Breathing and Bracing Myths

what's your view on the on the trend of breath work at the moment because i think there's there's no doubt the impact that the diaphragm has on allowing the the rib cage to move allowing thoracic and again allowing like external rotation doesn't happen if you can't move and extend that but my always my thing with this is that you take so many breaths a day that it's like trying to be a one man pissing in the ocean trying to make it yellow like yeah how much of an impact you feel we can change your breath work how much does this play a part in your decision making process with this almost zero almost zero you want me to teach you out of breathe that's it look i and and i you know look i i'm i'm not opposed to the breathing things i just think they've gotten a little too out of control and they've gone to an extreme um i mean fuck i 10 years ago well not 10 years ago maybe like uh six seven years ago i was into the wim hof stuff and i was into doing um you know apnea breathing and box breathing and i think those things are really important, but they're getting to a point where they're getting out of control. And I was talking to Will Crozier about this and he was at our gym in Brisbane and we were hanging out and he's done a lot of the breathing stuff and went to America, did a lot of breathing stuff. And he goes, look, that stuff works really good from a rehab perspective. When you have a small person that's in pain he goes i'm a big motherfucker and i squat almost 400 kilos that stuff works good until i put 400 fucking kilos on my back and then it doesn't work so good and i'm like i said well i guess instead of you breathing into a balloon you should just breathe into like a hot hot water bottle or some shit like because that's kind of what he was alluding to are the systems where you're breathing into a straw or you're breathing in a balloon you're moving a leg here or an arm here and you're pushing a leg into the wall. I actually like a lot of that stuff, but it works well for gym pop. It works well for people who are weak. It doesn't work that great for people who are strong. So you need, you need other things to do. Um, probably the, the stuff that I will do with breathing. I like the idea of learning how to do a lot of deep bracing breaths where you are like in a quadruped position and then learning how to vacuum and then learning how to expand and then breathing against the expansion. And the, the, what I like about that is when you look into the upper part of the lumbar, a lot of that's attached into the diaphragm. So if we can work on pulling on the diaphragm, it pulls those vertebral segments up, which can decompress the lower spine so we might use it for something like that um because there's a fascial attachment to the psoas as well right so we talk about the force coupling allowing that so as they regain sort of length oh no rather than over length just like use things off on the pelvis so yeah so well so yeah looking at where the the psoas and also the QL come in and attach it to the diaphragm and kind of in those top vertebral segments of the lumbar spine and thinking about breathing so that you cause that expansion that pulls that and it starts to relieve some of the nerves on the lower part of the lumbar spine in L4 and L5, which is where you're going to see a lot of the issues will be somewhere around L3, L4, L5 when you see like lumbar herniations. But