Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/665755
In a typical session, I begin—like most of us, I am guessing—with compression to the client's back. Just like you, in this first minute or two I assess the quality of the client's tissues; but just as important, I assess the quality of his breath. This sounds fancy, but is really quite simple: I am just noticing what parts of his back move, and which parts don't. What you'll find, as you compress and observe, is that the ways we breathe are as varied as the shapes of our bodies. Any generalizations are thus difficult to make. That said, one pattern is especially common. When my clients step away from their busy lives and lie down on my table, their breathing is typically shorter and faster than it wants to be, and requires more effort than is necessary. To put it simply, for many clients, breathing is harder than it should be; breathing is yet another kind of work. 1 I suspect the same is true of many, if not most, of the people you see, too. As you compress your next client's back, and begin to observe movement alongside musculature, what you'll likely find is that on the inhalation, the upper back moves just as much, if not more, than the lower back and abdomen. The ribs will push up against your hands as he inhales; often, you can even feel the muscles of the shoulders and the neck contracting, pulling that next breath into the body. Depending on the exact pattern of muscle recruitment, this can be considered "apical" breathing, or "paradoxical" breathing, or just plain "inefficient" breathing. 2 No matter the particular pattern, the client is working harder than he needs to. (The irony is that the client is rarely aware of the unnecessary effort he is expending to force that inhalation, even though he is painfully aware, as we shall see, of the various symptoms that emerge as a result.) In each of these patterns, the client is using the secondary, or accessory, muscles of respiration to force that inhalation, rather than allowing the breath to happen passively, via the unconscious activation of the diaphragm. Those secondary muscles are a broad group that wraps the ribs, shoulders, and neck, from the sternocleidomastoid to the scalenes, from the pectoralis minor to some of the intercostals. 3 Recruitment of these secondary muscles is necessary to expand the rib cage quickly and significantly, and thus is essential when we are doing aerobic activity, whether running to catch the bus, or in the case of our prehistoric ancestors, running from a lion on the savannah. And yet, that recruitment is terribly counterproductive for the vast majority of our daily lives, when we are not fleeing predators, but rather, sitting on our butts. This kind of unnecessary effort means that for most of us, our musculature is working harder than is needed, all the time. That effort-full breath is a vicious circle; once we have unconsciously learned this pattern, it reinforces itself: when we are awake and when we are asleep, whether we are in a stressful meeting or whether we are "relaxing" on the couch watching TV. You'll feel this cycle as you assess your client. After you observe where and how the client's back expands on the inhale, notice what happens on the exhale. The client's body will begin to sink as the breath leaves the body, but then more often than not, a few seconds later comes a moment when the client stops her own exhalation. For no apparent reason, and without any conscious awareness, she reverses direction—she sucks the breath in and begins that effort-full inhalation once again. Some clients—swimmers or singers or those versed in yoga—tend to let the exhale empty more fully than others. But rare is the client of mine who allows her body to sink all the way down to the natural endpoint of the exhale. We seem nearly unable to simply let our breath do what it was designed to do—function with the minimum effort needed in each particular situation. Instead, we insist on getting in the way of our own bodies, often without even realizing the effort-full pattern we've created, or its long-term costs. The more clients you assess in this way, the more you'll glimpse this epidemic of unnecessary effort all around us. After all, by some estimates, we take 20,000 breaths a day. For the vast majority of each day, we are not engaged in aerobic exercise, or other activities that require the use of those secondary muscles. That means each 78 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k m a y / j u n e 2 0 1 6