Chest-Opening – breathing exercise and chest stretch

06/04/2020
Hazel Dillon
belly breathe, Breathe, chest open, Chiropractic, Exercise, Exercises, Hazel Dillon, health, health tips, healthy, pecstretch, pectoralis, pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, pectorals, Stretch, Stretches, tips, Uncategorized, wellbeing, wellness, Winter colds, winter wellness, Yoga
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At this time everyone is worried about breathing and getting a cough so here are a couple of tips to help keep your chest open so that your lungs can work as well as possible.

Breathing Exercise:

Place one hand on the top of your chest and the other high on your abdomen. As you take a deep breath in you want the hand on your abdomen to move and not the hand on your chest. This breathing exercise helps you to use your diaphragm more during breathing and takes air deeper into the bottom of your lungs. Increasing the use of your diaphragm decreases the use of the muscles around the upper chest and so reduces tension in the shoulders.

Pectoralis Stretch:

This stretch helps to open up the chest and so improves your ability to breath deeply. The pectoral muscles – pecs – are the large muscles of the chest which we generally associate with doing press-ups.

You can stretch this muscle with the help of a door frame – you want to place your elbow against the door frame so it is level with your shoulder, then take a step forward with the leg which is closest to the wall and as your body moves forward you should feel the stretch in the chest. If you feel the stretch more in your arm you may be twisting your body to compensate so make sure as you step forward you keep your body straight. If you can still feel more of a stretch in the arm rather than the chest you can move closer to the door-frame

Picture 2 shows the stretch of the smaller pec muscle – the pectoralis minor, to stretch it you need to lift the elbow slightly higher than your shoulder and then repeat the stretch as before.

Note: If you feel a stretch in the chest as soon as you place your arm against the door frame then you do not need to take the step forward, just feel the stretch at the start point, as the muscle loosens you will be able to stretch further.

Happy belly breathing and chest-opening! Need some more help or advice? You can contact Hazel here