What is happening internally when you choose to breath from the stomach vs the chest? Why are we able to make our stomach grow when breathing in when our lungs are in the chest?
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The primary muscle responsible for breathing is the diaphragm. It’s underneath the lungs, and is domed upwards when relaxed and flattened down when contracted. This expands the thoracic cavity, inflating the lungs, but compresses the abdominal cavity, squeezing the intestines which bulge outwards.
Your body is like a balloon inside a balloon. You can fill the inside balloon by pulling on the outside balloon.
Breathing from your chest is a lot like pulling on the sides of the balloon up close to the neck. The rubber there is a lot thicker and stronger. With humans, you also have a rib cage, which gets in the way. When you breathe from your chest, your shoulders will rise, and your ribs will stretch outward.
Breathing from your stomach is like pulling on the bottom of the balloon: It’s a lot more flexible and you’re able to pull a lot farther and fill your lungs a lot easier. Human bodies also have an additional couple of details: the diaphragm is a very strong muscle at the bottom of your rib cage. This muscle pulls at the bottom of your lungs very efficiently. it also also doesn’t have to fight with your ribs. If you’re breathing using your diaphragm, your shoulders shouldn’t rise very much and your belly should expand.
Most has been said already, and this first part is not really what you asked about, but I want to add my 2 cents as I really love the neat mechanism in how our lungs work.
The lungs are covered with a ligament. To ELI5 it, we can see this as a thin layer of plastic foil. There is a second layer of plastic foil that is attached to our chest and between the 2 layers is a small cavity filled with fluid. This fluid is hugely important as it makes sure that the 2 layers of foil stick together, like 2 glass plates with a little bit of water between them.
So whenever the outer layer extends, the inner layer- and thus the entire lung attached to it- has to follow. All of our breathing muscles work in enlarging our chest, this pulls the outer layer of foil with and, as said, thus also the inner layer and the lung.
In a way it doesn’t matter how we expand our chest, either by heaving our ribs (breathing through the chest) or by enlarging our stomach and thereby helping to move the diaphragm down. (and indeed as said somewhere else already, the enlarging of the belly is just to make room for the diaphragm to move downwards into the abdomen).
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