When we move forward you do a lot more than just put one foot in front of the other. We think that walking is primarily just a lower extremity dominant driven activity. I get it. Legs are sexy. They are the most easily noticeable appendage when we move. We kick, run, and swing them in the air. It’s a shame though because without our arms and shoulders, our legs wouldn’t make sense to our brain. We miss the boat in how people move forward by just fixating on the lower half and whether they can pronate or supinate a foot. There are deeper implications to how we move because of our arms and shoulders. The truth of the matter is our arms are deeply connected into the locomotor circuits in our Central Nervous System. While our legs & feet help us accept our body weight to a side, there has to be something that helps push our COM there and organize us to do so. That is where our arms come in. By coordinating and communicating with our trunk and our head, our arms move us forward when walking. They compress and decompress the sides of our body and give us an implicit sense of timing when we walk. Let’s dive in to these unsung hero’s.
The robots at Boston Dynamics are fascinating (and Scary) proof of how arms are the game changer for moving. It wasn’t until that they added arms to the robot that they were able to do all this cool stuff like run, jump side to side and spin. Here is a great article talking about this. This was the before and after once they added arms.
In all seriousness, have we learned nothing about Skynet from the Terminator movies?
As soon as you add arms, the brain has to coordinate the arms with the rest of the upper body. The arms are serving as our counterbalance for our legs and help shift the COM from side to side. When we do this effectively we lateralize our upper COM to a side needed when moving forward. Arms serve as mini metronomes for the brain to organize where it’s limbs are in space. There are literally studies displaying this concept called HAT (Head, Arms, Trunk). The combined coordinative actions of our arms, head, and trunk have more impact on how we move forward versus our legs. The corollary of all these limbs working together helps our brain process where our body is lateralized to and how we got there from ground sense under the leg. While our legs help lateralize our lower half, the upper half consisting of our arms, trunk, and head has to position the upper half on top the stance leg to truly lateralize fully. In order to put one foot in front of another it requires 1 arm go to forward as the other arm goes back. It is a alternating and reciprocal action involving your left and right sides to be doing something different on each side. While arm swing is being discussed, I do not want pple to focus on swinging them so excessively that it looks like they are power walking and are violently punching high in the air. The key with our arms is that it is a passive action and is NOT an active action. It is through this passive action that allows all these muscles that attach all around the scapula and the to ribcage (serratus, low trap, tricep, obliques) to stabilize us needed for lateralization. There is no stretch shortening cycle associated when we swing our arms. The point of our arms is so it can impact and direct the side of that ribcage that they attach to that just so happens to be on top of a stance leg. The arm that is swinging will influence the ribcage on that side to counter it and move in the opposite direction. As we swing one arm forward the ribcage on that side is going to go back and likewise when one arm goes back the ribcage on that side will move a bit forward. The combined action of this will lateralize our upper COM to a side.
While arm swing does help shift our COM to a side, its not doing it because of propulsion from the arms but because of our sense of compression and decompression of the sides of our body. This alternation of compression and decompression from side to side is what allows us to rotate our trunk and lateralize us to a side while doing so. In short it positions us. As said before our body has to be doing 2 things differently on both sides of our body and it has to do this in an alternating reciprocal fashion. In order for you to move forward one side has to go back so the other side can move forward. If both sides were to move in same direction that overcommits our COB to fall forward which is what usually results being off balance or to falls. For instance when walking my Left arm goes forward and my Right arm goes past my pocket. The action of each arm directs the ribcage so the left side ribs become compressed as the right side become decompressed. If this is done correctly the head will centered over the ground leg and my trunk will be rotated to the right. We have now achieved a fully lateralized state with a head being stacked over a set of ribs that are compressed down with a leg/heel receiving feedback that the ground is being compressed under it. We need total compression sense for stance to work and how we position our head, trunk, and arms under our legs will allow us to achieve the missing half needed for the gait cycle. With the ground under my L. heel my body can be empowered to swing my R. leg. Arms help give us the sense of the ground because they close 1 side of our body via compression and open the other side with decompression. It is truly our arms that help place our feet on the next step
Thank God for legs because they sense the ground underneath us and allows us to accept our full weight each side but our arms are what allows our weight to be pushed from side to side. They are ultimate contributor to compression and decompression of our sides of our body. They work with our trunk and our head to do this. Arms empower us as humans to do all these cool things.
Through the years of exploring and understanding the body to the best of my abilities, I still feel there are waters that have not been dived into deep enough yet. There are mundane aspects of life that we truly don’t appreciate what it does to us and appreciate its impact. I’ve grown through my understanding in helping the majority of my clients out of pain but as any other coach knows the hardest part is usually behavior change and getting them to change their lifestyle. Even though they commented that they enjoyed their program because they had less pain significantly than before, and they felt things they never felt before while also still feeling they were getting their ass kicked (In a good way), I still felt I was failing people. I wanted to do all I could do to understand what could be going on with them and give them the resources so they could steer their own ship. I’m sure other coaches and people have felt the same as I have. Sure the nutrition could always be dialed in better but it wasn’t my passion to intervene since we have a dietician on staff and as long as people did the basics was all I cared about. Being the curious kid I am, I began to ask more questions. I asked about what their home life was like, what’s going on at work, how their family was, and anything that could give me a sense or essence of where they were emotionally. From our talks the topic sleep became a recurrent theme. It came again and again. Week after week. From an intellectual level I knew sleep was important (as most of us think we do) but it didn’t matter because more and more people seemed to dismiss it. There was a disconnect of knowing something and actually reaping its rewards from experiencing it. When I asked them to tell me more about what was going on with their issues around sleep I would hear things such as “I wake up 3 to 4 times a night, my dog gets in the bed which ruins my flow, my kids constantly keep me up, I just am anxious for this stress test or this big meeting at work so I can’t sleep”. I thought I’ve heard every possible scenario and I began to question the casual relationship we have toward sleep in our society. “It is what it is” one client said while raising her shoulders and tilting her head to the right as if she was mildly pleased with her own confusion. I didn’t understand this!
Why Y U No Get ZZzz’s
We preach to kids and people to get 8 hours of sleep yet we barely do it in our own life. It seems sleep mixes with all the other issues people have that makes things harder to do. I look at my father who takes all these different medications and has a sleep CPAP machine that looks like an astronaut mask. It made me wonder “Am I actually helping people enough with training or am I adding to the burden of stress in their life?” “Are the meds, and the things they are doing now even working and will they need it forever?” I had a lot of questions like about how the way things were done in order to help people get better quality of life, the healthcare system we have that underpins it, and where are they going if they continue on this path for the next 20 years or so. Sleep became something that I couldn’t brush by anymore since it became apparent that this was becoming a problem and it made me think that perhaps this cornerstone part of everyday life had more impact on all these things I was currently questioning in our status quo.
In 2018 I read Mathew Walker’s book Why We Sleep which was fantastic because it got me thinking. And It got me thinking and realizing how crucial sleep is!
Consistently lacking quality sleep is essentially committing hara-kiri to all the necessary qualities and prerequisites we need in order to go around in our waking life and consciousness. It impacts almost every bodily system and even ties in to our cognitive and emotional sides of who we are. I still remember this quote from the book “Sleep is our metaphorical Save Button”. It’s the save button in our life that allows us to maintain and keep all the adaptions and enlightenments from the day. Physically we all can understand that sleep helps us can rebuild the necessary hormones, muscles and tissue we need to recover as well as helping us to regulate and improve our immune system, but we forget the other HUGE aspects and which in my opinion are way more important! Cognitively, emotionally, and fostering our ability to increase our creativity, sleep magnifies all these other non-physical qualities that allow us to be successful in life and helps keep our edge and wits about us. That one silly horizontal aspect that we all do (or should be doing better) literally helps mold us to perform and become our best. Walker’s book went in to the nitty gritty which I was gratefull for but I wished I knew how to practically approach it.
I’ve had my many fair shares of struggling and being kept awake because my Nervous System wouldn’t quiet down the anxiety I had about a test, my life, or fear about what was to come in the the coming day or days. Basically I would wake up feeling like I got mauled by a cougar
The Karen’s never learn
I decided to take the plunge to improve my sleep during the pandemic since I had nothing really better to do and there began my quest to better understand sleep personally. I ate up everything I could read, listen to, and experimented with all types of sleep hygiene. Some things helped and some things “Meh” not so much. But as I got better and some things clicked for me and I actually wasn’t a grumpy irritable bag of bones where I needed 3 coffees a day to get by and wearing the annoying look that said “Don’t talk to me until I’m caffeinated”. I actually woke up almost pleasantly ready to go. The casual stroll to the bathroom to do my duties (pun intended) was less harder and wonky because the embrace of my bedsheets weren’t so heavy or lovely that much anymore. I also felt a bit sharper too. This cornerstone activity of almost nonconsciousness, which we all knew is super important, could actually be the X-factor that helps halves or at least to a significant degree decreases the chances of getting so many diseases, co-morbidities, and be the nuts and bolts to our client’s results, With sleep comes recovery and with recovery comes adaption. Recovery breeds adaptation and adaptation breeds results! In short, the recovery process from sleeping consistently better, regularly, and with quality depth is what allows them to succeed toward their goals. I wanted to find those resources and big rocks that I could understand to a greater degree what’s going on behind sleep and how to leverage it better. Then I came upon Nick Lambe’s Online Sleep Coach and Recovery Course during May in Lockdown.
“This might be the go to resource I was looking for” as I thought to myself and I signed up on a curious whim. It took me a couple of months after the summer to dig in and I took my time with it. In the end I LOVED IT! I could see the value of this course and I can predict that this will be a valuable resource for every coach in the future. Nutrition and exercise are key aspects to impact people’s lives in order to ensure they are able to defend off diseases, stress, and retain their sanity but if you want to up your game even further then you need to prioritize sleep. All of these things combined will give us a better idea of what “Deep Health” looks like and help make lifestyle changes stick. Sleep is our “Save Button” and I believe the education around sleep from the course was WORTH IT! Nick does a PHENOMENAL job breaking down in understandable chunks behind the “WHY” sleep its crucial, the principles, how to screen/assess for red flags, and the coaching process behind it. Principles are our guiding values and what we hold to be true that guide our decision making and Nick goes over the big rocks of principles to fill the jar to ensure your own personal path and most importantly your clients/patients sleep like a drunk babies.
There might be some people asking “Who would want to work with a sleep coach? That’s not a real thing and how would that even work….Are you going to coach me as I sleep?” Well you can say the same thing about training and nutrition right? “Why would you hire a trainer/coach or a nutritionist/dietician? Just eat real food and go to the gym 2-3 times a week, move more, and get general 7-9 hours of sleep…. There done. ” It sounds simple but sometimes it helps to have an experienced person to save you the work from coming up with a plan and can keep you accountable. Plus, there are not many people who are zero’d in as much as they think they are every aspect of their life. If you are then Kudos!
blue blocking glasses and mushroom kombucha…whoa I guess that makes you the Queen of England
But here’s the thing about sleep, just like how pain is complicated, issues around sleep are complicated. There could be many different things interfering with someone’s sleep. This is where Nick takes an interdisciplinary approach which is GOLDEN in my opinion being that you will learn that there are systems underneath and other reasons at play that will hold people back from achieving the sleep they truly need. You’ll learn different types of screenings, red flags, and base lines to know when to appropriately “pass the baton” to the specific right person to truly help them. We would do the same thing in our work ( I hope) if for some reason someone’s pain gets worse or pain continues because of some kind of underlying sensory problem like occlusion or a visual system issue was the issue underneath it all. Sooner or later you work with a tricky person who is going to stomp on what you thought you know and that’s OK. This world is complicated and I believe the best clinicians are those who are willing to look outside of what they do and acknowledge there could be other things at play that can affect a person’s health and sleep. Plus its nice to have a network of different people who you trust and who share the same values of THE CLIENT/PERSON COMES FIRST AND WE WANT TO PUT THEM IN A POSITION TO BE SUCCESSFFUL. Some specific scenarios that I’ve seen and I can imagine could look in referring out are working with someone who has been fighting off chronic Insomnia for years so they barely have any juice to drag themselves to the gym, or someone has some kind of sleeping disorder that you don’t want to touch because you have no idea how to deal with it. Someone who has a Tongue tie, that won’t allow them to put the tongue to the roof of their mouth which won’t allow them to breath thru their nose while training and let alone keep it there when they go to bed. Finally, it could be someone who is just hanging by a thread with tragedy after tragedy and would be better served to see a mental health specialist.
We also have a culture that that dismisses sleep .”I’ll sleep when I’m dead” they say glorifying the illusory activity of sacrificing sleep for the sake of being “productive” or seeing sleep as a luxury that makes you soft or weak. If only they knew how close they were to death itself from romanticized avoidance of this restorative part of life. We know drunk driving is horrific but did you know drowsy driving or falling asleep at the wheel is estimably to be responsible for 6,000 crashes each year? The essence of each are almost one and the same. Also most medical schools in the US devote only about 2 HOURS to sleep education (.06% OF TOATL CLASSROOM hours). Its no wonder why it doesn’t get the praise it deserves because even a certain population of the medical community poo poos it. If we change our approach on our relationship with sleep and recovery, it can differentiate us from other typical people in our field and allow us to work together with other professionals in an interdisciplinary way that could benefit the client in a way we never have seen or experienced before.
The course is structured in a way so its easy to go back and find the aspect you need to relearn the most, which buckets to fill, and which other principles are needed to apply at that given time. The science, anatomy, and driving mechanisms of sleep itself will help guide the clinician how to approach which buckets of sleep to address first especially the arousal/stimulus control aspects which can act as a double edge sword. All these things blend in together, along with understanding the levers and drivers, that maintain the quality, regularity, depth, and continuity of sleep. The individual context matters because the environment and the things going on with one person can be completely different for another person. A shift worker and an accountant will likely need different approaches. Besides the physical environment, the most insidious and overlook aspect we should take into consideration is also the mental and behavioral environment around sleep. Through this lens we see how people behave and what they believe around sleep. Context is Key and if the context behind their struggles actually happens to be what they think or believe to be around sleep, then no amount of sleep hygiene reorganization or supplementation is going to create long sustaining change. The behavior coaching is big because if people don’t acknowledge what they actually believe to be true around sleep and the things that’s underneath the surface with their relationship to it then the iceberg will never be avoided. The language and words we use with them will also make an impact on people. They are part of the environment we present to them and we set the tone in a way that can help make a person feel safe to reveal not only to you but also to themselves what may be going on and what they actually believe. If they never actually speak out into existence what they think and believe about sleep then THEY WILL NEVER BE AWARE. Awareness is curative and is the first step as any AA person will tell you. It’ll get the ball rolling so they have momentum to start. If you don’t think your a behavior coach in your work no matter your title then your sorely mistaken! We are a facilitator in how they navigate through sleep and its relationship to their health. If we can instill a positive association with them and sleep then they can be in a better position to recover in the pursuit of their goals.
There are other many fascinating and other cool aspects from the course that one will learn to use with their clients such as breathwork, which there are studies showing it reduces anxiety, blood pressure, and you’ll also get other invaluable bonus content and interviews that Nick had in his past virtual summit that will build upon the course so I don’t want to give it all away.
I’ve learned through a couple of times in my life that we need other clinicians and other people to help our clients get their sense of normalcy back. The current pandemic and this course helped reframed what’s important and that is our health. Our health will never be optimized if we don’t address sleep. Sleep helps our immune system to fight viruses, help foster our creativity, and improve our mental well being. Exercise and focusing on nutrition help and we must continue to do it but to think that its the only thing to take into account can limit the outcome for the people we care about. This myopicness of seeing only through our lens of practice can hurt us and more importantly hurt our clients because we might deprive them of what they might need in that given time and place because of our ego. Life is complicated and sometimes it takes fields from other professions to get that person out of the hole they are in. You can’t fix a highly sympathetic person who’s ON 24 7 with just some deadlifts and chicken.
I believe this course to be the future! and I believe this to be so because we are all frustrated somewhere in how we recover or what we want in our clients, parents, significant others, etc. Sleep is something that many people overlook but it is the lowest hanging fruit and ticks numerous boxes of what kind of adaption we want to instill across a variety of bodily systems. This problem to address the quality of sleep in our society is insidious and is something not many people want to open their eyes to (pun intended). Currently 80% of sleep apnea cases are going undiagnosed and people with severe sleep apnea are 2 times as likely to have depression (oh hello Mental health crisis) and 5 times more likely to die from Cancer and cardiovascular death! The change in how we approach sleep can reduce our chances of getting sick or change our experience in how we live. You see the lack of sleep doesn’t just deprive people of attaining their goals, it deprives them of living life fully on their terms, becoming all they can be, and being able to see that person they wanted to see one more time. It’s ironic how this one key activity we do every day that mirrors our death tends to be the most restorative aspect of our life. God has ironic humor and wisdom in how he built it in our life.
If your curious about sleep, life, and want the best for your clients/patients, then I implore you to dig in and don’t sleep on (Ok I’ll stop with the puns. lol) to Nick Lambe’s Online Sleep and Recovery Course. You won’t regret it and you might take away something different that impacted you to a greater degree than it did for me.
The movement we take for granted comes from a complex set of actions that involve many layers of our brain to coordinate our body to basically do things. Whether your reaching or following through on the split decision you made to get off a long line because you don’t feel like waiting that much for coffee are all driven by the brain through a body within less of milliseconds. How we go about doing all these things are dependent upon the position of certain appendicular skeleton structures that the brain uses to make sense and process where we are. Position of where we are and processing go hand in hand as we will see. The decision to move or do something is going to change the position and relative shape of these appendicular landmarks in our body. These are our Reference centers or points. They tie in with our Vestibular System in order to make sense of where we are. For the brain to understand “Where we are” when on the ground and in the environment around us, the reference points in our bodies are in a specific positions holding us there and referencing the space around them in that position. The brain coordinates the muscles that attach to that reference landmarks to usually be in a shorted concentric state (The muscles are “On”/working to maintain its position). Upon its relative position it is also putting pressure on the environment around it and likewise Newton’s 3rd law in which the environment pushes the same amount back on it. It is this pressure that is put forth on a surface that allows us to “sense” and when moving “sense” our displacement from the pressure. Ironically our “sensing of things” through pressure allows us to have a “say” of what to do. These are our metaphorical “feelers”/tentacles without being an octopus
Feel the feels on Shark Week
So without the “sense” of pressure from the reference point on the earth or around us there is no sense of position and hence no processing of where we are.
The reference points allows us and enables us to participate in things in our life and in the gym by feeling “Loaded” on a leg, feel weight on a side, feel the floor come up, feel air expand in back…………..all in all we are essentially sensing ourselves in the world better.
For instance when we are standing on our right leg and happen to look down at our feet, we will see the right arch up is way more noticeable off the ground. We might even feel our weight to the outside right heel too. It probably feels good being over there too (said probably every human). Our brain is orientating the body to put weight on those reference points on the right side. It is making sense of our position from the sense of feeling our right arch and outside right heel. Our heel is putting pressure into the ground and brain makes sense of “I’m on this here right leg”. The brain needs the body to go and not the other way around. If someone were to continue observing us in this resting state (probably on line waiting for coffee again), they might notice that the right shoulder is drooping lower than the left even though the person would barely notice if you told them. If you were to ask the person “Which side does it feel easier to reach in their pockets?”, they would probably comment that its easier to reach in their right pocket (right ab wall more shorted so their shoulder is already closer to reach). Our brain is organizing the body literally from head to toe or toe to head in a pattern from these reference points so the brain can “Make Sense” of where we are orientated. The reference point in this case is a right arch up and feeling the majority of weight on the right outside heel and a right ab-wall which is pulling the right upper half down towards the floor and made it easier for someone to reach in that pocket easier. The right heel in this case is putting more pressure on the ground underneath it to cement its position and everything is following along. This occurs usually on the right side more. People are usually unaware of sensing things in general and won’t feel things unless you point it out. But the reference points, without without us being aware, allow us to process and “make sense of our own sense”.
This sounds confusing at first even almost nonsense (Ah see what I did there?) What does it mean to “Make sense of our own sense”? First our sense of “where we are” in the world is important because if we didn’t feel gravity, the ground, or our bodies interacting with it, we’d probably be rag-dolled around in like some vortex or something (Space or how it works is NOT my strong suit as you can tell). Our sense of feeling the reference point allows us to have autonomy of our movements and shows why the sensory component of our system is important. Because if we didn’t “sense and feel things” in our body or in the world around us then there would be no movement to or from anything and we wouldn’t be able to navigate the world. This is as basic as the reflex of taking your hand away from something hot to the sense of feeling the ground underneath us come up so we can push it when we walk (Specifically to get New Orleans Cold Brew). The brain needs the body in order feel and move. There is a story about how a sea squirt moves around on the rock in order to find a place to stay. Once it finds a place to stay and is content with it, it then eats its own brain because it doesn’t need it anymore. The brain uses its body in order to move and feel and we are no different from a sea squirt.
For reference point to exists it must have a couple of elements. First it must be felt on a location on our body that we can sense. We can feel things expand or feel pressure in a specific location like air in a chest wall or pressure from a heel. The next element is the processing element in which once we sense it then the brain decides if its safe or threatening. Even if something is initially viewed as a threat it can eventually be retuned by the next element which is the the extra attention it brings around that reference point sense. The attention element acts as kinda like a planet that attracts stars around to it (why am I using space analogies again?). What that means is by sensing one specific location, it can allow us to recognize another reference point that we may not have initially sensed. Something else became more accessible from another point we finally sensed. The fact that you sense other things along with it can persuade your system that the initial “Pinch” or feeling something that might be a threat is a threat no more. For instance, if a person is shifted in their left hip and can feel the outside of their left heel and simultaneously sense a right big toe and arch, they should be able to feel something else like a left ab wall that they may have previously been unable to sense by themselves.
Our posture plays into the patterns of reference points that like to bias our weight & feel things especially on the right. This isn’t necessarily bad but when we start to live with the same reference points all of the time, never leaving them, and further keeping them to do almost everything we do, our bodies are going to bark at us. The barking in the form of pains and annoyances that all revolve around living with those reference points 24/7 365 days. These people live on one side to do everything and even walking. Muscles such as adductors, traps, lats, outside shins, etc are chronically shortened, overly tight for your brain to keep a sense of safety to “Stay over there” and not to leave that reference site whether its the floor and or space. Your brain doesn’t want leave them because, ironically, to leave them would be viewed as a threat (But it doesn’t have to be though). Usually it has been there for so long and it feels so safe there that it now deems this as the “new normal”. In your metaphorical house, you knew that you had other rooms you could go into but but barely flicked the light switched or even went in to them. You either pretended they never existed or never wanted to go back in there and check whats in there to begin with. But time to time we need to go in these rooms just like we need explore and sense other reference points in our bodies to help us feel like a normal human being who has control of both a left and right side. Doing so will allow us to get off the right and go to the left and from the left to finally get back to the right. Another big key is doing that efficiently and without interference from another or overrellied reference point. Its like being able to play a musical piece all the way through at normal speed without making 3 mistakes. That’s efficiency. To go from left to right interchangeably we would have to feel what might feel like “new” reference points so the brain, not only feels safe to go there, but to direct us there in an efficient manner.
When we find these new reference points on our bodies, we are probably not going to like them at first. It’s like when your first told to save some money for a rainy day or not eat so much on Thanksgiving. You know its good idea but what you’ve always been doing what you’ve been doing because its immediately rewarding and is all you’ve known that to try do something else would be an attack on your ego.
So you don’t do it until you can’t do it anymore. When you do start to do it you, you kick yourself because you now realize it’s not as bad as you made it out in the past and there’s a weird satisfaction to it. That satisfaction is abstract because its you realizing that you actually have more options than previously known and are now finally taking steps to set yourself up in a better position. You find and feel these points and now those old sites don’t hurt as much, things feel a bit easier, and once you do it enough you start to realize “This is how it’s actually suppose to be and feel”. Ease and effortlessness. The task marathon of your “against all odds” attitude in life can be let go. You don’t need to fight every second of the day anymore. This is what we are doing when we create new reference points and drop those old ones that we never got off of. The beautiful thing is we had to let them go so we can get them again. It’s like life is literally teaching us metaphors through our body but instead of a bird flying its literally your right ankle.
The ability to sense the reference points in our body can enrich our lives and make moving more authentic and bring less pain. We were evolved to use both sides of our arms and legs concomitantly and contra-laterally to sense the world around us and ourselves in it. The ability to oscillate back and forth with pressure is what allows us to be efficient movers and establish frequencies of our bodies.
When you can sense that you oscillate back and forth….. You “Find a Way”
Who would of thought one of the most asymmetrical muscles of our body has probably the most impact on us. From back problems, to posture, to our well being, our diaphragm in a way sets the tone of whats going on around us and has links to many different bodily systems. I’d like to dive in first on where exactly it is and some anatomical implications it has.
Its amazing and ironic that it is literally placed at the center of our body. You can’t get anymore center than our diaphragm. Its smack dab right at the bottom of our rib cage and underneath our lungs and in front of our spine. The diaphragm is almost like a septum that regulates airways and separates the chest cavity and abdominal cavity. From the front, the diaphragm has a sternal attachment right underneath the xiphoid process. The coastal fibers are along the inside of ribs 7 to 12. These ribs don’t attach to the sternum and are what we call the “bucket handle ribs” because when we inhale they expand out and up in a lateral direction. Then from the back, the diaphragm attaches to the lumbar spine from the crural attachments.As you can see the right diaphragm leaflet has more attachments being from L1 all the way to L-3. If your curious to read more about how our body asymmetrical you can read this post. To truly bring this to light, that’s like half of all our lumber spine so it definitely has some say in whats going in our back and how much extension its contributing. Besides the crural attachments, there are the lumbocoastal ligaments which are the lateral, & medial arcuate ligaments. These ligaments connect the diaphragm to the lumbar spine kinda like a web and cross into muscles such as the Psoas & QL. And finally we have the central tendon of the diaphragm in the middle which is what plunges our diaphragm up and down in order to breath.
You can even see the central tendon on the right covers more space than on the left. Again, we are asymmetrical on the inside and that’s OK. Another cool thing about the natural asymmetry of our diaphragm is that there is depression in the middle right between the domes. That’s because the heart sits on top of it.
dotted line is where the heart sits on top of it
Right on top
So the diaphragm has major influence on our heart rate and the Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
Besides making you wish the diaphragm dome should look symmetrical (but trust me we wouldn’t be the same if we were), the openings in the diaphragm itself gives way to important structures so things can go where they need to whether it’s above the diaphragm or below it.
Of the total openings, two are related to the heart such as the foramen of vena cava, and aortic hiatus and the final openning is the esophageal hiatus,. I can guess the things related to the heart make sense since the heart sits right above it but are you saying that the diaphragm has some kind of role in getting food down to our stomach? Yes! This Study suggests that the crural fibers act as a gastrointestinal sphincter helping food get to the stomach by the crural diaphragm briefly ceasing to contract. This will be so the bolus can transit across the diaphragm (Cherniack NS et al, 1984). So we have two openings related to the heart and a opening so food can go from the esophagus to the stomach via gastric reflux . It literally is the highway in the middle of our body.
So besides all this anatomy of where it’s located, why does the diaphragm have so much impact on us? Since it attaches to our rib cage and our spine, the position of those two landmarks are going to dictate what position the diaphragm is in as either a postural muscle or a respiratory muscle. In a way it almost owns us. We know its by the heart and our lungs but it also has a direct influence our autonomic system. Many of our sympathetic ganglia and nerves are in the ribacge and it can impinge on them if the ribcage is stuck in its position and can’t come back. From Gilbert C. Journal of Bodywork and movement Therapy, “We can easily disrupt the PH balance with 2 or 3 deep breaths. Ph will rise from 7.4 to 7.5 or CO2 will fall from a normal 40 to 30 or 25 in less with 30 seconds”. So with just the type of breathing we use we literally make ourselves Hypocapnic or have a decrease of Carbon Dioxide in our blood. This will raise our bodies PH and make us alkaline. Your basically hyperventillating and it’ll bring upon a bunch of sympathetic symptoms and unwanted things such as anxiety, hyper-arousal, and anything involving your sympathetic trunk making you feel like a tiger is chasing you.
Or racing to use the restroom after Taco bell
If our diaphragm can’t do its job of going down and filling our lungs with air then our body is going to do it some way and will use accessory muscles to do it. This has major implications for our health and well being. But as humans we have a natural asymetrical bias of our right diaphragm. The leaflet on the right is already better as a respiratory muscle because it has support of the liver underneath and is bigger than the left. The left is in a tough spot because it is anatomically in a disadvantageous position because its smaller and also its pull is not advantageous as the right. Another big factor that we have to go a little further into depth are the ribs position and abdominals. As humans we really like our right side…..like a lot. We are going to be more neurologically orientated to the right and the right diaphragm, as we said before, is in a better position to breath. The right ribs are going to be internally rotated but our left ribs are usually going to be stuck in external rotation which will pull the coastal fibers of the diaphragm to descend in order to act as a postural muscle to stabilize you.
the curved arrow = external rotation
Also it will pull the lumbar spine forward via the crural attachments into a position of over extension. Understand that both attachment sites of the diaphragm, the back and sides, are putting our body into a precarious unstable position. Biomechanically the left ribs are stuck in an externally rotated position and the abdominals on the left side are lengthened becasue they can’t pull the ribs down in order to changing the left hemi rib position. The abdominals, specifically the Internal Obliques and Transverse Abdominals (Which I will just call abdominals for short to make life easier) act as a way for the ribcage to compress and internally rotate so it can be in a better position. It also forms what we call the Zone of Apposition, especially on the left side. which restores the position of the ribcage and in turn restores the position of the diaphragm to its fully ascended positioned.
The term “Appose” means “to be next to or adjacent to”. The diaphragm when its fully ascended will be apposed or next to literally everything. It’s next to the ribcage, the heart on top, and the organs underneath it. If you ever played basketball, this is your “Triple Threat Position”.
Triple threat..Granny Style!!!!
You can’t have good diaphragm positioning without good ribcage positioning. The ability for that left ribcage to fully depress, rotate in, and retract back will change the shape of the ribcage so its positioning can get the diaphragm back to its optimal dome position and now act as a breathing muscle. The diaphragm will ascend all the way up to our eighth ribcage (T-8) and now can be in a position to ease up on the sympathetic nerves and can actually go through its full excursion on the breath cycle.
This muscle has a massive influence in many of our bodily systems and it would be foolish to just isolate it by itself. Its contributing to everything whether we know it or not. I’ve learned to respect it and take it into account whether I’m training or helping others.
Then from the back, the diaphragm attaches to the lumbar spine from the crural attachments.As you can see the right diaphragm leaflet has more attachments being from L1 all the way to L-3. If your curious to read more about how our body asymmetrical you can read this 
Movement and Musings 
