While it is not a topic often addressed, fatigue of the respiratory muscles can become a limiting factor in performance.  Not long ago my friend Steven Bubel wrote an excellent article covering the pain associated with dysfunctional breathing patterns caused trigger points in the upper-thoracic and cervical spine soft tissues that can cause referred pain in the shoulder and neck in distance runners.  This issue, while it may seem relatively banal, can wreak havoc on health and performance so it is something that has been on my radar for quite some time.
Before we begin to discuss how to restore proper breathing patterns, we must first understand a bit of how the respiratory musculature functions.
The diaphragm sits in the inferior portion of the ribcage separating the thorax from the abdominal cavity, and serves the primary purpose of creating a negative pressure deficit in the thorax to allow for inspiration.  While in low intensity activity, this is typically more than effective to facilitate adequate respiration.  We run into problems, however, when we begin to use secondary respiratory muscles to do the work without proper diaphragmatic function.  In patients with late stage lung pathologies, there can be some interesting uses of muscles not typically used for respiration.  I wrote about this in a previous post titled Compensation.

In the performance population, however, we can still see some of those compensation patterns particularly at the scalenes and pec minor as their attachments to the ribs place them at a biomechanical advantage to elevate the ribcage and (sub-optimally) help in creating a negative pressure deficit in the thorax.  While this strategy is effective and even necessary to some degree, dominance of these muscles can lead to a gamut of issues down the line from shoulder and neck pain to performance decrements to injury due to compromised “core” function.

One of the best drills to facilitate lateral coastal expansion is done by wrapping a light Theraband around the ribs and instructing her to open the ribcage into the band with each breath.

More on the topic soon!

Best regards,

Carson Boddicker