World Spine Day is observed annually on October 16 to educate the world about the importance of spine health. Did you know the position of the diaphragm muscle affects spinal position and function? And that breathing dysfunction impairs spinal movement?
The diaphragm muscle is uniquely positioned to directly influence every aspect of your postural skeletal and muscular core, and influences the position and function of all other body systems.
The diaphragm attaches to the spine and rib cage in 360 degrees. When the rib cage is positioned in a state of internal rotation, the diaphragm can function like a pump during inhalation (the diaphragm flattens creating negative pressure inside the rib cage to allow air to flow into the lungs) and exhalation (the diaphragm re-domes as it relaxes and this creates positive pressure inside the rib cage that pushes the air out of the lungs).
The function of the diaphragm as a pump depends on the correct amount of muscular action of the abdominal oblique muscles, concentrically shortening during exhalation to bring the ribs down and then eccentrically lengthening during inhalation so that the ribs don’t lift in the front to get air in, but rather expand in 360 degrees to receive air.
The diaphragm muscle is made up of the right and left hemi-diaphragms, each with their own innervation and asymmetrical forms. The right hemi-diaphragm is more domed (thanks to the liver underneath), thicker and has more attachments to the spine. This asymmetry contributes to the human preference of centering over the right side.
Humans tend to feel more stable centered over the stronger, thicker right hemidiaphragm, as when standing on their right leg. As they spend more time on the right leg, the right rib cage stays more closed allowing the right hemi-diaphragm to re-dome more easily. The left rib cage stays more open, preventing the left hemi-diaphragm from re-doming. The closed right rib cage effectively pushes air into the left chest wall. The open left rib cage is not effective at pushing air into the right chest wall, resulting in over-using the right scalenes & other neck muscles to pull the air in, 22,000x/day. We will often see a collapsed right shoulder girdle and under-flated right chest wall. The Postural Restoration Institute recognizes this pattern as the R Brachial Chain Pattern.
When we get stuck in this pattern, we lose our ability to reverse this pattern when on the left leg. In other words, the rib cage stays in this pattern, even when in left stance, thus we lose the ability to alternate and reciprocate from side-to-side.
This patterned chest wall represents what is happening when we are walking and our weight is on our right leg while the left leg is swinging. The body senses the more open left chest wall as high tension, and the more closed right chest wall as low tension, and interprets this differential as threat (sympathetic). When we begin transitioning to our left leg, there’s a point at which we shift our body and cross midline and have both feet on the ground – the rib cage is supposed to equal out—so now there is very little difference in the tension between each chest wall. This is interpreted as stable, or no threat (parasympathetic). If you think of a pendulum, I’m going from right stance (threat; sympathetic) to midline where I’m breathing on both sides of my rib cage (stable; parasympathetic) and then I go to left stance (threat; sympathetic). I’m breathing back and forth.
When the thorax becomes stuck in the pattern, and loses it’s ability to reciprocate, it’s stuck in threat, and some people deal with this threat by hyper-inflating. Using a mouth breathing strategy and craning their necks forward to maximize their airway, they will try to pull air in to inflate themselves to decrease the differential in order to feel stable. This is a neck that has become sagittalized–pulled forward in the sagittal plane.
The rest of the spine can become over-sagittalized too. As the ribs become lifted the diaphragm loses it’s dome shaped and is no longer able to act as a respiratory pump. Now flat and tonic, it thinks, “oh, you must want me to help hold you up.” The pelvis dumps forward and that makes the hip flexors over-active, and actually pulls the spine forward and up, creating extension of the spine.
“Repsiration is, at its core, reciprocation,” James Nestor, in his book Breath. When our rib cage and diaphragm are improperly positioned, we come sagittalized (stuck in extension in the sagittal plane) and lose our ability to alternate right to left and reciprocate opposite arm/leg swing for momentum. Our spine stays stuck in a state of “extended compression.”
One of the first things we must do to address this pattern, is to restore the internal rotation of the rib cage so the diaphragm and abdominal obliques can now properly function, and inhibit the over-active hip flexors to achieve a spine that is now in “neutral decompression.”
At GO Sports Therapy, we use Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) methodology to recognize these commonly identified patterns and offer strategies on how to properly inhibit overactive chains of muscles and facilitate under-active muscles to properly position the spine for balanced respiratory dynamics and right to left to right sequenced patterns.
Here’s to Spinal Health on World Spine Day!
All the best,
Amy Goddard, DPT
If you have concerns about your spinal health, please call me at 417.208.9838 or email me at amy@gosportstherapy.com. I’d be more than happy to try to answer any questions you might have. You can also book an appointment online here.