500 Words a Week - The Ribcage & Breathing

The first time I came upon up breathing and ribcage targeted exercises I was skeptical. My goal at the time was to squat a big weight, so I couldn’t foresee how this would help me. The first two drills I began doing were as a result of David Grey’s Lower Body Basic’s programme.

A central aspect to these drills is how can we encourage more posterior expansion of the ribcage. Without knowing it, I and many other people are very closed off and limited in their movement availability in our ribcage. When we breath, it’s mainly been as a result of our anterior ribcage doing all the work.

An analogy that helped me visualize this concept is thinking about a golf ball sitting on a tee. The golf ball is our ribcage, the tee our pelvis.

As we can see in image one, the golf ball is nicely balanced on the tee. This is how I think of our ribcage sitting on top of our pelvis when we get can some posterior expansion of our ribcage. The second image is how I view those who just breath from their anterior ribcage. Everything is pushed forward in front of their centre of mass. The ribcage no longer sits nicely on top of the pelvis. In fact, due to everything being pushed forward our pelvis begins to anteriorly tilt. Which could cause extra strain in other areas, such as our hamstrings and lower back.

The two drills below are an introduction to encourage more posterior expansion of our ribcage. When I began to do these I noticed little muscles around my posterior ribs begin to slightly cramp, further highlighting how I’d just been stuck in an anterior orientated breathing posture.

If we think about the typical weight room strength and conditioning we do with our athletes, a lot of it is compressive in nature. This is optimal for the tasks we are performing in the weight room, such as various squats and deadlifts where we are encouraging straight and rigid torso’s. However, as mentioned this does place a lot of compressive force throughout our spine and ribcage. As Angus Bradley puts it, in order for our athletes to not move like a fridge we must combat some of these compressive forces and programme exercises that encourage movement throughout the spine and ribcage. Below is a nice exercise I got from Angus encouraging some movement in our ribcage:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CeGsp4SjZAj/

Other examples might include rotational med ball throws, and hanging knee raises while encouraging spinal flexion at the top of the movement.