Change the Way You Breathe to Relieve Stress, Boost Energy, and Get Stronger

The seminar looks like a faith healing.

Seated elbow-to-elbow at tables set amid squat racks and weight sleds, more than 30 trainers crane their necks to see the miracle unfolding at the front of the room. The lights are dimmed, save for one illuminating a massage table where a man lies faceup and shirtless. The healer—bald, bespectacled, and dressed in khakis and a crisp collared shirt—smiles reassuringly as he places his left hand on the man’s chest and his right under his back.

 

“Excuse my cold fingers,” says Ron Hruska, M.P.A., P.T., director of the Postural Restoration Institute, sending a ripple of chuckles through the room. “Now take a deep breath and let’s see if we can fix that shoulder.”

Hruska’s subject, a 34-year-old trainer from Chicago, has suffered from shoulder impingement for years. Lifting anything with his right arm causes discomfort. Raising it above shoulder height triggers pain. And the look on his face suggests that he doesn’t expect to feel any different a few minutes from now.

He realizes how wrong he is as soon as he begins to exhale. It’s then that Hruska presses down firmly on the man’s sternum and pulls back along his spine. “Again,” says Hruska, pursing his lips with the effort. They repeat the cycle two more times. “Now relax,” says Hruska, grasping the man’s right arm and laying it next to his ear. “Remember how you couldn’t raise your arm above your head?”

Eyes wide with astonishment, the man moves his arm up and down a few times. “Unbelievable,” he says in a voice barely above a whisper.

“You want to know how I did it?” asks Hruska. Thirty heads nod in unison. “Let’s start with what I didn’t do. I didn’t treat his shoulder, not directly,” he says. “I helped his diaphragm do its job, and that released tension in all the muscles throughout his torso that were compensating for it. He doesn’t have a shoulder problem; he has a breathing dysfunction.”

In that, the man on Hruska’s table is not alone.

Most of us take breathing for granted. We breathe about 14 times every minute, more than 20,000 times a day, and no fewer than 526 million times during the course of an average lifetime. Nearly all of those breaths are automatic; respiration generally requires about as much thought as pumping blood or digesting food. Yet despite all that practice, most of us suck at it.

“The reason is that almost no one uses their diaphragm as it’s intended—as the body’s primary breathing muscle,” says Bill Hartman, C.S.C.S., co-owner of IFAST in Indianapolis and the host of this weekend’s seminar.

It’s a consequence of modern life. Chronic stress, repetitive habits, and skewed ergonomics cause your diaphragm to be misused. Instead of helping you breathe, it’s redirected to shore up posture and stability. “The result is disastrous,” says Hruska.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an 80-year-old smoker, a 23-year-old Olympian, or a regular, fit guy-odds are the way you’re breathing right now is flooding your body with stress hormones, compromising your joints and mobility, bottlenecking your energy, and undermining your performance in the gym and everyday life. Fourteen times a minute, you become a little weaker and a bit duller.

Hruska is on a mission to change that. Step one is understanding how your body is organized.

Outwardly, the human body appears symmetrical—we have two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears. But below the surface that symmetry vanishes. We have a liver on our right and a spleen on our left. Our heart sits in our upper-left chest cavity and takes up so much room that to accommodate it, our left lung must be smaller than our right (two lobes versus three). Even the two halves (or leaflets) of the diaphragm are different in size and strength. “Every single system in your body—visual, digestive, muscular, respiratory, lymphatic, neurological—is inherently asymmetrical,” says Hruska.

That’s not a bad thing; although organized asymmetrically, the body’s structures are still more or less distributed evenly. “But that asymmetry does tend to make most of us shift our center of gravity to our right leg,” says Hruska.

If you’ve ever stood in line, waited for baggage, mingled at a cocktail party, or spent more than a few minutes on your feet, you know what he’s talking about. You put your weight on your right leg, move your left foot forward, rotate your pelvis down and right, drop your right shoulder, and raise the left side of your rib cage. The result is a stance much like that of Michelangelo’s David.