Now let's take a look at some breathing techniques and bring this all together. The first technique I want to look at is diaphragmatic breathing or what we refer to as belly breathing. diaphragmatic breathing by far has the most evidence based research based support surrounding the benefits. I consider it the gold standard of breathing. your diaphragm is the muscle of respiration. It's a large dome shaped muscle that sits right below the base of your lungs.

And your diaphragm is very unique, and that it's the only muscle in the human body that can be controlled voluntarily or involuntarily. All the other muscles of the body are either controlled voluntarily through the somatic nervous system, such as your skeletal muscles, which is your hamstrings, your quadriceps, your biceps, your triceps or controlled voluntarily through the autonomic nervous system, which is your cardiac muscle and your smooth muscles, which line the walls of your intestines and your blood vessels. But your diaphragm can either be controlled consciously or unconsciously. So let's take a look at diaphragmatic breathing. Now let's take a look at how we perform diaphragmatic breathing or belly breathing. And this is according to the guidelines from the Cleveland Clinic, the number one Heart Hospital in the United States.

Diaphragmatic breathing can be performed either lying down, seated or even standing. We normally show patients in a lying down position first, but for illustrative purposes, we're going to begin in a seated position. This type of breathing technique is a little counterintuitive. So I'm going to break it down into pieces and then we'll draw the pieces together. First diaphragmatic breathing is performed by taking a breath in your nose, and then you exhale through your mouth. But when we exhale, we're going to do what's called pursed lip breathing.

So we inhale through the nose, and then we have pursed lips and we exhale, it looks something like this. Now going to the actual structure of the diaphragm and how diaphragmatic breathing works. Remember, the diaphragm is a large dome shaped muscle that sits right below the base of your lungs. When we inhale, the diaphragm flattens and comes down, when we exhale, it's just a passive process, it returns to its normal dome shape. So as we're inhaling, it's flattening out coming down, pulling air into our lungs, and then we exhale and it just passively comes up against the base of the lungs. To perform diaphragmatic breathing, we want to bring in those accessory abdominal muscles.

And we want to draw the the oxygen the air into the lower lobes of our lungs. So to do so we take a breath in our nose and at the same time our belly is coming out. When we exhale, we exhale through those pursed lips, and we bring the belly in towards the spine. So we're inhaling belly out. we exhale belly in. There's no movement or very limited movement in our chest.

So let's take a look in a seated position. what this looks like. Let's begin. The Cleveland Clinic recommends doing diaphragmatic breathing three to four times a day for about five to 10 minutes to see the benefits of lower blood pressure and heart rate, improve focus and concentration improvements and digestive system as well as sleep. So now let's take a look at diaphragmatic breathing in a lying down position. Remember we want very little movement or to no movement in your chest.

All of the movement is coming through the diaphragm. We'll start by taking a few normal breaths, and then we'll move into diaphragmatic breathing and finish by a few normal breaths.