Breathwork is Corework

Jenna Zaffino:

Hi, everyone. I'm Jenna. Welcome to your core strengthening class. In this class, we're going to work both in a seated position and then we're going to progress it down onto the mat onto your back and side for some additional exercises. Now, if being on the mat is not where you need to be today or it feels too restrictive to your breathing, then let's just stick with the seated exercises and let it be good enough for today. Often, we think of breath work as core work and understanding that many of you are working with restrictions or challenges in your breathing. I want to remind you that whatever you're able to do today is just fine. Let it be a starting off point or a baseline that you can come back to and explore over time and build upon and work as a real true strengthening program.

Just like a muscle, we don't come in, do a couple of bicep curls and then automatically have the strength we seek. It's a process that requires time and focus and commitment. So everything we do today will be simple enough for you to come back and return to it to play around with, and it's also something you can do every single day if you choose. Alright. I do have, as you saw, a 5 pound weight. We're going to be using this on your abdomen when we lay down. In the event that you don't have a weight, a dumbbell, or you don't want to use one, that's just fine. You can use your hand and it'll work perfectly.

We'll put this one off to the side. I also have a pillow for a little extra support when we come down on the mat. If you have some pillows nearby, that might help. And then finally, I have a yoga strap, which for you can be a yoga strap if you have 1, or a belt, or a bathrobe tie. Anything that can wrap around your torso easily. Now let's begin with our feet hip width distance apart. We're just gonna start to move our spines to get a little warm in our back, front, and sides. So, let's round the back, tilt off your sits bones, and just let your back stretch as you go back.

And then come forward and arch your back, lifting your chest up. We'll do that a couple of times in a row. For our purposes, I'd like to start to introduce the idea that your core is more like an apple core, a bending apple core, if you will, than it is one particular point on your abdomen. Working with clients throughout the years, a lot of people will come into me and say, I wanna strengthen right here, and while right here is part of the core, we don't wanna leave behind the other pieces that can really be helpful for us as we begin to understand why our core is important and how it supports us in doing pretty much everything, including breathing. So let's do one more lift up, opening our chest, and we'll go back to center. And hopefully, you feel a little warmer. If you need a couple more of those, you can go ahead and repeat them. Now, from here, I'm going to take the yoga strap, and I'm just going to wrap it around around my back.

If you need some help, ask your caregiver or a partner to help you with this. And then very simply, I'm just gonna thread it through one time. Now if you have a belt, you don't need to put the I don't even know what that's called. The little hooky thing in the hole. You don't need to do that. Just throw it through, the the, buckle. And if you have a strap, just hold it around your torso if you have a bathrobe tie. Our goal, and the reason why I like this, is because it has a little flexibility.

So it's very loose right now, and I've put it just under my chest around the kind of mid portion of my rib cage. If this is upper, this is middle, and then lower is kind of closer to the waist. So I want enough snugness on it to be able to feel that the belt is touching me on the sides, the front, and the back of my rib cage. And then we're just gonna simply start to do some breathing. I've got a little tension here, so I can feel it. And I'd like to invite you to take a deep breath in and just see where your ribs move as you breathe. So a lot of times, we'll find that we feel a lot of connection on one part of the strap, but maybe not as much in another part. As you take a couple of rounds of breath on your own timing and the own your own amount, think about what's really clear to you.

Where can you really feel movement happening? I know working with some of my clients that have asthma. A lot of times we feel more in the front than in the sides or the back. So that's not incorrect. It's just that you're used to opening your ribs a bit more to get maybe more air in quickly than you are on the back and sides. So for those clients, we work with a gentle awareness, thinking about how we can encourage more sensation towards the back of the ribs. So this is a great first start because as you are breathing, you are automatically engaging the muscles around your spine. You're engaging your diaphragm, which helps to engage your pelvic floor, and it starts to get things moving in the general area of your trunk and torso. Our goal with this type of breath is always to just see, can we make it as even as possible as balanced from the front to the side to the back.

And I will say on any given day, that might be a different experience for each one of you. So perfection is not on the table, unfortunately, with this exercise. Alright. I'm gonna loosen up my belt, and now we're gonna move the belt a little lower, kind of around your high waist. Think the highest waist you have on a pair of pants. And once your belt is snug there, now let's do the same sort of breathing. We'll take an inhale and then exhale. It's not uncommon to feel more movement happen in your abdomen in the front of your trunk.

A lot of us aren't used to breathing to the sides or to the back, but once you take a couple of breaths, and you notice what areas are moving more with your inhale and exhale, then maybe you can start to play around with breathing a little more into the spaces that aren't moving as much. This is all about awareness. And so far, we've had the awareness of the inhale moving and up in the ribs and now in the abdomen. We're gonna shift our focus now to our exhalation. So I've got this one hand on my strap. I'm gonna take a breath in. As I exhale, I wanna breathe out as long and as much as possible. As I do that, I'm gonna start to think about narrowing my trunk, meaning pulling it in, making it a little bit more narrow in the center, like the sides, the front, and the back of my body are hugging in towards my spine.

If you did any of the other breath work videos, they can be really helpful in breaking this down. This is the image almost that we have a little colorful ball in the center of our torso, and we're trying to breathe around it. And then as we exhale, we're trying to engage towards it. Now, pulling this little belt can be in just showing you, oh, I can do a little more, a little more, a little more, a little more. And then when you have to inhale and then exhale. Now, remember, if any of this causes you stress or restriction, then just lessen the breath that you're working with. Okay. So we've kind of felt around the middle.

You might even start to feel a little bit of burning, like engagement burning, meaning those muscles are turning on. Nothing painful. Let's bring your belt down a little low, and now we're in, like, the low rise jeans. We wanna feel that area with the belt. Kind of pull it a little tighter around your pelvis, and then let's take a breath and see what happens. You have to relax your belly in order for the breath to go there. But then when you exhale, thinking about how can you engage those muscles closer to the center of your body. Breathing in.

And breathing out. Couple more here. As you breathe out, you're hugging front and side and back and just looking for a little tighter engagement of that belt. Last one. And breathing out. Excellent. All right. Let's release the belt and we're going to go ahead and unhook it and place it to the side.

One thing I want to make super duper clear is that your breathing throughout the day should just be breathing. It can be helpful to think about engaging those muscles of your abdomen, the sides of your trunk, helpful to hug everything in on the exhale, but that's not necessarily how every breath should feel. In fact, it's not at all. Breathing wants to happen, multiple levels that really supports your ability to take in oxygen and exhale anything that does not need to be there. Right? So in terms of these awareness exercises, you could absolutely use them to, a, check-in with maybe where your body is moving in response to your breath, b, encourage a little bit more movement, and c, connect with your core musculature. So before we take it down onto our mat, I'll put our strap here, let's just move the trunk side to side. So we're gonna reach down through our right hand, take a little stretch. And once you're over to the side, give your ribcage a little tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

Just a little awareness tapping. Maybe you tap to the chest, maybe it's the side. And then let's come back up, and go to the other side, and tap, tap, tap. This is very, very kind of light, just enough to feel the boundaries of your ribs, not anything too heavy or harsh. Good. Come on up. Take a breath here. Notice where your breath moved your torso and also thinking about where did I feel my focus go as I was breathing.

Yeah. So, tapping can be a really useful way to draw more attention and to help you out. And again, it's a very, very light tapping action just to show you where your ribs are and what's possible. So, let's get ready to come down onto your back. And, I want to invite you again, if this is enough for you today, perfect. If you wanna keep going with us, come on down. And then, you can just make choices as we work through the exercises. All right.

So a lot of times what I like to do when we're working with breath is just to give a little extra support. So if you have anything like a bolster or a couple of pillows, you can place them lengthwise. And then just have your pelvis against the ground, and your spine can rest here right on the pillow. It just takes a little bit of pressure off of the chest. And, of course, if you need to prop yourself up a little bit more, that's okay too. We're looking for comfort because we're ultimately working on a lot of awareness building right now more than anything else. Alright. So I mentioned that we're gonna use a weight.

I'd like you, if you have one, to place the weight onto your abdomen. And if you don't, just place your hands there. It's the lowest part of your belly, kind of right around and below your belly button. Now we're gonna take a couple of breaths here, breathing in and thinking about where the belt was touching our ribs and our belly, maybe letting our abdomen lift the weight up a little bit. And then as we breathe out, we're gonna see how deeply we can let that weight sink down. So we'll breathe in. And then as we breathe out, exhale fully and let the weight sink. Let's go through a couple more of these each time attempting to let the weight sink just a tiny bit more.

You might feel a sense of pulling in from your abdominal wall, maybe from your hips, maybe even from your back. This is a real internal focus more than it is an external kind of big movement exercise. So a friend of mine teaches a number of kids classes, and he has this really great image that I think works great with adults too. So we're gonna think of the weight as a little rubber duck. Obviously, it weighs more. And if your hands are there, your hand is now the duck. As you breathe in, it's like the water level that the duck is swimming in, the pond, rises up to lift the duck up. As you breathe out, the pond drops down and the duck stays relatively submerged.

So its feet are in the water at all times, if that makes sense. So your little duck is floating on your pond. You're gonna breathe in. Everything rises. And then as you breathe out, you sink the duck down so it can stay in the water. So for a lot of my clients, even for me, it gives me something to do there. Thinking about those abdominal muscles like that pond and just kind of working the focus there. Let's do 2 more rounds.

Just seeing what's there for you. Last one. All right. Now that we've got an idea hopefully of how these muscles rise and fall, now we're going to explore how we can widen and keep them connected for more support. So we're gonna play a game of stillness. I'd like you to reach your arms up to the air, to the ceiling, make some fists, and or if this is too much, you can bring your arms down by the side. Now we're going to raise the weight up with our inhalations to breathing in. And then as you breathe out, sink that image of the duck down.

Now, once this has sunk, the question is, where does my breath go? If the idea is to keep your weight very still, to keep your duck down in the water, as you breathe in, where what are your options? So you might feel that there's some options for the rib cage, maybe for your chest. If this arm position makes it feel like it's harder to breathe, you might open them up or take your palms up. Anything that's gonna help open your chest up might be helpful for you here. So, again, we're trying to keep the abdomen just a little more still as we switch our breath into our back. Alright. From here, now we wanna challenge it a little bit more. So you've got hopefully a few strategies for yourself. And we're gonna keep our pelvis very still and see if you can just hover 1 foot up off of the ground, like, just enough.

It's barely hovered. Just enough to feel that it's not touching the mat. And if it's impossible to lift, then maybe just make that foot lighter. We're doing this without arching our backs. So we wanna keep the weight heavy. We wanna keep your abdomen engaged, and then we wanna keep your breath going and then lower it down. All right. Let's try the other side.

So you gotta think about it. And you wanna try to do the lift of the opposite leg with the least amount of stress and tension possible. You might feel some internal work, but lowering that down. So all of these exercises, let's go back to the first side. When I teach them in person, they are very, very effective because I'm right there and I don't let my clients cheat. Let's go to the other side. When I teach them online, they don't look like much. But if you are trying to keep that weight centered, pulled down, if you're trying to keep your pelvis still, and if you're making very focused calculated movements to lift one foot just a tiny bit and then lower it down and then do the other side, oftentimes, you're gonna feel the band of your lower abdominals kicking in.

If you move big and fast, you'll miss it. That's one of the pieces that when we're talking about engaging our deep core muscles, we have to go a little slower at the beginning. Ideally, our deep core should engage for us, but if we haven't been doing a lot of movement that engages those muscles, then we might they might be a little tired, a little sleepy. They might not be as as quick as we need them to be. All right. So on your last one, let's bring the knee up and then just bring it up to what we call tabletop. And then from here, seeing if you can feel a sense of dropping down kind of into that weight of your pelvis. See if you can switch legs without arching your back.

If that is too much for you, then you're gonna stay with those little leg lifts. But I like to make the fists because it helps me just kind of find a connection with other muscles that might be able to help out. The idea is to switch them nice and easily without a lot of stress or tension. I'm feeling the weight pull down. I'm feeling my pelvis get heavy. Just a really nice way to feel a connection across the low band of your abdominals. And for anybody who has gone through any abdominal surgeries or a pregnancy, this can be a really gentle way to just kind of reappoint yourself with these muscles. But again, if there's any pain or undue stress, then that's when we wanna just kind of let it rest and go back to the exercise that was possible for us before.

Alright. So that was hopefully a little meaningful for you. Hopefully, you were feeling a little more sensation. And from here, we're gonna take the weight off. I'm gonna ask you to bring the belt over once again, and I'm going to take the belt just under my waist. So here's the deal. We wanna be able to gently slide the belt out, but do so in a way that doesn't feel like we have to use too much force. So it should be able to kind of slip and slide underneath us, and then we're gonna just move the pillow back.

So our head and chest is elevated, but a little more of your back is on the mat at this point. So, 1st and foremost, we're gonna think of that sink to swim. So we wanna imagine that your front of your abdominal wall is sinking to the back of your abdominal wall, and because of that, you've got some pressure down into the belt. Now you should, when you're not working, be able to slide it, but when you are working, you should feel like you could push it down a lot. Once you're there, you're gonna give a little tug to the belt. Now, depending on where you put it, you can make this easy on yourself or you can make it hard on yourself. So if you put a little higher up your torso, you're gonna have to work a little harder to keep it down there. The first stage of this exercise, let's say, is just to keep the belt down as you try to tug it out from underneath you.

And if you do have a partner, you can absolutely have them tug the belt, but play nice and make sure it's not nobody wins if they yank it too fast. So you're just trying to get a little more engagement across that lower abdominal wall. Once you've done this a couple times, you might need to take a break. So use deep breath in and sink down, press your weight against the band or the strap, and then pull or tug and see if you can keep it there. Hopefully, you can keep it there. And then that's the first round. So that might be enough for you today. And often it is because it's a very concentrated, exercise.

I'm gonna show you the next level, which is very similar to what we just did. So from here, sink down, give a little pull on the strap, keep your weight dropped, and see if you can lift one leg up, and then lower, and then the other leg up, and then lower. This is the first part of it. Now again, I'm trying not to arch my back or pop my abdomen out, and I'm trying to do this and breathe. I'm not holding my breath. I'm just using whatever I can to go side to side. Once we have this piece, if this feels good for you, then you can upgrade by lifting and then switching, which is a little harder, and you're trying to do all of it without being able to slide that strap out from under your back. And I always joke to my clients that this gives you a one way ticket to quiver town.

If your abdominal wall is quivering a little bit, if you're feeling a little extra engagement, that's that's right. That is what we're doing here. Good. Let's go for 4, 3, 2, 1. Good. Rest. Alright. Let's roll to our sides and come up for a moment.

Now, you may have thought that this session was gonna be a lot of crunches and flanks, and certainly those things can come later. But when we're talking about core engagement and core strengthening, it is so much about awareness first, engagement second, and then integration third. So one of the things that, we can do is take our work that we did on our back and flip it over, so now we're on a hands and knees position. So, if we come to a place where our hands are under our shoulders, knees are under the hips, and we're in a long spine like we experienced seated earlier, and we take a moment to just let everything go. Think about your abdomen and just hanging. Just feel the weight of your organs. From here, push your hands into the mat, push your knees and shins into the mat, and then take a deep breath in. And this time, instead of sinking your belly, you're gonna imagine that you're lifting it up, lifting your abdomen up to your back to create support.

As you breathe in, you might relax it. As you breathe out, lifting it up for support. Let's try 2 more like this. Breathing in and breathing out. And last 1, breathing in. Imagine that belt getting a little tighter as you breathe out. Now, from here, we're gonna try to keep your belly lifted and slowly slide your right fingers forward to what I call spider fingers here. Now, keep your focus on your trunk and see if you can lift that arm gently without losing the connection to your core muscles.

We're just gonna do that 4 times lifting up. It's so common for everything to want to go as soon as you reach your arm out, just to let go. And last 1, and bring it all the way down. Find your connection once again, maybe take a breath in to relax. Breathe out to lift. And then slowly, I'm trying to do this with the least amount of motion as possible, reach for the other hand. And then we're gonna lift those spider fingers off and lower down. And lift them and lower.

Holding onto your connection, continuing to breathe. Last time, and then bring it all the way in, really nice. All right, so that can be a really great prep and it can also be a great way to prepare yourself to go into a plank, and we'll go into that strategy in another video to come. But the last thing that we wanna do in the event that you found anything frustrating or not really accessible today, then I wanna give you one more option, and that is to take your pillow or your bolster and just place it underneath the waist and rib cage, and you can just kind of lay down however you like. Think about your hips being stacked and just supporting your head. Now, sometimes, that's a little better for me here. Sometimes, when we breathe, we forget about the sides of our body, and there's a lot happening there. So, as you breathe in, imagine that you could breathe down into the pillow itself.

That might bring up sensations in your underarm, in your shoulder, in your chest, in your back. Just try a couple of breaths like that. Notice the expansion going down and lifting back up. Now, let's take our top leg and reach it out nice and long. We're gonna breathe down into the pillow as you inhale. As you exhale, imagine lifting your weight off of the pillow. So I'm just keeping my foot pressing down. My arm has weight and I'm imagining that the side of my body could just lift and hover really gently off the pillow just as if you could let some air back into it.

As you breathe in, we put pressure down. As you breathe out, you lift some pressure off. As you breathe in, relaxing as you breathe out. Engaging a little more. Let's try a couple more of those. Excellent. Alright. Let's come up and then we'll finish the other side.

So last one, same one, because we wanna get both sides evenly. So come on down to your pillow. Bring yourself into a comfortable position. Try a couple of breaths just into your rib cage. Need to change it. I like to make sure that I've got part of my waist connected as well. There we go. The more of your torso that you can be aware of, the more possibility there is to send some movement to help your breathing.

Good. Alright. Let's go ahead and extend the top leg. We'll breathe down into the pillow. As you exhale, imagine you're taking the weight of the side of your trunk up and off the pillow. Breathing down into it and waiting at the top. Let's go 2 more rounds. There we go.

Alright. Let's come all the way up to a seated position. Let's review what we did today. We started doing a little movement through our trunk to get everything nice and open and warm and to bring our awareness. Then we played with that 360 degree breath up at the top, the middle, and the lower part of your abdomen. Then we took that and we played with the connection from the front to the back, and then we distracted that as we moved our feet. Then we played on our knees with the connection of the front to the back in a different orientation of our body. And then finally, we engaged through the sides.

So, I wanna remind you that each time you come into a practice that builds awareness about the movement that's happening in your body, you start to develop more internal vocabulary that you can use to help you as you engage into more breath work or more activity in general. It is enough to show up for yourself and just explore. So let that be enough for you today, and I will encourage you to come back to some of these exercises and see what you can learn about the way you're breathing and what you can do in terms of supporting yourself from the inside of your core out. Remember you are strong, resilient and the small moments matter. I'll see you soon.