how can proper breathing improve your posture?

In today’s world of sitting at a desk all day and constantly looking down at our phones, posture is becoming worse than ever. We see those individuals with their shoulders rounded forward, hunched back, and hope that one day that won’t be us. How can breathing help prevent this deterioration in posture and promote healthy, normal posture?

When we talk about breathing, the goal is to develop deep, abdominal breathing as opposed to chest breathing. Your diaphragm is the main muscle of respiration. As we sit here, our diaphragm is a dome-shaped structure that contracts down into our abdominal cavity so the lungs can expand and relaxes to cause exhalation. In a normal, healthy person the diaphragm should be the main muscle of respiration. However, many people develop poor breathing mechanics due to stress and trauma. Instead of the diaphragm taking over the main role of breathing, the muscles of the chest and neck (ex: scalenes) take over. These muscles aren’t meant to be the main muscles of respiration.

As the muscles of the chest and neck take over, they start to become chronically tight. Breathing is a constant action (at least it should be…) and these muscles aren’t designed to work 24/7. These tight muscles begin to affect the normal, healthy posture by pulling the head out forward (forward head posture), rounding the shoulders in, and creating that “hunch back” appearance. Couple poor breathing with other postural stresses (ex: sitting at a desk for work) and the degradation of posture occurs even quicker.

So, how can we work to improve our breathing mechanics and posture? It’s all about re-training your breathing patterns to focus on deep abdominal breathing. We could write an entire blog on just that (hmmm, maybe I will in the coming weeks). A great breathing exercise to do involves lying on your back with one hand on your abdomen and one hand on your chest. As you breathe in, focus on your bottom hand (abdominal) raising and lowering while your top hand (chest) should remain still. Now, also try to expand your abdomen in all 3 dimensions (feel it pressing into the ground behind you and expanding out horizontally away from you). Practice this new type of breathing every day to retrain your breathing pattern. Exercises like yoga, pilates, and meditation are other great tools to train your breathing patterns.

Breathe is life, so don’t take it for granted. Train your breathing to build your posture up, not tear it down.