In part 1 I explained how compressed my body had become from years of traditional strength training and neglecting decompression work like myofascial release.
I couldn’t figure out why I was waking up tight and in pain on most days when I was fit and healthy by all conventional standards. I ate well, hit the 5 movement patterns every week – squat, hinge, push, pull, carry – and dedicated time to mobility and recovery.
But why did my lower back and joints kill on most days?
This bound up, restricted feeling in my muscles and tissues was normal from hard training, right?
What I came to find was that years of what I thought was beneficial strength and conditioning work had left my body severely compressed.
The layer of connective tissues surrounding every muscle and joint, the fascia, was knotted up, tight, and dehydrated.
This only became painfully obvious when I started dedicating hours each week to rolling out every part of my body.
The areas that were the most painful and compressed were my quads, hamstrings, lower back, and most surprisingly, my ribcage.
I had never thought that my ribs needed to be rolled or even mobilized. The thoracic spine, yes, but the ribs are a solid unit that just protect your vital organs right?
Wrong.
The Problem With A Compressed Ribcage
In fact, the ribs need to move and expand individually. Each one expands and contracts with each breath.
A compressed rib cage can affect your shoulder health, your ability to rotate, and most importantly, your ability to breathe deeply.
When your ribs are essentially glued to each other, they can’t fully expand when you take a deep breath. The diaphragm can’t ascend, descend, expand and contract like it should to provide a full, oxygenating breath.
Without deep breathing your body can’t fully recover, and can often get stuck in a state of fight or flight.
This has a negative effect on the entire system, leading to poor recovery, and in my case, chronic pain.
So how do you mobilize the ribcage?
Rolling your ribs up and down on a lacrosse ball sounds like a tortuous way to do this, not to mention ineffective.
There are soft foam balls you can use along the muscles surrounding the ribs, but the best way I’ve found to mobilize the ribs is through breathing drills.
The Power Of The Breath To Relieve Compression
You can position the body in ways to bias the breath to expand into specific areas of the ribs that are commonly restricted and compressed.
Most people have compression in their lower back ribs.
Ironically, this is where the deepest, most effective part of your lungs are, and where air needs to reach for all of the amazing benefits of deep breathing to occur.
The wall supported drill is a great way to feel your back ribs. The idea is to drive air and expansion into those ribs without allowing your skeleton to collapse.
Maintain a tall posture while pushing your ribs back and consciously drive air to that area while relaxing and expanding.
Decompression Breathing
Decompression Breathing was a concept introduced to me by Jessie Salas from Foundation Training.
Once you grasp this concept it’s an insanely valuable tool that you can use at any time to relieve pain, promote recovery and just plain feel better.
Essentially, with Decompression Breathing, you want to think wide, expansive breath in all directions. Each breath expands the rib cage up, down, front, back, and sides. It’s 360 degrees of expansion powered by each deep breath.
You also want to think of the rib cage lifting up off of the pelvis, creating space in the sacrum and lower back.
Each vertebrate is lifting off of each other.
The head is lifting up off of the neck, and the collar bones are lifting up off of the rib cage.
Total and complete expansion everywhere!
You are using your mind’s awareness as much as you are your breathing muscles to create expansion. You must feel and visualize all of these areas decompressing with each breath.
Decompression breathing is used extensively in all Foundation Training exercises, however you can do it whenever and wherever you want – between sets, on long car rides, after a stressful meeting, after hard training.
It’s an excellent tool that will help your body immensely.
Finally, the muscles around the rib cage like the serratus, lats, and obliques are vitally important for rotation, one of the key movements missing from most people’s training.
In the next article I’ll show you how to stretch and decompress this area to free up your movement even more, but also how to activate it, as these muscles are frequently underdeveloped on most people, but are vitally important for optimal performance and movement.
Until then, start using your breath every day to combat the negative effects compression is having on your life.
