Breathing For Pain Relief & Core Strength (How To Reconnect Your Breath & Body)

Dr. Amy Konvalin explains how to do it and why it works:

Take a deep breath…

A lot of people people overuse neck and shoulder “accessory” muscles due to stress, posture, and habits like mouth breathing, which leads to tension and increasingly shallow breathing. In contrast, using your diaphragm improves movement, reduces pain, supports your core, and helps calm your nervous system via the vagus nerve.

So, let’s do this in stages:

• First, diaphragmatic breathing: lie on your back to start, as this reduces strain and prevents dizziness while learning the pattern. Breathe in through your nose and let your belly rise, then breathe out through your mouth slowly but purposefully, like blowing out a candle. Let your belly expand on the inhale and fall on the exhale, using your hands for feedback if you need to.
• Next, abdominal control: allow your abdominals to relax and lengthen on the inhale, then gently contract them on the exhale to push air out. Your strongest abdominal engagement should happen at the end of the exhale when your belly is flat. Don’t flatten or move your lower back yet, and don’t lift your glutes yet either; keep your spine in a neutral position throughout.
• Next, integrating with movement: once breathing and abdominal control improve, add leg movement (for example a bridge) to train breathing during activity. Exhale, contract your abdominals, then lift your hips using your glutes, keeping control of your breathing. Breathe in as you lower yourself back down, and continue controlled breathing while moving, but do prioritize breathing quality over movement.
• Finally, back-body breathing: the diaphragm also expands your back ribs, so full breathing includes movement in both the front (belly) and back (rib cage). You can use a hands-and-knees position with a neutral spine, to better feel your back ribs expand. Start the inhale with belly expansion, then take a little more air to expand your back ribs, before exhaling with abdominal contraction. Dr. Konvalin notes that the rib motion is subtle, and so urges us to focus on the sensation rather than expecting large visible movement.

The idea of all of this is to retrain your body so diaphragmatic breathing happens all day, reducing tension and improving overall function.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might like this book we reviewed a little while back:

The Oxygen Advantage – by Patrick McKeown

Take care!