Inefficient breathing is not good for you! No surprises there – shallow breaths restrict the amount of oxygen you take in. That in turn limits the amount of oxygen available for life-essential processes like metabolising food and producing energy. But can a chiropractic adjustment help with breathing?
In this post, we discuss how a chiropractic adjustment can help improve your breathing. We also explain why good breathing techniques are important for your health generally and offer some practical tips for improving and maintaining good respiratory health.
Breathing happens on autopilot. We just do it without thinking about the process too much, which probably explains why we don’t really consider how its quality can affect our overall health and wellbeing either!
Even on autopilot though, you can consciously change up your breathing. Swap it out for better breathing. And, depending on the cause, you may even have very good breathing after a chiropractic adjustment!
Inefficient breathing habits develop for many reasons. Chief amongst them are muscle tension in your chest, or thoracic spinal misalignments that restrict your ribs and chest movement.
Either situation can ‘box in’ your lungs, and prevent them from expanding properly. Rather like trying to inflate a large balloon in a tiny box in fact!
Evidence though suggests chiropractic adjustments can help expand ‘the box’ by reducing muscle tension or correcting the spinal misalignments. These free up your chest and ribs so they can:
Similarly, holistic chiropractic care (postural education, lifestyle advice, exercise suggestions, and relaxation therapies) can all help address other contributors to inefficient breathing like bad posture, stress, and tension.
Your respiratory system’s job is to take in oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from your blood. As part of this process, it also keeps these 2 gases correctly balanced.
Carbon dioxide is usually considered a waste product – better out than in. However, keeping a small amount in circulation helps regulate blood pH levels. Therefore, your lungs don’t remove it all but retain enough to keep your blood slightly alkaline.
If you don’t have enough oxygen in your body, it’s usually not a game changer but more a case of ‘game over’!
Good breathing is fundamental for good health in so many ways. In a nutshell, the better your breathing is, the more efficient it is at drawing in oxygen, removing carbon dioxide, and keeping these gases balanced so your blood stays healthy. So, it contributes to better respiratory function and efficiency.
Typically, we think of energy in terms of muscular or physical activity “I don’t have the energy to do…”
However, your energy requirements are way more fundamental than that. Your cells need it too, and so they have tiny built-in power stations (mitochondria) to produce it. This is cellular energy.
Cellular energy powers every single function in your body… From thinking and muscle movement to digestion and DNA replication – everything your body does relies on having enough cellular energy to fuel it.
Your cells can produce cellular energy in 2 ways but mitochondria are far more efficient at it. They use a process called aerobic respiration to break down glucose to produce energy. ’Aerobic’ means it requires oxygen.
Your cells can use anaerobic (no oxygen) respiration to produce cellular energy as well, and will do so in certain circumstances (like fuelling short bursts of energy). However, anaerobic respiration produces just 2 energy molecules per glucose molecule vs the ~32 produced by aerobic respiration.
If we had to rely solely on anaerobic respiration for energy, we’d struggle to function, a negative game changer in anyone’s book.
Anaerobic respiration also generates lactic acid as a by-product. Your body then converts this back into useable fuel using – you guessed it – oxygen.
Breathing patterns are closely linked to your upper body’s musculoskeletal function. When you take deep breaths, for example, you naturally tend to sit or stand straighter (better posture). This is because your body uses core muscles to support the expansion of your ribs and chest.
Good breathing also reduces tension in other muscles in the neck and shoulders, which is important for breathing when you need to take deeper or stronger breaths.
We’re often told to ‘take deep breaths’ when stressed or anxious, and there’s good reason for this advice. Breathing directly impacts your stress levels because it’s influenced by the autonomic nervous system. The same system also controls your ‘rest and digest’ and ‘fight or flight’ responses.
When stressed, the ‘fight or flight’ response kicks in, causing faster, shallower breaths. Conversely, taking deep breaths activates your ‘rest and digest’ response, helping your mind and body calm down and relax. Anything that reduces stress and tension is a game changer for your health.
Good deep breathing can improve your sleep by triggering stress-relieving hormones, improving oxygen delivery, and calming your nervous system. Getting regular good quality sleep is of course one of the biggest game changers of all with many proven health benefits.
When you’re stressed, those stress hormones your body releases increase your heart rate and blood pressure. Optimal breathing techniques, like deep breaths, can help counteract this by activating your relaxation response to lower stress hormone production.
Brains require a steady supply of oxygen to function at their best. When you breathe correctly, you help this happen. This in turn may support good cognitive function, improve mental focus, sharpen thought processes, and improve decision-making.
We mentioned earlier that, even though respiration is an automated function, we can still improve it. Here are some tips to help you do that:
Practise deep, slow breathing, the type that expands your diaphragm and stomach muscles instead of just your chest. It encourages relaxation and improves oxygen intake.
Remember – shallow breaths only pull air into the upper section of your lungs. Consistent shallow breathing can lead to respiratory dysfunction like hyperventilation, and contribute to stress and anxiety.
Air pollution is not conducive to good respiratory health. Try and minimise your exposure to it. Limit your outdoor activities when there’s a lot of pollution floating around.
Keep your indoor air quality as healthy as possible – clean air conditioning filters regularly. Keep your indoor spaces well-ventilated. Avoid using harsh chemicals or irritative air fresheners where you can breathe them in.
If you have allergies, manage them correctly. Consider dust mite covers for your bedding, and turn the annual spring clean into a more regular activity to keep dust and allergens at bay.
Exercise regularly; it strengthens your respiratory system and increases lung capacity. Try to get around 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise each day.
Eat healthy and keep your weight healthy; a good diet, and maintaining a healthy weight support good respiration function and put less strain on your respiratory (and cardiovascular) system.
Drink plenty of water: good hydration helps keep mucus secretions in your lungs thin so it’s easier to breathe.
Get enough sleep; we covered this one in more detail above.
Develop good hygiene habits; we all learned the importance of this during Covid! Keeping those habits going post-Covid will help reduce your chances of picking up other respiratory infections, and keep your respiratory health good.
Quit smoking if you still smoke!
Chiropractic adjustments per se don’t directly improve oxygen circulation in your body. However, they can help improve HOW you breathe by freeing up chest restrictions and rib immobility. When you can expand your lungs properly, you can take deeper breaths.
This provides more oxygen to fuel your body and helps trigger your rest and digest responses.
Ewell Chiropractic
9A Cheam Road, Ewell, Epsom KT17 1SP
Our practice is next to the central car park in the Ewell village if you travel by car. And just a 10-minute wander from both train stations in Ewell.
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