PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR KNEES

Under the Hood is a weekly look at what's really driving your health, fixed 1% at a time.

Today: why breathing is a movement pattern, how it connects to the tight hips we talked about last week, and a two minute drill you can do tonight.

Ever notice that when you're really gassed, you want to put your hands on your knees?

Coaches have been telling us not to for decades. Hands on your head. Stand up. Don't let the other guy see you're tired.

Turns out your body was right.

Researchers at Western Washington ran athletes through four hard intervals at 90 to 95% of max heart rate. After each one, hands on head or hands on knees.

Hands on knees dropped their heart rate 53 beats in the first minute. Hands on head dropped 31.

Same athlete. Same effort. Twenty-two beats from where they put their hands.

Here's the part I like most. Nobody told them to bend over further as they got more tired. They just did, a little more after every interval.

There's a lot happening in that position. Your ribs, your diaphragm, and your pelvis all end up somewhere that lets you move air better. It's no wonder your heart rate drops faster.

Watch the best in the world when the whistle blows. Jordan did it his whole career. Watch any game this weekend and you'll see it on every sideline.

Your body already knew. We're the ones who taught it to stand up and look tough.

THE DEEP DIVE

First, breathing is a movement pattern.

I gave you six patterns a few weeks ago. Squat, hinge, lunge, push, row, carry.

There's a seventh. Nobody trains it and nobody talks about it, because it isn't sexy.

Breathing.

Here's why it belongs on the list. When you inhale, the whole system moves. Ribs swing out and up like Lamborghini doors. Diaphragm drops. Guts get pushed down. Pelvic floor drops with them so the pressure has somewhere to go.

When you exhale, all of it reverses.

That's a movement. Skeleton, muscles, nervous system, same as a squat. The difference is you do it 20,000 times a day whether you think about it or not.

And that's the whole point. You're never going to add an hour of mobility work to your week. But you're already taking those breaths. The only question is whether you're doing them well.

Most men aren't. They don't inhale deep enough and they don't exhale anywhere near long enough, which leaves a good portion of the diaphragm sitting there doing nothing.

Then, the order things happen in.

Here's the sequence I use with every client.

Nervous system first. Skeleton second. Muscle third.

Your nervous system is the computer of the house. It sends the signal to every part of your body. If it's stuck in a stressed, sympathetic state, it doesn't matter how good the program is. Your body won't let go.

Then your skeleton. Position determines what your muscles can actually do. Put a joint in a bad spot and the muscle around it can't do its job no matter how strong it is.

Then muscle. Last, not first.

Most guys train in the reverse order. They go straight at the muscle and wonder why the tightness keeps coming back.

Then, why this is the answer to last week.

Last week I told you flexibility is useless without mobility, and that the gap between your passive range and your active range is your brain not trusting you in that position yet.

Breathing is how you talk to your brain.

Conor Harris, whose work I've learned a lot from, puts it this way. You can chase a symptom with a few sets of corrective exercise. Or you can fix your breathing pattern and get 20,000 reps a day.

The diaphragm is a muscle. A dome under your ribs that attaches front and back. Train it and it gets stronger, same as anything else.

Position matters as much as effort. Zac Cupples lays this out well. On your back, air goes into your back. On your stomach, it goes into your front. Arms overhead moves things one way. Arms forward moves them another.

That’s why we don’t just tell guys to breathe. We put them in a position first, then have them breathe there. The position decides where the air goes.

One correction while we’re at it. Belly breathing is a half-truth. Dumping everything into your belly limits the ribcage. What you want is ribs, abdominal wall, and pelvis working together.

Then, how to actually do it.

Here's me walking through it: 90/90 breathing drill

Lie on your back, knees bent, feet flat. Put your hands on the bottom of your ribs so you can feel what's moving.

In through your nose, four to six seconds. Hold about a second at the top. Out through your mouth, six to eight seconds. Longer if you can.

Five to ten breaths. That's it.

At the bottom of the exhale you should feel your abs and your side abs turn on. If you're not used to it, that part's hard.

If you can’t get the exhale long enough, try one of these. Blow out like birthday candles. Or like it’s cold and you’re trying to see your breath. Or just a long open-mouth sigh. Those usually get the ribs to come down.

Two minutes and most guys feel different. That’s your nervous system coming out of fight or flight. Heart rate drops. Tone drops.

If you want to go deeper, James Nestor's book Breath is worth your time.

QUICK HITS

FUEL — Nose breathing at rest. Mouth closed, tongue on the roof of your mouth. You get better oxygen uptake through your nose than through your mouth, and most men default to mouth breathing without knowing it.

TRAINING — our session should have an arc. Start calm, drive up to a peak, come back down. We start guys on the table breathing before they train and bring them back down at the end. That's not filler. That's how you recover faster and get more out of the next one.

FAMILY — Next time your kid is melting down, breathe with them instead of talking at them. Long exhale. It works on their nervous system the same way it works on yours.

MIND — Next time you're gassed, hands on your knees. Not your head. Let the science win over looking tough.

ON THE WALL

I had a client who couldn't get a deep breath in. I'd watch his ribs and they barely moved.

He was compressed through his mid back and his hips. Tight in both places, and he'd been chasing that tightness for a while.

So we spent a few sessions just on positional breathing drills. Getting him into positions where he could actually expand and feel the air go where it hadn't been going.

His mid back and hips started loosening up without much mobility work at all.

Now, that wasn't the only thing we did. But it was the thing that changed the most.

Here's what I told him. His body had been sitting in a sympathetic state and it didn't know how to turn the tone down. That tightness he kept feeling wasn't short tissue. It was a nervous system that wouldn't let go.

Once the breathing came around, he started holding new ranges longer. We paired it with work that taught his system it was safe to stay there, and we built awareness into how he was breathing during the day.

He couldn't believe breathing could change that much.

If you know a guy who's always tight and always stressed, forward this to him.

Your body is worth stewarding.

1% BETTER

— Coach Joshua

Educational content, not medical advice. Partner with your physician, ideally one who believes in proactive care.

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