If you have ever come to see me as a patient, you have heard me talk about the importance of breathing. Not just for lung health, but for the health of your whole body.
That’s why I’m so glad that Ron Hruska, founder of the Postural Restoration Institute, was kind enough to put together two exercises that will preserve your lung health, and that almost anyone can do!
He created a video explaining the importance of compliance in our bodies especially in relation to our lungs, which I will summarize in this post. You can view the full video here.
So what the heck is compliance?
In terms of our bodies, it is essentially how mobile or flexible an area of your body is or isn’t. If an area is more stiff, it has less compliance, and if an area is more stretchy, it has more compliance.
In our bodies, there are areas that are anatomically stiffer and others that are stretchier. That’s just the way we’re made.
For example, your back has lots of layers of thick muscle and fascia, which makes that area more stiff. Conversely, the front of our body, including our abdomen, has much thinner, fewer layers of tissue, so this area is more stretchy (and also why you should not belly breathe! It makes the stretchy parts stretchier, and the stiff parts stiffer! More on that here).
Similarly, our left lung and surrounding tissues tend to be stiffer because the heart takes up a lot of space on the left side. The right side tends to be stretchier (unless we end up compensating, but I won’t get into all that here).
So, in general, the LEFT BACK area around the lungs tends to be more stiff, and the abdominal region a little too stretchy. This stiffness works its way down the chain to the left back pelvis because your pelvis motion is intimately correlated with your ribcage motion.
Why should we care about stiffness and stretchiness?
In the video, Ron shares an article about how a transplanted liver can last hours longer in transit if it is placed on a balloon-like structure instead of a block.
In this scenario, the balloon is your diaphragm.
The liver, just like all your other organs, needs to be massaged and moved around to be healthy. Your diaphragm, when working correctly, is constantly massaging your organs via your breath.
Furthermore, your lungs have many different nooks and crannys that need to be cleaned out by the right to left, front to back, and top to bottom pumping action we get through breathing and moving.
So the best thing you can do to stay healthy is to breathe well and stay moving! Climb stairs, get up and down from your chair, go for walks, etc.
But we need to give our lungs special attention, because of the anatomical differences we discussed earlier.
How does this relate to COVID-19?
Ron also cites an article from CNN, which discusses how healthcare providers are making it a point to place more severe patients on their stomach, and rotate them at certain time intervals throughout the day. This helps patients who are ventilated recover from COVID-19 infection.
The reason that positioning helps these patients is that lying on their stomach creates more stiffness in their abdominal region (from the pressure of the surface), and more stretchiness in the back. It also drains the back lung area of any infection, fluids, and stale air so that it can fill again with fresh clean air. Similarly, when the patients lie on their right side, the left side drains so that it can refill, and so on.
What is so amazing to me is that Ron and the Postural Restoration Institute created simple techniques that place your body in a position that drains all the right parts of your lungs, but in a functional, physically active way. Patients in the hospital on ventilators can’t do this because they are too weak, but you can!
Why would you want to do these exercises?
It’s so important right now to keep your lungs healthy. And if your lungs are draining and refilling well BEFORE you get sick, the severity and duration of your illness will be much less. So, hopefully you DON’T get sick, but if you do it will be good to have your body as prepared as possible to combat the virus.
Having good stretchiness/stiffness ratios in your body and lungs helps with so many other issues!
Allergies, airway issues, pain syndromes, there are so many benefits to these techniques.
I hope you try them, you will benefit from doing one or both of these every day. And at the very least, get up and move, whenever you can!
