Try this right now.
Sit where you are. Don’t change your posture. Don’t try to breathe “correctly.” Just notice your next three breaths exactly as they happen.
Where does the breath go? Does your chest rise? Do your shoulders lift? Do your ribs expand sideways? Does your belly move? Can you feel anything happening in your back?
Now place one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly. Breathe normally for a few cycles. Which hand moves more?
If your top hand moves significantly and your bottom hand barely moves, you’re a chest breather. If your shoulders rise with each inhale, you’re using accessory breathing muscles that should only activate during heavy exertion. If you can’t feel any expansion in your lower ribs or back, your diaphragm is likely restricted.
And if any of this describes you, it’s affecting far more than your breathing.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Breathing is the one thing you do more than anything else. Roughly 20,000 times a day. Every single one of those breaths shapes your rib cage, influences your spinal position, affects your core function, and sets the baseline for your nervous system.
Twenty thousand repetitions of a dysfunctional pattern, every single day.
No other “exercise” comes close to that volume. You might do 100 squats in a week. You breathe 140,000 times. If the squat pattern matters (and it does), the breathing pattern matters exponentially more.
Yet in my experience, almost nobody in the fitness or training world looks at breathing as a mechanical skill. Breathing is treated as either invisible (it just happens, don’t worry about it) or as a relaxation tool (take deep breaths, calm down). Both of these frames miss the point.
Breathing is a movement. It’s produced by muscles. It creates forces that shape your skeleton. And when it goes wrong, it creates a cascade of problems that no amount of exercise can fully compensate for.
The Mechanics
Here’s how breathing is supposed to work, in simplified terms.
When you inhale, your diaphragm contracts and descends. This creates negative pressure in the chest cavity, drawing air into the lungs. As the diaphragm descends, it pushes down on the abdominal organs, which causes the belly to expand gently. Simultaneously, the ribs expand laterally and posteriorly, creating more space in the chest.
When you exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and rises. The elastic recoil of the lungs and rib cage pushes air out. The belly gently moves back in. The ribs return to their resting position.
This is a three-dimensional, rhythmic, gentle expansion and contraction that moves through the entire trunk. The chest moves. The belly moves. The back moves. The pelvic floor moves. Everything participates.
Now here’s what happens in a restricted breathing pattern.
The diaphragm doesn’t descend fully. Maybe it’s fascially restricted, meaning the connective tissue around it has tightened from years of shallow breathing, stress, or postural habits. Maybe the rib cage has become rigid and the ribs can’t expand to accommodate the diaphragm’s descent. Maybe both.
When the diaphragm can’t do its full job, the body compensates. The scalenes and sternocleidomastoid muscles in the neck kick in, pulling the upper ribs up to create space for air. The upper trapezius activates, lifting the shoulders. The chest rises instead of expanding.
This compensation gets the air in. You don’t suffocate. But the pattern has costs.
What Chest Breathing Costs You
Neck and shoulder tension. If your scalenes and upper traps are active with every breath, they’re contracting 20,000 times a day. No wonder your neck is tight. No wonder your shoulders are up by your ears. No amount of stretching or massage will resolve chronic neck tension if the breathing pattern that’s creating it hasn’t changed.
Poor core function. As I discussed in the previous post, the diaphragm is the roof of the core. If it doesn’t descend properly, the intra-abdominal pressure system that creates genuine core stability doesn’t function. You can plank until you’re blue in the face. If your diaphragm isn’t moving, your deep core stabilizers are working without their primary partner.
Spinal rigidity. Every breath should create gentle movement through the thoracic spine. The ribs articulate with the vertebrae, and as the ribs expand and contract, the spine gets 20,000 gentle mobilizations per day. If the breathing is shallow and the ribs don’t move, the thoracic spine stiffens. This has downstream effects on the lumbar spine (which has to compensate for lost thoracic mobility) and the cervical spine (which has to compensate for the lack of thoracic extension).
Sympathetic nervous system dominance. Chest breathing activates the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight branch. Diaphragmatic breathing activates the parasympathetic, the rest-and-digest branch. If your default breathing pattern is chest-dominant, your nervous system is biased toward a stress state. This affects sleep, digestion, pain perception, recovery from exercise, and overall well-being.
Reduced exercise capacity. A restricted diaphragm limits your ability to manage intra-abdominal pressure during lifting. It limits your ability to exchange air efficiently during cardiovascular exercise. It limits your ability to recover between sets. You’re training with a governor on the engine.
The Patterns I See
In my studio, I assess breathing with every new client. I’ve yet to meet someone over 40 who doesn’t have some degree of breathing restriction. The patterns vary, but here are the most common ones.
The Chest Lifter. Inhale lifts the whole chest and shoulders. Minimal rib cage expansion. Minimal belly movement. This is the most common pattern, especially in people with desk jobs or histories of anxiety.
The Belly Pusher. This person has been told to “breathe into your belly,” so they push their belly out on each inhale while their ribs stay locked. The belly moves, but the diaphragm isn’t actually descending properly. It’s an imitation of diaphragmatic breathing that misses the three-dimensional expansion of the ribs.
The Holder. This person barely breathes. Their inhale is minimal. Their exhale is minimal. They seem to be holding their breath most of the time. You can almost see them bracing through their trunk, as if waiting for impact. This pattern is common in people with chronic pain, anxiety, or trauma histories.
The Paradoxical Breather. On inhale, their belly draws in instead of expanding out. On exhale, their belly pushes out. Everything is reversed. The diaphragm and abdominal wall are working against each other. This is more common than you’d think.
Each of these patterns has different downstream effects, and each requires a slightly different approach to resolution. But they all share one thing in common: the rib cage isn’t moving the way it should.
Why I Address Breathing Every Session
I work with breathing in every single session. Not as a warm-up. Not as an add-on. As a foundational component of the work.
Here’s why. If the rib cage is restricted, the shoulder blades can’t move properly, because they sit on the rib cage. If the diaphragm isn’t moving, the core can’t stabilize properly, because the diaphragm is the core’s ceiling. If the thoracic spine is stiff from lack of breathing movement, the lumbar spine and cervical spine compensate and break down.
Breathing is upstream of almost every movement problem I see. Fix the breathing, and many downstream problems begin to resolve on their own. Ignore the breathing, and you’re constantly fighting compensations that are being reinforced 20,000 times a day.
What Breathing Work Looks Like
This isn’t “take a deep breath.” That instruction is almost useless, because most people take a deep breath by doing more of their dysfunctional pattern, just bigger. A chest breather told to take a deep breath takes a big chest breath. Nothing changes.
Instead, we work with positioning, tactile cues, and specific movement tasks.
Side-lying rib expansion. The client lies on their side. I place my hand on their top ribs. Their task is to breathe into my hand, expanding those ribs laterally. This position takes gravity’s compression off the ribs, making it easier to find expansion. And the tactile cue gives the nervous system a target.
Many people can’t do this at first. The ribs don’t move. They push their belly out or lift their shoulder instead. It takes patient, repeated practice to find the rib expansion. When they do, the sensation is often surprising. “I’ve never felt that before” is something I hear regularly.
Prone breathing. Lying face down, forehead on hands. Breathing into the back of the rib cage. This targets the posterior ribs, which are often the most restricted. The floor provides feedback, and the position makes it impossible to use the chest-lifting compensation.
Seated breathing with manual rib guidance. Sitting on a bench, I place my hands on both sides of the lower rib cage. The client breathes into my hands. This gives bilateral feedback and helps the client feel whether one side expands more than the other. Asymmetrical rib expansion is extremely common and connects directly to the rotational compensations I see in gait and standing posture.
Exhale training. Most people focus on the inhale. But the exhale is equally important. A complete, gentle exhale allows the diaphragm to return fully to its resting position, which sets up the next inhale. Many people have a shortened, forced exhale or an exhale that doesn’t fully complete. We practice long, easy exhales that let the rib cage settle completely before the next breath begins.
The Structural Integration Connection
Breathing restriction isn’t purely a motor control problem. Often, the tissues themselves are restricted.
The diaphragm has fascial connections to the spine, the rib cage, and the pericardium around the heart. If these fascial connections are adhered or fibrotic, no amount of breathing practice will fully restore diaphragmatic excursion. The tissue is physically stuck.
The intercostal muscles between the ribs can become fibrotic and shortened, limiting rib cage expansion. The fascia around the respiratory muscles can become dehydrated and stiff.
This is where structural integration work becomes essential. In the Anatomy Trains approach that informs my practice, we specifically address the fascial restrictions in and around the rib cage, the diaphragm, and the respiratory muscles. This hands-on work creates the tissue freedom that makes breathing re-education possible.
I’ve had clients who couldn’t find lateral rib expansion despite weeks of practice. One session of structural work on the rib cage, and suddenly the ribs move. The tissue was physically preventing the movement. No amount of cueing was going to override that mechanical restriction.
The combination of structural work and movement education is especially powerful for breathing. Release the restrictions, then teach the body to use its new freedom. One without the other gives incomplete results.
Breathing and Everything Else
I want to connect this back to the larger conversation in this series.
If you’ve been training hard but still hurting, breathing might be part of the picture. If your core work hasn’t fixed your back pain, your breathing pattern might be undermining your core function. If you feel like you’re working harder than you should be to produce basic movements, restricted breathing might be limiting your recruitment.
Breathing is not a separate topic from movement, posture, strength, or pain. It’s woven through all of them. It’s the most fundamental pattern your body has, and when it’s restricted, everything built on top of it is compromised.
What You Can Start Today
I’ll leave you with one practice. It won’t fix everything, but it’s a starting point.
Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands on the sides of your lower rib cage, fingers pointing toward each other. Close your eyes.
Exhale slowly and completely. Let the ribs settle under your hands. Don’t force the exhale. Just let the air leave until there’s nothing left.
Now inhale slowly. As you inhale, try to push your hands apart. Not by pushing your belly out. By expanding your ribs sideways into your palms. Think “wide,” not “deep.”
If this is easy, you might already have decent rib cage mobility. If this is difficult, if you can’t feel the ribs expanding, if the breath goes to your chest or belly instead, you’ve just discovered something worth working on.
Five minutes of this practice, morning and evening, can begin to change a pattern that’s been running on autopilot for decades. It won’t be dramatic at first. But 20,000 breaths a day is a lot of repetitions. Even a small shift in pattern, compounded over that volume, creates meaningful change.
In the next post, I’m going to pull the threads of this entire series together and talk about why I combine structural integration with movement education, and why the two together produce results that neither can achieve alone.
If breathing feels like an area worth exploring for you, book a session. It’s one of the first things we’ll look at, and it’s often one of the most impactful.