where does the air go when you breathe through your belly?

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When you take a deep breath, your shoulders go up because your lungs expand. When you breathe through your belly, your belly expands but lungs not much. What are you expanding? Does the air go into your stomach?

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Forced inspiration is done using two sets of muscles the external intercostal muscles which are located in between the ribs and pull the ribs outward to increase the area of the thorax. And the abdominal muscles. There is something called the diaphragm that divides the abdomen and thorax. Upon forced inspiration I believe the diaphragm shifts lower pushing the contents of the abdomen downwards.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your shoulders are entirely outside your ribcage. Raising your shoulders to take a deep breath does exactly nothing to help. The ONLY way you breathe is when your diaphragm tenses up. In doing so, it flattens out. Relaxed, it’s curved to the bottom shape of your lungs. by flattening out it expands the area your lungs occupy, thereby drawing air in.

Now, by ‘belly’ breathing all you’re really doing is allowing the diaphragm to operate with less resistance. Given practice, it’s possible to expand your lung capacity a little. This is how singers can hold notes for 20 seconds or longer without passing out.

Anonymous 0 Comments

No, air goes in your lungs. The difference is that when you breathe through your chest, it’s the small rib-cage muscles that expand your thorax so that the lungs suck in air.

When you breathe in through your belly, it’s your diaphragm that expands and allows the lungs to suck in air, and pushes the content of your belly outwards. It’s just a side-effect.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Belly breathing is simply normal breathing but instead puffing up your chest to breath, which is what you do when you need a large amount of air in there quickly (like exercising)…
Your body takes a more relaxed approach (literally) by relaxing your core muscles.

This allows your diaphragm to expand downwards towards the area where your stomach would usually sit which creates the negative pressure in your lungs that we use to draw in a breath.

Breathing is controlled by your diaphragm.. imagine it like the bottom of a sack.
If you make the sack bigger, more stuff (air) can fill it and if you then shrink it, the stuff inside spills out.
The diaphragm simply does it using pressure difference on either side of it.

Your innards move down creating a negative pressure in your stomach cavity, which pulls your diaphragm downwards, which creates a negative pressure in your lungs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Breathing like that expands the diaphragm more than letting the displacement rise your shoulders. In most people, this can result in more volume of air, with greater control.

My old choir teacher used to pick us out of the group if he saw our shoulders rising. Singers in general try to remain in this practice.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You have a muscle there that can expand the lungs by pulling their bottom “edge” down. When you breathe “normally”, you expand your lungs using muscles in/on your ribcage or chest.

Anonymous 0 Comments

No… it doesnt go into your stomach. Your stomach is not connected to your windpipe (not when things are working correctly anyway) so air doesnt go there.

Breathing through your belly also expands your lungs. it just expands them downwards instead of forwards.