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50: Bracing versus Breathing
1.5k Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Laurel and Sarah discuss bracing and breathing. Why are we all so confused about our breathing mechanics and convinced we’re doing it wrong, no matter what we’re doing? When is the right (and wrong) time to brace when lifting something? What’s the difference between bracing and bearing down? And is navel to spine even doing what we think it’s doing?
You will learn:
- Is there a right and a wrong way to breathe
- How social media influences our sense of right and wrong breathing
- Breathing vs bracing in yoga, Pilates, and strength training
- Common postural tension that can impact breathing
- Sarah’s favorite injury
- How Sarah teaches breathing in the clinic
- Anatomy of breathing
- What bracing for a heavy lift actually entails (hint: it’s not bearing down)
- When to use bracing in strength training
- The value of trunk stability and what navel to spine is actually doing
- Whether pranayama techniques should be done all the time
- How to cue diaphragmatic breathing
- Whether pranayama is the most efficient way to challenge the cardiovascular system and increase breath capacity
And more!
Sign up here for the Live Strength Training Webinar on Sept 14th 10am PT/1pm ET with 30 day replay
Season 1 Episode 10 Is there a Right and a Wrong Way to Breathe?
Season 1 Episode 19 Oh NO! Nose Breathing and Nitric Oxide
Email Apnea article
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Transcript
Introduction: Societal Pressures and Exercise
00:00:00
Speaker
I mean, everything around us is telling us that we're screwing up somehow, right? I'm not exercising enough. I'm not exercising the right way enough. I'm not lifting something enough, heavy enough, light enough. It's too light. It's too heavy. I'm not doing enough pranayama. I'm doing too much pranayama. I'm not doing enough cardio. I don't know that anybody's doing too much cardio. Maybe some people are. You know, there's always somebody out there to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, right?
00:00:27
Speaker
And, you know, my bottom line is, like I said at the beginning, we're all still here. So we're doing something right when it comes to our breathing, right? We're breathing enough to stay alive. And frankly, in this day and age, that's a bit of a miracle just in and of itself.
Meet the Hosts: Strong Opinions in Yoga and Therapy
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:01:18
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Cort, physical therapist, and I'm here with my co-host, Laurel Beaverstorff, who doesn't need a title because she encompasses all things. I am a person. She is a person. With person, Laurel Beaverstorff. I'm here with another human, Laurel Beaverstorff. Both of us are humans, and we're definitely not alien.
Breathing Techniques and Listener Feedback
00:01:42
Speaker
Today we're going to talk all about breathing, bracing, and everything in between. We'll be asking the hard questions like, what's the right way to breathe? Or is there a wrong way to breathe?
00:01:55
Speaker
If I'm lifting heavy, do I keep breathing or do I do that bracing maneuver where I go purple in the face and start vibrating with how hard it is to lift? Maybe yes, maybe no to all of those questions, but that's what we're going to get into. But before we jump in, I want to read one of our reviews. We love our reviews and we love the people who leave them. Don't you want us to love you? Don't you want your review read out on air for posterity? You realize telling people we're going to read their reviews on air might prevent some people from
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah. This might be backfiring. We promise not to read your review out loud, but we are going to read it ourselves to ourselves and fall in love with you even more. And don't you want that? Don't you want to know that somewhere out there, Sarah and Laurel are so happy right now because they just read your review, even if it's a crappy review. I want to read a one-star review.
00:02:52
Speaker
Because I want to see what happens to Laurel. They're fun. They are stimulating. They sure are. Okay. This is from someone who has identified themselves as critique, which now I'm just saying it out loud, realizing what that is. And the title of the review is awesome educational content with two exclamation points. That means it's extra awesome and extra educational. And here's what they said. I have loved listening. I feel like I have found my tribe with them.
00:03:21
Speaker
Their cutting edge, research-based info really speaks to me and has helped unravel false information that I have heard through the years. Here's an idea for an episode. Can we talk about how there is a pretty open aversion for some teachers regarding the term bracing, kneading and lifting loads, but some movement systems talk about it as if it's a horrible thing. What do they think it means and is the way they are teaching abdominals sound? Actually, I don't know what that sentence means.
00:03:50
Speaker
What do they think bracing means and is the way they are teaching, quote unquote, abdominals, like abs, like ab work? Oh, sound, not like how does it sound. Is it sound? Is it sound? Gotcha. Based on something sound. Yes. Sound reasoning. Thank you. If you're going to write us a review, please don't write one where I get confused. And does this connect at all to the dance world where many movements, teachers come from?
00:04:16
Speaker
I also wonder about the negative influence of perhaps old-school dance ideas infiltrating movement teaching like Pilates that have led to lots of misinformation, a glorification of hypermobility, and body shaming, including the long and lean idea perpetuated in female-oriented exercise studios. This is like three different juicy episodes. I know, right? I was about to say we could do a whole season just off of this review. But the reason this episode exists is because of this review. Yes. We're doing this whole episode just because
00:04:45
Speaker
This person has requested that we talk about bracing.
00:04:48
Speaker
And so maybe now we have to also do a long and lean episode. Sure. I'd love to. I'm already upset about the long and lean episode, but to the point that you're making also, we asked you to write reviews and leave ideas for future episodes in your reviews. And so critique has done exactly that. Thank you. And so they're one of our best listeners and we are grateful for them. Let's start with breathing. So I recently.
Controversies in Breathing and Yoga
00:05:17
Speaker
made a whole bunch of people mad on social media. Can you believe it? No, not at all. I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. Shocked. Clutch my pearls. Because I made some posts explaining that I was seeing, and this is true, I was seeing more and more patients coming into the clinic with very confused breathing patterns. And when I asked them about why they were breathing in this way, they would say things like, oh, this is what I got in yoga. Or I thought I was supposed to be doing this from yoga. So I made some posts. I have strongly worded posts.
00:05:45
Speaker
in which I said, maybe yoga teachers needed to stop teaching some of these breathing practices. And I'm going to get into the fact that these are not like a traditional pranayama type thing, but it's more about like, parceling off different parts of your body, and where you should be, quote unquote, should be breathing from, right? So I said, maybe people shouldn't be doing that in class, yoga teachers shouldn't be doing that in classes. And the overall response, most people were like, hell yeah, right on. And then some people were like, it would have been nicer if you'd said that nicer.
00:06:14
Speaker
versus it would be nice for my students not to be confused, right? So that's another episode, and we should just start taking notes for a new episode. This is all season four is coming right out in this episode, but there's a whole other episode about white yoga female teachers wrapping themselves in this mantle of a hymnsa that is actually much more about their own fragility. Yeah, and also society's reaction to any time a woman gets just a little bit outside of pleasant.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yes, exactly. I was a tad outside of pleasant and people did not like that.
00:06:46
Speaker
But people who practice yoga are still confused about breathing, and people who don't practice yoga are also confused about breathing. And I think we all kind of have the sense that we're like not breathing well, or like not breathing right, or not breathing well enough, or there's some better kind of breathing that we all could be doing, but nobody seems to know what that is. It's just whatever they're not doing, right? What do you think?
00:07:11
Speaker
Oh my God. Whatever I'm doing is wrong. I have no idea what right is, but I'm wrong. Yeah, you nailed it. I think it's very similar to the conversations we've been having about postural dogma and how everyone's got bad posture and that there's this right way to be. There's this right way to breathe and no one's fully there. That's why you have to come to my class. Right. I don't know that teachers are telling students they're not breathing correctly or suggesting
00:07:39
Speaker
for the purpose of filling their classrooms, but I do think that it is a way that capitalism and the ideals of capitalism kind of leak into the way that we basically position everything and couch everything in this idea that it's not good enough. Like I said, at some point in the season, I will say, or I have said, I don't remember which episode it was, because we're batch recording these right now, but I said, there's not a whole lot of yoga teachers or Pilates teachers or even strength coaches
00:08:07
Speaker
Standing up in front of people and going like, y'all are doing great. You're fine just the way you are. You don't need to change. You keep going. It's usually like people's glutes have amnesia. People's hip flexors are too tight. There's upper cross syndrome. You're not breathing well. You're a mess. You're a fucking hot mess. That's often what's communicated. I think that it's changing. There's more awareness around
00:08:35
Speaker
this negative way of, and fragileizing way of viewing the body and problematizing tendency, but I think it's still really rampant. I mean, just go on social media. Yeah. Oh, God. I mean, all of social media. The red Xs. All of the red Xs. Oh, my God. We should also do another post. Somebody be keeping notes about other posts, but we should do another post about
00:08:57
Speaker
Somebody be keeping notes? Are you talking to some assistant that we don't have? I'm talking to our imaginary assistant that we have not yet hired, but that we're going to be. Somebody be keeping notes about this, okay? Listen, if you're out there, keep some notes. Keep some notes. Somebody, are you taking notes? Listen, somebody. If you listen to this episode, you'll understand why we need an assistant. Okay. So Laurel's exactly right, which is often the case.
00:09:24
Speaker
Oh, wow. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Can you say that one more time? Yeah. I missed one of the words in there. Laurel. I just need to hear it again. It was Laurel? Was that the part you missed? Yes. Okay, you could say the whole sentence. Laurel's exactly right. Yeah. That's what I thought you said. Okay, great.
Anatomy of Breathing: Muscles and Functions
00:09:42
Speaker
And it's a yes and. So, you know, the thing that I think about all the time is like, look, we're all still alive, which means we're all breathing enough, right, to be alive. So that's a win right there. None of us is keeling over from not breathing enough. And if you do, like, I don't know if you did this when you were a kid, but you're like, hold your breath. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, some people would do it to the point where you pass out because you're
00:10:04
Speaker
Not that dedicated. Yeah, I mean, me neither. But what's happening at that point is your brain is taking over and saying, hey, dum-dum, we need to breathe. I'm going to take over and knock you out for a second, right? And your body starts breathing again. So anyway, we are all breathing enough to be alive. And that is a win, as far as I'm concerned. So we also did a couple of episodes about breathing in season one. And I think, honestly, we could do an episode about breathing in every season because I think there's that much to talk about, that much confusion, that much junk.
00:10:34
Speaker
So in season one, in episode 10, we asked, is there a right and a wrong way to breathe?
00:10:39
Speaker
And we talked about that for a bit. And then I read the James Nestor book, Breathe, and I did a solo episode, and that was episode 19, where I talk all about nose breathing and nitric oxide. And at the moment, there's a whole debate going on around whether you should exclusively be nose breathing. Good luck. Or is mouth breathing still OK? And when you're mouth breathing, it's impossible to not also nose breathe a little bit and so on. So if you want to listen to more of that kind of nose versus mouth debate,
00:11:06
Speaker
conversation around breathing, you should go back and listen to those episodes because I'm not going to talk about the day today. We're going to talk about the anatomy of breathing. We're going to talk about the use of breathing and or bracing in strength training. And we're also going to talk about ways that people have been confused by breathing cues from yoga, common tension patterns that I'm seeing in the clinic or that we might see that restrict people's breathing capacity.
00:11:33
Speaker
And then, you know, peppered in with all this, Laurel's going to talk about like breathing confusion that maybe she sees in some of her students online.
00:11:42
Speaker
you know, different things happening in strength training versus not strength training. And then at the end, I'm going to tell you about how I, you know, my sort of, this is my, let's erase the board and start from the beginning. I'll tell you how I do it. So it's maybe a bit weird to have a favorite injury, but like, you know, clinicians, we tend to get a bit weird because we see so much stuff that if it doesn't make you a bit weird, I'm actually worried about you. So the kind of weirdness that we all tend to have is a lot of casualness around
00:12:10
Speaker
Things that might be like quite distressing in terms of like an actual injury, right? So because we just see this stuff all the time for you individually It's probably really distressing to have massive shoulder pain. But for me, I'm like, well, you're just like Bob I saw one o'clock and now three o'clock somebody else has shoulder, you know what I mean? So it's like it's it's it's a little more quotidian but I do have a favorite injury, which I think is a bit
00:12:33
Speaker
I bet if you asked a lot of clinicians, they would also have a favorite injury. Maybe that's an episode. I'm just going to go around, hey somebody, make a note. I'm going to go around and just ask the various medical people I know, what's your favorite injury and why? Somebody. Hey somebody. No. Is that a compelling episode? Let us know, readers. Write in, write a review. Tell me if you want to hear me talking to various people about what their favorite injury is. So my favorite injury is a pneumothorax.
00:13:02
Speaker
And I'm going to explain what a pneumothorax is later on as I talk about anatomy. But Laurel, do you have a favorite injury or are you normal? I've actually never thought about what a favorite injury would even be. So at the moment, I don't. But I'll work on getting one. Yeah, maybe by the end of this episode, you'll have one. Great.
00:13:24
Speaker
She's going to work on that in the background while we're talking. So let's talk about the anatomy of breathing. So you have one major breathing muscle, and that's your diaphragm, or sometimes it's called the abdominal diaphragm because there are different diaphragmatic structures in your body. But when someone's talking about your diaphragm, this is generally the one that they mean.
00:13:45
Speaker
and it lines the bottom six ribs of your rib cage all the way around. And then it has two little, what are called crura, or they're basically tails that extend down onto the lumbar spine.
00:13:58
Speaker
My diaphragm trivia is that skirt steak is diaphragm. Nice. Yeah. Delicious. Yes. So when you're not breathing, when you haven't yet inhaled, your diaphragm sits shaped like a jellyfish. It's a sort of dome shape. When you inhale, the diaphragm flattens down. And by doing so, it pushes your stomach and your liver and your other intestinal organs forward.
00:14:26
Speaker
When you exhale, it goes back to its resting dome position and your intestinal organs return to their original place. So when you are using your diaphragm and breathing, what you might see is this like some amount of distension of the belly, but that is just the sequelae.
00:14:48
Speaker
of your diaphragm pressing your guts down, your guts having basically nowhere to go but forward and a little bit sideways. The other thing that it's doing and really more importantly to your breathing is that when the diaphragm flattens down on the inhale, it expands your ribs circumferentially.
00:15:05
Speaker
which is an excellent word that you should try to include in at least one sentence per day. I'm going to start bringing in, um, what was it? Cantilever curvilinear, curvilinear, curvilinear, curvilinear, curvilinear. And Laurel's going to start saying circumferentially more and scapion, scapion all the time. Okay. So it flattens down and expands your ribs and it is, which gives you more space for your lungs to have breath move into them. And it is assisted in this endeavor.
00:15:35
Speaker
by several other muscles, including your intercostals between your ribs, the scalenes on the front and side of your neck. And then I just went to, and friends, because that's an abbreviation, that's an et cetera that I like to use. There are more muscles that have to do with breathing in sort of secondary ways. Sometimes people say like any muscle on your trunk is a muscle of respiration. And I would say
00:16:02
Speaker
yes-ish in the sense that it may not be driving respiration, it may not even be a secondary muscle of respiration, but it might be if that muscle is very aggravated, tight and short, or all those words I'm not supposed to use, but it potentially could inhibit the movement of your rib cage and thereby get in the way of you breathing deeply. Now, the lungs themselves are wrapped in a sack called a pleura.
00:16:31
Speaker
And the pleura is the part that is actually connected to the diaphragm and to the inside of the ribs. So when your diaphragm moves down, the ribs move out and up circumferentially, the pleura goes with them and then the lungs are expanded and air is pulled into your lungs. So the reason that I went into what a pleura is, is really just so I can explain what a pneumothorax is.
00:16:58
Speaker
Do you actually know what a new orthorhox is? Oh, no, I told you already. Shit. I wish I hadn't already told Laurel what a new orthorhox is because I'd like to surprise her. But anyway, a new orthorhox, it's a puncture wound that goes in between the pleura and the ribs. So what that means is then this person now has an air pocket that is inside their rib cage. It's inside their body, but it's outside of the pleura.
00:17:21
Speaker
and therefore outside of your lungs. And one thing that's true about your anatomy is there's not supposed to be any air in there if it's not inside your lungs. So what happens is the air pocket can gradually get bigger and bigger and it pushes on the lungs and it gets in the way for the lungs' inflation when you inhale. This is painful. It sounds incredibly uncomfortable. It's incredibly uncomfortable. It's also super distressing because our nervous system gets very quickly agitated when we cannot get enough air in. So it's very distressing.
00:17:51
Speaker
And if you're, you know, what you do to fix it, and this is part of what is fascinating to me, is you get something often like a pen or something sharp and you stab between the ribs into where the pneumothorax is so that that air escapes the space. You're not penetrating their skin, though? Oh, yeah. All right. So you don't do that. A surgeon does that. Oh, I don't personally do it. So, but that's what you do. You have to make the air pocket means to be able to go back down. So you make a tube.
00:18:19
Speaker
for the air to leave. Is this a medical emergency? A hundred percent. Okay. How fast does the air bubble increase? It probably depends. I would think it would depend on what the injury and how, but it can be real bad. I mean, and if you don't have something like that, like a tube that you're then letting the air out of, it is just going to keep taking it more and more and more and more space. So then the lugs are able to inflate again. This has been medical emergencies with Sarah Court.
00:18:49
Speaker
But it's interesting, she said, sounding like she's trying to convince people that it's interesting. I think it's interesting. All right. Maybe more interesting to people is what's actually going on inside of your lungs. So once we get down to the sort of nitty-grittiest level inside the lungs, there are the alveoli, which when you see them in dissection, the closest visual comparison I think is like a sea sponge. Laurel, do you have a better one?
00:19:15
Speaker
Oh, it's a good one. I mean, I imagine like tiny, itsy-bitsy little grapes. Yes, they do look like bunches of grapes. Yeah, but like minuscule. The alveoli are where the gaseous exchange is taking place between the oxygen in the air and the carbon dioxide from your blood. And fun breathing fact, I've got another one. If you laid out the network of alveoli in your lungs, it would cover a tennis court, which is about 100 square meters.
00:19:39
Speaker
That's a lot of square meters. That's a lot of square meters. Yeah. So let's talk, we're going to skip past any sort of yoga Pilates breathing and get
Proper Breathing in Heavy Lifting
00:19:47
Speaker
to that later. We're going to go straight to the meat of the matter, which is how you're breathing when you're lifting heavy. And I'm going to ask Laurel to speak to this in more detail because she has more experience with cueing this or just with seeing people doing it. There's a point along that path of movement where it's maybe going to feel more effortful or the most effortful, and it's sometimes called the sticking point.
00:20:07
Speaker
So the sticking point of a squat is the bottom of the squat. So you stand under the bar, take it off the rack, you drop down into a squat, and then you gotta come up out of that. That is the sticking point. That's typically where we're gonna exhale. The deadlift begins with the sticking point, because the barbell's on the ground. Then you set up for the deadlift, you grab ahold of the bar, and you gotta get the barbell off the ground. Tends to be the sticking point is where your muscles
00:20:35
Speaker
need to produce force to concentrically shorten produce force and lift the weight up away from the floor, but simultaneously they're in a lengthened position or at end range so that they are simultaneously mechanically disadvantaged in their ability to do that to exert force.
00:20:58
Speaker
So it's not something that you have to overthink though because you're gonna be lifting weights and you're gonna notice that there's a point at which it feels the hardest to lift the weight. So in a strict press, you're holding a barbell or a couple kettlebells or whatever and pressing those weights up overhead, you're probably gonna feel like it's hardest at the very beginning where you have to get the weights from resting on your shoulder somewhere, even started in that upward motion.
00:21:26
Speaker
Um, and so you don't have to overthink this, but it's, you're going, you're probably, if you're listening to your breath, right? If you're noticing how your body wants to breathe, there's going to be points in the lift, in the, in the repetitions where you notice yourself kind of exhaling to help yourself complete the lift if the weight is heavy enough. Right. Right. And how would you compare that to like.
00:21:48
Speaker
You know, let's say I was picking up a heavy box of something in my day to day life and I was, you know, how I might breathe for that. If it's a heavy box, it's similar to lifting a heavy weight. I mean, it's a heavy weight, right? So you're going to, if you're lifting with your legs, you're going to probably squat down, gather it up in your arms and exhale as you stand up.
00:22:12
Speaker
you might be hinging or stooping to lift it with your back. Oh, no. Oh, God. Oh, no. And in which case, same thing, you're going to stoop, wrap your arms around it, and exhale, and lift it up. I guess the bigger difference is when we look at low-load activities like yoga and Pilates, or just lifting light stuff in our day-to-day life, and compare
00:22:35
Speaker
that with lifting some substantial amount of weight and you're probably not exhaling because there is no sticking point. There's no like point at which it's like so hard that you need to get your respiratory muscle or like the muscles of your abdomen involved in that way. So the exhale, I mean, just to kind of back up a little bit, when you need to vomit, when you need to burp, when you need to shout, when you need to do any type of forced
00:23:05
Speaker
expression of air out of your lungs or if you just need to get anything out of your mouth, you're going to probably use your abdominal muscles to do that, to create compression. The purpose of exhaling at the sticking point is just to increase abdominal muscle force production.
00:23:31
Speaker
make it so that the trunk is perhaps a little stiffer and it's also potentially just going to help you hold everything together there as you're moving the weight. And well, so I guess part of my question also is, you know, I don't think people tend to think like, they certainly think, you know, don't lift with your back when it's time to pick up something heavy, but I don't think they're thinking exhale at the sticking point, right? But I do think there is a sort of automaticity
00:24:00
Speaker
where you just do it without thinking about it. Yeah, and exhaling at the sticking point just also to be clear is like not a way of bracing. It's just a way of breathing while you're exerting some amount of effort that is like above what you normally are. Yeah. Okay. And then when you're lifting heavy, there is going to come a point where that exhaling at the sticking point doesn't really give you enough stability through the trunk
00:24:26
Speaker
and this action of bracing becomes more appropriate. And my personal experience with this has been, you know, because I started lifting heavy in November of last year. It's now July. You know, the weight that I'm lifting is considerably more than the weight that I started with. For my deadlift, I'm pretty close to lifting my own body weight. And what I discovered is somewhere around this weight is when my body felt like it needed to switch from
00:24:53
Speaker
exhaling on the hardest part to actually bracing through it. And it wasn't a conscious choice. It was quite literally as I was going to do the lift, I was like
00:25:03
Speaker
F, this is hard. Maybe I should be bracing and I tried it and I got through it better. It just happened organically. First of all, I don't think the line is, as soon as you're lifting something that's your body weight, that's when you have to brace. It seems like it's a personal thing, but when did you, Laurel, start bracing when you were lifting? Was it a certain level of weight that you noticed?
00:25:26
Speaker
I think I have been probably doing it for a long time, but I really started to notice it when I started to work on getting my first pull up, which was around 2020, 2021, or somewhere in there, where lifting your own body weight through that vertical pull even one time is way beyond most people's ability until it's not, and then you start
00:25:48
Speaker
working on it and you find like, okay, I'm going to attempt a pull up and I would take a big breath in and like pull with all my might until eventually I got a pull up and then I got two and three and four and five. And, and I still brace on a pull up because I can do six in a row, but that's still, it's still a heavy weight for me. Um, so I'm not exhaling at the sticking point. I'm bracing. Uh, I definitely brace when I deadlift heavy. I definitely brace when I squat heavy.
00:26:17
Speaker
I definitely brace when I strict press heavy, I brace when I do Olympic lifting, so it's definitely something that is a regular part of my lifting technique because I am really interested in lifting heavy weights and doing Olympic weightlifting with heavy weights.
00:26:37
Speaker
Can you describe what you're doing when you're bracing during a lift? I think this is an area of confusion about what bracing is, what it looks like. Do you just hold your breath and go or do you do it at a certain point? People are confused. They're very confused. I want to just tell a brief story that when I was growing up, I had two older brothers
00:27:04
Speaker
one of which would always want me to punch him in the stomach as hard as possible. Because it was just fun for me. I got to hit my brother in the stomach as hard as possible. He's seven years older than me, so he's like a teenager, right? And I'm like a little kid. And I was like, yay, okay. And so what he would do is he would...
00:27:22
Speaker
make his abdomen as hard and tight as possible so that like actually it hurt me to punch him in like I would hurt my hand. Your poor little hand. Yeah and so we all know what it feels like to get the air kicked out of us or to like what is it like the wind knocked out of you. Wind knocked out of you. That's not going to happen if like a little kid's about to punch you in the stomach if you create
00:27:44
Speaker
that contraction, that isometric contraction, that basically creates a hardening or a stiffening of the trunk. That's not how you brace. That is not how you brace for a heavy squat, for example. That is how you brace before you get hit in the stomach by a little kid. The effect is similar in terms of both forms of bracing create a stiffer
00:28:06
Speaker
Trunk, but they they function along different mechanisms, right? So the first mechanism that I described with my brother is he's creating isometric muscle contraction With lifting or squatting a heavy weight in whatever way that isometric muscle contraction is automatically happening right your your nervous system is really smart and it's figured out that if you're going to complete the lift and
00:28:28
Speaker
going to have to keep your trunk relatively still. What you then layer on top of that is a breath holding, sometimes called the Valsalva maneuver. It's not super aggressive, but you're increasing intra-abdominal pressure, which is basically you're filling up
00:28:43
Speaker
Similar to how you would fill up a balloon right when you when you have a flaccid empty balloon there's another word I love flaccid I hate that word lasset when you have a flaccid empty balloon it's super jiggly it's super wiggly and then you fill that balloon up with air and it is
00:29:00
Speaker
stiffer, which is the opposite of flaccid. You just were looking for another opportunity to say flaccid. Sarah is, she is having a moment right now, folks, and I am enjoying it enormously. Sure, her fists are curled up and like tight against her face, and now she's shaking her fists and her shoulders are way up, like inside of her ears. It's just flaccid is like moist. It's like moist. Or panty. Or like panty. What was the other one you hated? There was another one you didn't like. Oh, broadened across her collarbones. That's just broadened your collarbones. That's, everybody hates broadened your collarbones, don't they?
00:29:31
Speaker
When you increase intra-abdominal pressure, you're doing what you do when you blow up a balloon, but not entirely the same thing. An image I love is that you can just imagine what you do before you dunk your own head underwater. You're standing waist-deep in water and you're going to go ahead and go underwater.
00:29:54
Speaker
You're standing there, you start to bend your knees and lower yourself into the water, and about halfway through that motion, you're gonna take a breath and go, you're underwater, you're still holding your breath, and then you come back up and you exhale. Now imagine you're doing that in a squat, right? So you climb under the bar, you lift the bar off the J hooks, you step back away from the J hooks. You're about to head down toward that sticking point, but before you do, you're gonna,
00:30:18
Speaker
You complete the squat all the way to the bottom. As you start to stand, you go ahead and exhale. And then you do that again for however many reps you're doing, which probably isn't very many reps because you don't need to do this if you're not squatting a heavy load. And a heavy load is a heavy load for you, right? And so it's a load that you probably couldn't lift very many times more than five reps. So if you're bracing all the time in strength training, holding your breath all the time, if you're holding your breath all the time in your life or in yoga or Pilates,
00:30:48
Speaker
You're probably misusing this, but I don't think that's what's happening. What I think's happening when people get confused about bracing is they're just not sure what to do. Is it getting ready to take a punch? Is it navel to spine? Is it puff your belly out? That's how it's not like blowing up a balloon. When I inhale,
00:31:08
Speaker
It's definitely not my belly poofing outward. It's a little bit of a change in shape of my rib cage all the way around circumferentially. And it's quick. It's not this. Okay, it's not that. It's more like this.
00:31:31
Speaker
It's fast, circumferential, and it's not something you're going to go purple in the face from because you're really hopefully not taking that long to get to the bottom of your squat, right? Well, I have a question now. I have a follow-up question because now I'm a bit confused. Great. But only a little bit. Do I start my exhale?
00:31:55
Speaker
as I'm coming, like the moment I change directions and start going up? No, you're gonna keep that breath hold probably through the sticking point. And then basically as soon as your head starts to come up above the water, you can exhale. So if you really just imagine how long would you have to hold your breath while standing way steep in water and going all the way under, you wouldn't have to start holding your breath at the top necessarily. You would hold your breath kinda on your way down,
00:32:25
Speaker
And then you would come up quickly if you're doing a squat, right? And as soon as your head breaks the water, you can exhale. Now, I find myself bracing doing that breath hold even before I start squatting downward. But then I exhale before I get all the way to the top. I don't hold my breath through the full arc of movement all the way down and all the way up.
00:32:47
Speaker
It's interesting. When I started doing it just because it felt like the right thing to do for the deadlift, I got into this thing where I would, like you, start with the bracing part. Start with that little bit of breath hold, do the movement, and then I'm only exhaling once I'm done with the movement. You might be exhaling at any point of the concentric, but probably not.
00:33:10
Speaker
the very beginning of the concentric because that's going to be the hardest point. You probably need that intra-abdominal pressure most at that point. Yeah, I think in a deadlift what's happening is I come down to the bar, I hold my breath, brace, and then I go through the movement and once I'm standing, then I'll do my abs. Yeah, absolutely. That's, I think, a little bit closer to what I do as well. Also, I want to say something else that can be a concern, especially for women in pelvic floor.
00:33:41
Speaker
health type concerns is that when you do the valsalva, it's not like bearing down when you're pooping. You're not pushing anything out the pelvic floor, or it's not like giving birth to a child, right? A valsalva is actually creating a stoppage of flow of air at the top of the respiratory pathway, right?
00:34:07
Speaker
at the, what is it, the glottis, right? It's not trying to then simultaneously push something out of your anus or your vagina. Okay, so there should not be a quality of, or urethra, okay? There should not be a quality of pushing downward into the pelvic floor.
00:34:29
Speaker
So again, I'll reiterate that you're filling your rib cage circumferentially. You're not poofing your belly out or pushing or bearing down. This is where, you know, if you are having pelvic floor dysfunction,
00:34:46
Speaker
type symptoms that you may want to seek out the help of a specialist and taking a look actually at how you are breathing because it's possible that you are actually bearing down in ways that really aren't helping you create intra-abdominal pressure and are potentially causing some issues. Right. As far as lifting is concerned,
00:35:09
Speaker
Is bracing always necessary? I think we've sort of discussed this where we're saying like, it's when I get to what is a heavy load and that is something that's individual for
Bracing Techniques and Misconceptions
00:35:19
Speaker
people, right? It's not the same for everyone. And it's also not going to change for you, right?
00:35:24
Speaker
Once you get to something that is heavy, heavy being something that you can't lift more than maybe five times, that then bracing will likely be necessary. It likely will. And so something that happens to me, for example, like if I'm working out in a busy gym and I'm distracted and I'm thinking about something or someone's doing something and I'm like not really paying attention to what I'm doing is I'll forget to brace.
00:35:48
Speaker
And I'll have a load that's quite a bit heavier than my normal loads on my back. And I'll be like, oopsies. And I'll get to the bottom of the squat. The squat's the example that I use because I find the squat a lot more challenging than the deadlift. And it is.
00:36:03
Speaker
objectively a lot more challenging from a balance standpoint. It's easy to fall over in the squat. You can just fall over. I'll find myself losing my balance and have to drop the bar because I forgot to brace. I would say it's necessary and you'll know it's necessary when you actually run up against, maybe you hit a plateau and you find yourself unable to move past a certain weight because maybe you aren't creating enough trunk stiffness to be able to transfer force as effectively as you could.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. I like that as a way to maybe gauge for yourself. Should I now be bracing? It's like, well, have I not been able to increase the amount I've been lifting for maybe the past couple of months? What might be getting in the way? Maybe it's your bracing. Yeah, maybe it's technique. It's worth looking at. Maybe it's Maybelline. Maybe she's born with it.
00:36:58
Speaker
Now, if we talk about bracing, and this is sort of going back to what our reviewer was asking about, this idea of bracing in either yoga or in Pilates, you know, when I think about this, we've talked about that navel to spine cue in Pilates, both
00:37:13
Speaker
I think in the pelvis dogma and maybe also in the spinal dogma episode, but the cue of navel to spine in theory is about turning on your transversus abdominis, but what it does end up doing is turning on a bunch of everything because when you do that, you kind of turn everything on, right? In your abdominal muscles somewhat, right? Yeah, I don't think that you can disassociate TA engagement from rectus abdominis engagement from oblique engagement. I would agree. I would agree.
00:37:39
Speaker
And you know navel to spine just becomes this sort of like it's like the Pilates equivalent of broaden your collarbones It's like well if I've run out of something to say navel to spine or you actually Made it the equivalent of lift your pelvic floor or moolabunda. Yes Well, I feel the spine becomes the moolabunda of Pilates in the sense of do it always do it the whole class the whole class navel to spine and The reality is there is not always you know, even if you're on the reformer and pushing heavy springs with your legs there is not a a
00:38:07
Speaker
physiological need to create that bracing through your trunk because you're lying on your back. The stability of the carriage is transferring to my body. My body's not going anywhere but
00:38:20
Speaker
micromanaging the abdomen is kind of the name of the game in Pilates. And you're saying that with like an appreciation of that, or a critique of that, or can you say more about this? Yes, absolutely. I mean, as someone who came to Pilates from yoga, I was grateful that somebody was finally talking about actually turning on some of these core muscles. I remember people saying to me all the time in the past, like, oh, yoga is so good for your core. And I'm like, it absolutely freaking is not. Because there's literally nothing in it where, apart from maybe holding a plank, but I could hold that plank.
00:38:49
Speaker
from my shoulders, you know, there's nothing. Whereas in Pilates, almost every single exercise is also technically a core exercise. Like there is no point where there's not some amount of core activity going on for the most part. And that's maybe one of the reasons so much of this is done horizontally, right? Like you're either on your belly or on your back or you're side-lying. You're challenging your spine in that like flexion extension relationship.
00:39:14
Speaker
regularly. Yoga is much more about being on your feet. Now you're on your belly, now on your back, all over the side, jumping up into the air, upside down.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yes, all of those things so language I haven't heard lately but people used to talk about your core and Pilates like it's your powerhouse Like that's the engine of like where everything comes from in the rest of your body and it's like I love that image That's a good image. Yeah I mean, you know creating trunk stability is not for nothing really useful to be able to do and I never learned how to create trunk stability in yoga and I did in Pilates
00:39:44
Speaker
So, I'm saying micromanaging the abdomen kind of jokingly, right? A little bit of like a wink, but it is the focus primarily throughout Pilates, like core is like where it's at. Cool. So, it does become similar to that Mulabunda in yoga when people are teaching it the way we talked about sometimes like, oh, Mulabunda all the time, you know, navel spine pretty much all the time, but that's not actually true.
00:40:11
Speaker
in the way that Pilates works. And it's also, I mean, I think fewer teachers are really teaching that way. My question then becomes, if it is a lot of navel to spine, and if we've decided that that is like maybe one way to get the transversus abdominis and like everything else, but you know, the story they're telling is like, navel to spine is for your TA.
00:40:31
Speaker
as though you could contract it in isolation, are we saying that transversus abdominis engagement is important for some special reason? What is the purpose of it? The purpose of it is, as far as the way I understand Pilates to work, is that we're trying to create situations where we are stabilizing the trunk, including the pelvis, so that we can move either a leg or an arm or both things.
00:41:00
Speaker
create this proximal stability for distal movement and helping people who perhaps have never actually tried to do that, right? Who maybe are just wobbly, weebly all over the place. So that's the sort of primary goal of that in my understanding. There's probably more nuance to it that I have missed.
00:41:18
Speaker
Okay. So I mean, in a sense, then what you're suggesting it is, is a bracing strategy. Yeah. But it's one unique to what it seems like it is, is unique to Pilates. Although there's plenty of navel to spine and yoga too. I've heard that cue a million times in yoga as well. So, but I wonder how much of that it came like.
00:41:34
Speaker
When I was in my teacher training, nobody ever said enable to spine. I wonder because there are now far more ... It used to be very sort of like you were a yoga person or you were a Pilates person. It seems to me now there's a lot more people doing both versus one or the other. I wonder if some of that queuing just kind of mishmash over that. For sure. I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. What I'm saying is you're not going to just hear this queue in Pilates. Pilates is true. The yoga world has debated its value.
00:41:58
Speaker
Stated drawbacks of constantly doing navel to spine one of which is like it's harder to breathe It's harder to allow your diaphragm to move through its full like path of excursion because you've created like tension stiffening of the you know Its ability to descend on inhale Another another is like maybe what we're suggesting is people just suck their abs in all the time and like right So for example, I want to I want to just pull up this post I'm not gonna say like whose post on Instagram This was this person has a very large following
00:42:26
Speaker
And they've shared a video here, which is encouraging people to find their deep core muscles, try this trick. She's doing a single leg good morning. It's like a single leg hinge, pressing one foot into the wall.
00:42:41
Speaker
And then her hands are behind her head, so it's very much like a good morning. She hinges at her hips. She said, imagine squeezing your hip bones together. So that's a cue I've seen given to encourage transversus abdominis engagement. Even though you can't literally squeeze your frontal hip bones, like those ASIS's together, in trying to squeeze them together, you might have a chance at engaging your TA. Not a bad cue if you're going for that.
00:43:07
Speaker
And then she says, inhale, release, exhale, zip up, brace, there's lots of arrows, like all this stuff. But so what she's doing though is like, she's doing a body weight, single leg hinge with the ball addings, like a ton of stability, right? And if you go further into the copy, she writes, it can be hard to understand how to trigger this deep core.
00:43:29
Speaker
Musculature, it's one of the most common questions I get. So obviously her students think it's important to have the deep core musculature turned on. And so a huge part of deep core work, she's separating out the TA from all the other core muscles suggesting that you can engage it in isolation from the others because we're just engaging the deep core here.
00:43:53
Speaker
So she says that the deep core is a tricky one. You can't always flex like you can another muscle like the bicep or even the rectus abs. The rectus abs are the more superficial muscles.
00:44:05
Speaker
it's more complicated than that. I think one of the reasons she thinks it's more complicated than that is because the TA actually doesn't move bones. It creates a cavity compression. It reduces the volume of your abdominal cavity. That has a very important purpose, which is to maybe vomit or cough or fart, sneeze, poop, all these things. It's really helpful to be able to
00:44:28
Speaker
push things like air and stuff out of your body and vomit as needed. But it doesn't actually move a joint. So it is hard to engage it because you have to do things like imagine squeezing your hip bones together or like trying your navel.
00:44:44
Speaker
to your spine, right? Your navel is literally where you had your umbilical cord like you were attached to your mother, right? And so it's like something on your skin that you're now moving your skin towards your spine, right? It's also not a joint. In all fairness, it is tough to engage the TA. You have to use some interesting cues, but here's what she writes. It's all about the press back into the wall with her foot, a nice hip hinge with a flat back,
00:45:11
Speaker
and really trying to envision squeezing your hip bones together. This is physically not possible, but can absolutely help get that mind-muscle connection and trigger the deep abs to start firing. Hang on a second. I'm going to make a noise because I'm standing up because I want to try this and see what actually happens. Okay.
00:45:27
Speaker
Bonus points if you can execute a pelvic floor contraction with it. So now we've brought in TA, we've brought in pelvic floor contraction. She's still, by the way, she's still just doing a body weight single leg hinge. Here's the kicker, a huge part of deep core work for a stronger and flatter tummy.
00:45:53
Speaker
is this mind muscle connection, being able to focus on the muscle to be worked and actually work it, not just go through the motions. So here's where I think we get kind of to the bottom of another purpose that navel to spine might be serving, which is to create a flatter stomach. Okay, Sarah's doing the exercise.
00:46:16
Speaker
She's coming back. Here's what I'm going to report my findings from the field. Here's what I found in my research, folks. N equals 1. Because I started to be like, well, is the change in position enough to trigger the amount of transversus abdominis activation that you would just automatically would get so as to not lose your guts out the front of your body? There's some amount of tension that it would just turn on from the fact that you've gone from vertical to horizontal.
00:46:46
Speaker
You would think. So I tried just doing a basic good morning with both feet on the ground and it was coming on a bit, but there's no huge need for it to come on because there's no weight. There's no external load. So then I was like, okay, well, what is this foot on the wall doing? All the foot on the wall was doing was just making me push both of my legs harder into the floor and the wall so that I didn't fall over.
00:47:09
Speaker
As a result, that tensioning of my legs transferred some probably cross the myofascial connections into my body that maybe turned my core on a little bit more, but it didn't really happen.
00:47:27
Speaker
It had nothing to do with what my trunk was doing. I could also do that and completely relax my abdominal muscles, right? So all of it's a bit weird. It's a bit weird. I feel like the real tell is when she's like, we're doing this for a flatter tummy. Yes. As soon as somebody says flatter tummy, I'm like, yeah. Well, here's a question now. Is she suggesting
00:47:48
Speaker
that we're going to do a hinge, which is arguably like much more about the back muscles. Sorry to tell you because the gravity is going to try to pull you into flexion. So you're going to have to work anti-flexion, which is just like basically the same thing as working extension, your extensors. The flatter tummy part is where I really kind of, I want to zero in on that because I think there's a lot of this navel to spine cueing.
00:48:12
Speaker
is the idea is that we're gonna get long and lean. We're gonna create a flatter tummy. We're gonna straight, we're gonna, muscles are modeling clay. And if we strengthen the muscle by creating an abdominal cavity shape that we find is ideal, then the muscles will like shorten in that position and keep our abdomen flatter. Well, you know what this reminds me of? When? You know what this reminds me of as you hold your face. What this reminds me of a ton is when people use those
00:48:41
Speaker
I don't know if you've seen it, you saw it as much in New York. I'm assuming probably in Huntsville you're not seeing a ton of this, but we see them here all the time. Thank you, Kardashians. Something called a waist trainer. Do you know about waist trainers? Oh, waist trainers are essentially, and you'll see like, Laurel and I went for a hike this morning, and I was surprised we didn't see any waist trainers on the hike, but you'll see people exercising and wearing them, and essentially it's like a piece of elastic that goes around the middle of your body and pulls it in.
00:49:09
Speaker
It trains exactly nothing. Well, sometimes this is a product that's sold on Amazon for women after they have a baby to fix their diastasis recti. That's not what people are using it. There's a ton of evidence of stress. It does not help with that. No, it doesn't help with that. And you know what else it doesn't do? Train your waist in any way because all that's happening is you're getting this external assist that's pulling your waist in. If anything, it's making your waist less trained because it doesn't have to do any work. Do people think they're made of Play-Doh, Sarah? Yes.
00:49:35
Speaker
They do. They seem to. I think they really do. If a Kardashian tells me they're made of plate up, then it's got to be true. Right. It's got to be true. So yeah, this idea of like long and lean pulling the waist in, it all goes hand in hand with this like posture and, you know, your, the shape of your body and whether it is worthy or unworthy, whether it is appropriate or shameful,
Core Engagement in Pilates
00:49:58
Speaker
right? It's this very ridiculous black and white, you know, correct, incorrect.
00:50:05
Speaker
that is not what it means to be a human. Also, I want to also back up and just say that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the naval to spine cue because I think it's really easy that while we're pointing out some type of alignment dogma or cue dogma that we're simultaneously being dogmatic and going, because this cue is
00:50:26
Speaker
misapplied or overused or done too much or misunderstood, we should just never, ever, ever say these words again. And then the words get banned and people get canceled on social media if they even suggest. Like I'm not going to cancel this woman, right? Like I'm not going to even say her name, but like, I think there's a time and place for navel to spine. Let me give you an example of when I would cue it. Great. It's one of my favorite cues that I give. I pat myself on the shoulder or maybe on my navel.
00:50:55
Speaker
So baby Cobra, right? Someone's lifting up into the back end. Okay. And I want them to find less lumbar extension and I want them to find more thoracic extension. So I might say something like.
00:51:11
Speaker
pretend your bare tummy is in contact with a cold floor, what would it do? It would like recoil away from it, right? And sometimes that cue, navel to spine, something that's like meant for a low load activity like baby Cobra can go a long way toward helping people disassociate slightly like thoracic extension from lumbar extension, especially if they're kind of just the name of the game here.
00:51:35
Speaker
is just go straight into their lower back and do a lot of lumbar extension and not get the opportunity to work on that thoracic mobility and that thoracic extensor strength. Or even this idea that I might, I'll tell people about activating through their abdominal muscles, not as an alternative to using your back, but so that the activation through the trunk
00:51:56
Speaker
is what? Circumferential. So it's balanced. So it's not just your back muscles doing everything and your core is completely off. And another thing I'll say about Pilates is that I spent a lot of years of my yoga practice just hammering away at yoga and found that I was developing more pain sensitivity to more positions. And then I would go to Matt Pilates and leave those classes feeling wonderful. And I was cued
00:52:23
Speaker
probably navel to spine to kingdom come in so many different ways. I had excellent teachers teaching these classes to me and whatever it was that I was doing in the navel to spine was not causing me any problems at all. So again, we kind of come back to this idea of like, what are you doing a lot of? What are you not doing a lot of? And it's sometimes the simplest solution to feeling better is just do more of what you're not doing. So the same people who are
00:52:49
Speaker
constantly doing navel to spine might benefit from just not always doing that all the freaking time, right? Let it go. When I used to teach at Equinox, every now and then they would, I would sub for a class that was a Pilates class, a Matt Pilates class. And I was not a Pilates instructor at that point, but they were sort of like, Sarah knows enough core stuff, just toss in a bunch of core and it's fine. And one of the things that I loved to do in that class was to make them do Udeana Bunda.
00:53:18
Speaker
Because my reasoning was that they probably were spending a lot of time tensioning their abdominal muscles. And they should also learn how to let them go enough to do Udeanabunda. And I was also- Udeanabunda is wild. Yeah. And if you don't know what it is, it is a way to kind of overstretch your diaphragm. But what looks like happening is you're sucking your guts in like crazy, but you actually, it's the opposite. You have to relax all of your abdominal muscles for it to work properly.
00:53:43
Speaker
And to be fair, I was also doing it a little bit as a stunt because I wanted to come in and be like, you know, that's the Equinox model, rock their socks, right? You got to make them like, oh my God, wow, that sub was great. Like one of the ways you might get yourself fired or invited to stop working there.
00:54:00
Speaker
Is if like your numbers aren't up right that's that's a big thing so especially if you're subbing so anyway I would do that and at the same time then I would go into when I was teaching my whatever class probably yoga tune up or yoga tune up inspired class at that point and I would make them do some of the stuff I learned in Pilates because I like everybody here it's like that ad for Reese's peanut butter cups when
00:54:20
Speaker
from 1980 whenever, and the guy walks around a corner and all of a sudden he sticks his chocolate Twix or whatever in this, someone's just walking along with a jar of peanut butter like you do. And they're like, your peanut butter got on my chocolate, right? So like you want your peanut butter and your chocolate to both be happening. You want the Reese's cups of body capability. I love it. I don't recommend navel to spine when you're squatting heavy though, I just want to say.
00:54:47
Speaker
Oh, yes, no. I mean, there's a time and a place for everything. I think that's what we're saying. Naval 2 spine included, there's a time and a place for everything. Speaking of times and places for everything, this is a good opportunity for us to actually talk about our six month progressive overload, strength training, weight lifting, bone density course.
Strength Training Course Promotion
00:55:11
Speaker
Don't you? Yeah, I do.
00:55:14
Speaker
bone density course is a six month course and it includes a six month program within it. It also includes bonus courses like strength training 101 and all about osteoporosis. But the bulk of the content is really the program and the program is six months because why Sarah? Because six months is
00:55:35
Speaker
in the research when you are able to start seeing changes to bone density. So if you are going to start doing this kind of progressive overload, no matter what weight you're starting from, you're not going to see any change in your bone density typically until you're past that six month mark. Right. And so we need at least that amount of time to make a change.
00:55:56
Speaker
It's properly programmed, which means that we start you where you are. So in the beginning, we're going to be focusing a ton on techniques. So you might be lifting what would be more moderate or even lightweight in the beginning for you so that you can really dial in the technique of of working with a barbell. Now it is a barbell.
00:56:14
Speaker
specific program, but that doesn't mean that you can't take a lot of the information we're sharing and apply it to using dumbbells and kettlebells. You certainly can. We just simply believe that a barbell is the best, most logical piece of equipment that you would want to become familiar with if you want to be able to progressively overload for life. And so this is the other thing too. This is a six month program, but that's not to say that you are going to
00:56:40
Speaker
ideally lift weights for six months and then stop. This is basically us helping you get started over a course of time where you will have ample time to learn how to use weights, learn how to strength train, learn how to progressively overload, learn how to progress toward lifting heavy weights. And barbells are the best way to be able to progress for life, but then we want you to keep going when this program ends. And we'll give you ways of continuing to use our program
00:57:10
Speaker
to continue going, right? So it doesn't end at six months. It's something that we can continue to cycle back on and use. You know what it reminds me of? Sorry to break in. Yeah, yeah. But I was just thinking while you were talking about that, it reminds me of like, you know when you see a parent helping a child learn how to ride a bicycle with no training wheels? And I mean, I remember this. This is how I learned. My dad held on to the back of the bike.
00:57:33
Speaker
And I started pedaling and he's running alongside me and at some point he lets go and I kept going, right? And it's that moment where like, you don't know as the person I'm like, when did that happen, right? So in that metaphor analogy story, Laurel and I are like your parent. We're going to hold on to you.
00:57:48
Speaker
Is that weird? We're going to hold onto your bike, your metaphorical bike, and we are going to hold your hand the whole way through, and then our goal is to make ourselves no longer necessary so that you can then continue to work on your strength for the rest of your life. The course is called Lift for Longevity for a Reason. Yeah, and two things that are really important. One, you own the course when you buy it, so it's yours forever. It'll always live in your computer.
00:58:14
Speaker
And then number two is that this course is structured in a way that we have not encountered any others. First of all, there are no like six month programs that are guided with live option and recorded follow along classes included with it.
00:58:29
Speaker
a rude awakening for me when I was going from yoga into the strength training world. And I wanted to get stronger. I was like, oh, I need a program. OK, I finally got that through my head. I can't just be one-off classes all the time. So then I invested in a program, and I got emailed a PDF. I was like, wait, where's the program? Where's the content? That was literally all you got. The PDF. So the PDF was linked to videos on Vimeo.
00:58:48
Speaker
So yes, you're like, how do I do a bent over row? Let me click over to this one-minute demo video on Vimeo. And look, that's a fine way to be given a program. The thing is that it's actually very, very different, though, than how yoga practitioners
00:59:05
Speaker
and even Pilates teachers are used to being taught movement. We're used to going to a class where there's a group of people and being guided step by step through what to do in the class.
00:59:19
Speaker
I think that it's more yoga slash Pilates teacher friendly to do the course the way we're doing it. We're offering one live class a week. You don't have to attend live. It's all going to be recorded. We're going to ask you to strength train more than one time a week, but we are not only going to provide you with a demo video of every single exercise that you're going to do in the program, we're also going to provide you with a full length class of every single workout in the program.
00:59:44
Speaker
So you will always have the option to just watch a quick demo and workout on your own like the rest of the strength training world is doing, or you will always have the option to take the workouts as though it were kind of like a yoga class or a Pilates class for it to be a guided follow along experience.
01:00:00
Speaker
I cannot find anything like this, not to mention the fact that we have a physical therapist and a strength coach teaming up to provide you with this content. It's Sarah and I. We have a breadth of knowledge and a breadth of expertise and a breadth of qualifications that it's
01:00:21
Speaker
you also don't always find, right? So we have something for you that will give you a taste test of what this program is going to be, which is a free webinar. And the webinar is just basically a workout. The way this workout will work is that you'll show up with whatever equipment you have. So if you have barbells, great. If you just have a broomstick, that's also good. And maybe if you have a couple dumbbells and kettlebells, we're going to take you through the experience of a workout. We're also going to do
01:00:46
Speaker
exactly what we're going to do in the course, which is leave time at the end of the workout for Q&A. We're also going to do exactly what we're going to do in the course, which is provide individuals with form check feedback and take questions. So it's going to be very interactive and basically an exact replica or slash it's going to be an example of how this program
01:01:09
Speaker
will be for you to take in its longer form. This is a free webinar. You get a 30-day replay. It's happening on September 14th if you want to attend live. If you can't attend live, again, you will get emailed the replay.
01:01:21
Speaker
You'll be able to take the class a couple of times, get a feel for what it's going to be like. And then knowing that's the bulk of the content, like you'd be able to make a better decision about whether or not this of course is something that you want to invest in. Absolutely. So alternatives to this are obviously like to get one-on-one personal training sessions, which I will never not recommend. It's a great idea. But in terms of cost, sometimes that can be a major valid objection, like people just don't have
01:01:47
Speaker
a couple hundred dollars every month lying around to pay their personal trainer. And I think that that warrants longer discussion. If you don't have that type of money, the cost of this longer form course that we're presenting to you
01:02:01
Speaker
is a fraction of that cost with a lot of this. It's not the same thing as working with a personal trainer, but it has a lot of the same benefits because there's that live real time personal feedback component to it. So if that's interesting to you, make sure you go to our show notes where you can sign up
01:02:19
Speaker
to get the Zoom link for our webinar that is taking place on September 14th. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it too. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. And the other thing is like, if you have been listening to this podcast, this is who Laurel and I are. There's nothing, this is not like, like these people are showing up in that class as well. So just get ready for... They'll be there. These people will be there. By they we mean we. We'll be there.
01:02:43
Speaker
So, I want to talk about breathing in the yoga world because there's a part of it that we haven't really discussed.
Yoga Breathing Techniques as Exercises
01:02:52
Speaker
In the yoga world, there are specifically exercises or techniques taught that are about breathing that are pranayama exercises. It's one of the eight limbs of yoga, right, is pranayama.
01:03:05
Speaker
And most of the pranayama exercises are pretty obviously things that you're not trying to do all day long. Like for example, Kapalabhati breathing, that breath of fire when you're doing this very forceful exhale out your nose. I don't know how you would do that all day long, you literally can't.
01:03:33
Speaker
You can't. But Kapalabhadi's frickin' cool, but it's not something you can do for a long time. Same with Bhastrika, or Bhastrika, where you are lifting and lowering your arms along the timing with your inhale and exhale. Well, I do that when I want to jump in and interrupt Sarah. Lift and lower your arms? I mean, mostly you just jump in and interrupt. You're right.
01:03:56
Speaker
And then also, nadi shodana, alternate nostril breathing, which I also really like, right? But you're not sitting around, I'm not talking to my patients in the clinic while I'm doing alternate nostril breathing and somehow also typing notes on with my other hand. So even like a timed breathing where you're doing inhale for four, hold for three, exhale for seven, something like that, you're not doing that in line at Trader Joe's. It's not happening.
01:04:23
Speaker
I think that's pretty obvious to people. I don't think people are confused about that because they contain certain elements that are, you know, for want of a better term, they're exaggerated and they don't seem like they should be happening all the time. Right. And let's just, it's always, it's never the wrong time to remind ourselves and our listeners about the Westernization of indigenous yoga practices like pranayaba that become, that are stolen.
01:04:47
Speaker
and renamed and repurposed because most everybody's heard of box breathing, right? That supposedly the army came up with or the Navy SEALs or something. Research, so this technique gets renamed. Research is done on the technique with its new westernized name and then that is found to be useful and then it erases the indigenous origin of the technique. You see this
01:05:11
Speaker
Everywhere if you start looking so whenever I'm talking about anything like a pranayama practice I always want to make that point that you know, it's coming with it It's what I know of it is how I was taught it by fellow Americans, right?
01:05:26
Speaker
So just as a general reminder. So people are not confused about these techniques, or if they are confused about it, the confusion is not, I should be doing this all day long. What people are getting confused about is in the teaching of things like diaphragmatic breathing, or three-part breathing, or belly breathing. And here's the thing, and this was another post that pissed off a bunch of people.
01:05:48
Speaker
and excited some other people, which is my favorite kind of post that I made, but all breathing, Laurel, is diaphragmatic breathing. The only way that it's not is if you had an upper cervical level spinal cord injury and you are on a ventilator because you no longer have control of your diaphragm. And I'm assuming most of our listeners are not in that position, right?
01:06:11
Speaker
So we want all breathing to involve our diaphragm. That's a good thing. It's a main muscle of breathing. There is no reason to try to inhibit it while we're breathing. But where I think it's all gone wrong, Peep Tong, is with techniques where you're separating out these areas of your torso or you're emphasizing
01:06:27
Speaker
one area over another area to breathe from. First I poof my belly, then I inflate circumferentially my rib cage, then I go all the way up top to my clavicular region, and then I exhale slow and steady. It's like a wave. I love this way of breathing briefly in a yoga class. It's a good way to tap into the felt experience of breathing and the movement that takes place if you control it in this way.
01:06:55
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I, I thought for a while that was, I was supposed to breathe like that all the time, all the time. Or, you know, people will talk about, even if they're people say like, you know, let's, let's do some diaphragmatic breathing or let's do some belly breathing.
01:07:08
Speaker
in an attempt to get people to use their diaphragm more when they're breathing. But I've seen people who are supposedly, quote unquote, belly breathing or trying to, and all they do is kind of just push their belly out with their muscles, which if you try it, I don't think actually feels very good at all to just push your guts out. Definitely can't get a very deep breath. No. And here's the thing, if I actually need to oxygenate my tissues because I just did something like run really fast or if I lifted some heavy weights and or whatever it is that I did that was actually like
01:07:38
Speaker
more than moderately exertional in nature, is that a word? I don't know. Sure. Is that I'm not belly breathing. No, right? And so when we think that belly breathing is how we should always be, we start to run up against this conflict of like how our body actually wants to breathe and then how we think we should be breathing. And then we become very confused. We potentially also become, you know,
01:08:09
Speaker
you know, this idea of like, oh, well, people need to use their diaphragm more, they need to breathe lower into their body more or that kind of idea. And like, don't be so much of a chest breather, right? People that like breathing into your upper ribs is demonized as like the worst part of your breathing that could possibly be. But what then what I see happen in the clinic, this is what was happening with my patients is they get the idea that breathing up in your chest is wrong. And the only way you should ever be trying to breathe is down in your belly. So they're like locking down their upper part of their body and
01:08:25
Speaker
in trying to breathe right. Pretty wacky breathers.
01:08:37
Speaker
trying to just somehow belly breathe. And then we say silly story-based things that everyone loves about how babies are so relaxed. Babies are belly breathers. Have you ever seen a baby breathing? And I always want to be like, that baby ain't got hardly no hard tissue in their bones. Actually, also, have you ever witnessed an adult acting like a baby? Because I have.
01:09:05
Speaker
It's not a good look. Or the other thing is this idea of three-part breathing that you just described, right? So breathing into the diaphragm and then allowing it to move like a wave into your rib cage and then into your chest. And I think it honestly requires a very high level of proprioception to be able to do that
01:09:28
Speaker
and not also be interfering with your regularly scheduled breathing, right? I think this idea of like, okay, well, let's just diaphragm breathe, and then we're gonna lock down the diaphragm and just chest breathe, which PS you can't actually do, and then you try to lock down your diaphragm and your chest and just collarbone breathe, and this idea of these different zones of breathing, but the part that seems to be missing overall from this kind of breathing versus the pranayama techniques that we
01:09:57
Speaker
naturally have a sense of like, this is not an all day activity. The part that seems to be missing is students are not getting the message that this is a technique. This is an exercise. This is style. This is a thing that we're doing right now.
01:10:12
Speaker
And then the rest of the time, you should just breathe normally. You should just not worry about breathing. Yes. Right? So, but instead some other messages, this, you know, wave of breathing is how you should be breathing and you're supposed to carry it with you throughout your
Cardiovascular Exercise and Breathing
01:10:29
Speaker
day. And anytime that you have a break, do your three-part breathing or something like that. And it's actually,
01:10:38
Speaker
Generating your breath from the bottom up is actually not how your body breathes, like just when you're trying to just breathe and not die, right? And the thing that I see a lot in the clinic is sometimes I see people who are really exclusively chest breathers in the clinic. And I'm like, all right, well, we need to stop holding so much tension in your stomach in the lower part of your body. Maybe that person is also naval to spining it.
01:11:03
Speaker
Laurel is about to jump in and say it and I beat her to it. But sometimes I see people who aren't letting their ribs expand for whatever reason and they just end up breathing really shallowly, but belly breathing is not necessarily the fix for tension in my upper body because my upper body tension, that tension in their upper body may be what's causing or contributing to their neck pain, their shoulder pain, their low back pain, even their hip pain.
01:11:32
Speaker
Because some of that pain that they may have, if they're in pain, is going to be attributed to restriction through the rib cage. When anyone think of the rib cage. So Laurel, can I jump in and just make a point? Please make a lot of points. All right. So to go all the way back to the beginning of the episode where you talked about that gaseous exchange of the alveoli, that is the whole reason we breathe.
01:11:58
Speaker
is I don't think people realize it's not just about air going in and out of the lungs. It's about the molecules that are exchanged at the alveoli. Why do we have this gaseous exchange? Well, because we need to deliver oxygen to all the cells of our body so that they can conduct cellular respiration, so that they can go on living as the
01:12:20
Speaker
most foundational building block of any organism, a cell, right? So your muscles are made of cells. Everything's made up of cells, right? So we need to be able to, when we breathe, create this gaseous exchange and that goes way beyond respiration, that goes way beyond even what your heart is doing. It involves vasculature, it involves your arterial system. So here's where we have to talk about cardiovascular health and how
01:12:50
Speaker
sitting and breathing or lying down and breathing in any particular special way isn't going to make any type of dent in your body's ability to deliver oxygen to your tissues and for your tissues to be able to actually use that oxygen in an efficient manner. To do that, we have to challenge those systems in a meaningful way, aka we have to exercise, right?
01:13:14
Speaker
Specifically, we should probably engage in cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer worldwide of all people. I'll say that again. Cardiovascular disease kills more people than anything else worldwide.
01:13:27
Speaker
And 25% of people in the United States are currently meeting the physical activity guidelines set out by the CDC, which is pretty reasonable, right? Which is like engage in, is it like 75 minutes of high intensity cardiovascular activity or 150 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity? Why are they asking us to do this? They're asking us to do this to stave off chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease. But ultimately what they're helping us be able to do is oxygenate
01:13:56
Speaker
are tissues more efficiently. And this is the reason we breathe. So if you want to get better at breathing, if you want to breathe right, consider that you should maybe look beyond breathing practices to do that. And consider taking up some form of cardiovascular exercise.
01:14:16
Speaker
I'm going to tell you one thing you're going to learn real quickly if you haven't been doing a whole lot of cardio because I'm going to raise my hand and be like, that was me about a year ago when I was really only doing strength training. Me too. When you start challenging your cardiovascular system beyond what you typically do on a day-to-day basis, that
01:14:33
Speaker
you're going to stop controlling your breathing. Your body is going to just breathe the way it's going to breathe. And you're going to feel, hopefully, over time, really good after that cardiovascular exercise. Because there's all kinds of cool ways that your body adjusts itself during the exercise, even after the exercise, that kind of leave you with that really, the runner's high, right? We'll talk about the runner's high, the endorphins,
01:15:01
Speaker
There's more to it than that in terms of how oxygen continues to be delivered to your tissues at a more rapid rate or a higher than average rate even after you finish cardiovascular exercise and your breathing is different well after finishing cardiovascular exercise. Just to open up perspective around the role of breathing
01:15:23
Speaker
And taking it beyond the diaphragm, beyond the lungs, because we get really stuck in that area and we go like, is the diaphragm moving enough? Are the ribs moving enough? And it's like, it's actually body wide. And we don't actually get better at the body wide role that breathing plays if we're not challenging our whole body through cardiovascular.
01:15:45
Speaker
exercise absolutely and you know so if we think about it like the difference between a person if you visualize a person sitting and doing a breathing technique that is perhaps you know a lot of the breathing techniques like a pranayama the the kapalabhati or other pranayama techniques are
01:16:03
Speaker
aimed at doing things like exchanging all of the air inside the lungs for the quote-unquote fresh air, doing something that is supposedly improving lung function, but to your point, versus this idea of using cardiovascular activity that's going to raise your heart rate, which in turn is going to raise your breathing rate, all of those things playing off of each other, where actual tissue perfusion
01:16:28
Speaker
is taking place, not least of which, especially if you're doing cardiovascular exercise with your lower body involved, which most cardiovascular exercise is, you're getting that venous return from the movement of your ankles and your calf muscles. To Laurel's point, it's way more system-wide and it's a way more efficient and effective way to get more oxygen into your body
01:16:48
Speaker
different than sitting and doing a breathing technique. It's not also necessarily about getting more oxygen into your body. It's about conditioning your body to be able to actually use that oxygen. Yes. It's not to say also that sitting and doing a breathing technique is a waste of time because there are lots and lots of benefits beyond what's happening in your lungs. But I think especially in the world of yoga, we may sort of be like, oh yeah, I do my pranayama because that's how I work on my breathing. Yeah. Right? You're going to work on your breathing.
01:17:17
Speaker
But ultimately, ideally, your breathing is an automatic process that's happening without you working on it at all.
01:17:24
Speaker
It's increasing per demand, it's decreasing per demand, and you're not thinking about it.
Technology's Impact on Breathing
01:17:30
Speaker
There's also other common tensioning patterns that we see, not unrelated to yoga. In 2008, this writer, Linda Smith, coined the phrase email apnea or screen apnea. She was having issues with chronic respiratory infections.
01:17:49
Speaker
She started to practice this Butechio technique for breathing, which she found effective and I don't know it well enough. I know, I know roughly what it is, but it's basically a method that emphasizes like really slow, shallow breathing, which is useful for people who hyperventilate. It also emphasizes nasal breathing.
01:18:07
Speaker
But what she- I'm just going to jump in and say, I think there are a lot of non-evident space claims made around Botteco. A hundred. But like anything, it probably has a ton of value for certain people in certain situations. Yeah. Well, so this person was like, I have a respiratory infection chronically, therefore I need to practice breathing. So she went and found a breathing technique as opposed to like, oh, I should start walking faster.
01:18:30
Speaker
But what she noticed was that separately, when she was sitting in front of her computer or when she was on her phone, she would breathe really shallowly because now she started to pay attention to her breath. She would breathe really shallowly or even hold her breath and it wouldn't change until she got up and move around. She spent a bunch of time testing people around her. This is not formal research, but she was like, let me see if this is a thing. She found that of the people that she tried this out on, 80% of people were also holding their breath or breathing very shallowly in front of the computer.
01:19:00
Speaker
And there's other studies out there that support the idea that sitting and reading emails increases your stress. No shit. Which shockingly. Oh my God, that's never been my experience. No. And probably doesn't help you breathe better. No. I mean, it's a vicious cycle because like I'll be sitting there stressing out about something I'm staring at on my computer and then I'll notice that I'm breathing very shallowly.
01:19:21
Speaker
and then I'll notice that I feel stressed out because I'm not breathing. And so it's just like the cycle continues. Right. And I would guess, and this is completely a guess, that if you're spending a lot of time singing from the computer and breathing shallowly, it may not be automatic that you get up and start breathing more deeply. Or maybe you get off the computer and now you're looking at your phone. Maybe you take your phone into the bathroom. Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is we are asked to be pretty disconnected from our body in general for large portions of the day and sedentary.
01:19:50
Speaker
while conducting business through screen, right? It's not even human interaction. And so I guess this like makes me think about the biopsychosocial model of pain and of injury and makes me wonder if actually breathing is highly biopsychosocial and if getting really wrapped up in like the diaphragm and like belly breathing and it's just a super bio-centric way to look at breathing and that like when you tell people they're not breathing well, it's nocemic in nature because you're basically kind of tapping in to their sense of like,
01:20:19
Speaker
You know, good enough, smart enough. And God damn it, people will like me. Like I want to be liked and I want to be a good person and I want to do things correctly. And like you're telling them they're not breathing well. Are you actually negatively impacting their breathing by layering on this like critique on top of like one of their most basic fundamental like the oldest
01:20:40
Speaker
part of your brain controls your breathing, right? So like you're saying, okay, this like most fundamental nature of the way that you are alive right now is being done wrong. Are you
Prioritizing Health: Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition
01:20:50
Speaker
potentially operating outside of the biopsychosocial model of being a decent human being?
01:20:57
Speaker
I mean, everything around us is telling us that we're screwing up somehow, right? I'm not exercising enough. I'm not exercising the right way enough. I'm not lifting something enough, heavy enough, light enough. It's too light. It's too heavy. I'm not doing enough pranayama. I'm doing too much pranayama. I'm not doing enough cardio. I don't know that anybody's doing too much cardio. Maybe some people are. You know, there's always somebody out there to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, right?
01:21:24
Speaker
And, you know, my bottom line is, like I said at the beginning, we're all still here. So we're doing something right when it comes to our breathing, right? We're breathing enough to stay alive. And frankly, in this day and age, that's a bit of a miracle just in and of itself. I have a dream, but not nearly as big as Martin Luther King Jr.'s. Tell me your dream. My dream is if we could start focusing on the things that actually matter, okay? And stop dancing around, doing a jig.
01:21:52
Speaker
around the things that really maybe don't matter as much. So let me just say this. Here are the big three. Sleep enough, exercise enough, and eat well. Can we focus on that and maybe don't be all high and mighty telling people how to do that with a super judgmental tone or whatever? But can we leave things like posture and how people are breathing and all that stuff maybe doesn't
Breathing as a Natural Metronome
01:22:20
Speaker
Like, maybe it can be fine in a lot of different ways, and we don't have to nitpick the crap out of it. Because I don't find that very motivating. Well, and people will nitpick the crap out of your sleeping, your moving, and your eating. Fair. Fair. But I agree.
01:22:34
Speaker
It doesn't have to be complicated. None of those things have to be complicated. And we overcomplicate how people should be breathing. Yes. This is at the height of overcomplicating everything. I mean, this is like, making it more complicated in your breathing is the number one way to confuse a lot of people about their breathing. And let's just stop doing that. I agree.
01:22:56
Speaker
So Laurel, I'm assuming people ask you things like, how should I be breathing when I do this movement? Is that something that happens to you with your students? Yeah. A lot of times I just tell them to keep breathing and like they're breathing fine. Nice. Sometimes their question is more concerning because they have like pelvic floor dysfunction or something's going on there. And then I usually refer out in some way, shape or form, or I ask them like, okay, if you're, if you're strength training and you're bracing, like, what are you thinking about doing when you're doing that?
01:23:25
Speaker
Um, trying to kind of get to the bottom, like if they're bearing down, if they're, if they're like pushing down onto the pelvic floor. Um, sometimes people just want tips on how to like keep their trunk stuffer. Right. And so I'll teach them how to brace or I'll teach them how to exhale at the sticking point, or they just want something to focus on other strength training because they're yoga teachers slash practitioners. And they are really, they really like paying attention to their breath. They want strength training to feel more like yoga. They want it to be a mindfulness practice, in which case I'll give them that really super.
01:23:54
Speaker
easy thing to do, which is exhale at the sticking point. And I'll show them where that is in the exercise. It's like if you're doing the row, you would exhale here. If you're doing a dip, you would exhale here, right? If you're doing a deadlift, you would exhale here. And it helps give them some type of container or structure from which to operate. Also, breathing is a wonderful inner metronome. We know this about yoga, right? We use the ujjayi breath and the audible breath
01:24:20
Speaker
to kind of keep a metronome or a pacing or a rhythm or a tempo. Well, tempo plays a huge role in strength training, and your breathing can become similar to yoga, a form of inner metronome that you use to find an appropriate tempo for the reps that you're doing. So there's all kinds of reasons that I would actually give people advice about breathing, but I have not in many, many years saw someone and said, like, we need to work on your messed up breathing.
01:24:48
Speaker
Sometimes I notice people aren't breathing. I mean, they're holding their breath when they don't need to be. And I'll just remind them to keep breathing. Sometimes I notice that people aren't getting enough of a push at a certain point of a lift, like say it's a chest press. And I'll say, exhale to push.
01:25:06
Speaker
or if it's a pullover, I'm like rip the kettlebell off the floor as you exhale strongly to improve their performance. But I've become almost allergic to advice about breathing better because I think what it does is layer on top of a deeply, deeply ancient autonomic process, a level of anxiety and hypervigilance that is directly contradictory to breathing better.
01:25:34
Speaker
Amen. Why are you laughing? I thought that was really good. Thank you. I just get really worked up. You do, but you get worked up. And similarly, Laurel and I both, when we get worked up somehow, we also get more eloquent. I should have become. You would have been a dangerous politician. A really good cult leader. Fuck. You really would have. I think that's a t-shirt. I would have been a great cult leader. Just on the back.
01:25:55
Speaker
The way that I cue, thank you for asking, is like this. Basically, the only time that I interfere with people's breathing is similar to you if they're saying like, they're doing a deadlift, where should I be breathing with this? It's very easy. Exhale as you go, you know, or whatever. If we're doing a body weight exercise or a low load exercise with like a resistance band and I notice that the person's holding their breath, I'll be like, hey, don't forget to breathe, you know, same thing.
01:26:18
Speaker
When I work with someone who's having generally anywhere from like the neck to the pelvis pain, at some point, I'm going to investigate how they're breathing because there's a strong chance that they're doing something funky with their breathing that is either the source of some of their pain or contributing to some of their pain or they might be breathing differently because their nervous system has a sense that if they breathe any more deeply, it would make things more painful or you know,
01:26:46
Speaker
And so that's when I'm just trying to- Maybe they have a pneumothorax. Hopefully they don't have a pneumothorax. But usually what I'm- I'm just envisioning you like reaching across your desk, grabbing a pen and like- And then going, you're welcome. Does that feel better? Can you breathe now?
01:27:05
Speaker
Generally, what I'm trying to do is educate. People don't
Mindful Breathing and Societal Performance
01:27:10
Speaker
know a ton about their diaphragm, generally speaking. I'm focusing on helping them feel where their diaphragm is. If I'm going to teach someone about what is happening during breathing, I exclusively focus on the diaphragm. I don't worry about any of this other stuff. I have them put their hands on their lower ribs, or I put my hands there, and I'm like, this is where your diaphragm is.
01:27:31
Speaker
Notice how when you inhale it's expanding and when you exhale it's contracting. Let's just do this for a bit and then one of the things that I do is I very purposely don't look at people when they're like I I no no no because people when when you say to someone okay just breathe normally and then you're watching them that's the number one way comfortable eye contact and
01:27:54
Speaker
Well, no, not eye contact because I'm looking at their body but like that's one way to get people to breathe weird is to tell them just breathe normally and then you're looking at what they're doing, right? So, I do a lot of my breathing assessment without letting people know that's what I'm doing. Like it might be right in the very beginning if the first time they lay down or I might be talking about something else and having them answer a question but I'm just kind of out of the corner of my eye watching what's going on in their body.
01:28:18
Speaker
And so the big part of it for me is about not making them feel self-conscious about their breathing, but just be like, hey, where's your diaphragm? Feel where it is. Put your hands on it. I will turn around and be like, tap, tap, tap, tap on the computer like I'm taking notes. And I watch what they do. And I see if they're able to execute that in a very basic way. And for some people, just that is more than enough. And there's no need to overcomplicate it. So I'll give them like, OK, for your homework, I just want you to, every now and then,
01:28:45
Speaker
put your hands on your ribs, and take some breaths and try to move your hands. And that's it. Good. Right? It made me think of this phrase, performing breathing, and how I think that might be a really good way of summarizing the weird breathing that you are seeing of patients coming into your room because they think that the breathing they're doing in a yoga class is the right way. So they perform that for you. And I have a confession to make, which is that when I go to the doctor and the doctor uses the stethoscope
01:29:13
Speaker
to check in with how my lungs sound, I will sometimes perform breathing. And I have been told by a couple of MDs, like, just breathe normally. I instinctively, it's true. I'm a performer. As soon as we put the stethoscope, I'm like, and then he move and I'm like, oh shit, wait, I'm not done with that exit. I'm taking like the world's biggest breath. I annoyed a doctor once because my exhale went on for too long.
01:29:37
Speaker
And I think that literally the doctor was like, I've got other patients you need to, let's, let's hurry this up. Could you please for the love of God, just exhale. And in all fairness, like this idea that we need to perform breathing, like is kind of similar to the way we perform posture. Yeah. We pinch our shoulder blades together and we stand up straight. It might be similar to how we perform the voice of a yoga teacher, how we perform, how we perform good parenting in front of our friends, right?
01:30:06
Speaker
So it's all in service of being good enough, smart enough, and God darn it, people will like me. And I think what we do as teachers when we do a service for our students is we help them understand that they're enough just the way they are.
01:30:19
Speaker
That they're fine. That's right. You're fine. You're fine. I would like to bottom line this episode. Great. Can you turn bottom line into a verb? For your day to day, just breathe. You're doing it fine. You're getting enough air in. You're alive. Don't you have better things to think about, first of all? Probably. Yeah. So just focus on that. But just, I mean, truly, we all get very wound up about doing everything right. And the fact that you're breathing means you're doing it right. So you're fine.
01:30:48
Speaker
Feel free to practice pranayama or other breathing practices. Just make sure they are specific to that moment of practice and are not interfering with the automatic process of breathing that you're doing the rest of the time. Well said. Feel free also to do more cardiovascular activity if you're really interested in things like tissue perfusion. When you are lifting weight, you may choose to exhale at the sticking point slash effort. You may choose to brace.
01:31:18
Speaker
when seems necessary based on the load. Are there any other bottom line things you wanna say or did I get them all? Thank you, Adam, cool. All right, well, I hope you enjoyed this episode about breathing and bracing and you feel like you're not gonna obsess about how you breathe for the rest of the day, but if you do, just take some deep breaths here and there and don't worry about it.
01:31:44
Speaker
You can check out our show notes for links to references we mentioned in this podcast. You can also visit the Movement Logic website where you can get on our mailing list. And please, if you are interested in taking a free, did we mention it's free? Oh yeah, it's free. Free, like a half of our stuff, free live weightlifting class with... Yes, there will be a replay. You will get a replay. Yes, if you can't make it live, you can also do the replay. Either way, you can make it live and do the replay.
01:32:14
Speaker
Sign up for that. Show notes, link in show notes. I think that's everything. And what's going to happen is we are going to see you next week.