The Layers of the Back - Inhalation
AKA Dumb Drawings to help you breathe easy...
Happy Sunday!
I’m continuing on my journey of making dumb drawings to show what exactly you are. This week we’ll begin to look at the layers of the back as we work our way down to the feet (slowly). But before I share the awesomeness of today’s drawing, I’m going to share my thoughts on WHY I would bother looking at these things in the first place!
Why Learn Anatomy?
Learning anatomy is a great way to hone your ability to verbalize and describe what you are sensing; either to yourself or others. Are you looking to enhance how you play a musical instrument? Are you looking to get SWOL at the gym? Are you attempting to recover from injury? Or are you just looking to make awesome drawings?
No matter what your reason is, learning a bit of anatomy can greatly help you understand what you are feeling in a given moment.
The Layers of the Back
As I’ve been looking to better understand myself, I’ve taken the time to go through my anatomy app and explore. Typically, Alexander Technique anatomy is studied from the point of view of the directions. These directions have absolutely informed how I’ve been sharing drawings with you.
When we look at the layers of the back (torso), I present it to my students in 3 layers.
The muscles involved in breathing
The muscles involved in supporting the spine
The outermost muscles of the chest/shoulders/stomach.
I divide my view into these 3 generic groups because I want to consider what it means to:
Not hold my breath while moving an arm or leg or think about the spine
Lengthen the spine
Allow the torso to come to its full volume.
Not only will these drawings help you better understand what these directions mean, they will also help you identify harmful habits within yourself. I’ll share a few of those habits with you in a minute, but for now let’s look a the muscles involved with the action of inhalation.
In the drawing above, you will see muscles in purple. Starting near the top of the neck, you will see a group of cables running between the vertebrae of the neck and the ribcage. These muscles assist in drawing the ribcage up during the breathing process1.
In between each rib, you have intercostal muscles that also assist in elevating the ribs during forced breathing. You can feel them active if you are inhaling and drawing the ribs wide and up. The pulling action of the intercostals will reduce the space between each rib slightly and you will feel the joints where the ribs meet the spine moving.
At the base of the ribcage, you can slightly see the diaphragm. It is actually a huge muscle but the view I’ve shared this week doesn’t quite do it justice. The diaphragm is typically considered the main mover in the act of breathing… but that doesn’t mean you need to walk around forcing it to move!
My Personal Confusions
As a kid, I developed allergies that made breathing difficult. When I had an allergy attack, I would become very short of breath as the muscles around the ribs would automatically begin to freeze up. This lasted from about 10-13 and fortunately I just kind of grew out of them.
To compensate for this condition, I developed a habit. I would force inhalation with a sucking in of air and grip up around my nose and jaw. Most of this habit went away quite naturally when I turned 14, but some core of this habit stuck. I had learned to associate stress with a gasping for air and a grip in the head and neck.
As time went on and I picked up a shoulder/back injury, this confusion reared its’ ugly head again. Working out of a broken office chair during my late 20s, I developed a frozen shoulder and a lock around the thoracic spine. As a consequence of this lock, I instinctually found myself forcing movement into my torso by breathing heavily.
As you can see from the dumb drawing above, the muscle of breathing DO NOT move the spine or shoulders directly. When I write about left/right confusions, I am referring to THIS kind of confusion. FM Alexander calls them delusions!
Try not to take the word delusions personally! We all have them!
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They also assist in moving the neck about.