there will be some belly movement.
When your diaphragm is expanding down, it puts pressure on your pelvic floor, causing it to expand down.
Exhale:
When you exhale, the rib cage moves down and in.
Your diaphragm recoils up, and as a response, your pelvic recoils up.
Your turn; let’s check to make sure you are breathing correctly:
Place your hand on your chest and one on your belly. On the inhale, ask yourself, does your air go into your stomach or chest? Are your ribs expanding in the front, side, and back?
If your ribs are not expanding, it may be due to chest/ upper back muscle tightness or weak abs. The tightness could prevent your transverse abdominal and oblique muscles from moving in an outward motion. When you gain flexion in your ribs, the abdominal muscles must maintain tension throughout the core. If your ribs are only moving in the front, your rectus abdominis is lengthening, and the fascia connections are causing your belly to expand into a diastasis recti separation.
If you find your ribs are not moving or have too much belly breathing, the first step is to learn how to practice the deep breathing system and incorporate it into exercise.
Lay on the floor
Place one hand on your diaphragm and the other on your side at your rib cage.
Breathe in, feeling your diaphragm expand and your ribs
Your chest should not rise, or your shoulders move up towards your ears.
Your stomach should not expand, either. You may feel a slight rise in both your stomach and chest, but most, if not all, air should expand your diaphragm
Complete 8-10 breaths
The child’s pose is perfect for beginning to achieve back-body rib expansion. When you are in a child's pose, your belly rests on your thighs, preventing you from belly breathing. Start by getting into Child's pose.
- Practice feeling your breath go into your back.
- Feel the ribs expand up and out to the side.
Complete 8-10 breath
