Complement Your Breathing Exercise by "De-Training" Your Traps

"Detraining” a muscle may not sound like something you’d ever want to do (We’re pretty sure we made the word up actually), but the fact of the matter is that when certain muscles get too big, too strong, or too active, they can actually do our bodies harm. Nowhere is this more true than in the upper trapezius. The upper trapezius is the large muscle above your collar bones that you use to shrug your shoulders. It is one of the major muscles of accessory breathing. As discussed in the beginning of this tutorial, when accessory breathing muscles are used to breathe all of the time, they get overworked. The upper trapezius responds to being overworked by becoming shorter, tighter, thicker, and developing knots. All of these effects not only distort posture, they also actually make it harder to breathe properly.

Short overdeveloped muscles undergo a process called “facilitation”. What this means is that as these muscles are worked more and more frequently, they tend to contract more and more easily with less and less stimulation from the nervous system. Most people’s upper traps are highly facilitated, meaning they fire on a hair trigger. As a result, many people find it hard to stop breathing with their traps by raising their chests up, even when they are concentrating on trying to breathe with the diaphragm. 

Fortunately there is a way to “detrain” muscles. Simply stated, you detrain a muscle by working its antagonist. Most of the muscles in the body have antagonists. Muscles are antagonists to each other when they perform opposite actions at the same joint. For instance, the biceps and triceps are antagonists. The biceps flex the arm while the triceps extend the arm. When you exercise a given muscle, that muscle actually shuts off its antagonist. This is an important effect. If the biceps didn’t shut off the triceps during a biceps curl, you wouldn’t be able to lift as much weight because the triceps would actually resist the biceps' action. Over time, training the antagonist of any given muscle can actually reverse facilitation.

 All of this might sound a bit complicated in theory, but it's charmingly simple in practice.The traps shrug the shoulders up. Therefore the antagonists of the traps must push the shoulders down. The primary muscle that does this is called the serratus anterior. The name isn’t important. The real question is how do you train it!

You train the serratus anterior (turning off the traps and defacilitating them) by doing what is, essentially, an "anti-shrug" (forgive another linguistic sin). In a shrug you raise your shoulders up towards your ears. An anti-shrug (or, more formally, a  "straight arm dip")  involves pushing your shoulders down, moving your shoulders away from your ears. To perform an anti-shrug (straight arm dip), find a chair or any other stable surface where you can rest your hands with your feet on the ground and your body suspended in the air ( Position 1 shown below).

Position 1	Position 2 (note - picture incorrect - arms should not bend)

Staring from Position 1, with your arms straight, your chest up, your spine straight, and your head as high up towards the ceiling as you can get it, begin this exercise by letting your torso fall straight down towards the ground. Keep your arms locked straight. Your head should fall down between your shoulder girdle to about the level of your ears, without your arms bending at all at the elbow. When you reach the bottom of this motion (Position 2 - note that, for now, this picture is worng - the arms should not bend), switch directions, and push your head and torso back up towards the ceiling (Position 1). Again, be sure your arms stay locked straight, your spine stays straight, and your chest stays up the whole time. Breathe in, filling your belly with air as your torso is moving down toards the ground. Breathe out, pushing air out of your lungs by pulling in your stomach as you're pushing your torso and head up towards the ceiling. Perform as many reps of this exercise as you can without exhausting yourself, up to 30 or 40 reps at a time. Do 3-4 sets a few times per week.

Summing Things Up

Improving your breathing technique is one of the easiest, most effective things you can do to improve your health. Combining the breathing exercise illustrated here  with the “anti-shrug” exercise outlined above, should help you begin breathing better as a matter of habit within weeks. Once you do start breathing better all of the time, you'll most likely find the tension in your neck and shoulders easing up. You may also find yourself feeling less stressed and more alert and energized as you go about your day. In the end just about every cell and organ in your body depends on oxygen. Proper breathing technique will more thoroughly oxygenate your body, and in doing so, help just about every organ and cell in your body to do its job better, leading to more energy and better overall health.