Dr. Kelly Starrett

Unfortunately, those things go away.

All the getting high on your own supply that you get from – it all just becomes normalized.

So I would say, you know, one of the reasons we start with breath, anytime someone has neck pain and sometimes had mid back pain or low back pain, we teach the breath mechanic first, because it's such a powerful way of desensitizing a painful spine or irritated spine.

We normalize a lot of motion around the spine.

The book that everyone loves to reference is called The Spinal Engine by Grakovetsky.

And it's a really like, it's a hard book to read everyone.

It's like gnarly biomechanics of salamanders, side mending.

But really hints at that this is a really great whip, that the spine is a powerful engine and initiator of movement.

And that's actually how we define functional movement in the first place.

Works of a wave of contraction from trunk to periphery,

from core to sleeve, from axillary skeleton to peripheral skeleton.

And it's one of the reasons we take a moment to always organize the trunk into a little bit better position if we can, because it allows us to have better function, right?

So if I'm slouching at my computer, hard to take a big breath there, hard to turn my neck there.

If I'm driving in my car or I'm on my bike and I'm like, is there a position here where I could take a bigger breath?

Well, suddenly we might not say that that's a good position or bad position.

We're just like, hey, that position doesn't give me access to as much physiology, as much power, as much volume, as much rotation, as much range of motion.

So we might make decisions about how we organize the body to maintain the integrity of the breathing movement system.

And that's a good indicator of when we start to look at the breath and our ability to take a diaphragm breath, breathe laterally in the ribs, actually get some motion in the upper back and trunk, we suddenly see that we can start to flip on lights in the room that was once dark and lo and behold,

We also got the brain and the mind okay with high CO2s.

So for example, with Berkeley, we try to have seven hypoxic events before we compete.