Two Minute MUST DO Breathing Mobility Routine

If there was only one thing that I could do to improve my health for the rest of my life, it would be breathing.

My name is Bryan. I've been in the health and wellness world for almost 20 years, I've been coaching pro metabolic health and fitness for close to 10. And today, I'm gonna teach you one of my favorite tools for dealing with brain health, thyroid function, and movement.

So today, we're gonna talk about breathing.

Why do we care about breathing?

Breathing is how your cells get oxygen.  The better your cells are at getting oxygen, they can make energy better. And if you breathe poorly, you're gonna make energy poorly. So how will you breathe has a direct impact on every single cellular function that you have.

When it comes to how you get oxygen into your system, the number one way we do that is through moving the lungs. As your lungs move, they pull air in, and as you exhale, you force the lungs to compress, and that's what expires air. That's what an exhale is. So if we want to breathe better, we want to get better oxygen into the tissues, we need to have better lung movement. The number one way we can do that is improve our mobility.

I'm going to show you three of my favorite tools today, and how to improve your overall breathing capacity.

How well you breathe is directly related to how well you move. If there's an area of your ribcage that doesn't move well, there's going to be some major deficits in how those lungs underneath move.  We're going to work on some key areas of mobility today to improve how well your lungs move.

So first off the first thing that I want to do, I want to set a baseline or figure out how I'm breathing. So find the bottom of your ribcage. And what you're going to do here, you're going to inhale and exhale.  What you're looking for, do both sides expand evenly, or do I have one side that's really good and moving on one side that's kind of sticky, do i have one side that's smooth. Do I have one side that's kind of raggedy?  Do I have one side that expands in the front but one side that doesn't really expand at all, or maybe just in the back or just in the front. So you want to make sure that our goal is to get all sides to move evenly. And if I have one side, it's doing a really good job. And one side that's not I want to fix the side is not because every breath I take that one is not moving as well as it could.

So for me, as I'm doing this today, my right side is a little bit stickier. I can feel that doesn't want to expand quite as well as the left side. So I'm going to work on my right side today.

So the first thing we're gonna do, we're going to stretch that up.  Take your arm out to the side, you're going to lean away from the tight side. In this case, my left side is what I'm leaning towards. And in order to create a little mobilization, we'll do some circles here with my arm. Three each direction.

Okay, now, reassess your breathing and if that cleans it up, great. If that doesn't, we've got more to do.

Second thing we're gonna do today, we're actually gonna move your thoracic spine. Find your sternum with your fingers. So imagine that your hands are a hot poker coming towards your sternum. What I want you to think about now is moving away from that hot poker. You moving that sternum backwards. What this looks like from the side moving backwards.

Okay, after you do that, reassess your breathing. So now my right side is actually breathing better than my left side so I want to get my left side caught up.

Drill number three, we're actually going to breathe now in rotation. Everyday life is going to put you in different positions, it's not always going to be in neutral, you're not always going to be in one plane of motion. So you want to own your breathing in all sorts of different positions. I

n this case, now I want to improve my left. So in order to improve my left, I'm going to rotate towards my left.

As I'm holding this position. I'm going to breathe three good breaths. Okay, come back to neutral, reevaluate the breathing. And that's much bigger, much fuller.

I hope that worked out well for you.

Let me know in the comments below what you noticed, or you might be surprised what you find.  I will see you soon. Take care