Heart of Motion
The Heart of Motion Podcast is an exploration of the heart, soul and science of movement - and what it means in our lives.
Movement connects us more deeply to ourselves, to our bodies and to the things and people that are most important to us. Beyond a fitness routine, why do you move? And what moves you? When we can look past the hamster wheel of ''fitness" - we start to realize that when we really live the lives of our bodies - life can be a whole lot more fulfilling, and a whole lot more fun!
Host Susannah Steers is your guide on a quest to understand how we can move better, feel better in our bodies and connect more deeply to our people and the world around us. Join her for some conversation, interviews with experts, and conversations with everyday people about what movement means to them. You might just find movement feels a little different on the other side...
Heart of Motion
The Science of Breath for Better Health
Enhance your health through the power of breath, and discover how such a simple act can profoundly impact your physical and emotional well-being. Join me, Susannah Steers, as I guide you through the often-overlooked science of breathing, drawing insights from James Nestor's "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art." Together, we'll navigate the intricate connections between breathing patterns and health. Learn about the role of the diaphragm in effective breathing, and how modern society's loss of fundamental breathing skills affects everything from posture to athletic performance. Whether you're into Pilates, fitness or sport or or whether you're someone curious about ways to improve your wellbeing, you'll gain valuable insights into how movement practices like Pilates, and deep nasal breath can help you live healthier and feel better.
Some references for this episode:
- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art,” James Nestor, Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, USA, 2020
- “Spark: The Revolutionary Science of Exercise and the Brain,” John J.Ratey, MD with Erik Hagerman, Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group. New York, NY 2008
- “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Breathing Pattern Disorders,” Leon Chaitow, Dinah Bradley, Christopher Gilbert, Churchill Livingstone, 2002.
Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.
Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.
Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.
Social Media Links:
Moving Spirit Pilates Instagram
Moving Spirit Pilates Facebook
Susannah Steers Instagram
Welcome to the Heart of Motion podcast. I'm Susanna Steers and I'll be your host as we explore the heart, soul and science of movement as a pathway to more active, vibrant and connected living. Nothing happens until something moves, so let's get started.
Susannah Steers:Breath we take it for granted. We breathe in, we breathe out, typically. Unless something is very wrong, we don't have to think about it, it just happens. And yet breath ties into literally everything we do. It supports posture and acts as the bedrock for almost every single system in our bodies. Breath integrates the sympathetic fight or flight side of our nervous system to the parasympathetic rest-and-digest part. It can be a powerful tool in helping us to regulate our emotions. Breath is an integral part of the body's core and works as a platform and even a springboard for physical fitness. Breath connects the being part of us to the doing part. It connects spirit to form, part of us to the doing part. It connects spirit to form.
Susannah Steers:Honestly, there are very few things as important to our health as the ability to breathe well. It is really our most important movement skill and yet as a society we've lost the ability to do it well at all..
Susannah Steers:In his best-selling book Breath the New Science of a Lost Art author, james Nestor describes human beings as the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. A significant portion of the world's population suffers from breathing pattern disorders, and most don't know it, and many of those patterns may either be a symptom or a cause of a whole host of health problems. The problems I tend to think of first are things like asthma and allergies, copd and a general susceptibility to respiratory illnesses and I say that having just spent a week in bed with a wicked upper respiratory infection. Anyway, sleep apnea might be in there too. Those of us over 50 might be more interested to note that breath pattern disorders can contribute to things like elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate and poor circulation. If you're an athlete, you might be more interested in things like breath pattern disorders causing inefficient oxygen use, decreased athletic performance and a general overworking of the body's systems just in order to breathe. Now, if we broaden our awareness and include mental health, we can consider that breath pattern dysfunctions can play a role in heightened stress and anxiety. It might even mean decreased cognitive function and mental clarity. You might experience poor sleep quality and insomnia. A lot of that might have something to do with menopause too, who knows? And on top of all of those breath pattern disorders may worsen things like chronic pain and even have a role in structural and developmental challenges.
Susannah Steers:Conversations around health promotion typically revolve around physical activity, nutrition, body composition, inflammation, stress and those kind of things. When we talk about cardiovascular health, we're usually talking about our heart and our lungs and the quality of oxygen exchange, maybe our blood pressure and the speed that our heart rate returns to normal after exercise, and unless we're dealing with an identified respiratory condition, we're probably not talking about the actual quality of the breaths that we take. Lately, though, that seems to be changing. I don't know if you've noticed it. It seems that breath is having a moment in pop culture, and I am here for it. As with all things pop culture, though, the headlines and the hashtags rarely get down to the heart of things. With breath in particular, I think how you move matters.
Susannah Steers:Over the last 30-odd years as a movement educator, I've watched lots of trends come and go, even with respect to breathing. In my earlier training as a Pilates teacher, I was taught very specific breathing techniques. Yoga and some martial arts have their own specialized breathing too. Recently, you might have heard about breathing techniques to improve the tone of your vagus nerve as a way to regulate the nervous system. There are different techniques for different sports, for singing, for speaking and acting, even for something like cold plunging. And if you've read James Nestor's book about breath, then you might even have tried taping your lips together as a way to discourage mouth breathing and shift to more nasal breath. All of these different breathing techniques support different systems and activities, and all of them presuppose that certain biomechanical conditions are present which in a body living life in the modern world may or may not be present. So today we're going to take some time to actually talk about breath, to bring it out of that subconscious realm where it just happens, and maybe bring it into a state of awareness. It's rare that something so basic can make such a huge difference to our health and well-being.
Susannah Steers:Before we can really talk about breath, we need to understand how it works, and to do that we need to get the lay of the land. Let's start with the diaphragm, which is your main respiratory muscle. It's a dome-shaped muscle which attaches to the inner surfaces at the bottom of your breastbone, at the front, your mid-spine, at the back and all the way around your lower six ribs. The muscle fibers of that dome connect to their own central tendon at the top. And then there are long tendinous crura which extend down along the front of the spine like little legs, from the diaphragm down to the first couple of vertebrae in your lumbar spine in your lower back. So if you picture that the main body of the diaphragm is like a parachute, then the crura sliding down are a little bit like a ripcord. So that's the main structure.
Susannah Steers:But what actually creates breath? There are a lot of things we could factor in here, but for our purposes today I'm just going to talk about the basic mechanics of respiration. And it actually all starts as a chemical reaction. Sensors in the brain and near the blood vessels register elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, which is actually poisonous for us, and that triggers the reflex debris. Once stimulated, the muscular fibers of the diaphragm contract and they draw its dome downward. There are muscles in your neck and around your ribs that help to expand the rib cage at the same time.
Susannah Steers:Now your lungs sit just above the diaphragm. They're a little spongy and they can't expand and contract on their own. They depend on the movement of the rib cage for that. So the lungs live inside a fascial bag of connective tissue called pleura, and it's important to understand this because the attachments of the pleura to the top of your diaphragm, at the bottom, to the ribs and the sternum and the upper spine, even at the back of your neck, create a supportive and connected web that facilitates the movement of your lungs.
Susannah Steers:So as you inhale, when the diaphragm contracts and draws down and the ribs elevate and expand an action often called bucket handling the lung tissues are effectively pulled open and the volume inside the lungs increases and the air pressure decreases. The universe abhors a vacuum, pressure decreases, the universe abhors a vacuum, and so oxygen is literally pushed into the lungs by the higher air pressure outside of them. Your body then takes all of that fresh oxygen and moves it through your tissues to feed all your various functions. When you exhale, the diaphragm and accessory muscles relax and the lungs naturally deflate on their own, much like an elastic balloon will deflate when you let it go. If you're physically active, the abdominal muscles and the pelvic floor will become more involved, contracting and increasing the pressure upward under the diaphragm, while those muscles between your ribs contract to compress the rib cage, all of it increasing the air pressure and decreasing the volume of the lungs. Many of the deep core muscles act almost like a bellows, effectively pushing the air out of the lungs. The harder you're working physically, the more accessory muscles will work and you're probably going to feel the work of those muscles as you breathe. But at rest breathing shouldn't really feel like work.
Susannah Steers:While there are lots of experts who approach breathwork from the perspective of the nervous system or chemical reactions in the body or with a view to improving psychological and emotional states, I often work with breath from a movement perspective. In my experience, good breathing patterns usually equate to generally decent movement patterns and, on the flip side, poor breathing patterns can actively get in the way of free and functional movement in the rest of the body. The two are linked in every possible way. In the book Multidisciplinary Approaches to Breathing Pattern Disorders, author Leon Chaitau, who was an osteopath, dinah Bradley, who was a respiratory physiotherapist, and Christopher Gilbert, who is a psychologist or psychiatrist, I can't remember which, they report that nowhere in the body is the axiom of structure governing function more apparent than it is in relation to respiration. They go on to say that this is also a region in which prolonged modifications of function inevitably induce structural changes. Given time, structural adaptations can prevent normal breathing function and abnormal breathing function ensures continued structural adaptational stresses.
Susannah Steers:But you might be thinking wait, we're talking about breathing and that's in my chest. How does breath affect the rest of my movement? And if that's what you're thinking, here we go. Remember, in my world, every movement is a whole body movement. Being a Pilates teacher, something I spend a lot of time with people working on is good function of the body's core. And you know what the core is a pressure zone. Earlier we looked at how changing volume and pressures inside and outside your lungs might affect breath. What you might not realize is that the body's core is very much influenced by pressures in the body, but in a slightly different way.
Susannah Steers:Let's shift focus for a moment and think about the core which is located in the area below your ribcage and above your hips. The deep system core, which is responsible for some important roles supporting the pelvis, the spine and the trunk, is made up of four main parts. At the front there's the deep abdominal wall or the transverse abdominal muscles. At the back, there are deep segmental muscles known as the multifidus and the spine. They look a little like a chevron sign going up the spine, from the sacrum to the skull. At the bottom we have the pelvic floor, which is made up of deep muscles at the bottom of the pelvis and on the top is the respiratory diaphragm. Most people don't think about the diaphragm as being a core muscle, but I'd say it's arguably the most important one. All these deep core structures create a kind of cylinder in the middle of the body in which live all our abdominal organs.
Susannah Steers:The organs are packed pretty densely together in another fascial bag, this one called the peritoneum. You might think of this bag full of organs like a water balloon, and if you've ever squeezed a water balloon balloon between your hands, you know you can't compress it without having some part of it squish out somewhere. Now remember the action of the diaphragm on the inhale, how it descends downward as you breathe in, increasing the volume and decreasing the pressure inside the lungs. Well, at the same time that descending diaphragm is increasing the pressure on the abdominal organs below it. The point is, when you apply pressure to the abdominal area, the volume of the tissues can't decrease the way your lungs can, because they're not full of air. There's nowhere for it to go. So, a little bit like the water balloon, when those tissues are compressed, they get squished into areas that will allow them the space to do it.
Susannah Steers:In the best case scenario, there's a beautiful piston-like action between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor, on the inhale and on the exhale. When you breathe in, the diaphragm descends, the organs are pushed downward a little and the pelvic floor lengthens to allow a little space for that to happen. When you breathe out, the diaphragm relaxes, the pelvic floor rises a little, helping to move the organs back up and the air out of your lungs. This wonderful relationship does all kinds of good things for the healthy functioning of the cardiovascular system, of the organs, for the lymphatic system, for the circulatory system, as well as providing important muscular support for the spine, the pelvis and the hips. When the breath and the core are well integrated, then every single breath you take is a core exercise.
Susannah Steers:Okay, so if that's true and we're breathing all the time, wouldn't it follow that we should all have fabulous core strength and stability? Well, no, and I think this is what Leon Chaitau and friends were talking about when they described this loop of dysfunction that can arise between breath and movement patterns. There's a delicate balance between all these deep core structures. Beyond the core. There are other musculoskeletal influences.
Susannah Steers:Probably one of the easiest ways to talk about them is through the work of a guy named Vladimir Yanda. Yanda was a Czech physician and a rehab specialist who, in the late 1970s and 80s, identified what he called the crossed syndromes. These are patterns of muscle imbalances that can lead to poor posture, movement problems, breathing issues and pain. They create a kind of tug of war between different muscle groups in the body, pulling the bones and other tissues into relationships that can impair their function. While Yanda didn't explicitly connect his crossed syndromes to breathing disorders, subsequent research has demonstrated a clear relationship between the two. The cross syndromes just give us an easy way to visualize those relationships, so let's talk about them for a second.
Susannah Steers:Imagine you are looking at your body from the side and you have a giant X across your upper body, from your neck to your chest. In an upper cross syndrome, the muscles at the front of your neck and your chest become shortened and tight, and the muscles behind your neck and your chest become shortened and tight, and the muscles behind your neck and in your upper back become weak and stretched out. This tends to lead to a forward head posture, as if you're constantly kind of peering out at something, trying to read the small print or texting on your phone, and it might include rounded shoulders and a hunched upper back, like you're constantly slouched at your computer. The upper cross syndrome is pretty common for people who spend a lot of time sitting at the desk at their computer. What does all that mean for breathing? Well, tight pectoral muscles at the front of the chest can restrict the expansion of the rib cage as you breathe in, those tight pecs actually prevent the movement of the ribs that is necessary to expand the ribs and draw the diaphragm down At the same time, overactivity of accessory breathing muscles like the upper trapezius and the later scapula, which are upper back and shoulder girdle muscles, can mean you default to an upper chest breathing pattern instead of a diaphragmatic breathing pattern.
Susannah Steers:So you're getting most of your air in the upper lobes of your lung. We need to get oxygen down into the lower lobes of the lungs for the best oxygen exchange to happen. In an upper cross syndrome, we're having to use more muscle and more energy in order to breathe, which costs us in terms of oxygen and musculoskeletal function. So let's picture another giant X, this time from your lower back to your hips. This is the lower crossed syndrome. The muscles in your lower back and in the front of your hips become tight and short. The muscles in your abdomen and your buttocks become weak and stretched out, and this can lead to an exaggerated arch in your low back and cause your pelvis to tip forward a little bit. You might even see a protruding belly. This is often seen in people who sit a lot or who have weak core muscles.
Susannah Steers:Lower cross syndrome involves the tightness of extensors in the thoracolumbar spine between the ribs and the lower back and your hip flexors, with weakness of deep abdominals and gluteal muscles. Sometimes this creates an anterior tilt pelvis that may alter that vertical piston-like relationship between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor in breathing. It might also compromise the stabilizing function of the deep abdominal wall, which plays a role in both postural control and respiration. And if we keep our attention in the context of rehab and motor control, research has actually shown that patients with chronic low back pain exhibit altered breathing patterns during motor control tests. So breathing pattern disorders can lead to funky motor control strategies and reduce trunk stability, potentially contributing to musculoskeletal pain. The diaphragm is the primary breathing muscle and it contributes to trunk stability and postural control, so the coordination of both functions can get very complicated when demand increases on postural support, motor control and or respiratory function.
Susannah Steers:We could dive way deeper into all the pieces and parts of this, and the truth is that the ways we move and breathe most often are going to be our default patterns. Bottom line, though, and what I love about this is that the relationships involved here give us so many different ways to make a difference. If that's something we want to do. Attending to how we move and how we breathe gives us a window into shifting that tricky loop of function and dysfunction. Untangling it really just takes a little time, attention and some dedicated practice, and I think that's one of the reasons I like Pilates for this. We can explore it all inside a regular movement practice if we want to. What if we're doing all kinds of movement and exercise-centered work and they are not doing the trick?
Susannah Steers:Reports are that a significant portion of the world's population, particularly from the developed world, which I find interesting suffers from breathing pattern disorders. Some even put that number around 20%. Among the most common issues are over-breathing and mouth-breathing, and you might not get to the bottom of these challenges exclusively through movement. Over-breathing is a pattern in which the depth and rate of breathing are greater than the body's metabolic needs, so you get more oxygen than you need to use. You can recognize over-breathing in a few ways. Typically it involves upper chest breathing and a higher than normal rate of respiration, often more than 14 breaths per minute. Typically an overuse of accessory breathing muscles like your shoulders or upper back, inefficient use of oxygen and sometimes hypocapnea, which means the level of carbon dioxide in the blood is low. Too much CO2 is dangerous, but too little isn't good either. You might notice a habit of frequent deep sighs or yawns in someone with this pattern. Those sighs are a little less about the inhale and more about exhaling to try and rebalance the oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Susannah Steers:The effects of chronic over-breathing mean a reduced oxygen delivery to your tissues, altered heart rate variability and potential contribution to hypertension, changes in the blood flow to your brain and more. It can increase anxiety and contribute to sleep disruption. It might also mean chronic activity in some of those accessory breathing muscles which can alter your body's posture and your structure over the long term. The other massive culprit is mouth breathing. You're likely already aware that folks who breathe mostly through their mouths are more likely to snore or have something like sleep apnea. There may be a thousand reasons that they breathe through their mouths, but as a result, their risk of respiratory, sinus, ear and throat infections is higher. Mouth breathing is associated with chronic inflammation and high blood pressure. That list goes on to include cognitive, metabolic and dental issues, and even developmental changes to the shape of the mouth and the skull in kids. Mouth breathing is something you probably don't notice day to day, unless your partner complains about your snoring, and yet it can have some pretty profound effects on your health.
Susannah Steers:So what do we do? Recommendations are to get good, slow, diaphragmatic breaths through your nose. Nasal breathing immediately does a few things. It filters, warms and humidifies the air that you breathe in, making it cleaner and easier to absorb. It activates the diaphragm more effectively, bringing the air more quickly and directly into the lower lobes of your lungs, increasing oxygen absorption by about 20% compared to breathing through your mouth. If you're an athlete, that can mean better athletic performance. It helps regulate your heart rate, lower your blood pressure and improve your heart rate variability. Your brain gets more oxygen, supporting brain function, and it also activates the parasympathetic nervous system that rest and digest stuff, which will help manage anxiety and stress. Overall markers of chronic inflammation go down with nasal breathing, which does really good things for every aspect of your health.
Susannah Steers:Seems simple enough, right? James Nestor, again from the Breath Book, advocates for slowing down the breath rate. He suggests aiming for about 5.5 breaths per minute, which translates to inhaling for about 5.5 seconds and exhaling for 5.5 seconds. He claims this pattern can help improve focus, reduce stress and enhance overall well-being. So why don't we take a minute right now and give it a try? If you're driving a car or doing something that requires your full attention, pull over first or come back and listen again to try it later. I have my timer here and we'll do the pattern for one full minute. It won't be exact, but I think you'll get at least the beginning of a feel for this breath pattern. Inhale through the nose for five and a half seconds and exhale through the nose for five and a half seconds. Ready, here we go. Three, two, one. Inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale, Inhale, exhale, inhale and exhale. Inhale, exhale, exhale, inhale and exhale. All done, how did it feel? Could you get the air that you wanted? What else did you notice happening in your body If you're someone with nasal or sinus congestion, this might not be the easiest thing to do right off the bat, and if you're someone who over breathes or has postural or movement challenges that have changed your breath patterns, you might have a hard time shifting to nasal breathing right away.
Susannah Steers:So you start simple. Start with a few cycles of that breathing, practice it daily and see if you can increase the number of cycles that you can do. Start wherever you are. Right now Can you adopt that breath at different times of the day, even when you're physically active. And if you're an athlete, you might want to take that a step further and see if you can explore some breath holding as you train. That's something that synchronized swimmers do really well, although it's just a necessity of the sport. The idea behind breath holding exercises while you're training is to increase the body's tolerance to carbon dioxide, which can be really helpful for athletes looking to improve their endurance.
Susannah Steers:Now in the book, nestor talks about finding ways to address the things that are getting in your way, exploring ways of managing the sinus issues or working on your posture or any of the things that make it difficult to get that good deep nasal breath. For me, the point is this. Breathing, like health in general, is something that can be managed and supported in a whole bunch of different ways. The most important thing is just to start somewhere, and bringing awareness to your breathing could be the first step. What do you notice about your breathing? What challenges do you observe, if any? What happens when you play with different aspects of your breathing? As you open yourself up to noticing this stuff, you may decide you want to dig deeper, and whether that's through specific breathing exercises or movement, or dealing with chronic congestion or making a decision to improve your cardiovascular capacity overall, there's really no wrong way to go.
Susannah Steers:Longevity is having a moment these days, at least among a lot of the people I connect with, and whether we're talking about physical health, prevention of Alzheimer's and dementia, management of stress and anxiety disorders, menopause or even most diseases associated with aging, breath, movement and cardiovascular health are always on the table as key mitigating factors. Spending a little time with any or all of them can only improve your life, so why not play a little? If you've got questions or comments on what we talked about today, reach out. Send me an email at sue, at movingspiritca. I might even include your thoughts in a future episode and if you enjoyed what you've heard, please consider leaving a comment or a review on whatever platform you're listening to or share it with a friend.
Susannah Steers:In the next few weeks, I've got some great guests coming up. I'll be talking about meditation as medicine with physiotherapist Siobhan O'Connell, and about high performance paddling and cancer recovery with Olympian Kamini Jain. You are not going to want to miss a single moment. For now, though, thanks so much for listening and have a great week. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and, if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks. For now, let's get moving.
