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Our Treatment Foundations at Move Better

The Breathing Paradigm

Breathing is the most direct way to decrease pain and improve function. It allows multiple systems of the body to return to balance and proper capacity.

Breathing is the first independent action we all take in life. Coming from the womb, the body is asked to exchange fluid for gas, permanently rendering us dependent on something we can only see on a cold winter day. It is the first system the body must normalize for us to be an independent human being. With that, it is a logical starting place for evaluation and medical treatment. Beyond that, breathing holds a special place in history, our consciousness, and in our anatomy. Breathing also has large amounts of empirical and scientific evidence of its usefulness. It is a common thread across many religious and spiritual teachings, despite geographic or cultural isolation at times.

Learn More About The Breathing Paradigm

While the breath can be discussed in many ways, we will focus on its mechanical action as it relates to pain and movement. This is not to minimize the importance of other aspects, but to bring our concentration on how it is used at our clinic. A common introduction here would be to outline the anatomy of breathing to list specific muscles and parts of the body that contribute to breathing. We choose to avoid creating such systems because it makes an artificial box that is breathing, making anything that is not in that box not part of breathing. Every clinician in our clinic has seen previous concepts of health and medicine be overturned or challenged, and so have you. Case in point, are eggs good or bad? This binary approach to labeling has created many problems in medicine (and history in general) and ultimately makes it far too easy to exclude people from thinking about the issue in front of them. Instead of asking if eggs are good or bad for everyone, maybe you should make your own decision of how they interact with your body. To bring this back around, we would say there are many parts of your body that interact with breathing.

During your evaluation, your clinician will discuss why breathing is important as it relates to your specific treatment. Nearly every biomechanical condition can be improved with breathwork, even if only to modulate the body’s interaction with the pain process. Most importantly, if our evaluation shows that your breathing patterns have sufficient capabilities, we will move past this point quickly. We can say with confidence that this is exceedingly rare in our current sample set.

The Bracing Paradigm

We define bracing as the simple act of creating midline stability while being able to breathe. The challenge for bracing in our clinic is to simply create a 360-degree wall of firmness around the midsection. This is a skill that all humans must learn to begin to create motion.

Bracing is often mislabeled as “core-training,” a term not generally accepted in our clinic. The challenge for bracing in our clinic is to simply create a 360-degree wall of firmness around the midsection. This, as with the first foundation of breathing, is a skill that all humans must learn to begin to create motion. As a newborn, a motion must be attached to at least one stable thing. This stable thing should logically be at the center of mass, which is roughly two inches below your navel. This is a task that all humans, in the absence of a congenital or developmental issue, have already achieved. Every time you laugh, cough, sneeze, or have a challenging bowel movement; you brace. This really means that there are two challenges to address here. 1 – You don’t know how to consciously use this skill to your advantage 2 – You must be able to do this while breathing.

Learn More About The Bracing Paradigm

Most people naturally brace when they pick up something heavy. Have you ever held your breath when you have to pick up an awkward object? That’s bracing. Most people can just breathe or just brace, but few people can do both well in our evaluations. The body is constantly negotiating the somewhat competitive tasks of breathing or bracing. The tug and war of respiration and stability. To achieve the maximum at either end, the diametric opposite must be sacrificed. This is why competitive power athletes take a huge breath in and hold it during a maximum lift. They are choosing to maximize their stability at the expense of respiration. This is fine for a single lift, but most of life is not a single lift. Most of life is a combination of needing both respiration and stability. In fact, nearly ALL sports require both.

Through organic logic, the body will always prioritize breathing, as the breath is life itself. So if a person does not know how to breathe AND stabilize the midsection, the body will sacrifice stability for respiration. This is a significant problem for most people, especially athletes and those that need to use their body for their profession. The body is constantly adapting to the use of ineffective systems of stability because it has forgotten the skill of bracing. Once this skill can be taken online again, the body can effortlessly up or down-regulate the amount of bracing based on the tasks at hand. Until a safe and stable midline can be established, all rehabilitative processes are rendered minimally effective. If the center is faulting, all other systems will fail as well.

The Hinging Paradigm

If we were left to teach only one skill to any of our patients, it would be hinging. Nearly all low back pain types can be simply and logically related to an inability to hinge appropriately.

Our foundational skills follow a simple unifying theme – normalize the center of the body. The payout for the ability to hinge is incredible and helps every biomechanical ailment that comes through our doors. It is one of the final skills a child learns before they truly become a mobile human and usually takes around 12 months to develop as multiple systems are involved. The ultimate goal of hinging is allowing the body to spread work across the entire body instead of through specific joints.  The skill of hinging can be defined as one simple test. Pick up something from the ground without bending your back or neck at all while sharing the work appropriately across the entire body.

As with our other foundational skills, it is exceptionally rare for patients to be able to do so upon initial evaluation. We believe this is the single and simple cause of nearly all low back-related ailments. Nearly all low back pain types can be simply and logically related to an inability to hinge appropriately.
Learn More About The Hinging Paradigm

Hinging is the skill of using areas of large muscle mass instead of areas of small (or minimal) muscle mass. The two common faults we see in our evaluation are that either the knees or back take all load during our testing. It is easy to see in our biology that these areas are not designed to be large movers, but transfer points. Neither the knees nor the low back have a large amount of muscle mass. This is especially true when compared to the hips. For us, hips include the muscles between below your hips and above your knee. In comparison, the hip muscle mass and muscle mass potential massively outshadow that of the low back and the knee. Using this muscular potential is what allows humans to be at all athletic or mobile. Because of its central importance, hinging affects much more than the low back. The shoulders and neck have an intimate relationship with the hips. Because arms, elbows, wrists, and hands all attach and interact with the shoulder, they are also directly related to the function of the hips. Because you interact from your hips to the ground, knees and ankles must also function and follow the hips. It all starts in the middle. Our most common feedback when we start discussing hinging is “I wish I knew this earlier.” We agree and we are working hard to make it that way.

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If you are looking to improve your biomechanics and function through breathing, bracing, and hinging paradigms, contact us today to learn how our treatments can help you.

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Our Treatment Foundations at Move Better | (503) 432-1061