Myth and Science of Breath

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Purposes of Breathing

It's good to be with you and to be with plots anytime and to be talking about the math and science of breath. I think sometimes in the plots world and in any movement world and yoga that we sometimes have rules that are so rigid in breadth that we sort of forget that breath can be thought of as a tool, not necessarily a rule. And that there's great variation in breath. So I hope to be able to clarify some of the myths that are out there. And I'm borrowing from some good friends of mine.

So I have some quotes from Joseph [inaudible]. I have some good quotes from um, blending. Some of you might know her anatomy of movement, anatomy of breath, and also from a gentleman named Simon Borg, Olivier who wrote the book anatomy and physiology of Yoga. And so just some good things that are out there. And then of course some mechanical stuff that I'll bring in a little bit later talking about the rib cage and how that facilitates movement in our [inaudible] world and how breath can actually be part of that and how we integrate them.

And then we'll finish up talking about plot ease as an energetic form and how it feeds our body and gives nutrition to ourselves in our body. So you're ready to get started. Good. So let's turn it off by looking at this saying and quote is that breath facilitates movement and movement facilitates breath. I always like to start with that because I think sometimes we get so hung up on telling people when to breathe that we don't realize it. Just movement in itself creates breadth, opportunities and breath opportunities.

On the other hand create movement opportunities in our body. And so there's this beautiful synergistic dynamic between when we breathe, even in a relaxed breath, there's movement happening and when we move our body through space, it naturally moves a rib cage and breath is exchanged because of that or pressures change in our body. Because of that, Joseph Potty said one of his quotes, your blood will flow with renewed vigor as a direct result of your faithfully performing the [inaudible] exercises. These exercises induced the heart to pump strong and steadily as a result of bloodstream carries and discharges from your system, more of the debris created by fatigue. So in his basic work, Joseph was very interested in the idea of breathing and circulation and the idea that as we breathe, as we cleansed our body, as we brought nutrition to ourselves, that we would be healthier and we would have more energy to the things that he was very interested in. Now I've put up here a couple, um, things that Joseph has been known to say in his history. He said that complete exhalation inhalation of air stimulates all the muscles into greater activity.

So he said as soon the entire body is abundantly charged with fresh oxygen. And I know that's sort of a feeling that we get sometimes. Now on the other side of it, he said, lazy breathing converts the lungs, figuratively speaking into a cemetery for the deposition of diseased, dying, and dead germs as well as supply in ideal haven for the multiplication of other harmful germs. That doesn't sound so nice, right? I mean, they think of this idea of you are cultivating a graveyard, right? Ah, these dying cells. Now if you think about that, the number one cause of death in a hospital is pneumonia, right? People don't come in with pneumonia, but they go under the ground with pneumonia, right? So what is happening with these people? If we could get that rib cage to move, and I want you to think of the long almost being like a balloon, right?

And the balloon has millions of cells inside of it. They can expand and close the makeup, the Alvioli, the IB only as these little sacks that transfer the air and the old air to the new air and the old blood with a new blood. And if you could imagine the lower lobes of those balloons or lungs having no movement and a little germ crawling down into there, that starts breeding and festering. And because there's no movement, there's no exchange or ability to clean the lungs, which is where Joseph was talking about. Can you think of another thing that Joseph talked about that he referred to breathing as internal shower? He said an internal shower. That's right. He said, squeeze every atom of air from your lungs until they are almost as free of air as a vacuum. Now, I'll talk a little bit about that because that's a little extreme. And when we talk about what really is reserved volume in the lungs, if you've ever fallen out of a tree or falling down, had the wind knocked out of you, we don't like that. That's not a good feeling.

So we want to keep a little bit of air in our lungs, but through movement we can exchange it and move it around. So it isn't the stagnant cemetery for old cells and debris. Okay. He also said Rowling is the very action of rolling and unrolling it cleanses our lungs. So you think of the roll up. Sometimes we think of the roll up exercise and rollover as an abdominal exercise or a core exercise when in reality it's a movement exercise and it's not just moving the body, but it's moving the digestive system.

It's moving the circulatory system and definitely moving the respiratory system. So moving the ribs and moving around is what's going to process and get that old air out of our lungs and new air into our lungs. And if we're not active and don't move in those parts of our body, it's very hard to get exchange of air and those parts of our lungs and to being old out of breath, diseased. And eventually in pneumonia he finished up. And one of the things I like to quote him, he said, never fail to get all the sunshine and fresh air that you can, that your body also breezed through the pores of your skin as well. So your mouth, nose and lungs. So the question comes up, do we breathe through our skin? I'll answer that as well.

So there's some things up there that are true. There's some things up there that are symbolic that we can use. And there's some things up there that are not actual. There are sort of more of a myth that we learned from when we look at a blending. Kelly's Jermaine's book, anatomy of breath. She quoted that the purpose of breath is to exchange gases and this exchange only takes place in the lungs.

So if we think of Joe talking about us exchanging things in the skin as far as air, it doesn't necessarily breathe and we don't get oxygen into our bloodstream through our skin. But we do absorb vitamin and vitamin D through our skin. So there are some things we know that happened through our skin, but breath is not one of them. So we know the breath actually occurs only in the lung tissue and it does not always strictly depend on the oxygen needs of our body. So we know that a lot of times we talk about efficiency of breath. So while I'm doing a movement, how much breath do I need to be able to use to move my body or farm running or cycling? It might be a really high amount of oxygen needed.

Other times we do exercises that are breath specific exercises. They are exercises to exercise our breath capacity. So one of them is to deliver oxygen, one of them is to practice breathing. Two different purposes that we can focus on. We just did a research study with Dr Larry Haleigh and out of Miami.

We looked at a lot. I think we're about 75 politeness teachers and we measured their inspiratory capacity, how much air they could breathe in. Right? And how long and how much force could they do it over time. And we found that those PyLadies teachers that had breath emphasized training, I. E Ryan Fletcher, um, there they had bred better, significantly better inspiratory capacity than the other pilates teachers did. We also found that the longer you are a pilates teacher that your inspiratory capacity actually decreased relative to the newer teachers.

So it's an interesting find. It's not quite sure what that means, but we do know that we do and should practice breath emphasize as part of our regimen then SME, we have to do it all the way through every exercise. But there is something to be said that when we emphasize breath in the hundred in the breathing exercise in the chest expansion, that we actually do significantly increase our breath capacity, sort of cool stuff. Um, other things that blanding's said is that there's other reasons besides exchanging gases of why we would breathe. So one is to, uh, accompany another action. So we often talk about exhaling with exertion or inhaling with spine extension or exhaling with flection. The a lot of times we'll use movement as a way to facilitate a movement or a movement direction. She also says the breath can change emotions, so we ever been very emotion or very stressed or very anxious and notice when you practice some breath calming, you can really bring that anxiety level down. Or if you're getting ready, like when I want to go do a sport or pump myself up and get myself anxious, we say right before the events are that I'm all psyched up and excited from my breath kind of thing. Right, and so you share, we could use it to change the body tension either towards more relaxed or more tense to accompany or modify sensations of pleasure or pain.

When I work with chronic pain patients, I'll use breath techniques all the time to modulate or change the sensitivity to pain. Pain is an interpretation. The central nervous system, the tissue themselves don't feel pain. But if the central nervous system is turned up a little bit in the modulation of pain, then even just like brushes, those kinds of things in the arms can cause or be interpreted as significant pain. So we can use breath to calm that mechanism down and the interpretation of pain down and we can use it to help us with our speaking and our singing voices. So we know that a lot of our singers and, and uh, actors and drama work on that aspect of it. I just saw the, uh, opera, uh, what was it? Um, Nobuko about Nebuchadnezzar and it's a Italian opera and I couldn't believe cause I ended up getting these nosebleed seats. I was up way high and it was great, but to hear the projection, their voices and they're not miked in opera.

So to think of the power that they generate, what their diaphragm must be doing to sing with that clarity of that voice in that large of a space that they're filling out. So very well trained. Um, we can use breath to more forcefully open or close the rib cage, which is what we're going to be using to play with. Because rib cage movement directly relates to spine movement. So if we understand the rule of ribs, which we'll go over today in the biomechanics section, we can understand how inhalation exhalation can truly facilitate the desire movement of our spine, which is pretty cool. And then the last one I said to accentuate or moderate the curvature of the spine in our body with the movement that we want. So we can create axial length. So if you all just sit on the edge of your box or your seat where you are, right, and you take a nice deep breath in and just think of expanding the breath in all directions. When you exhale this time, exhale and feel all of the ribs coming closer to the central axis and see what happens to the curves in your spine. They start to lengthen, right? So when we bring the ribcage closer to the central axis, that's what, um, Eric Franklin talks about of ideal posture, brain structure as close to the central axis as structure permits.

So breadth in itself, when we organize a good exhalation, we can actually change the nature or the severity of the curves of our spine. We can make them longer or we can make them shorter. Simon Borg Olivier was the other one. I talked about a very famous, uh, physio and Yoga in Australia to Sydney, Australia. And in his book he talks about Yoga. And I wanted to go to yoga because I know that our pieties comes from a yoga route.

And if we can understand how breath was designed in part of the yoga work, it's Pronto, the energy, we might have a better understanding of how we should be using breath inside our parties teaching and exercises. So Simon said Yoga is the art of learning how to regulate and be comfortable with one's breath in all situations. This goes back to the lobby efficiency. One of Joe's quotes was that we are able to do our daily tasks or mini daily tasks spontaneously with vigor and pleasure, right? And so that idea of having efficiency is what he's talking about. And then controller breath is learning when to use it and how much and how little and Yoga says the purpose of debriefing then is not to take in more air but rather to airaid those parts of the lungs that are aerated and everyday breathing.

So that would support what Joseph was talking about of cleansing the lung or that internal shower to use breath as a way, just exchange that all the air, get rid of it. We don't need it for oxygen, we just want to cleanse ourselves and that that's validated. Uh, Simon said that, um, breathing is the art or yoga is the art of learning how to make the most effective use of every bit of air that we breathe in and the Pronto that we absorb. Now yogis, there's a number of them. They can hold their breath for 10 11 minutes and they'll bring in a breath and they'll circulate the breath inside their lungs. If you think about it, oxygen can only be consumed in the Alvioli. You can only be exchanged in the very end of the tubules in our lungs, so the bronchials and the trache and all those things do not exchange oxygen, but there's a lot of air in there. So what they'll do is they'll hold their breath and they'll just do with the close breath, little circulations with a diaphragm to move the air around in the lungs to be able to exchange the old air with the new air as if they were breathing outside so they can keep circulating that air. It's pretty cool.

Chapter 2

The Physiology of Breath

Let's talk about physiology of breathless. Try to understand, you know what do what are the right terms because I think we need to learn it.

You use the right terms of breath and we talk about two types of respiration. There's the internal respiration, which is the physiological exchange of gases. So a lot of times we, we don't often think about that so much and we're not going to talk a lot about that today a little bit. But the external respiration is actually where air is exchanged and air can only be exchanged in two ways. We want to take a shot at it where the two places are the two things that can exchange air in our lungs.

It's going to come through the air will come through our mouth or nose. But what has to displace to be able to make change in pressure. So the rib cage is one of them and the diaphragm is the other. That's right. So the rib cage has to move or the diaphragm has to move in order to be able to create a change in pressure that would then exchange gases through our mouth or our nose. So internal respiration is that automatic exchange of blood gases based on our body's need for oxygen. Right.

And that measure actually comes from our CO2 levels. So when our co two levels get high, we then have a stimulus automatically two in hell. And that happens when we sleep. And when we're resting. And even right now you're not thinking about breath other than what we're talking about, but just, yeah, just exchanges when it needs to exchange. Okay. So the focus we're going to look at a little bit now is going to be the external, and we said the two types of external exploration and inspiration that ar is from the movement of the diaphragm and the movement of the rib cage, learning to breathe and some activities, even very complex ones, only spontaneous breathing will harmonize well with a movement.

And I think this is important. Yeah. As we go into more advanced exercises or movements, or if I'm moving my body through space, when do I inhale? When do I exhale? When you need to, when I need to. It's not. And what we're saying is how do I get a body to be able to have the suppleness and the movement that wherever they're at, they can take breath in.

So it's not just the role of, oh my goodness, I need to inhale. I can't be inflection. I gotta go into extension. Cause that's when inhalation happens, extension. And then I'm in extension pose like a Cirque de Solei person hanging there and it's going like, oh no, I've got to exhale. Right? So the idea is that breath should be able to occur in all dimensions of our movement.

And what we want to give our clients is the ability to move in all those directions to be able to breathe when and how. And as Joe said, spontaneously with our movements. I think that's pretty cool. So breathing terminology, we know inhalation basically bringing air into our lungs. Exhalation is a process of air going out of our lungs. That's done by a pressure gradients, right? So if I bring in a deep breath, if we all breathe in deeply, we now have this elastic component in our lungs and our rib cage that's trying to return to normal. So the pressure is pretty high. So if we open our throat or our nose relaxes down, right?

If I blow air out, forced out, there's an elastic component now that wants to do what expanded back out. So this is a natural elastic and fashionable and structural components of breadth that when we do take airway, the body naturally springs, it has this potential energy that wants to bring us back into a position that air would come back in and we taken a deep breath. It distorts it again from its normal position and it wants to return to its normal position. What happens though, when our bodies, our clients' bodies start getting used to being more in, more in, more distended. So we know as we age we get more and more of a barrel chest women after having children, their rib cage expands. So unless they do an active organization and bringing their body back into a more actual lengthen posture, they often will have that rib cage that is flared.

Now, normal movement of ribcage or alignment. If you take your thumbs right and you bring them underneath your sternum, that angle as you go down, that rib should be about 90 degrees, which would be the same as the wall to this, to the floor, right? So it should be about 90 degrees if we go wider. Right. And this is what I want you to realize. This is something that happens in plots all the time, is that somebody will come in and two weeks ago I lost two dress sizes in my first couple of weeks doing palarmis. Now they didn't lose any weight, but what happened? What happened? That's right.

So this a hundred degree angle all of a sudden came down to 90 degree angle and that's going to decrease the size of your chest, your bra size, your dress size by bringing that rib cage and a little bit closer, a little bit tighter, okay? So that's a common thing that happens is not about losing weight, it's just changing shape, okay? And that's what we do with our breath. Now, apnea is the absence of breath. Have you heard that word apnea before? Um, often accompany with sleep apnea. Sleep apnea means that while you're sleeping, you stop breathing. So apnea is absence of breath and a good portion of our day, healthy and normal is spent in apnea.

You're not inhaling and exhaling all the time, right? We'll sit here and we'll just, there'll be five, 10 15 seconds sometimes where we don't breathe because we don't need to breathe, right? And then we'll get it impulse that are co two levels are coming up, up, up, up, up, and we'll go and we inhale and then that air will sit in there for a little while and they'll slowly come out. But we don't need to breathe in for awhile and then we'll get the impulse again. So he typically would be something like 12 to 15 times per minute. All right, so there's time. So apnea is normal when apnea is not normal is when it's too long.

So if you have a closure in the back of your throat or your nasal passage, snoring for example, and you're there too long, that can stop the breath from going in. So even in our plot exercises, they don't necessarily have to be exchanging air all the time. There's times where they don't have to be doing that. What we want to be cautious of is things that are called a the bow salvage technique or closing the air in to create intra abdominal pressure. Especially with our clients that are aging because they don't need that pressure on their arteries and their veins and around their heart and their brain. Okay. Another word we often use is tidal volume. Um, tidal volume is just like the ocean.

So we have this beautiful scenery behind us, the tidal volume that tides coming in and going out, and this is just a gentle shift of the tide. Okay. Are Resting Breath of air coming in and going out is our title volume. It's just our resting breath. So when we exhale just with a letting the ribcage come back to its normal position, that's a tidal exhalation. And then we take it a little sip of air because we need a little bit of air.

That's a title expiration. So there's nothing that is a forced inspiration or expiration in the title volume. Very relaxed. What muscle do you think usually is responsible for tidal volume? Great. It's the diaphragm actually is the diaphragm is the primary one because it's just, it's going to be a neurological response based on the chemo receptors around our heart and our neck and our carotids. It tell us CO2 is coming up.

Do a little contraction and subtle contraction to bring some area. Okay. Now inspiratory reserve volume is after I've sort of done my tidal volume in, then I want to take a deeper breath in, right? How much volume can that be? Well that can be anywhere from two to three and a half additional liters of air in our lungs. So this would be what Joe wanted us to do with chest expansion, right knee, lean high on the reformer. We're in that position and we'd taken a deep breath and then we let it out with the control to the sides and then forward again.

And then we would do another deep forest inspiration. Expanding that rib cage, expanding the diaphragm, keep that nice long body. So forced inspiration is the air we take in above the title volume. Okay, so for us expiration is going to be the air that we take in or XL below tidal volumes. So let's practice that just for a second and make sure we understand that. So we're inhaling and exhaling just our resting breath.

Just a normal breath. And now we're going to fill your hands on your ribs and taking as deep of a breath as you can take. And, and you can feel that expansion. Now can you take a little more air? A little more? Good. Okay, so that's the Max inspiratory reserve that we have there. And now just relax and let it go back out.

So that could be anywhere from two to three and a half liters. Now this time we're going to take a deep breath in, but we're going to go past the relaxed breath and we're going to go in that right. So here we go. So a nice deep breath in and then let's take it all the way out. Get Taller as you get it out. Yeah. Can you feel the narrowing pulling all the way around?

Now there's a funny phenomena that happens and a lot of patients go, oh, I get this cramp right here in my back. That is a very important breathing muscles. And a lot of times we ignore it because we don't breathe posteriorly. It's called the post to your Serita's inferior. And you also would have the same kind of thing with your inspiration with the superior, right, so these are muscles that collaborate with the muscles of inspiration, the muscle gonna move our rib cage, and especially on forced exhalation, we're getting axial long because a lot of people do forest exhalation and they'll just short in the front.

But if you want to keep axial length and you're narrowing the rib cage, that posterior Serratus is going to talk to you. I used to think that the [inaudible] Raiders was a nothing muscle. Like we would dissect our cadavers and it would look like it was paper thin and so you'd cut through it and it's like this is not significant. Right. But really what it was is just people who were not actively breathing that were dead, right there were dead that they're not use that muscle. I had a cadaver, a fresh cadaver that was a 24 year old young athlete that had Marfan Syndrome but was very muscular and very well built. And that muscle, he was a basketball player, was look just like the sweetest anterior you would see on an athlete coming underneath the Scapula. So it was a beautiful muscle. Serratus mean fingered.

So it actually attaches to the ribs and pulls down towards that central line. So you can just imagine now you've got this cone of the rib cage and the muscles in the back are pulling it down just like our obliques and our rectus pull the ribs down in front. So that full circumferential quadratus right, we have the posterior sway, a posterior inferior, and in the front muscle set 360 degrees narrowing the rib cage. Now the residual volume is one that a I, this is where Joe wanted us to squeeze every atom out of our lungs like a vacuum. Well, I've had that vacuum experience. I've, I've fallen down from pole vaulting, I've fallen out of tree houses. I slipped off a roof. Um, when you get that impact or somebody hits you in a [inaudible] process or something, it's like that, that those last ounces of air come out.

And what does it feel like? There's a name for it. It's called a collapsed lung, right? Not Fun. Go to the hospital. They poke the little needle in there and they make a hole so the lung can re inflate, right? So we don't really want to push every atom of air out of the lungs. We're happy going to the expiratory reserve and then moving our body so that we know we're circulating that air. So as long as we're articulating our spine and deflection extension and rotation and side bending those lower lobes of the lungs, we're going to squeeze that air out. There's not going to be stagnant.

Everybody good with that one? So again, movement is king on this. All right, so we're going to jump into a little bit of the science of this and look at the anatomy. We'll look at the physiology, the biomechanics, motor control, and even the bioenergetics of how we can incorporate breath more efficiently, more full into, into our work. Any questions up to now based on sort of a preface of looking at it from a a Yogi, looking at it from blendings anatomy, looking at it from Joe's history and a little bit of our experience. Comments, questions? All right, so let's move on.

Chapter 3

The Anatomy of Breath

So the anatomy, I love this picture of the thoracic cage, right? And we use the word cage, but typically we think of cage, we think of that a thousand pound gorilla on the other side or lion on the other side of those metal bars. And we don't want those metal bars to move, right?

We want, we don't want them to stretch, move apart, we want them to be really firm. But in our body we use the word cage because it is a protective mechanism to our vital organs. So it does protect us, but we are moving animals, which means that these are very supple and flexible cages in our bodies. So let's go through them. We have 12 vertebra from those 12 vertebra. We had them, all of them move and articulate and they have a disc in between them. And then we have 12 ribs on each side.

Now the rib is by far the most flexible bone in the body. You can squeeze your own ribs and bend them on your own body, right? So a very flexible bond. It's a bond that has a lot of elastin inside of it. Okay. Then that connects to rubbery cartilage and the rubbery cartilage connects to a floating bone.

So that's a lot of movement and it's more spring induced. So if you think of it having that potential energy that when we close it, it wants to open back up. When we open it, it wants to close back down. As we talked about that potential energy is crucial for us in how it moves. It needs to be supple. The other thing that I want to make clear is that the lack of mobility in the thoracic spine and the thoracic cage of the rib cage are predisposing our bodies for cervical, shoulder and low back pathologies. So the breathing becomes really important when we understand breath is movement, movement of the thoracic cage, and that if we can provide that movement alignment to the rib cage and the thoracic spine, we're going to decrease the risk of injuries or pathology and degeneration in the neck, the shoulders, and the low back.

So if you just sit in your chair there, you're still there. And what I want you to do is go into a very restricted kyphosis in your thoracic spine. Okay? So that means the curve is going to go back and you dropped down. Your head goes forward because you want to look forward, right? So now very carefully look with your head to the right and to the left and notice how much range you lost, right? So can you imagine having to be in this posture and spending all day on the phone or typing, right? Right? Now lift your arms up over your head.

What do you feel of that? Right? You feel impingement right away, right? So you think of people that have this kyphosis that are lifting weights and working out in the gym and rowing and cycling. And playing volleyball and those kinds of things that they're asking for. Shoulder pathology right now, come up with that Nice posture, right? Taking a nice deep breath and feel the length of the spine.

And now rotate your head to the right and to the left and notice the difference or the ease or lift your arms up over your head and notice how much easier it is to move the shoulder girdle. So lack of movement of that thoracic cage, right? That thoracic spine, rib cage are predisposing factors to shoulder, cervical and lumbar pathologies. And those are three of the most common orthopedic injuries that we see in rehabilitation. Okay? And we often don't look to treat it by mobilizing and thoracic spine. We get caught up looking right at the shoulder, the neck and the back rather than the whole body. So as pilates, teachers always say, uh, we're already blessed to work with whole body integrated movement.

So the goal would be is how do I, you know, facilitate the alignment in that transition of force and the breath and the expansion and contraction? Because just doing that in our whole body exercise is going to reduce the risk of injury and it's going to improve performance, decreased neck injuries, shoulder injuries, and back injuries. And people say that all the time. They come to us with shoulder injuries. It's not the shoulder exercises that are making their shoulder better. It's the alignment and congruency that happens in those joints when we get movement and alignment in their thoracic spine.

So keep that in mind as we go through this part of the anatomy. We look at the muscles of breathing. It's important for us to understand the diaphragm and the nature of the diaphragm and how it works. The diaphragm is a unique muscle in that it has what's called a central tendon. So you have this doming effect of the muscles.

Natural position is domed and as a central tendon in the middle of it, okay? And it's goal is to be able to change the pressure of the lungs. So the lung has a lining called the pleura and the pleura attaches or sticks onto the dome of the diaphragm and the fibers of the diaphragm run in the same direction up in, down, connecting the central tendon down to the ribs, all the way around. So you can see the white Domi part of the tendon, right? Imagine that connected to the lobes of the lungs through the Pleura when that muscle contract is going to create a vacuum in the lung tissue. And that's why we in hell when the diaphragm gets pulled down and when it relaxes, because the central tendon, what's it going to do? Spring, back up.

So that's going to increase the intro lung pressure. And if we open our throat, air will come out. Okay, so very simple mechanism. Very cool. One of the things I like to remind people about is directly underneath those domes of the diaphragm is our guts. Some people think like there's air or space or something. No, no. It's filled with liver. It's filled with pancreas. It's filled with the stomach and the spleen and the and the rest of the viscera.

So when I breathe deep and I drop that diaphragm down, and by the way, the diaphragm is angled, so it's actually going to push forward and down, right? It's connected from here to the back. And so if you think of how the Dome Sits, right? It's going to contract is going to push the viscera out the front. So when you see are doing a deep diaphragmatic breath, we call it rectus PUFAs, right? You see that time you come way out because the guts have to move out of the way when that drops down. Now if they don't, the rib cage has to expand, which is how we use diaphragmatic breath employees and movement in dance, right? We don't want to see people's belly sticking out in a posture exercise, but a singer, right? We're very much an opera singer is taught to expand that space and support from down low that they had that nice sustainable pressure from here and can relax your throat to be able to create voice. Beautiful voice. Okay, so diaphragm contraction is going to move viscera.

So here's a question for everybody. If I over recruit my abdominal wall so much the powerhouse, right, that I now end up with a little bit of a contracture. I'm holding those muscles in so much, I have a little bit of a contracture. What happens to my potential of diaphragmatic breath? It really decreases. Yes, and we're not going to talk about it today, but we looked at the function of the pelvic floor too, so when we over recruit the abdominal wall, pelvic floor also loses function in descends is not able to come up because there's too much pressure. It's all pressure related.

We're looking at what is the intra abdominal pressure, right, and how do we vary that intra abdominal pressure, maintain the right amount of stiffness for the activity that we're anticipating. It's not really a volitional contraction, is it? It's a volitional orientation of our body so we can control our alignment and the load and once we do that, the body naturally stiffens up based on the lobe. So we're going to try something really cool, but I want you to do is just sitting on the edge of your chairs there, right? I want you to go into a 15 year old.

We're looking at their phone posture. Are you with me? All right, everybody in that posture, okay. Now, if you imagine that your desk between your vertebra or like little balloons or inner tubes, right? And the crown of your head is the central axis. So if I start pumping up your disc, sure pulling you out of that 15 year old posture [inaudible] right? Get that nice tall position. Now we have this nice elongated position. Now in that seated posture, just rotate nice and easy side to side. Okay, so just very nice and easy.

Now what I want you to do is think of contracting and drawing the belly button into the spine. Lift the pelvic floor up, and now do the same movement and see which one felt better. Not as much, right? So sometimes I think we get in trouble of telling muscles what to do rather than what we want the body to organize. The the body's central nervous system is much smarter than any of us can be of telling a muscle when and how much to recruit. Now here's another interesting phenomenon about this intraabdominal pressure.

Okay, so we got this nice lift, we got the disc all pumped up, right? So she's [inaudible] right now imagine having 30 pound weights in your hands or bags of groceries with milk in it. What automatically happened in your body as you thought of turning around and rotating it stiffened up, right? Because the anticipation of ours knows that already. So I don't have to tell somebody, draw your abdominal wall and lift your Pelvic Cup. But I might just talk about good axial length and then image of load.

And we play with these things. I can down stretch. The other day we were working on this, talking about the, the glute Max and its relationship with the down stretch. So the Dallas judge position, we want that nice extension, right? So we're here on the bar pushing back and we wanted a little more hip extension. So one of the cues that came out in the study and we were talking about, somebody says, let's give him a glute Max contraction cue, right? So to squeeze their buns together to do that well, it did the opposite of what we wanted.

So the way that we sort of found a better way to do it was just by increasing the springs. When you increase the load in posture, the body then recruited the glutes to be extensors, right? But if you tell them to squeeze their glues together, they go into more of a posterior tilt. And that's not the position we wanted in the down stretch. That makes sense. So this is our pertinent, I'll tie it back together again because we're talking about how do we organize and use our rib cage in our, in our intra abdominal pressure to be able to function well. And the diaphragm is one of those muscles that controls the entire dominant pressure from above. So it's dumbing down and up pelvic floor from below and up.

And then all of the abdominal muscles around in the diaphragm, when you look at the diaphragm from below is in the picture. You can see that there's holes, right? And the strands coming down are referred to as the crews, right? The cruises. And what portals come down through this soft togas, the Vena Cava and the aorta are the three vessels that come through there. And if you think about these straps or these cruises come down and they attach in the front of the lumbar spine and not only in the front of lumbar spine.

So here's the curve of my lumbar spine. They come over and they go over the apex and come down into l four and l five anterior longitudinal ligament. So when I breathe it actually, if my abdominal wall is working correctly, is going to lengthen, right? So taking a deep breath right down low and fill it happens when the diaphragm descends and you have abdominal wall involved, you can almost feel the lumbar spine lengthening in that position as you breathe in into that lower abdominal region. Can you feel that it's on, it's going to almost lift like a girdle in front of the spy. So really cool feature of the diaphragm, but it only works when the other muscles are intact. So when I have somebody who's been injured and they lose the ability to use their abdominal wall or their low back muscles, that often, that's where we go to work in our rehabilitation to try to wake them back up.

How do we wake them back up? Movement movement that creates the demand for those muscles to work. Okay, so let's summarize this a little bit. Functions of the diaphragm. Most regular breathing occurs because of this muscle. It acts as a pump at the base of the lungs and it acts like a piston. So it's just pulling down and up, creating pressure changes inside the lungs.

We know that the top of the Dome, right? Is that the level four or five? So four or five is gonna be nipple height of the rib cage, right? So that's pretty high. That's how high the dome comes up, right? On an exhalation, not an inhalation exhalation. And that at the back, the top of it is at t seven which is the base of your shoulder blades. So that's about the angle of it, right? So if you put fingers at Nipple High, 34 in the back of the hand at the base of this shoulderblades, that's going to be your angle.

So it literally is about a 30 to 40 degree angle that is down with every movement of deformation. The diaphragm will transmit to the lungs. So whenever the diaphragm's moving, it's going to change the pressure into the lungs and it's going to cause an exchange of gas, right? And every time the diaphragm moves, it will influence the organs. So I think that's also important to understand that when we do breathing exercises, it affects our digestion. It affects our absorption of nutrients, it affects the ability to eliminate, it affects the ability to get lymphatic and circulatory fluids in our body, moving and also cleansing and detoxifying us through the liver, through the kidneys, right? And the bladder. So it really helps us in that process of keeping ourselves healthy.

Other muscles of inspiration are the intercostal muscles and in particularly the external intercostal muscles. So if you put your hand in the upper rib cage, sort of like this, just behind the breasts, that's where those muscles are. And if you think of the ribcage, have an apex about seven, it's almost like a mouth. So those muscles contract and they're going to lift the upper ribs up. You can see that it's going to lift the upper ribs up. So if it does that, it has to have something in the bottom that's going to hold the lower ribs down so that they open up, right? So we think of breathing and sitting on the edge of our table there.

We want to go into extension. Those lower ribs must be going down in order for the upper ribs to come up. So as you breathe in a nice deep breath and feel that expansion forward, so lower ribs go down, upper ribs come up. Okay, so those are the intercostal external intercostal muscles. The other inspiratory muscles, we often talk bad about them, right? Are the accessory muscles.

And it's because accessory is what they're designed to be. That's why they have that name. So if I'm cycling and I'm at the end of a 50 mile race and I'm out of oxygen, man, accessory muscles are great. They're going to bring in a little bit extra air that I need to be able to make it for that marathon. But when they become primary breathing muscles, this becomes a problem, right? And this is why a lot of us is ply teachers. We get our clients that come in and they're breathing up here. Well, accessory breathing doesn't facilitate any real movement of the middle or lower rib cage and definitely not the diaphragm.

And so you're not going to get the same kind of response with somebody that comes in that's an accessory breather by saying, exhale, when you push the carriage out, right? There's no, it's like sip and puff. There's no relation from here to what's going on down here. And so it's a disconnect. So a lot of times we like to teach our patients how to get the breathing down lower into the ribcage and down in their abdomen and get that exchange in their back and other parts of their body. People who have asthma or other CLPD will often emphysema, bronchitis, chronic bronchitis, we'll have.

So that increased tension of hi, and it's exactly that reason, right? So the scalene eye muscles and the sternocleidomastoid muscles are trying to lift the upper ribs up into displace the ribs enough to get a little air to come in. And they do, if you think of Christopher Reeves, right? Remember he was a c two spinal cord injury and so he did not have any diaphragmatic breathing or any intercostal muscles that worked, right? It's too high up. So the only thing that he had access to was accessory breathing muscles.

And for that reason he was on a respirator. So even when they took him off the respirator, he'd have to read like that to be able to do Arion, right? And then he gets so fatigued they have to put the respirator back on so that he could sleep at night because it was a voluntary accessory breath. You can imagine panicking and thinking of things like asthma, right? When the Alvioli are sort of narrowing down, the trachea is narrowing down, the bronchials are narrowing down and in spasm that they'll try using the accessory muscles to get the area. It's a scary thing.

So now let's move from inspiratory muscles to expiratory muscles. How do we get the air out? Well, all of our abdominal muscles, the quadratus, lumborum and we said the posterior cereus muscle and even some of the inner most intercostal muscles, anything that's going to narrow the rib cage, right? And he's going to decrease that space is going to be an exhalation muscle. And that's really where we put most of our emphasis in plot is a lot of time is the exhalation utilization for movements. So we're going to do a roll up, we're going to exhale to do our roll up, we're going to do hundreds. We often focus more on the exhalation rather than inhalation.

And we should focus on them equally. Just like fluction extension. We should be balanced in where we put our focus, but all the abdominal muscles are powerful, exhaling muscles. And one of the things in pilates too that we often fight about, right, we discussed between the different schools is sort of silly because what we are looking at versus say I'm in a plank position, we're getting ready to do long spine or, or uh, getting ready to do down stretch, up, stretch. Or some of those other exercises from a plank. Some schools inhale to go into a plank and create a stiffness and some schools exhale and they fight back and forth. Which one's the right one? Well, the truth is, if I'm a Cirque de Solei performer and I'm holding that plank position, I have to be able to breathe in and breathe out while I'm in that plank position to be able to be stable. And the truth is, is the dynamicness of the muscles.

When I'm exhaling to maintain plank, everything has to come in very close to creating of stiffness so my body doesn't collapse when I'm inhaling, I'm blowing up like a balloon and I'm stiffening that abdominal wall and the spine in that creates stiffness. So they both work just fine to be able to create stiffness in that position and they both work to create movement, right? Here's a little experiment I like to do is we often teach that flection should be accompanied by acceleration, but if I wanted to inhale while I'm flexing, how could I use an inhalation or direction of inhalation to help me inflection? Where would I send the air backwards? That's right. So I could send the air into the back of my ribs in the back of my lungs.

That will help me inflection. Okay. And the same thing would be true if I'm here and I want to, um, inhale while I'm going into extension, right? Or XL, I'm going to extension. I can use the exhalation, right? To narrow things down from the back, right. To pull that down and create more extension. So when we teach people to move, I want them to know that they have spontaneity. Whatever they're gonna do, they can control it, right? It's just natural for them. So let's move on to the last muscle group I want to talk about,

Chapter 4

Blood Gasses and pH

which is the pelvic floor. And when we talk about the pelvic floor, it's like another diaphragm. So the diaphragm that are horizontal in the body.

We have our vocal chords, we have our diaphragm, the breathing muscle, and we have the diaphragm with the pelvic floor. And those are like the horizontal shelves of our, by the help control that intra abdominal pressure. And the other thing important to understand is that pelvic floor also has a similar kind of tilt that we talked about with the diaphragm. So the diaphragm, it's tilt is going this way and the pelvic forward tilt is coming up and forward. So that again means there's pressure pushing forward from below and from above, which means that's why we have to have the intact anterior abdominal wall to be able to keep that intra abdominal pressure constant, right based on the load.

Very important for us. So I do bring that up here. I do in a lot more detail and pelvic floor when we talk about pelvic and lumbar dysfunction. So we're going to, we're going to move on. Physiology of breath, I said pretty simply is the exchange of oxygen and CO2 and most of the other gases are fairly inert. So the nitrogen makes up a lot of our, our air and our body doesn't react to it. So we breathe it in and we send it back out as basically as a space filler. But the real chemistry is between oxygen and the co two levels.

And so they are continually being balanced. And this is sort of an interesting phenomenon because we don't breathe because we need oxygen. We breathe because we have too much CO2 in us. And so those are all our chemo receptors in our body are measuring CO2, not two. And so that's how we drive that. And I remember in the picture here you see the little branches going down the very end of the lung and the branches down at the very end of the lung have the Alvioli at the end of them. Now the Oli is where the blood gas gets exchanged. So blood gas is not get exchanged inside the branches of the bronchioles.

And so there's air in there. So again, movement, even while we're sort of holding our breath, would continue to provide the Alvioli with new oxygen. So it's not always, and that's why when we hyperventilate, what do we do? What's the old wives tale breathe into a paper bag? That's right. So the paper bag we send in are all there and breathe back in are all there. And so what happens is we cause a vasodilation.

I'm gonna explain that process as called the Bohr effect. So this is what happens in western culture. We breathed in talk too much. All right, we just do too much. So we would be considered people that have increased ventilation.

We typically do increase thoracic breathing, which one of you mentioned your husband has him do more thoracic breathing and we tend to have a decrease in our CO2 levels. So we're pushing the CO2 out. We get a little nervous. We talk about that. Or you think of a, for me, I think of when I go diving and I put the regulator in my mouth, and in the beginning when you're first learning to dive, you over breathe. So you run out of air really quickly because you hyperventilate. What that does is it drives the Ph of the blood up, so you become alcalytic and it increases the overall muscle effort and it also increases tension. So that's sort of interesting. Now, eastern culture, they think that you only have a certain number of breaths in your life, so use them wisely and don't do it as Westerners do.

And you need to shut your mouth and not talk so much. Don't breathe so much. Now if you are on that side of the world where you breathe less often and you have decreased ventilation, you will probably have more diaphragms, matic or abdominal breath. So if you saw the Yogi sitting there breathing, you would see a subtle more of a abdominal breath, which sort of goes against what we talk about in PyLadies, but maybe it shouldn't in our resting breath and meditation, and we have an increase in the CO2 and it causes a vaser dilation. Now this is the interesting thing. When we have high CO2 levels, it opens our capillaries and arteries to get more blood to the tissue. If I hyperventilate, what happens? I get too much oxygen, not enough CO2. I go into vasoconstriction and I get dizzy or lightheaded, I pass out. So it almost seems backwards, doesn't it?

That if I get too much oxygen, I'm gonna not get oxygen, right? And if I have too much CO2, I'm going to get more oxygen. That's called the [inaudible] effect. It's the opposite of what we think. Okay. So this is something I noticed a lot of times with beginning parties teachers is they're so focused on the rule of breath that they hyperventilate their clients. The client sits up and they go, Oh man, I'm really dizzy. Right?

Cause they were doing heavy breathing with footwork and footwork didn't have a demand for heavy breathing. So they hyperventilated. And the beauty is in pilates we can exercise ourselves enough and make the exercise challenging enough that it has a demand on all the tissues for oxygen and we will breathe heavier and we will exchange gases because our body needs it. And so if we breathe fast or hard because we're running, we're out in there. So you're going to pass out and go into vasoconstriction because our body's demanding that oxygen. But if we breathe hard, like we're running and we're walking, right, we're going to have too much oxygen, too little CO2, and we go into vasoconstriction. Okay? Does that make sense? Now that also affects our blood alkalinity. And this is why I think sort of one of my philosophies with theories, it's those of us that are Westerners and talk too much and breathe too much, are going to be more on the alcohol alcoholic side in our blood.

Even just a little bit, make a big difference. So then I say, you know what, I'm doing pilates and I'm doing yoga and I want to have a yoga lifestyle. I'm going to go with the vegetarian diet. So a vegetarian diet is going to take them into what more alcalytic or more acidic, more alcalytic, right. Well, they're already on the alcohol clinic side. So how do they feel when they start going into an alcalytic diet? Worse, they don't feel good. They look depleted energy, they don't look well.

So it's really important to understand these differences and to say, if I go with a vegetarian diet, I still have to make sure that I'm getting plenty of proteins and things like that in my diet that are going to take me a little bit more towards the acidic level, which as soon as they start eating meat again, they often will start feeling better if they didn't allow their body to really change. And you've got to think that genetically our families had been eating meat and potatoes and those kinds of things for maybe thousands of years, depending on our family, where we're from. So we could have some [inaudible] genetic makeup that tend to lead us towards that alkalinity in the other side. Now just the opposite would be true too. So if I was a slower breather, right? I would be more acidic. If I'm more acidic and I started eating meat, what is I going to do to my acidity? Right?

It's going to take me into more acidosis, right? More acidic. Right? And so they don't feel good either because we feel good when our Ph is balanced. And so a lot of times our breath has affected, this is a little side note. So the bore effect says that an increase in alkalinity, which is a decrease in CO2, right? So the CEO twos down, we're hyperventilating increases the affinity of hemoglobin oxygen. So the paradox of Pranayama in breath controls that one actually gets more oxygen and product to the brain, lungs and tissue cells by taking in less air rather than more air.

So what does that say to us as Palladia as teachers? What can we take away from this lesson? This stop focusing on the breath. So much in every exercise is probably a good idea. Just like we don't want to focus on muscle contraction either.

We want to focus on movement, we want to facilitate movement. Does the movement enhanced the quality or does a breath enhance the quality of the movement or does it interfere with it? Right? It can do either one. And that's where blending said, in complex movements, breath must be spontaneous and we want to give them enough diversity of where that movement can come from to change here, that they can move spontaneously and healthy without having to worry about these things. Now that it doesn't mean that we don't do breath exercises cause a breath exercise is where the purpose of exercising our breath and our expansion, but it doesn't mean we have to make every exercise a breath focus exercise. So how do we address the idea of people that have structural deficiencies?

They have strategic deficiencies and their breath patterns. Sometimes they're just people that come in and they say, I'm a bad breather. Have you had clients have come in and said, I'm a bad breather? And I'm always like, well, who told you you're a bad breather because you're like a pretty good breather to me are the bad breathers I know are all dead. So you look pretty good to me. And did take the focus away from that because that is a metaphor, right?

That thought in their mind or being a bad breather. It's a metaphor. It's going to interfere with their ability to be well, not just in the breathing activity or moving activity. That's just like our clients coming to us and say, I'm not a very good mover. I'm clumsy. And you have to go back in those roots and say, where did that pattern come from? And saying, we breathing. Like, did this really come from a COPD or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? Or did it come from a perception of what accompanies a Copt, what a company's asked me. A lot of times these are perceptual things.

And so when somebody comes to me and says, you know, I don't know how to breathe. Well, I can't breathe the way you're teaching me to breathe. I don't understand breath. I'm a bad breather. I pull away from breath 100% I reinforce that you're doing a great job because you're alive and your skin looks good and well, we're going to focus on his movement. Now I can put them in positions of movement that I know will facilitate breadth in different parts of their body. So the person who talked about that breeze in their chest backwards, right? So it's just a matter put them into a tower bar position, enroll them forward, right? And have them practice breathing there.

They'll have to go the diaphragmatic breathing, which is what he's not doing. He's doing chest breathing. So you take the chest out of the equation. Now the only place he can breathe, it's going to be posted to your or abdominal. And sometimes they get to that point where they're in that position, right? So they're here and they're pushed through and they start doing this because they're trying to breathe into their chest.

And I just pushed their head down further and further, further, right? And I'm like, it's okay, because the good news is your pass out before you die right now. But the idea is that we can position the body to be able to shift the strategy and not have to talk about breath, right? Put in a position. All of a sudden you'll see them go and they go, oh, that's it. Look at the euro. Great breather. You got the breath in your diaphragm. Isn't that fantastic? Now, sometimes structurally what happens with them, those are diaphragm really years restricted in short.

And in those cases they need things like mild fascia release and they need to have some deep work in some serious breath training and those kinds of things that might be out of our league, sometimes as polite as teachers, but typically I feel they're more strategic and not so much structural. Right. If we try all of our strategies and we're not getting anywhere, then then it's time to refer them out and get an evaluation on that and see what's going on. The fair good. The idea of intraabdominal pressure in the history of those of us that did weight lifting or power lifting using an exterior belt, like the big fat leather belts, the power lifters use and pushing into the belt, increase the intraabdominal pressure. And there's a lot of research done on this and it's actually a hot topic in pilates. And maybe I'll speak more about it in the lecture on the latest research on healthy spine. Uh, the, the idea, however though, is if your true goal is to increase intraabdominal pressure.

So a power lift or lifting 700 pounds in a deadlift, we don't want any movement around that spine and we want to increase that intra abdominal pressure as much as it's safe. So a belt in pushing out in that belt is going to be this the greatest generator of intrabdominal pressure much more than us hollowing the abdominals are drawing in. So the research has definitely shown that. And this is where I come with the policy, just like, let's get away from the idea of thinking that we are a, you know, that we have the best core control exercises that are out there because that's not true. Um, Stuart McGill's work would show that pushing into a belt will increase greater intraabdominal pressure. What we want to be famous for is control Ology, right? We want people to know that we teach people how to be efficient in controlling the quality of their movement no matter what the task, including heavy power lifting. So if their heavy power lifting, I want to teach them how to be as efficient as possible and heavy power lifting, but they would be pushing into their belt as a heavy power lifted because they need that additional intra abdominal pressure. Does that make sense? But for you and me, we're opening doors, lifting things up, putting shirts on Washington, our feet empty in the laundry machine, you know, cooking dinner, picking up a bag of groceries.

I mean that type of movement has a very spontaneous, um, organization of intraabdominal pressure in our bodies. So having good posture and be able to breathe and be supplied spontaneous to me with a majority of the people in the world is much more valuable than thinking of my goal is to increase that core control and get intrabdominal pressure as high as I possibly can and walk around stiff and that's not what we want. And that's not what Joseph wanted either. That's not what he taught. Matter of fact, his thing was if you perform his exercises regularly, that your movement will become natural and you would do your daily task with spontaneous vigor and pleasure or something like that, which is really what we want, right? And breath is very much a part of that. So the body uses take home message. Body uses only as much oxygen as it needs.

Chapter 5

The Biomechanics of Breath

So we get, we get put the oxygen hose in our nose and fill ourselves with oxygen. But if we don't need any more oxygen, we're wasting oxygen. Okay? And you can become toxic with too much oxygen, which is another problem. Okay? Most of us, we just don't use it. It just comes right back out into the atmosphere when we exhale.

And that's why when you breathe into a bag, there's still enough oxygen inside that bag that you could breathe in that air probably for five, six minutes if you want it to that same breath of air, just like somebody going down and doing the diving would do deep diving. Right? It's scary. All right. And breathing is regulated by the amount of CO2 in your bloodstream, not oxygen. Okay, everybody go that simple physiology. Now I want to get into, my favorite part of this is the biomechanical. And I want to talk about the rule the ribs, because if we understand how these joints work and what they do, man, it makes movement so much easier to teach and our breath becomes an incredible asset to us in teaching the movement.

So we look at the different joints that we talk about here. We look at the cost over t-bone, that's the one we're going to spend the most time on. That's where the rib actually comes in and connects to the Vertebra posteriorly, right? And then we have the sternal Costa, which is where the ribs come in and connect to the sternum. And that is often done through the costochondral and inner chondral connection. So chondro means cartilage.

So we have this rubbery cartilage that connects our ribs to the sternum or to the other, Carla. So only seven ribs truly connect into our sternum. Eight, nine and 10 are called false ribs. They come up into the Chondral, the cartilage, and that connects into seven which connects into the sternum. And then 11 and 12 are floating ribs. So there's no car, a chondral cartilage on those, uh, on those bones. Okay, so here we go. I love this part. This is the rule of the ribs. Okay? So if we think of the picture that you're looking at, the rib comes into an articulates and it has special for sets that articulate right in between the two vertebral segments. So what is in between two vertebral bones? What's the rubbery thing there?

The disc, right? It's the disc. So the disc is in between them and it comes right in and articulates with the disc and it has a little fossette that goes up to the vertebra below, above, and the set the vertebral low, right? So it goes right into it. So rule number one says that where the disc goes or the nucleus of the disc goes, the rib will follow. Okay? That's worth writing down where the disc goes, the rib will follow. So let's play that game.

Let's make our hands as if our hands are actually our vertebra, right? So we have a top vertebral or vertebra, the disc in between. If my spine in that segment goes into extension, right? The nucleus of the disc is gonna move in which direction? Forward or back forward. That's right. So it's going to move forward.

So that means the ribs are going to move in what direction forward? They're going to follow the disc, okay? If I go into flection, the disc is going to move back or posteriorly and the ribs are going to also glide posteriorly. And if I side bend to the right, the disc is gonna go to the left, the ribs are going to go to the left, the right, they're going to go to the right. Okay? So that's rule number one where the disc goes, the rib is going to follow. Now rib two is a little more complicated, but when we understand it, it makes movement so much easier. And that is because the rib attaches to the transverse process of the Vertebra below. So the neck of the rib, you can see the neck of the road comes down and connects to that transverse process of the vertebral below. So let's think of this now.

So we're back here with the two vertebra. We have the disc in between and the rib comes in between and then the neck of it, it's can articulate down lower with the vertebra below. Okay. It's always a variable below. So if I go into extension, we said the ribs are going to move into what direction for right anteriorly, but because it's connected down low, what direction is the rib going to tilt? Relative to the river? Above is you're gonna tilt towards the floor or up towards the ceiling.

Towards the floor. Towards the floor. Right. It's connected to here. The ribs going to do this relative to the river bar and image of it is the accordion. Right? So if I take the accordion and I open it like this, the parts of the accordion have to come apart to be able to close the back end and then the front end. So it'd be like the flection and the extension. Right. And that's what we're doing here. So we have extension, the ribs go forward and they tilt down relative to the rib above. You're with me on that. If I go into flection, we said the ribs going to move back. And because it's connected to the vertebra below, it's going to tilt up.

Right? And that's a really powerful lesson to learn cause let's feel it now. Let's see what it feels like for our body. So typically when we do extension, we will use a Q, like lift your sternum up towards the ceiling or your rib cage up, right? So just go into a sloppy extension and you're probably gonna feel it in your low back and maybe in your neck. Are you with me on that? Yes. Okay. So now what we're going to think of is let's think of those lower ribs going forward, but tilting down towards the pelvis right now, what just happened to your extension is cleaning and where did it go?

Where did we get movement now that we didn't get before? And the thoracic. That's right. So we are able to facilitate the thoracic to articulate new extension rather than just lifting the whole thoracic up as a brick and dropping it down into the low back. And that's the most common thing that we see. People not liking the Swan, not liking extension exercises because they're not extending thoracic spine because our ribs are coming up the queue we give them as lift your ribs up towards the ceiling of just turn up towards the ceiling. When in reality we have to be sending something down in order for something to go up. Okay? Same thing's true. Now for reflection, so I go into flection, right? Go ahead and drop sternum down towards the pubis, like we sometimes say, bring this term for the pubis. Now you feel compression in the low back, right?

So now from that position, think of the ribs are going back, but now for them, lift up underneath your heart. And what you'll notice now is that you came out of the lumbar spine and you feel the spine is much longer and there's movement in the thoracic now in your flection. So imagine teaching your role up teaching your hundred exercise, teaching any kind of flection activity. You're going to have a much cleaner rolling up than you would if you're just bringing your sternum two closest points. You're going to close those points, you're going to go right into your lumbar spine. Okay? Now it gets a little more challenging when we go into things like lateral flection rotation. So let's do figure that out. If I go into, and I'll, for the sake of you and and our audience looking at me, I'm going to pretend I'm going the same direction as you.

So I'm going to say this is my right side bending, right? And so writes, I've been, and we've said the disk is gonna go to your left and the ribs are gonna go to your left. Now they act like they're an extension on this side. Inflection on this side. So the second rule would say that the ribs on my left side should be tilting down and the ribs on my left side should be lifting up underneath my heart.

So feel the difference. Now if you were doing a mermaid of that feeling of feeling this side, the right side, lifting up underneath the heart and the left side, reaching down, right? Reaching down towards the pelvis. So it's going to have that same effect you felt when you went into the extension that your rib cage was actually connected to the pelvis and by all definitions, I would define that as being core control. Core controls. When the rib cage has the right relationship with the pelvis, not how much torque, not how much tone that determines is determined by our anticipation, right? The load that we're going to carry, but the core control is knowing that the rib cage is actually in alignment and connected to the pelvic rim or the pelvic bones appropriately.

Right? In alignment. As soon as I go here, right, right. Dropped back behind it or I shifted to the side doing my mermaid. Right? I've lost core control by that definition and I could be doing all kinds of muscle activity. I'm creaking all my muscles in there right now to work. I got great core control on this exercise, but I'm not aligned here very efficiently as core control based on this activity and that allows the rest of my body then to start moving so my other ribs can start opening up. Okay, last one. Rotation. Are you ready?

Okay, so rotation, there really is no displacement of the disc if we're in a true axial rotation. So we go into our rotation and the ribs will rotate because they're going to follow the vertebra going around. Okay. And the most common pairing of movement with rotation is side bending in the opposite direction. That makes sense. That's fry. It's law. So if I rotate to the right, that segment is going to be a left side bending force couples with it. Okay? So let's pretend that happens a little bit.

When somebody going in to do a rotation, they up side bending to their right a little bit. So let's take the rule of ribs. Now this being lifted up, we're going to actually send it down and let this site up and then you'll notice you got about another 15 degrees or 20 degrees of rotation by making that correction. Let's repeat that. So we go into a rotation and a little bit of a side bet in the opposite direction. And even if you go as far as you can go now taking the rib that is open on this side of the rotation down and the rib on this side up underneath, you've created core control. Now the connection between pelvis and the rib cage, and now the rib cage has 10 1520 more degrees of movement.

Why? Because when you create below movement is allowed above. If you don't have the right stiffness below, then it will be stiff above and you'll move too much from somewhere. Typically l four five l five s one hence back pathology, shoulder pathology, neck pathology, right. Okay. How are we doing on those two roles? Good. You see how we'll and we'll apply them in the movement class as well.

So we'll play them and then we'll try and make the movement as easy as possible just by understanding where the movement comes from and not always thinking that we have to muscle through things and make it work. When we look at the joints of one through seven, they have more of a rotatory component to it and we often refer to that as the pump handle. So they come into the sternum and back in the vertebra they have more of a rotatory kind of mechanism. So the ribs are going to do this, right? So what breathing would that relate to? What direction of breathing in hell or exhalation but its going to be chest breathing, right? So it's going to be that anterior posterior diameter. So just so you can just imagine this, if the sternum lifts up, it's going to increase air coming in the lungs and when a sternum comes down it's going to force air out. Okay. The lower ribs have more of a glide.

So they're doing this in their full sets, right? So eight, nine, 10 and 11 are doing this action. So that's going to be our lateral or transverse plane going out this way. Expanding to the sides. Okay. That's their tendency. They all have the capacity to do both. So I can do a lateral displacement in the upper rib and get a lateral translation just like I could down low.

And I can also get these ribs to lift up a little bit in front. So they both have rotatory properties and gliding properties. But the dominant, if we know where it comes from, the upper thoracic is going to be more into your postier like a water pump. And the lower is going to be more like a bucket handle. So those are terms we often use in describing movement of the rib cage water pump handle forward and back with a sternum.

And we have the bucket handle for the lower rib cage. And so we talk about breath as being an expansion into the three diameters of the rib cage or of the lungs. So we have an anterior posterior. And what I want you to feel now is this, with the hands on your thighs, your knees is taking a deep breath and notice if the breath goes more anteriorly or more postage early when you do a bull chest expansion, right? And one of the things we often miss is we don't expand posts too enough. We're very anterior animals, but see if you can increase the posterior a little bit more and Xcel good. Okay.

The transverse one is going to be going inside, going out to the side, right? So that's going to be our dancers breath, right? The dancer will tend to want to have breathe from here and not show any breath action coming here. And then the third one I did vertical backwards, but anterior post to your transverse and then you have vertical. So verticals are going to be diaphragm and accessory. Okay. So cetera is going to pull from above. Diaphragm pulls from below.

So those are your three diameters above and below. And to your post to your and lateral or transverse. The question of losing it, uh, because we sit all the time and it sedentary animals I think is changing a lot of things in our bodies and that's probably one of them. It takes the move the bone towards the end of range of motion. So our posture is already at the end of a range of motion is not a whole lot of movement that can happen there. As we come into a more upright posture, we have a lot more movement in displacement posteriorly.

When we're in upright posture. If we stay in position too long though we get rigid and stiff in that position is in the range and we don't move anything in the chest. We just go into diaphragm or to accessory breathing. So we'll see. The more deconditioned somebody is, they're going to be more like breathing up in the upper part of their neck.

Chapter 6

The Purpose of Pilates Breath

So purposes of breathing in Pele's, one of them is the sustainer posture with dynamic breath.

And the hundred is a great example of this. So we have a load this coming down on our bodies, right? So we're in the a hundred position and I have a little thing on the back of my body there, but here the gravity is pushing down on my legs and that load is constant throughout the entire breath, right? So now what's happening is I'm breathing in for five counts and out for five counts and I'm trying to keep my intra abdominal pressure constant. So how does that happen?

What has to take place in order for the intra abdominal pressure to stay constant? Right? And this will be referred to as a number of names, but we often talk about the hydraulic amplifier. So the abdominal muscles, the pelvic floor, and the diaphragm all work synergistically to keep the inch abdominal pressure constant for the load. So in the a hundred the load is the legs against gravity. That's constant, which means my intrabdominal pressure has to stay constant, whether I'm breathing in or breathing out. So when I breathe in, the abdominal wall is going to have to eat [inaudible] lengthen. And the pelvic floor should also essentially lengthen to maintain the intraabdominal pressure constant when the diaphragm is descending, right? Because if I let go of that abdominal wall, what's going to happen, right?

This poof is right. So this comes up, Lombard comes up off the mat, legs rub down. So we see that all the time people first strategy to survive the a hundred as a sip and puff strategy, right? So you go on their a hundred position, they're going like this. Okay, okay. Right. So they use little accessory motion. There's no nothing coming down in here. They're keeping this constant.

And then as we mature, it's a [inaudible] [inaudible] right. And we don't want to see this because then they will lose that dawn wall. So there's this beautiful synergy going on between the diaphragm, the abdominal wall, and the posterior wall, not just the anterior wall and the pelvic floor. And if I could tell you when they need to contract in our contract, I would be lying because it, it's done. It's such a minute level how much contraction to the ta versus the pelvic floor versus the quadratus versus the, you know, internal, external, oblique and the Rectus, they work synergistically together. And so I think of it more like a basket. It's really finely woven.

And when I inhale, I have to keep a certain tension. And you know, like when you put your fingers in the, those, those little finger traps. Yep. So the same thing as it, it has to be able to expand and move appropriately based on the load. Well then what happens when I started doing other things, crazy things where I'm putting more load on it, right? So I started putting reciprocal movement through my body. That's gonna cause rotatory forces coming through. So when I have this leg up, that means the multipolar I on this side and the [inaudible].

So you're going to be working harder to make it so that this doesn't pull me over to the side, right? So the more dynamic the movement, the more spontaneous the organization has to be. So when we have load that load, those things, those muscles have to work synergistically together to be able to lengthen in short and based on the breath pattern, because we're putting that load on it with the inhalation, right? And our goal is not to increase the intra abdominal pressure is to keep it. So it's the appropriate and intra abdominal pressure for the exercise. So the more efficient we become with the exercise, the easier it comes to do the exercise.

Okay. So here's the big question of the day. Does breath facilitate the movement or does it interfere with the quality of movement? That's how I measure breath. So I'm not saying do they inhaled the right time or exhale the right time. I'm asking the question, did your breath pattern or strategy facilitate the movement or interfere with the quality of movement? It's about quality of movement.

Alright? That's where breath becomes a tool, not a rule. Okay? Really powerful for us to think that way. Now beginners have to have rules. So beginner plot teacher is fine. Exhale, when you do your footwork, pushing out in hell, when you come down, when you're doing your plank, do it this way, the way your school teaches you. But as you progress, you start realizing that the real question is, is are we producing what Joseph talked about after practicing over and over again? Are we producing natural and spontaneous movement of our daily activities with vigor and zest? That's our outcome. That's our desired goal.

And so that's what we're trying to teach them, right? And then I can also use breath to challenge. So for example, when I work with somebody that has an acrobat or a circle slay or a dancer or an athlete, I want to be able to challenge them is can they inhale when they're in this kind of a position? And where would that in hell take place spontaneously, probably in the back. Right. And that would still be able to keep in balance out the right amount of tensions that are necessary for that body in that particular activity. So I want to give them that freedom of having the ability to expand their rib cage and their diaphragm in all different orientations. So I might do exactly the opposite of what we've been taught as the rule to be able to challenge somebody to have spontaneous natural breath in a different orientation.

Okay. So the breathing should match the demand of the activity. This is another one where we don't want people hyperventilating, so we have them do their activities and let them breathe. Normally if I see that I could use a breath cue to correct a faulty movement, then I use it just like I would attacked our cue or an imagery queue. Right.

Why don't you try exhaling as the legs lower in feet and straps and see if that helps keep the alignment of your low back closer to the mat. Right? So it doesn't mean that you have to exhale when you lower your legs. I want to challenge somebody in hell. When you lower your legs, then it really is challenging to see how strong you are, right? But I could use it as a cue to facilitate it, right? If I saw them holding their breath in, their bottoms going to start moving instead of their legs and their hips, right?

So they stiffen up their legs and they started the bottom rolls up and down when they're doing their feet and straps instead of disassociating the hips. Not right now in enclosure of our workshop today, couple of things I want to talk, talk about and we'll experience them in the mat class, but it's understanding all the things that have effect on breath that we teach. So the muscles themselves have a direct relationship because they connect to the ribs, right? So I have my petrol girl that Kurt connects to the ribs. I have my lats that connect to the ribs a little bit. I have a straight as anterior and other muscles, or my shoulder girdle that connect to the ribs.

My thoraco Costello's muscles and my erector spinae connect to my ribs, right? My cervical muscles connect to my ribs in the back and all these muscles have a direction. And so when I moved my body into a direction or that my head go down, it creates displacement on the ribs, which could be associated with breath because breath is caused by the displacement of the rib cage. And when we understand that, we can start thinking that, you know, when that the muscles themselves during breath, just the position of our body, the fashion pool can create exchange in breath. And if some coy learned in a, from one of my Gyrotonic teachers as we just sit on the edge of your chair and you bring your arms across your chest, right? And you just sort of open your throat and you can listen to me first.

Okay? So what happens is all I've done is open my throat. The poor of the rotation on my rib cage is going to be compressing. And then the release of it expanding, compressing, expanding. And as I get a volume going and I can really relax my throat, the movement is exchanging air for me.

No longer am I doing an active diaphragms matic or change of something to get air come in. The movement does it. So when we do certain movements that have pulses and rhythms and timing to it, those are things that are going to facilitate breath if they're hooking onto our ribs. So if you sort of think of what you know, lifting your arms over your head or the pulse or or salute and those countings, if there's muscles that are going to be pulling on the ribs and directions, the dark is another great one and extension. I love the dart, um, where you're coming up into a little bit extension and you're pulsing and that peck girl is pulling on your rib cage in the front and you're opening the clavicle to be able to have that nice dark alignment in your breathing activity. Okay? We also know that gravity has an effect. So if I'm in the elephant or I'm in rollover or I have my head down below my heart, right?

Gravity now is pushing my diaphragm towards my head. And so a contraction now of my diaphragm has to push my guts against gravity when I'm standing up. It's following gravity. So when I inhale, it's just dropping down and my guts are gonna go out. But when I'm upside down, it has to actually lift weights so we can train our diaphragm to get stronger by having people do diaphragmatic breathing in inverted positions. So Hain exercises, um, rollover a corkscrew, a boomerang. I mean, all of these intermediate Vance exercises are ones that are actually gonna strengthen our diaphragm. If we're inhaling as we're going through that movement, it's very cool kind of thing to understand that. Or if we really want to help somebody, right, we can bring them up.

Maybe they don't do so well laying on their back. We bring them up into a seated position in a seated position. Gravity is in their benefit to help them with their diaphragmatic breathing. So I'll even do things who bind their chest, right? And sort of force them to drop diaphragm down or take them into flection to get diaphragm to drop down. Okay. So there's some cool little techniques.

When I have people that are obese or coming back off of a pregnancy, I will use a large sheet or a towel around their lower rib cage because their rib cage is out here and the flared rib cage, and depending on how big they are, it depends on how many assistants I have to use to pull it tight. But what happens is when we said that rib cage goes from being here, right to 180 degrees. So you think of how that changes the framework for your house, your tent of your body, right? If my ribs come out here, what does I gonna do to the framework coming down around my pelvis? Can you see the difference? I mean, it's just like immediately you see me go from a size 46 chest to a size 58 chest and my belly and walls going to match that. So what happens is because all those abdominal muscles connect to my lower rib cage and the rib cage is out here, those muscles become actively insufficient.

So the actin myosin are pulled so far apart that they no longer can draw the fibers closer together. They can't do an active contraction, their abdominal wall or to bring their ribcage closer so we can use binding as a way to do that. So with obesity and especially after pregnancy, we can start binding and that's where sometimes girdles tumtums times help too. The old fashioned girl. But the bindings nice because we can draw it in and help them. As they exhale, they start feeling those muscles started to come back in and physiologically as soon as that act in Myers thing gets close enough, they can start contracting and as soon enough they can start organizing their own abdominal wall to draw that rib cage back into a healthier place. Keep the old air out of those lungs. So the lungs are healthier, improved digestion, improves posture, gets rid of back pain. If I don't have that connection in my interior wall, then I don't have intraabdominal pressure. Right.

So if I don't have that tension there, unless I put a belt on and I'm pushing out with a val Salomon maneuver, I don't have intra abdominal pressure, which means I don't have stability. And that's where leads into another topic with pregnancy, with diastisis and the tearing of the Interior Wall. If it's bad enough and they can't close that wall with the Trans were so Donald from behind, they can't get enough intraabdominal pressure to stabilize their body with movement stability being defined, right? Core control of the connection between rib cage to pelvis, not how much torque you can create. But that connection, if this was pulled apart and you can't close it, you can't connect ribcage to pelvis. If the ribs are out like this and flared, you can't connect ribcage to pelvis and we've got to address those problems and breathing is a tool to do that. Okay, so we can play with gravity, we can play with external forces, we can use muscles and muscle position and bony position to be able to facilitate breath to be more efficient and more effective. Moving the skeleton. This is one of my favorite, just moving the body through space is going to facilitate air exchange.

One of my favorite is the tower bar exercise pushed through and using the circumduction a way to move around and to be able to exchange air with that particular organization. Right? So if I go into a circumduction around, I'm going to be facilitating that change in those pools on those bones. That's skeleton to increase air exchange and parts of my lung that maybe I didn't have before because as a real sagittal beast, right? That sagittal beast, everything is here. Everything is forward and flexed. Okay. The other thing is that the ribs are spring, so take advantage of that image of springy ribs.

Get away from the word of cage and go with things like springy and elastic and theraband and rubbery and you know, resilient and and all of those kinds of images. Get rid of the image of cage and breathing problems. Get them to, whether they're having a healthy concept of movement that's there for them. All right, I think that takes us to energy. So we'll finish up with the last slide here. And it's a wonderful quote and it's probably the most important part of breath.

We've talked about the anatomy of breath, we talked about the physiology of breath, the biomechanics and the motor control. So far a breath. But probably the most important thing for us to talk about is the energy aspect of breath. And I think this is where, you know, Joe talked about it as vitalizing all of our tissues and ourselves throughout our body. And when you think of how we are created, how our body's organized, that every cell has its own nucleus that reproduces its own DNA to the reproduction of that cell. And so there's this incredible intelligence inside the nucleus of every cell of our body and that's connected through our fashional system. And when those cells are healthy and moving well, they vibrate at a certain frequency. And that frequency resonates.

My understanding about 99 oh hurts with mother earth. And there's some variance based on the tissue density, but mother earth and our bodies are meant to vibrate about the same. And so when we talk about energy and life and what comes in from light, what comes to us from the air, what comes to us from the earth vibrations. These are the energetic forces that we want to parallel ourselves with. Not just physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.

So I want to read this quote, uh, by Robert's for Boda. It says breath. Prana in mind are mutually inherently related. Cultivate one well and the other two will fall into line. Pronto is the energy that drives life. The power that animates the body enlivens the mind and spurs the soul.

Pronto is life's inspiration. It's foundation is tenacity. It is the sure hand at the Tiller, the wise voice of good counsel, the urge to help and harmony that craves to turn our bodies into havens where we can take shelter from the storms of the hectic modern world. Prada is at work in every instance in every cell of every living organism. I love that quote because it reminds me of my purpose. It reminds me of how beautiful our creation is.

You know that we have the ability to participate and to connect with the earth and to connect with the cosmos and to connect with each other. And breath is part of that. I don't think it's a mistake that it's one of his three guiding principles. I love the part where he says it turns our bodies into a haven of rest from the craziness in the world. We can be anywhere. Mandela was in prison and he was preparing himself and I'm sure he used breath many times to calm his abused body and mind and soul to be able to find his haven.

It really doesn't matter what lot we've been given in this life. If we understand this, you know, we so often are judging, but when we're at peace with ourselves, we, we get that and we can find peace by just slowing our breath down, connecting with ourselves, energizing ourselves, realizing what's important. There's no coincidence that inspiration and inspire are the same root. There's no coincidence that Prama is thought to be in every living cell in the universe and that we connect and resonate with those other cells in our body. And with each other's body, with the air that we breathe in the earth that we walk on in the food, the wheat.

And my gut feeling says that when we truly understand breath, we really understand energy, that we're at peace no matter what we're dealt. And the more that I learned that, and the more that the focus is learning, that breath is this incredible gift. And even Maslow talks about this and his hierarchy of needs says we can be up in that self actualization level and the top of the cone or the pyramid and somebody puts a plastic bag over our head and about 30 seconds later, all that all truism is gone and we're ready to do whatever it takes to take in that next breath of air. And so how important is it the breath be one of our guiding principles in plots. So I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have. And I, you know, it's, I love what we do. Um, I think sometimes we get caught up in the rules and we forget the big picture of movement and movement is life.

And people who move live longer and healthier and people who move with better quality even do better because they have awareness and awareness ties us to the universe and you can't stop it. When people move, they make better decisions. When they don't move, they make worse decisions. It's just part of life, relationships, business, whatever it is. So breathe on, be inspired. All right,

Chapter 7

Put It Into Practice

we're going to start with a little movement and a, the movement I want to happen is going to start inside your lungs, but I want you to appreciate how breath and breath actually takes up space and posture and changes are weight-bearing. So if we're just saying on our feet about shoulder width apart, and I always like to take it into a little bit of an anterior lean so you can feel your feet right and if you just try to go around the edges of your feet and feel the all the contact points on the floor so you can feel your toes, the inside and lateral side of the foot and just moving around. And then you're going to come with smaller and smaller circles until you sort of fall in that place where you have a good grounding, typically about 55 to 60% of the weight on the ball of the foot and about 40 to 45% on the hill. Can you find that place there? And we just stack our bones up so we know that the tailor sticking straight up and the Tibia is on top of that and the femur on top of the tailors and or the Tibia. And sometimes you can think of those bones stacking up.

You can find a place where there's the least amount of muscle energy happening, right? So sort of like we're just suspended or that elastic band connecting the crown of the head up to the ceiling and we're suspended like a puppet. You just sort of find that free space. And when you find that place, close your eyes and as you take in a deep breath, notice what happens to your weight distribution and exhale. Now for me, when I inhale, I feel my body weight shift back towards my hill. Deep breath back. And this time, see if we can bias it by really sending the air into the back of the lungs and notice that it sends you more to the back. This time. Deep breath into the diaphragm or the belly.

And you'll notice it doesn't change at all. Can you feel the difference? And then when the weights in the front of the foot, right deep breath into the back. So the weight shift in the body shift in the back. So now this time, see if we can bring the area in as much as possible in all sir conferences. So we talked about forward and back side and superior. Inferior. Okay.

And you notice as you do that the body doesn't sway. It stays up nice and tall and exhale. So understanding again that the movement or what causes breath with your eyes open is going to be the movement of the rib cage. If your rib cage moves forward, it's going to displace your gravity forward. If your rib cage moves back, it's going to display, shift your weight back.

If it displaces in the abdomen, it's going to go forward. And we go all directions. It should keep us right in our ideal alignment. Okay, so let's go and start on your backs. Knees bent, smiles on your face, smiles across your shoulders, hands down to the side. And again, we're going to be playing with the concept of breath throughout this particular class. And not so much with rules of breath, but more with observation of breasts. Allow breath to do its job as I sort of take you through the movement. So let's just simply start off with some gentle bridging and bridging with articulation.

And I want you to observe how you breathe with this exercise. So I'm not even going to give you any breathing cues to start. Just begin to articulate the pelvis, the l 504-OH-THREE-0201 t 1211 ten nine eight is about as high as you're going to go. And then from there you'll roll back down 891011121234, five and the pelvis. Now let's go right into our rule ribs. We're going into a bridge, and so we're going to want to send the ribs posteriorly into the mat as we start to pill up.

That's probably going to be associated easiest with a little bit of an exhalation, at least opening your throat as you roll the pelvis up and then taking a deep breath and as you exhale again, sending the upper ribs down and back first. Let's repeat that again. Coming on up and rolling up around my hand. The ribs relaxing down into the floor. That's right. Now we're thinking of this day in here a little bit and fill this, sending down into the mat, fill the ribs posteriorly gliding pants, and not worrying so much about this. On the next one, you're going to bridge up and you're going to stay up and we'll go right into our lateral translation. So we're going to slide the pelvis to the right, slide the pelvis to the left, dropped down one rib and then slide to the right and the left again and see if you can get at least five or six segments by the time you get down into the l five s one area. Feel that translation of the ribs side to side. It looks good.

Good, good, good. Everybody's getting some good movement. Yeah. One more time. Rolling up. Good. And the disrupt out just a smidge. And now bring the ribs over to the right lead. There you go. Good. And to the left. Good. Drop down a little bit. Keep going. Good.

That's the transition I want. Feel these ribs reaching down into the mat, keeping the hair you go. Good. Excellent. Yeah. Last one. We'll do one more of those sides. The sides, and again, just loosening up that connection. Sometimes we just hold a little bit too much in there and this is what wakes up those deep local muscles and puts those big muscles that are holding the rib cage tight to rest. Get those elliptical stylists muscles to chill out. You got it.

And when you come down rest in that position, now slide your feet out about another foot. You're still gonna have a little bit of a bend. Dig Your heel into the mat. Yeah and just point and flex your foot. So it's your whole body rocks. Can you make it so you just rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock. Cause the whole body translating. So you're going to feel more of this kind of a feeling through your head.

I am doing and see if you now take the feet out a little bit further and keep pumping it so your body articulate. You are a chain dominoes. That's it. Isolation. Okay. Find your rhythm too. Maybe your pumping too fast. Maybe you're pumping too slow. Typically we like to go row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream isn't that your favorite thing to do is sing.

So I thought, like I said, I never get mad. I just get you back and relax. Very good. Bring the feedback into that hook line position. Yep. And let the knees now shift side. The sides of the feet and knees are going to be together.

Widen your hands out a little bit. Yep. So there's some room. Take the knees together over to the side, right until you get all the way over to the right side. And just before that left shoulder wants to disengage from the floor. Now in this position, stay there, stay there. Stay there. Over the right side. Yeah, your other eyes. There we go. Good.

Taking a deep breath and as you exhale, bring that first rib up underneath that left armpit. Bring that rib down to the mat, then bring two and three and four and five and six following it all the way until the pelvis comes back into its resting position. And then take the knees over to the left side and again, keep the knees together because that's going to give you that nice pool and that direction. Taking a nice deep breath this time. Send the breath into the back of the right lung and as you exhale, bring that top rib down underneath your armpit and continue with the sequence. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 1112 and then the legs come back. Let's go a little bit quicker. Now.

Take the legs over to the right, taking a deep breath into that left lung back behind the heart. Exhale, bring the ribbon, the chest down into the floor, bringing the legs back over into the left. Inhale you in the back of the right lung. Exhale, bringing the arm pit down. Then the ribs follow. Increasing the movement. Those upper ribs that we saw often. Just ignore and again, bring it down. Last one to this side. I do. I hear some releasing going on in your body. That's good.

Last one to the left. Now let's challenge the control of that a little bit. So we're going to bring the right leg up to a 90 90 and bring the left leg up to match that connected. Take your hands out just a little bit wider. Yep. Send your shoulders wide and fill that and cream in that organization up in the upper. Yeah, and take the knees over to the right. Now a little more control. Same thing.

Breathe in the back of that left lung and brewing that rib down. As you bring the legs back up into that neutral position, take the legs over to the other side. Deep breath in. Yes, I feel it coming right here. That's what's going on. Yeah, that's it. Good. Okay, good. And one more time. If you want to make it more challenging, you can straighten your legs up towards the ceiling and do the last one with straight legs. You increase in the lever but see if you can still find that segmental movement.

That's it. Good drawing down. Excellent. Bring your hands to the side. Feet. Come back down. Take your hands to your sternum. Back the hands together. Yeah, just like that. Elbows in front of you. Now the sternum is going to slide, but I want us to think of the rib cage expanding in the back and the lower ribs lifting up underneath our heart as we come up into a pre chest lift. So we're going to send those elbows away and feel the ribs coming up underneath our heart as we come up. Right. That's it. Good.

And it's almost like if you could feel me too huggy. Yeah, there we go. Exactly. Good. And back down and feel the slang. Relax for a second and let me pull you up. Last, last word, last word, last word. Sometimes we work too hard on this one. See if you, again, if you think of that sling of the Trapezius and the rest into my hands, rest into my ass. Ribs. Drop back into the floor. There it is. Last one. Up, down and up and come down. Very nice. Hands behind the head. Going into the chest.

Lift this time. Elbows in the peripheral vision. We're going to exhale. Come up again. There you fill in the ribs. Come up underneath the heart. Inhale as you reach the hands behind your knees, grab with your hands, your fingers and exhale and come up a little bit higher. So we're going to challenge ourselves. Opening the rib cage in the back below the shoulder blades. Keep that height.

Now inhale, bring the hands back behind the head and then exhale on roll down. Let's do two more of those. Exhale, roll up. Expand the ribs posteriorly. Reach your hands through [inaudible] based behind the knee. Draw yourself up a little bit higher. Find those ribs.

Open them up in the back. Hands come back behind the head and roll down. One more time and preparing. Exhaling, rolling up ribs. We're going posteriorly. Lower ribs are lifting up underneath the heart arch. The arms lift. Use your assistance to come up to that space. It's awkward for you. Stay there for a second. Keep the fingers there.

Send those ribs back with breath. Inhale. Inhale. Exhale three or four times right there. Filling to expand posteriorly. This is going to help all of your reflection exercises, not about strength but movement and relax and go down. Good, very nice. All right. Now bring your legs up to 90 90 hands to the side with a happy smile on your face. Roll up into a pre hundred position you go. It's going to be easy right now. Inhale on the back of the lungs.

Pulsing the hands in two, three, four, five hours. Three, four, five. Feel the air in the back of the lungs. Exhale from the belly. Inhale on the back of the lungs. Behind the shoulder blades and exhale halfway there. Here we go. Straighten the legs out if he can. Challenge Yourself.

If you've got it in you, the lower the legs, by all means do so. Here we go. Feel the breath expand. If you get tired, bringing those knees back in. Key breathing into the last one. Here we go. Big deep breath in the back of the lungs. Exhale, bring those knees into your chest. Give yourselves a huck. Excellent. Roll your head side to side. Gentle nod on the floor and no support of the muscles. Release the muscles in the front of the neck. Nice deep breath.

Relaxing your jaw, your tongue, your throat, even your sternum. Your body is warmed up. That is the internal heater. Grabbed the back of your thighs and without any muscles other than your fingers. Roll up into a seated position. No thrusting. Just balance. Rule it up. Good. Now sitting up nice and tall, taking another deep breath and exhale by starting to reach the ribs back as you inhale posteriorly and to get about halfway down. Exhale, finish the roll down again. You could stop at any time. This is where we play red light. Green Light. Okay, hang on to your legs.

Modified roll up. So we keep your fingers there grabbing on. We're going to use those legs. Grab onto your legs. Legs are up in the air. And when I say greenlight, you start rolling. When I say red light, you stop. If you do not stop when I call red light, you're out of the game. You got it. Green Light, red light.

Oh, I'm gonna give you a second chance. Okay. Green light all the way up, all the way up in the seated red light. Green Light, red light, green light, red light, green light. Keep going up and down. Don't wait for me. You trying to play me? I'm more random than that. Keep going. Here we go. Two more times. Green Light your green light. Keep it moving. Keep it moving. Now here's the trick. Some of you are holding your breath.

There's two things that happen when you hold your breath. You can't move or you fart. We don't want to Fart on film, so don't hold your breath. Not a good idea. Use your breath to help you out. And let's think of the ribs moving. Okay. Very important. Hey, it's happened on film trusts me and saying that back. Exhale. Take a breath in between and see if you can find that. That's right. It's gotta be continuous. You can start and stop at any time.

Your body is that supple. It's about just moving the spine. And last one you're going to roll down and stay down. You got it all the way down. Hands up over the heads, leg straightened out in front of you. And we're ready for our full roll up. Yeah, so the full roll up has an advantage because your legs are heavy into the floor. Fill your legs heavy into the floor.

Think of a little bit of stiffness happening with the energy between your legs and a little bit in the pelvis. And that's going to give you the foundation so the rest of your spine is really subtle and can move and will move as you exhale. So inhaling, hands float up over the chest, excelling, roll in the spine, up all the way up and over. Lovely roll-up over there in the corner. Very nice and right back down. Now this is where we all get to sing because I said I was going to get even then the song goes, this one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You wait, you guys are going to sing it and then when you go back down, it's going to go like this. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. So you all know the song. It's very easy. Here we go.

Starting with the hands over the head. Inhale and exhale. Arms float up over the chest and we start singing. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and down. Eight, seven, six, three, two on. Now, some of you, I heard this. One, two, three, six, seven, eight, eight, seven, three, two, one. So the key is I need you to be operatic on four or five and six. You gotta be operatic on four, five, and six. You lose. I don't care about your roll up. I want to hear you sing in hell.

Arms over the head, arms float up over the chest. Exhaling. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight, seven, six, five, four. Oh, we're calling that a tank. That was a good one. On your right side, going into side kick position. Right side, facing the window. Facing in the back. No, he writes that right there. Right there. Right side. Yup. Right side. All right, let's come up onto that forearm. Get ourselves up there. Feel the length of the spine. Left hip on top of the right hip, the crown of the head, reaching away the shoulder blade on top of the humerus. So fill that, lift that energy down into the floor. Lift that left.

Dig Up as high as you can without changing the position of your pelvis, your ribs, and bring it back down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up. Halfway down circles going forward. And one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and reverse and go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, side kick. Take it forward and back and forward and back. Use your breath. And in and back and en and ex and in and eggs and in and x. Last one. Inhale and leave that left leg back.

Take that left arm forward as far as you can have full rotation in your body reaching opposite directions while your right heel and the crown of your head are reaching in opposite directions from the c, like the lengthwise. You got that que the length. Good. Now in that position, taking a deep breath, expanding the rib cage as much as you can and when you exhale, you're gonna make the sound of a bee [inaudible] connecting the belly button to the spine and [inaudible] to the sternum. Another deep breath. Let's do it again. This time I don't want any air left in the lungs except for that residual volume we talked about. [inaudible].

[inaudible] when you run out of air, you can roll over onto the floor on your belly. All right, let your head rest on the back of your hands. You should be warming up. Yes, I see you taking these sweaters off. It is the right time to do that. Head resting on the back of your hand. Cool. Yes, there you go. You got it. The first thing we do is we find our head and then we see if we can put our hands close to the head where we can rest our hands on there. All right. Create space.

Create space that gravity work with you right now for a second. Soften in the middle of your thoracic spine. T seven coming down into the floor filled [inaudible] coming right down. Yeah, soft tissue moving aside. Sternum comes down for that softening.

Taking a deep breath into the lower ribs posteriorly. See if you're gonna expand that space away from your head, away from the neck. And as you exhale, there's even more space around your neck and more space around your head. Now with those arms on the floor, feel the pressure, the forums into the floor and reach the crown of the head forward and gently lift the head and the neck up off the floor. Just the head and the neck, and then bring it back down to your hands again. Reach the head, bring the head and the neck up off the floor just a little bit. The back of the neck is long. It's coming from.

Think of just the very top of the sternum, reaching towards your hands a little bit and head coming up. You sort of feel that connection there. Good. And back down. Last one. The head will come up one more time. This time from that position, bring the hands up to touch the head as well as the forearms. So you're floating. Hold that position right there. Take a deep breath into the back of your lungs. The back. Yeah.

Now when you exhale, bring those hands into that scarecrow or goalpost position. Drop the hands down under the floor with the arms out at a 90 90 angle. 90 90 angles. So bring your elbows up a little bit higher until your armpit is a 90 90 yeah, there we go. Now push those hands into the floor. You're lifting the head and the neck up, but now feel the spiral.

Don't come up too high. I want you to feel the spiral of the arm brewing the sternum forward. Can you feel that? That's the direction I want. Good. That's it. And back down. You guys got some wild tape on your bodies and I want some of that tape still.

This flower from here. So what I'm bringing forward is about T4 up t five up. Yeah, go ahead and back down. Last one. Come up that same height just about t five t six take your arms and float him off the ground. Hold that position. Deep breath into the lower thoracic. Keep the hands off.

See if you can find it. Can you expand those ribs? Come on. You can do it. Do it. Do it. Good. Bring the hands now down to the side of your chest. Elbows up to the ceiling and a pre swan position. Send the elbows down. We're going to continue to come up to the lowest rib. We're going to continue our TK despite the lowest rib.

That's right and back down all the way. Head, neck, sternum, lowest rib. Come up into your priests one. Send the elbows down and back. There's no muscles involved in this. It's floating. You got it. And back down. Last one, bring it up.

Lift your hands off the mat. Take him down by your side. Palms up towards the ceiling and legs come off the ground ever so slightly. You're on the dark position right now. A nice slow pulses with a hands. I'm fine with the hands or palms being down or up so it doesn't matter to me, but palsy. Now, where's the breath taking place on that pulse? Notice where the breath is. Can your breath lengthen the lumbar spine?

Ah, there we go. Good. Let the breath length in. See if you can fill up that space. Still pulsing, pulsing pulse. Turn your hands the other way. Whatever way you are. Turning the opposite way. Palms down or palms up and again, just feel that difference. The Pec muscles pulling on the ribs in front.

Last one and relax. Rolling over onto your left side. Wrapped up on that four arm. Lengthen that spine, that left foot, reaching away the head, reaching away. Take the right leg up. We go without displacing the pelvis of the ribs and [inaudible] and up and up. [inaudible]. [inaudible] here's a little trick. Leave the leg up. Think of the hip joint itself spiraling down into the groin rather than lifting the leg up. When I say up, okay, it's a little bit easier on your abductors, so feel the spiral of that femoral head that floats that leg up.

There you go. One more time. Halfway down circles coming forward and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and reverse and go. One, two, tiny small flowing circles and sidekick going forward with a double pump and back and sure. [inaudible] and back. Okay, that's it. Two more. Last one, Ford back and leave it back. Now fill that reaching.

Another key here is not the leg that you're gesturing with. It's the leg that you're standing on. Send that heel down opposite of your head. Push into my foot. Yes, good. Push into my foot without the hair. You Go. Good. Push into my foot. Feel that push. There it goes. Now that rotation is complete. Fill that you can't rotate on something. It doesn't give you a foundation.

Taking a deep breath. We're going into the CZI mode. Busy bees [inaudible] go until there's no more air narrowing and reaching. Continue to reach. As you exhale, mobilizing those ribs, mobilizing them with that XL and roll onto your Tommy beautimous beautimous. Push up into a quadruped head position. You got it right there. This is about movement right now. So this is a relaxation exercise.

We're going to go and move the pelvis like a pelvic tilt, and it's going to be like a wave. You're gonna roll it all the way through your body all the way through the head. So as the pelvis tilts, the body's going to wave. It's looks like an angry cat in a saggy old horse. But really it's a wave. And I need you to find the wave inside each of the segments of the spine.

Whatever you're at. Find each segment of the spine. Yeah, find it all. I need movement in here too. Yeah. And all the way up to that. Go ahead and [inaudible]. You got it. Come on. And now let's see if we can do a diagonal.

So can you send your pelvis to the right foot? When you go up into the angry cat, the head goes down to the left and then comes up to the opposite angle. Standing right on top of those femurs. Yep. And go two more times of that side, and then we'll do two to the left side. Find the diagonal freeing up the intercostal tissues. Move it a little more flowing like when we were rocking on the floor with our ankles. See if you can find that kind of fluidness moving through your spine.

Like I said, it dominoes going right into circumduction pelvis and head. Moving around opposite direction of each other. Circling the spine, listen to your breath. Don't force it. Just let it happen. It's going to happen on its own. When your body wants air, it will find it and it can find in any of those directions in inspiration or exhalation. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Spontaneous movement requires spontaneous breath. Beautiful. You go both directions yet.

Make sure you switch to the other direction. I don't think I called it so you're okay. Beautiful Movement. Now give your hands just a little rash. Shake them out. All right, good. And we're going to go into a little quadrupedal activity. So let's go back onto to your hands when you're ready. Yup.

And let's just see how easy it is as you sweep out the right leg and the left hand, sweep them out from each other. Feel how easy it is. Bring them back together and switch and back again. Now use your breath to your advantage. Exhale. When you reach out, inhale when you come back in and exhale when you reach out and how when you come back in x on your reach out and how you come in. Now we challenge ourselves. We're going to switch our breath. We're going to inhale when we reach an x elegant and all my goodness.

It creates stability too. And inhale, when you reach out and x, when you come back in and inhale and you go out x, we can now alternate it. We inhale with the right arm or left arm, bring it back in and switch it out a little bit faster cause your breasts can switch on every alternation. So it's an inhale, reach, exhale, reach, inhale, reach, exhale, reach and switch. Exhale, reach, inhale, reach, exhale, reach. You got it. You got the idea. Exactly. Much more practical, isn't it? That's probably what we're going to do. And we go running or whatever we do. Now from that quadro pit position, I want you to come up into a squat position. Fee can be a part and your elbows are going to be between your knees.

Yup. And as we're going to practice our diaphragm and our pelvic floor breathing, you know, so the idea is inhale, feel the diaphragm and the belly expand. Fill the sit bones expand and then all you gotta do is release it and they will spring back up and you feel that and how like span, exhale springs back up again. Inhale, expand. XL Springs back up. Good. Now come on up into a half squat position. Yup. And we're going to do, yeah, we're going to do our swimming this way. Good.

So we're here and we're going to try and get it so we're nice and hands. The bodies relatively flat, bringing the hands up and the hands can, don't have to go over the head. We're just gonna go into the swimming right here. Organizing the body a little different level here. So we're just [inaudible]. I mean beat, beat, beat, beat, beat in Haley. Now let's use that diaphragm.

See if you can feel the dynamic span and then contract back in. Yeah, expand the abdominal wall. Get a little more horizontal with the body. It's here. Yup. And what you'll notice is that the breath expansion posted early as well. So take it into that low back, expanding into this space. When you inhale five more beats and relaxed.

Beautiful. Go Back Down into quadro pad. Now in this position, we're going to allow our belly to separate itself from the spine. So we're going to find that nice neutral position. We've been working on the heads and nice alignment. And we're going to inhale as if you had a little weight attached with a string to your belly button. So the spine stays in this neutral position.

But as you inhale, the belly is going to reach down towards the floor. When you exhale, the spine still stays in its place and you draw the weight back up into the spine. You got it. Okay. Not at all. Yep. Spine is not moving, so you're in that nice neutral position in how the belly reaches down towards the floor. Exhale, the belly reaches back up and have you inhale. That's right. Exhale. Draw that back. Yeah, let's do that again. Huh? Buddha belly. It's a Buddha belly.

Now lift all four limbs off the floor at the same time. Jump. Okay, very good. We're going to go into a mermaid position facing forward with your right at this direction here. Let's go this way through the front room. Right leg is to the right side for everybody. Right? Left leg in front. Right? Like to this side. We all there? Yeah. Okay.

We all got it left hand on the floor. Let the left elbow soften a little bit. Yeah, and then give a little bit of push into the floor. Bring your right hand over your head, right. You're going to grab your head like your elbows bent here. Yup. You got it. Now we're going to stay in this position for awhile and we're going to inhale.

Sending the elbow up towards the ceiling is a great exercise for you, isn't it? Yep. And remember we talked about the rib cage moving over and sending it out underneath the armpit. So the breath is coming in underneath that armpit, right for like Spansion and I think of the lower ribs reaching down a little bit and underneath ribs lifting up underneath the heart and we're just kinda about four more breaths. They're just expanding that area. I'm coming. Fill that elbow region up there it is really good. No, up and over to the right side. Leave the legs where they are, right hands going to go down the floor. Left hand goes behind. [inaudible] ahead. You got it. Good feeling this reaching up towards the ceiling in healing into the left lung.

Now expanding underneath there. Yep. Fill those lower ribs, lifting up underneath fairness [inaudible] and just be patient. That breath will do its work. It will open up those ribs. A little anxiety at first, and then it just melts away. Now let's pick up the pace a little bit. Add the upper arm as a gesture arm. So up and over to the left, reaching the right arm as a gesture arm. Reach it out. You got it. Regular Mermaid. Be careful not to lose that control, right. We're still keeping the rib connects.

I don't want to see us dropping down to the side. We're staying in the picture. Yeah, and up and over to the right left hand gestures up and over to the left, up in over the left arm, opening up underneath the rib cage, upper ribcage. Good. And up and over to the right. Let's go a little bit faster flowing. Seaweed in the ocean and up number to the left, up and over to the right and I've been over to the La last one up and over to the right. This time when you come up under the left, come down and stay down to the left.

Bring that right hand down around to the floor to match both hands, pushing into the floor. Sending the right sit bone down towards the floor by rounding your back. Go into flushing flection and left rotation. Now stay there. Listen to your breath. Can you increase the space between your shoulder blades with your breath?

Can you increase the distance between the ribs on the right lower rib cage? Expand. Expand a little more air, even though it feels uncomfortable. Good. And now we're going to go into extension. So the hands pool into the mat, the head and the chest come forward and the sit bone comes up. That's it. Exhale, push back into the mat, sending the sit bone down, rounding the spine, opening the shoulder blades, Max expansion. Those ribs are coming up underneath your heart.

Feel that lift that massage and forward in extension and push into flection. Last one right hand becomes behind your head. D Rotate d side bend, hands behind your back on the ground. Bring your legs forward and switch more to the left side. All right, right hand on the mat. Left hand behind your head. Sustained breathing posture. Up and over. Up and over. Fill the ribs.

Expanding on that left side. Now, here's what we want and stay there for four or five breaths, allowing that expansion to take place. It doesn't happen just because you want it to. It happens because you're there because you're breathing. Last one, up and over to the left. Sustained. Hold right hand behind the head.

Inhaling into the right lung, sending that right elbow up to the ceiling, opening up that space. That's it. You're to feel the left ribs come up underneath your heart and the right one's reaching down to the mat. You're ready to go. A little quicker. Gesture. Arms in place, up and over to the right and up and over to the left. Seaweed flowing in the ocean and over and over. Feel the energy in the spring of the body.

The tension in the spring of the body, the tension and potential energy. One more time to the left. Last one to the right, up and over that left hand down to the mat. Push with those hands, send the left. Sit bone down to the mat. Increase the space between the shoulder blades. Feel that space increasing, increasing and space.

Increase the distance between the hip and the left lower ribs with your breath. Expanding that space for that fashion aback opening, expanding happy Fascia and taking a right into extension. So the head arms pull down, the hip can come up. Where's that movement happening? And back. That's it. Go ahead and forward. Inhale a little more fluid. Now Roll in through that and back and it's the last one and the legs left hand behind the head. Open it up and come up. Good.

Bring your feet towards the center. So long sit position. Excellent. Good fingers to the side. Now I'm going to ask this, the two centers to back up about a foot so that you're staggered and the inside and outside the come a little bit and that gives us plenty of room. Good. So fingers to the sides. Spine stretch, right? We're going to walk those fingers on the floor. Keep walking and walking and walking them. Do you feel about attention in there? Low nerve tension. Good. Keep walking them. Enjoy it.

It feels good and it's good for you, right? Fill the crown, reach into the ceiling of the, of the roof or the building. Feel the shoulder blades and the collarbones drawing apart as you actively are walking those fingers out, open up all that tension. Those are all muscles that hook onto your ribs, right? That's your Pec minor and your Pec major and your, uh, cervical muscles. I can feel that. Good. Now float the arms up and hug down imaginary tree with a deep breath up and over the imaginary ball.

Right now I like to let my hands come down to the outside of my legs, palms up, and I like to let draw come out of my mouth onto my legs. So if you could imagine your lips become your Barry head bubbly, fob habitable, you couldn't park very well. Hey, heard that heaviness to take in a break, breath and as you be asked to help stack up your spine, one vertebra at a time. All right, all the way back up. And I dragged my hands, he'd give me a low resistance, leave them down and let's go a little bit quicker. This time, walking the fingers out, floating the arms up, hugging the imaginary tree up. Then over the bar, reaching up over that upper thoracic is a movement I want, and coming up and over. Feel that energy. Lifting the ribs up as you stack the spine back, kind of dragging the hands a little quicker. Walk the fingers out, float the arms up, hug the tree up and over the last one you got hands come down, drag it back. Beautiful hands go behind you. Now knees are bent. You can go in a traditional pies positioning when the fingers in or you can go with the hands back. I'm comfortable. Whichever you're more comfortable with.

Knees are bent, they stay bent. We're going to do is we're going to bring up and fill the anterior tissues of the body, drawing on the lower ribs as you bring your bottom up into a sort of like a leg pull position, but without straight legs. Now here's what's important. Hip flection tightness affects breath and affects your ability to move your spine correctly. So I do want you to give me the energy of sending those hips up and throwing the ribs, drawing down and opening the shoulder blade so the breath is going to go in the front of the chest, the front of the shoulders. When you exhale, fill, lifting your bottom up. The exhale, lift your bottom up. Inhale, expand the front of the shoulders and descend the bottom back down. Good. Shake your wrist out. We'll do that one more time.

It is, but it's a good one. You sort of our relationship. All right, hands back behind you. All right, here we go. We're going a little bit quicker. We're going to bring the pelvis up right, taking a deep breath up. Exhale while you're up in the next exhale, drop the bottom down. Take a breath down. Exhale, bring it up in how? While you're up expanding the chest. Exhale, bring it back down and held a repair. Xcel come up. Inhale while you're up. Expanding, expanding, expanding. Hold that expansion.

Stay there for a second. Take your right leg, reach it out. Stay there, stay there. Keep the hips up. Challenging the load. Now breathe in four times with that leg there. Inhale. Exhale. Keep it up. Challenge Yourself. That's a dynamic challenge. You've got a diagonal coming across your body. Last breath and bring that leg back down.

Don't put your bottom down and take the left leg up. You're almost there. This is it. This is a challenge. This is where we take you. We take you to the level you gotta keep that bottom up, the ribs connected, opening across the chest. The expansion is full. Last breath, bring the foot down. Bring your bottom down. Shake your hands out. Crush your feet in front of you. Yep. And you're going to roll over onto your hands. Yeah, you got it.

You know what follows leg pull, right? [inaudible] oh, but we're just actually going to play with plank. We're going to forget about leg poor front, but I do want you in plank, so you can either be on, we will all need to be on your hands. Yeah, everybody okay? Being on their hands. All right. You know what plank looks like. Let's go. All right. Now in this position, I want you to concentrate on the breathing more than on the muscles. Family. Talk softer and slower.

And I want you to think of how breath is actually floating and supporting your body up in space. We're holding this for 15 seconds where it's seven right now, eight, nine, 10 1112 1314 down onto your elbows and forearms. Don't let your knees come down. Keep the post a little more challenging there. Now breathe into your lung so it's like support you on your shoulders. So can you breathe into the part of your lungs? There's just underneath your shoulder blade.

Expand that air and you'll find you get some power in it. Feel it. Exhale from the belly. Inhale into your shoulder. That's it right there. Right there for three to relax, relax. Sit back on your heels. Give yourself a little love. Little prayer. Stretch. Yeah. Nice. I like, I like and like I like the scoot to the front of the mats, sitting on your bottoms. Little Fun time rolling like a ball, rolling like a ball. Hug those legs, hug those legs, grab those ankles and your wrists.

And create space, right? Make this fun and feel the expansion like you're sort of pushing into your legs and sending the belly back away. So the back is nice and round. Inhale rolls back. Exhale, brings you back up. Find your balance and held back. Exhale up. That's it. Yep. There you go. And held back. Exhale up. Last one.

Find that balance there. Taking both legs. Reach them out and back in. Now what I want you to realize, don't worry about even how far the leg straight. Now, just go to where you feel the tension and then bring them back in. Now part of this is where your breath is going down into the low back. So send your air into here as you reach up. Yeah, it's going to give you stability and bring it back down. Can you feel that? Inhale in that lower? All of a sudden your stability improves significantly.

And so did your range of motion because we don't worry about stretching your organize your body, right? The legs will do the rest. Okay. There's the last one. Keep the legs up. Yep. Bring the legs a little closer together. Yep. Find the balance. Breathe into that low back and send it back towards the ground a little bit. Yeah. And when you're ready, roll back your dove and leg rocker. You got it?

Yeah. Oh one more time. Just nice and easy again. Just appreciating how when your back is in the right place, it's not so hard. Good. Bring your knees in towards your chest sitting there. Now you're, you gonna keep the feet up off the ground. Hands behind your knees. Yep. So we're going to do is we're gonna do a little teaser from this position. Yeah.

Put your leg, straighten out a little bit more. Yep. You got it. You're okay there. So now bring the hands out over the top. Can you lower through here with a breath? A little bit into, towards the Mat. Just let it keep your balance. You have good. Now disassociate the hips, the knees and the ground dropped down three inches and back up and back up. Yeah. Cause this is where you're working the right way. Yeah, I see.

I like that the hips are sinking in the socket to come up, not lifting the legs. Good. Now leave the knees up. Take your body down three inches and back up just a little bit with your breath. If you inhale and those lower lungs in the back, it's going to help you exhale to come up and how to come down. Exhale to come up. That's the last one. Now both are going to move.

So teaser three, legs and body. Go down just a little bit. You don't have to go down all the way and up. You got it. And down. Do you want to show off? You can do a straight legs. Yup. And down. And uh, you got you got it. And relax all the way on your back. Roll. Bring your knees to your chest. Give yourself some love. So one of the things I want you to notice is when you're in that position, your tendency is like hip flexors dominate and they pull you into hip extension and sheer force. When you use your breath to expand down low, all of a sudden your legs became very free.

And you could move them when you were here, you can't. And so you fell down, you fell back. Right? So again, using breath to fill that space and get it out of the idea of muscle. All of a sudden that leg became much freer to move through space for a teaser. Um, let's roll over onto the right side. Okay. Reach your right hand out on the floor.

You're laying down on your side in front of you. We're going to do book openings. This is time to have relax, right? So arm's going to be this way. Yup. Bring your left hand on top of it. Yep. You got the idea. And I like my knees bent in this position. Sort of like my anchor.

And only thing is you're probably gonna put your fingertips in somebody's mouth, so just don't bite. Okay. So we're going to open up that left arm. Leave the knees where they are. Roll that body open. Just be Kevin to whack anybody in the face. Good. Now stay in that position. This is where like what we did in the mermaid. Okay. We're looking at how breath can increase that thoracic mobility.

So in this position, breathe in to the front of the left rib cage and as you feel it soften down into the mat and notice that you get a little more rotation. Each breath. Don't be in a hurry. Don't make it a muscle thing. Just let gravity and breath open up those intercostal tissues on the left side and the pectoral girdle will draw naturally on those ribs by the weight of the arm. All right, let's do it for one more breath. Bring that left arm up and over. Slide it through. Good. Taking a deep breath into the back of your rib cage. And once again, open that arm up. We'll do two to each side and then say, notice you're going to go down a little bit further.

Take your left leg now reach it out straight in front of you and just let it drop down to the ground. That's it. So again, that whole posterior chain on that side. Notice a difference on your rib cage and that leg is straight. Reach that left leg a little bit further. Now reach it towards the front of the room or towards the wall. Feel that reach, reach good.

Take that deep breath. Feel that connection of breath all the way into the diaphragm. This time can you breathe into your diaphragm and excellent. Bring it back over. Bend the knee back in place and we're going to switch sides. Yup.

So we are going to come over and lay on your left side with the left arm out in front. All right, that works a little bit better. Doesn't stag like that? All right. Opening up the right arm. We'll say we designed it that way. All right. Right arm out and opens up. Leave the knees bent. Knees anchored. You might find one side easier than the other. Yeah, one time.

Maybe more challenging. Breathing in to the front of the right rib cage. Now exhaling, softening in the back. Feel the weight and try and let it happen. Let it happen. Imagine a nice warm bag of rice, about 10 pounds, 15 pounds being set on the middle of your rib cage on the right side. It's warm, it's heavy, and it's just melting your rib cage down into the floor. That's it.

Good. And when you're ready, go ahead and bring that hand back up and over. Slide it through. We'll do that one more time. And this time we'll add the leg. That's going to be fun over here with the legs face in each other. Send that right leg out straight in front.

Creates a little bit more of a lever that it come down to the ground. If you can get it, fill that heavy rice bag ride on the rib cage. [inaudible] right on the rib cage right there. That's good. All right, I'm liking that Mary. Good rice bag is right here. Yeah, that space in the floor and roll over onto your backs and I'll let you correct yourself so we're all good. Alright, so I wanna try one more thing.

Now that your rib cage is all loose and prepared and it's going to be a modified roll over. All right, so let you know if you do not do rollovers, I get it. If you have a fused neck or osteoporosis, you might want to hold off on this one. Otherwise, I want you to think of this as um, just a chain, like a bicycle chain, right? And I'm just pulling the chain up and over, right? So you're going to bring your knees up into a 90 90. Now here's the thing. If you use a lot of your hands to push down to the floor, you're using your lats and your lats are extensors, so they're not gonna work so well. They're gonna work against your body coming up.

So I'd rather you widen your arms a little bit. Yeah. And I rather you think of having a little more stiffness through the shoulders, sort of anchoring down into the floor. Yeah. Rather than from the lattes, fill it like you're winding into the floor. Good. Now start to peel the bottom up and the knees up and over, right? You'll find it's a lot less effort. Now from there, imagine that I have handles on your sit bones and I'm lifting those sit bones up. Fill the lift, taking a deep breath into between the shorter ways like we've been practicing, and as you exhale, feel the sternum and the ribs sliding towards the Mat. The lowest ribs are coming up underneath your heart as you lower your legs down. You got it? Good. Let's do another one of those nice and easy.

Modify. Rollover. The filling, the breath now up and over. Now this time while you're up, once you feel the sit bones reaching up. Yeah, take a deep diaphragmatic breath and see what happens. Can you push your guts up towards your hips? Can you lift that up? Can you feel your liver and your tummy and the guts and the kidneys pushing the sit bones up in the ceiling and now roll down through your heart, your lungs, your liver, your pancreas, your intestines. Control, control, control. Very good. Crowd the back of your thighs.

Send them four and a modified roll up into a seated position as easy as possible. Cross your legs. You're going to stand up. Pilati style. Very good of you. Go. Very good. And now understanding we're going to finish up in the standing position. Just finding that way. Bearing the bond, stacking up. Shift the weight over to your right leg. Shift the weight over to your left leg, right. Do a little circles around both of your feet, right for weight bearing is to use your lot more movement around and find that middle ground, that space where you feel like you're dangling.

The buttocks muscles are relaxed. The quads and hamstrings are relaxed. Even the calves, your face, your shoulders heavy. Yeah, and from here you're going to take in a nice deep breath and notice the difference this time that your body weight's not shifting. You're going to be right in the center as you inhale right up on top of your feet. That's how we know that our breath is right where we want it.