How you breathe can impact upon your pelvic floor and effect your overall health and well being. Learning how to do diaphragmatic breathing exercises is simple and can be readily incorporated into your everyday life. Benefits of diaphragmatic breathing exercises for your health. How diaphragmatic breathing exercises can help your pelvic floor. Step by step diaphragmatic breathing exercise technique. Diaphragm breathing or abdominal breathing is a breathing exercise and technique that promotes deep breathing using your main breathing muscle- your diaphragm.
The diaphragm is a domeβshaped muscle that sits under the lungs. The image below shows how your diaphragm moves as you breathe. When you breathe in normally, your diaphragm contracts and moves downwards into your abdomen. This downward movement creates a vacuum inside your chest causing air to enter and fill up your lungs. You breathe out when your diaphragm relaxes and moves back up into your chest allowing air to leave your lungs. The way you breathe affects the tone in your deep abdominal and pelvic floor muscles.
Your trunk is like a cylinder surrounded by muscles that should work together during breathing. The muscles surrounding your trunk clinder include your diaphragm top of the cylinder , your deep abdominal muscles wrapping around your trunk the sides of the cylinder and your pelvic floor muscles at the base of this cylinder.
During regular breathing your deep abdominal and pelvic floor muscles are also active to help maintain pressure in your trunk cylinder. When you breathe in deeply during diaphragmatic breathing, the pressure inside your abdomen is increased so that your pelvic floor muscles need to contract even more strongly to maintain your continence. Learning diaphragmatic breathing technique and practicing breathing exercises can help you promote the coordinated activity of your deep abdominal and pelvic floor muscles.
This is a vital first step in undertaking pelvic floor rehabilitation for prolapse or incontinence problems in women and men. You will notice that if you try to breathe deeply with slumped forwards posture, it is difficult to fill your lungs and breathe deeply.
