Lower back pain and spinal alignment - Incorrect breathing leads to tightness in hips flexors and psoas muscles.

Incorrect breathing patterns lead to postural instability, or in simple words, if you do not breathe correctly, you cannot align your trunk properly (and vice versa), which in turn renders your trunk unstable.

If your trunk isn't doing the job it is supposed to, other parts of your body will need to jump in and do the heavy lifting (excuse the pun). This often involves the hip flexors and psoas muscles.

In addition, overactive hip flexors are often associated with overactive neck flexors and our largely sedentary lifestyle does not help with this problem.

Trying to stretch the tight areas does not give lasting relief, largely because your body does not feel save without going right back to those same muscles and tightening them up again. You need to offer your body an alternative for stability, so your nervous system can allow itself to release those previously tight areas.

If not addressed, this type of tightness will change posture over time.

One of the more common examples is the posture in which people try to "stand up straight" or "stand up tall" but instead end up with an overextension in their lumbar area (the small of your back), and a chest that is held up excessively.

The latter is usually accompanied by the lower ribs sticking out and overtime becoming "stuck" in this position.

Further up the chain, the head and neck start tilting forwards.

Further down, in the pelvis area, the pelvis develops what is called an anterior tilt, meaning your bum starts sticking out like a duck, further aggrevating the overextension in the small of your back.

Your whole trunk is now out of alignment and your nervous system will signal "unsave" and "unstable" to other muscles which need to start creating a sense of stability.

From a pelvic biomechanics perspective, anterior pelvic tilt (that duck bottom) lengthens and weakens the abdominal muscles. Those abdominal muscles are exactly those that in an ideal position and breathing pattern would be helping with stability.

The hip flexors are forced in a shortened, dominant and tight position, trying to create this sense of stability and safely.

These are only some of the more obvious problems that arise.

During functional movements, such as overhead reaching or lifting, something that a lot of us have or want to do on a daily basis, this unhealthy posture increases the load on your back, especially around the lumbar areas.

In an ideal pattern lifting and upward reaching motions should distribute load across the hips and thoracic spine.

Arrows showing the back postural changes with lack of trunk stability and correct neutral spinal alignment

One of the most effective countermeasures, rather than working on tight muscles only, is to go to the root cause of the problem: Lack of trunk alignment, lack of stability via a neutral spine, coupled with incorrect breathing mechanics.

Want to know more?

In DNS we learn that breathing and stabilization are ONE UNIT (facilitated via the diaphragm) that cannot be separated.

No movement can be optimal without correct breathing mechanics.

Frequently we see in adults (and even in children) that this simultaneous ability of breathing and stabilization is compromised. This is a critical, fundamental component of good posture, especially for the stability and alignment of the lower back.

The exercise and treatment goal in DNS training concerns itself with the retraining of the same breathing patterns that are established subconsciously during early development in childhood.

DNS offers are set of dynamic tests that allow the practitioner to search for the "missing link" in the way the patient organises his/her stability, with the aim to restore the areas of fundamental weakness back to their original stabilizing function.