My thoughts on breathing...
A bit more information as it occurs to me about how breathing impacts your health and well-being. If you have questions or want me to address a particular topic, please don't hesitate to contact me!
Welcome to the second instalment of "What's breathing got to do with it?" As I mentioned in the first post on this topic, breathing is much more complicated than we might think, and disruptions in breathing have impacts that are far reaching (read: it doesn't just create shortness of breath). Today we will discuss how breathing and low back pain are connected. When it all began... Ok, so we might not be able to pinpoint exactly when we starting linking breathing and low back pain, but the Smith/Russell/Hodges study that came out of Australia in 2006 sure gave us some ammunition to investigate further. Their longitudinal study of over 38,000 women found that "middle aged and older women had higher odds of having low back pain when they experienced breathing difficulties." Hodges (2000) had previously found that the diaphragm - thought to be only a breathing muscle - demonstrated recruitment behaviours that suggested it had a role in postural stability, so this perhaps led him down the path to search for more connections. Breathing affects movement Due to that ground-breaking study showing the diaphragm played a role in postural stability, there have been numerous studies since that suggest altered breathing patterns affect how we move. Belgian physiotherapist Lotte Janssens discovered that when the respiratory muscles (diaphragm and rib muscles) fatigue, they cause an otherwise healthy individual to have a balance strategy similar to someone with low back pain. It should be noted that persons with low back pain have a less than optimal balance strategy - relying on muscles in their feet and ankles to keep them upright when jostled, as opposed to healthy individuals who will use their back and abdominal muscles. Janssens further discovered that the respiratory muscles fatigued faster in those people with low back pain. Noted Czech physiotherapist Pavel Kolar discovered that individuals with low back pain had an altered position of their diaphragm, which may affect the muscles' ability to behave in a coordinted fashion. Which came first...the chicken or the egg? These kind of discoveries always lead us down the path of trying to discover, which came first - low back pain or breathing dysfunction? Sometimes, there may be clues in the history - maybe someone had battled severe asthma all their life, maybe there was an incidence of of increased stress and anxiety, or maybe it was a prolonged illness that disrupted breathing patterns and therefore core strategies, leaving the individual vulnerable to back pain. Sometimes we may find it was the other way around - that quick twist or bend that resulted in acute, sharp back pain. Usually that kind of pain causes us to breathe in quickly and hold it, often bracing our abdominal muscles for protection. When this bracing pattern is adopted for a prolonged period, it can become habitual, leading to shallow breathing, which as you will learn below, disrupts normal muscle function. How should our muscles work together? The best way to understand how our muscles work, is to consider what muscles actually make up our "core." We previously considered this to be just our transversus abdominus (TA - deep abdominal) muscle, but we've since discovered, that just like breathing, our core is much more complicated. Having good spine and trunk support means we need to have a balanced effort between many muscles - the major players being the diaphragm, the pelvic floor muscles, the TA and a deep back muscle called multifidus. When these muscles work as a team - we are unstoppable! Okay, maybe not unstoppable, but we should at least be in a better position to reduce injuries. The team works together like an internal elevator: when we breathe in, the diaphragm will contract and flatten out into the abdominal cavity, pushing our organs towards the pelvis. In a balanced situation, the abdominal muscles and pelvic floor muscles will lengthen to decrease the pressure the movement of the diaphragm would cause. When we exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and moves upward and the pelvic floor and TA will experience a recoiling effect (a really small contraction) and the organs are moved back up (we will talk more about how this affects digestion in a later post!). This up/down motion of the diaphragm and pelvic floor usually created an efficient, balanced movement strategy. The amount of movment and recruitment of these muscles will depend on our activity level - but it is important to note that this strategy should be employed with most movement (heavy lifts will require a slightly altered strategy but the underlying teamwork must still be balanced). How does it go wrong? So what might happen to break up the team? An obvious answer would be injury - because despite how much we work on having optimal muscle recruitment, things happen. And when we experience pain, our breathing patterns often change. Think about the time you banged your shin on a hard surface - ouch! There is that quick indrawing of breath, the breath hold, then the slightly laboured breathing as your whole body tenses from the pain. Luckily, the acute pain in our shin usually dies down after a few minutes, but in other situations, we may experience pain for a prolonged period. That shallow breathing pattern may become habit. I often see that same type of breathing pattern in my patients with asthma. Having a real struggle for breath can often lead to a situation where the body is constantly in "red alert" breathing mode. Fast, upper chest breathing means the diaphragm may not be going through it's full range of motion. And because the pelvic floor and TA muscles need that downward motion of the organs to go through their range of motion, their strength and recruitment may be affected by upper chest breathing. This means your core strategies are less than optimal and can put you at risk for injury. In this scenario, I often feel that breathing disorder came before the back pain. One last influence on both breathing and back pain, is stress. This becomes a topic in itself (which we will cover in a later post), but suffice it to say, that stress will often disrupt breathing patterns, leaving you in "red alert mode" which not only affects your breathing pattern, but also increases your sensitivity to painful stimuli - this part we will address in the next post. What can you do? When breathing patterns and core muscle recruitment strategies are disrupted, the key is to go back to the basics and start from there. Breathing is the foundation for good health, so restoring normal, relaxed breathing patterns are key to optimizing core and movement strategies. Without addressing breathing, it would be like trying to build a house on a foundation of sand - eventually the waves of movement would erode that foundation leaving you with a host of problems. For a few tips on how to re-establish better breathing patterns, you can check my previous blog post here. Keep in mind that if you have developed a history of upper chest, faster breathing, restoring diaphragm breathing does not happen overnight. Think about how hard it is to break a habit or start a new one (think New Year's Resolutions!). Sometimes, you may need a little outside assistance with re-learning diaphragm breathing - just as someone with suboptimal running or walking form would have to re-learn. This is where physiotherapists with training in assessing and treating breathing patterns come in! Check out www.bradcliff.com for practitioners near you. For those who don't have someone near them, Breathe Well Physio offers on-line consults as well - drop me a line and we can see what we can do for you!
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Welcome to the first installment of a new regular feature called "What's breathing got to do with it?" Over the next few weeks I'll attempt to make some connections to help pave the way to understanding just how important breathing well is. We will link poor breathing patterns to a number of conditions in which you may not have considered breathing to be a factor, such as jaw disorders, low back pain and anxiety. You'll gain better awareness of your own breathing pattern and nagging symptoms and I'll give you a few tips to help improve your breathing. I shouldn't have to think about breathing... Despite being an automatic function, breathing is easily disrupted by illness, injury and emotions. Breathing is not merely just about charging the blood with oxygen and clearing the body of carbon dioxide, but it is an intricate series of inputs from many areas of the body, including muscles in the limbs, stretch receptors in the chest wall and lungs as well as our own voluntary requirements (talking, blowing up a balloon, etc). I like to emphasize that breathing is also a movement pattern - just as walking or lifting are movement patterns. And just like walking or lifting, we can sometimes (often subconsciously) choose a less effective way of moving that leads to problems. The good news is that a disrupted breathing pattern is not a disease. It can cause troubling symptoms, but it's not life threatening. It takes a bit of work to retrain breathing patterns, but it's not impossible to restore normal, functional breathing.
What's Next? Stay tuned for more installments of "What's breathing got to do with it?" to find out what breathing does indeed have to do with good health (or poor health, as it may be). In the meantime, if you have pressing issues about your own breathing, please feel free to connect with me! |
AuthorI'm a physiotherapist who is passionate about educating anyone and everyone about the impact breathing has on our health. Archives
November 2020
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