Breathing – Inhale/Exhale

Breathing is so important apart from keeping you alive!

Did you know that:

• Your diaphragm is a big muscle that sits like a parachute in your chest.
• Your pelvic floor muscle and your diaphragm are closely connected, when you breathe in your diaphragm will move downwards and so should your pelvic floor muscle.  And then as you breathe out your diaphragm will move upwards and so should your pelvic floor muscle.
• With our crazy busy lives quite often we don’t think about our breathing and take short shallow breathes usually from the upper part of our rib cage and lungs.  This does not allow any movement in your pelvic floor.
• In the last stages of pregnancy our baby usually comes up and under our rib cage, can give you a feeling of breathlessness when walking up stairs or going for a walk because the lung capacity is not as big.  Postnatally we need to work with our diaphragm to ensure that it descends again and is able to expand like it did before we fell pregnant.  Once our baby arrives we are often so busy that we forget to breathe.
• When our diaphragm is not functioning effectively, every system in our body can be affected: bladder leaking, pelvic organ prolapse, back pain both lower and upper back and decreased stress management.
• So start simple breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, thinking about sending the in breathe into your rib cage and imaging it as a 360-degree barrel, see if you can fill that barrel full of air.  Try and do that a few times a day and see if it makes any difference to your energy levels and to your levels of stress.