The main function of breathing is for respiration or oxygenation of the blood, obviously, right? But did you know it's number two function is postural stability? How that works is the muscles of your abdomen working in concert to create intra-dominal pressure via activation of the diaphragm. What the hell does that mean? It means that our spine is not held up just by muscles working individually to contract and hold the spine, but those muscles working together in concert to create pressure inside the spine. So what happens is the inside pressure pushes against the spine and then your musculature in the outside, push against in the opposite direction, creating stability. When we learn how to do this properly, it's our natural weightlifting belt. Training this allows us to create a stable anchor or fixed point for our shoulders and our hips to pull from so we can create efficient movement. The core is not meant to be an engine, rather a transmission of forces. So let's train it that way. We're going to start this breathing for stability series by learning how to use our diaphragm to expand the abdomen as opposed to breathing up into the chest. First you'll lay down flat knees bent, back flat to the ground. You'll take one hand, put it over your heart, and the other hand over your belly button. What you want to focus on when you breathe in is that the hand over your heart stays relatively relaxed while the hand over your belly button raises up toward the ceiling as you inhale and then as you exhale, it should sink down towards your spine. When you breathe in, you're inflating a balloon. Once you feel like you're getting the hang of this, you can take a simple weight and place it on your stomach. Take your fingertips and place them into your pectoral muscles, ripple or your collarbone. What you want to do is breathe into the weight raising it toward the ceiling. Without feeling a ton of contraction into your fingertips, you should not get this. In the last video we learned how to use our diaphragm to belly breathe. But it's not all about belly breathing. We want to be able to expand our abdomen 360 degrees. So here we'll learn how to expand the abdominal wall back near your spine and as well as below the belt line. To do this, we'll use a child's post position. So bend the knees, sit the butt back into your heels and then rest your arms down in front of you. Rest your elbows about your level. Rest your forehead on the ground. From here, you're going to think about breathing down low into your waistline. So imagine you're wearing gym shorts and if you are perfect, you want to stretch the elastic band 360 degrees with your breath. The goal is to breathe low where you're starting to get expansion into the lateral abdominal wall on both sides. So you breathe in low. You should feel expansion and inflation on both sides. If you have knee trouble, you can use something such as a ball to bolster your butt to get into this position. Now that you've got the 360 degree breathing down, we're going to learn how to maintain pressure in the abdomen as we breathe and breathe out. We'll lay on the back, start with the knees bent and then feet placed up onto a bench. You're going to create the lateral with both hands and you're going to wrap this around your abdomen around the pelvis where your thumbs are in the backside and the fingers are looped around the front. Try and stick your stomach out without breathing. Want to make sure you're not squeezing your abs and you're just sticking your stomach out with relax the abdominal wall, which is a tough thing to do. Now as you're stomach stuck out, go ahead and back off a little bit. So maintain pressure as you breathe in, breathe out as opposed to breathing in and losing pressure completely, deflating that balloon. So it's sort of having a 50% inflated balloon at start and we're filling it up to 100% and then bringing it back to 50. And we're getting that pumping action of the diaphragm with the abdominal wall and pelvic floor. For the last part of this series, now that we've got the breathing principles down, we're going to try to integrate it into something functional. Just take a seat, we'll create our letter elves, wrap them around the abdomen, stick your stomach out without breathing, gently pushing the thumbs and fingers outward and now we're going to breathe into it. And breathe out, maintaining pressure, not squeezing the abs. And then we'll lift one leg up, trying not to shift our body. We don't have good stability, we'll do this and this. So maintain your center, get your breath and lift one leg on another side. And then take to the next step what you can do is simply do a sit to stand. I highly recommend getting a core 360 belt. It has points in the front and the back to replace your thumbs and fingers so that you can integrate this breathing, your natural weightlifting belt into all of your athletic activities, workouts, whatever.