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Breathing

simon341
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05/24/2009 - 11:03am
Breathing
I have recently been reminded to breathe using my diaphragm, and it has made a huge difference in my stress levels. My question is how this breathing style related to posture. Can we engage our inner corset without taking shallow breaths?
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09/10/2008 - 8:36pm
When you breathe with your diaphragm, you are reducing the "anxiety breathing" you may have been doing with your scalenes and other upper rib cage muscles previously. I don't think solely breathing with your diaphragm is where you want to settle though. You want to work towards relaxing your back muscles enough that your entire spine can elongate freely with the breath  and also that your intercostal muscles are stretched / relaxed enough that your rib cage can expand outwards easily with normal breathing. Depending solely on diaphragmatic breathing means that you will not be able to breather very deeply with the inner corset in place.  This to me is pretty compelling evidence that pure diaphragmatic breathing doesn't make sense as a default pattern of breathing. If you reinstate the spinal and costal breathing patterns, then you will have no problem breathing deeply even with the inner corset in place - very handy when you are doing vigorous exercise, for example.
Tom-
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09/09/2009 - 2:26am
this reminded me of another thread here talking about belly breathing http://gokhalewellness.com/forumtml
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