Why Breathing Is Important (besides the obvious)

Lemme talk to you for a second about breathing, y'all. 1. Venal return pump: you know how the heart pumps blood away from the heart to the arteries? Well, when it’s time to make the return trip through the venioles to the veins back to the heart to get re-oxygenated, that no longer gets the job done. The blood slows down so much in the capillary beds in order for oxygen exchange to happen with body tissues that once it reaches the veins it can’t get the speed back up on its own. (Heart–>arteries–>capillary beds–>veins–>heart is how blood circulates.)

So the body relies on other pumps. In the limbs, muscle movements contribute to venal return–but that only gets it into the vena cava, a giant blood vessel in the torso. (It's the blue guy on the left below.)

From there, one of the main ways that de-oxygenated blood gets back to the heart is through what we call “belly breathing.” You see that thing in the top of the abdomen that looks kinda like a church ceiling? That’s the diaphragm muscle. When you breathe into your belly, you’re not actually breathing into your belly: you’re contracting your diaphragm, which a) allows the bottom portions of your lungs to expand and fill all the way, and b) presses down on your stomach, intestines, liver, and the rest of your guts, causing them to swell outwards.

This also presses on the inferior vena cava, which squishes blood towards the heart like toothpaste out of a tube.

tl;dr: breathing improves blood circulation.

2. Lymphatic pump: there’s this thing called the lymph system (also called the immune system). It’s kinda like the circulatory system in shape, except it functions to filter toxins out of our bodies. You know lymph nodes, right? Those little bumps in your neck, armpits, and groin that get swollen when you’re sick? Well, they’re swollen because they’re working to fight off whatever pathogen you’ve got in you. There’s a whole network of vessels that carry crap to the nodes in order to be filtered.

Lymph is a gooey mess of proteins and pathogens that are sorta hanging out in the body tissue and eventually gets picked up by the lymph vessels, a delicate network that acts as a kind of sewage system for the body, moving the lymph through various cleaning points (the lymph nodes) that are full of white blood cells that attack and kill the pathogens before it dumps the filtered and (hopefully) purified result back into our heart. Unfortunately the lymph system doesn’t have its own pump either, so it, too, relies heavily on breathing to return filtered and clean lymph fluid back to the circulatory system. This improves the lymph system’s ability to fight off pathogens.

tl;dr: breathing improves the function of your immune system and overall ability to fight diseases.

3. Improved sleep and relaxation: deep breathing has been shown to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls all the automatic or involuntary things that happen in our body like organ movements, hormone releases, etc. The parasympathetic side controls things like rest, relaxation, digestion, and sleep; the sympathetic side controls fight-or-flight response. We tend to live our lives on the sympathetic side, with lots of stress and work. Unfortunately that leads to the release of tons of a vicious little hormone called cortisol that SCREWS. UP. EVERYTHING. Like, if you’re running from a tiger it’s great, it does all sorts of things to the body to make it more efficient at fight-or-flight, but it also does awful things to pretty much every body system in the process. This is why stressed-out people get sick, can’t sleep, develop heart problems, have higher rates of neurological and mental disorders, get cancer, get diabetes…Google practically any disease + “cortisol” and there’s a link. I’m serious.

Breathing can change that. The way and amount that we breathe has been shone to drop us out of fight-or-flight and into rest-and-relax. This is why deep breathing helps with anxiety: when you’re anxious you’re locked in the sympathetic nervous system response, but deep breathing drops you into parasympathetic response and tells your body, hey, it’s all cool, man.

tl;dr: breathing improves everything.

The 5 Things A Massage Therapist Will Probably Tell You To Do In Order To Stop Hurting

1. “Shoulderblade kisses” aka scapula retraction exercise. You know that spot between your shoulderblades that gets tense all the time? Well, it’s not actually tense: it’s stretched. Those are your rhomboids and the pain they experience is the price we pay for using a computer, studying, driving a car, texting, and any other activity that involves our arms being out in front of us. That position brings our shoulders and our shoulderblades forward into protraction. That stretches out the rhomboids and causes them to tense up in an effort to counteract our slump.

What do? Take your arms out to the sides, Jesus-style. Now bend your elbows and try to bring them behind your back. Your forearms should still be out to the sides. You’ll kind of look like you’re trying to pick a fight with someone. Do 25 of these and you should be able to feel those rhomboids getting stronger, pulling your shoulders back where they should be.

2. “Write the alphabet with your nose” aka neck exercises.

Stiff neck? Tension headaches? You might be tempted to stretch. Don’t. Necks are super-prone to adhesions and trigger points, both of which can actually get worse if you stretch without warming up the muscles first. Next time you wake up with neck pain, try exercising it instead of stretching.

What do? My favorite is the alphabet exercise, in which you pretend the tip of your nose is a pencil and write the alphabet with it. Start off small with A and get bigger until the Z is huge. That takes your neck through a lot of different motions.

3. “Play superman” aka back extension exercises.

Hand-in-hand with the shoulder slump is the back curve. This usually presents as pain in the mid-back on either or both sides of the spine, in what’s called the erector spinae group (or ESGs in massage lingo). True to their Latin, the ESGs hold us upright–but when we’re slumping forward all the time they, like the rhomboids, get stretched out and weakened. Then when we go to lift something too heavy and bend over instead of using our legs, we get that eeeeeeak feeling in our back that is the ESGs informing us that this shit is not on.

What do? Lie on your front with your arms out to the sides. The picture above is kind of advanced: feel free to not have your arms out so far above your head, I only have my arms at a ninety-degree angle with my shoulders, frankly. Start off with maybe 20 reps of that motion and work your way up to 50 and arms straight out. Don’t overwork the muscles, but get them going.

4. “Cobra pose” aka psoas stretch.

You ever get that pain in your low back from sitting in a chair for a long time? That’s your psoas being a jerk. This stretch is a natural transition from the superman exercises. Really, it stretches a whole lot of things that need it, but especially the psoas muscles. The psoas attaches to the fronts of the vertebrae in the small of your back and run down through the pelvis to end up on the insides of your legs. It’s a waist flexor, which means that all that time you spend sitting down is teaching it to be short. Then when you go to stand up, it wants to STAY short instead of stretching, and the result is a sharp, powerful tug on your lumbar vertebrae and a helluva lot of low back pain.

What do? Lie on your front and lift your torso until you are propped up on your elbows. You should feel a stretch in your abdomen. If you don’t, go up onto your hands like the figure to the right.

If you still don't feel a stretch, try doing this. Then get the hell away from me. What's wrong with you, do you not have a freaking spine??

5. “Foam rolling your IT band” aka WHY GOD WHY DOES IT HURT??

I don’t know who made that picture but it is 100% accurate. See, there’s this swath of connective tissue (think tendons and ligaments) that runs down the sides of both your thighs from your hips to your knees, called the Iliotibial Band, or IT band or ITB for short. The ITB, being sticky-wicky connective tissue, loves to get tangled up in everything around it, which is primarily the hamstrings and the quads. The adhesions that form along the whole length of the ITB prevent both these muscles groups from relaxing, and leads to all sorts of painful things, from torn hamstrings to kneecaps getting out of alignment and wearing down cartilage (thus necessitating knee replacements) to hip issues (gluteus maximus aka “the butt” feeds into the ITB and tugs on the sacro-iliac joints). Basically the ITBs want to fuck up your entire lower body.

What do? Well, if you’ve got a high pain threshold like the lady with the rictus grin in the picture, you can buy a foam roller and plop down on it like she is, then roll back and forth to your heart’s screaming, agonized content. If, however, your IT band is as sensitive as most people’s, I recommend a) taking a hot shower/bath before rolling, as it makes the ITB more pliable, or b) getting a hard plastic water bottle (one that won’t crack and has a tight lid!!), filling it up with warm water, and using that instead. You can  simply sit in a chair and rub it up and down your legs from hip to knee. Do it for about five minutes each day and that will relax the IT band as well as loosen the adhesions to the hamstrings and quadricep muscles. Stretch both those muscle groups afterwards for maximum benefit!

Again, these are just the things that I’ve found to be most helpful for my clients. I take no responsibility if you injure yourselves actually doing these things, and especially no responsibility if you actually decide to foam roll your IT band. Seriously, that shit hurts.