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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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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