Breathe Your Way Through Movement

Written By Cency Van Den Dool

Breathing, we all do it, but can we do it better?

We are so blessed that there are so many places holding breathwork amongst our northern beaches community. With this trend we are getting positively curious about how to harness the power of breath for better function, better recovery, better movement and even better sleep hygiene.

So what’s all the hype?

We’ve heard of the Ice Man, the famous methods of Wim Hof. The Dutchman who has adapted traditional breathing methods from across different parts of the world. Using them to optimise his immune function and longevity. He’s conquered extreme cold temperatures with only his skin to protect him. We’ve been inspired by the way he’s looked at health, and now everyone has tried his breathing techniques to upgrade their immune function. 

There are so many different ways to manipulate our breathing to benefit our performance. Another to be aware of is nasal breathing. Famously, over the last few years James Nester has studied the benefits of nasal breathing and the deficits of mouth breathing. To sum it all up, his studies have shown how much more oxygen efficient we are when nasal breathing. From recovering faster after training, to encouraging nasal breathing to improve sleeping; we can enhance our oxygen efficiency and reduce the rate of inflammation in our cells just from filtering our air intake properly.

So, if you have caught yourself occasionally mouth breathing while concentrating behind your desk, try these methods. There is a likelihood you tend to sleep and train with the same tendencies. 

Historically, many breathing traditions have developed ways to create heat in our body, down regulate the nervous system, calm our thoughts, rewire our brain, reduce inflammation and amplify our strength just to name a few. We see a lot of these in yogic type practices like ujjayi pranayama (ocean breath), kumbhaka pranayama (breathing retention), kapalabhati pranayama (fire breathing), nadi shodhana pranayama (alternative nostril breathing) and simhasana (lion’s breath).


What might be holding your breathing back?

  • How you breath when you run and train - paradoxical / upwardly respirating, upper posterior respirating

  • Functional deficiencies, such as tightness in your diaphragm, pelvic floor, jaw, intercostals, scalenes and clavicle (front of the neck) or serratus posterior inferior muscles (lower rib muscles)

  • Physical dysfunction, such as polyps or deviated septum, sleep apnea, asthma

  • C-Section scarring - inhibiting your pelvic floor from working alongside your diaphragm

  • Anaemia - iron carries oxygen to your blood cells, hence low iron can correlate to how you might be breathing

  • illness, allergies, mould exposure


What are some symptoms of poor breathing quality?

  • Breathing up into the top section of your lungs. For instance, it is quite common for runner to breathe into the upper back when exerted. This changes your running posture, but more importantly your lung capacity. 

  • Mouth breathing, catching your breath.

  • Feeling fatigued after a night’s sleep or poor recovery after training. You might hold onto tightness or inflammation more easily.


Can massage help?

Not only can massage help release the diaphragm and the tight muscles we overuse for breathing efficiently, it can also help with our understanding of where these muscles lie in our body. Ie our proprioception. When we are receiving a massage we are helping our brain map out where our muscles are around our bodies, just as much as exercise can. 

Below are some great techniques for self release you can use at home that will assist your breathing.

How can we actively use this to move better?

There are a few amazing techniques used in pilates and also in singing and wind instrument use that create a much more effective way to support our breathing. They also allow us to stabilise through the rest of our spine. Although with singing and other musicians these techniques are used to project our voice and breath, the way they understand the inner workings of their muscles and lungs is something we can all learn from to enhance how we use our breath during exercise. 

To understand how to control where we breath from when we’re active, we have to understand how to harness our techniques when we are relaxed too. This means a functioning diaphragm.

Lets try DIAPHRAGMATIC BREATHING to start. This simple breathing technique may seem basic, but for a lot of us we are so used to using our upper chest muscles to breath due to closed postures like desk work, we block off the ability to use our diaphragm. 

Next stop, isolating an upregulatory breath. A breath pattern we are more commonly used to, but is over used due to the amount we sit. This breathing technique tends to signal to our brain to keep cortisol levels high. It allows us to concentrate for short periods of time, but if used chronically can fatigue us. 

Lets try this with simple movement first. 

Cency Van Den Dool
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