This mighty muscle that nobody really cares to know much about, as it’s hidden, and not as visible as the biceps or glutes, and yet it’s if not the most, one of the most important muscles in the body (together with the pelvic floor muscles and the tongue) – and so beautiful too! I am always in awe at how powerful, how central, how indispensable, and how connected to everything it is. You will notice its existence when you get hiccups (involuntary spasms of the diaphragm), or when you cough, sneeze or laugh really hard.

Did you know that every single main meridian (TCM) of the body passes through the diaphragm? Did you also know that the diaphragm is the main muscle for breathing and we cannot breathe without it (the lungs by themselves cannot pump air)?
Our body falls apart without it, it’s not an auxiliary muscle at all, and it has a major impact in our posture, circulation, immune function, digestion, emotional regulation, etc, aside from, of course, the breathing mechanism.

“The diaphragm is the most important muscle we have. There is no if, and, or but about it.” – Brian MacKenzie, founder of Shift (former Power Speed Endurance) and the Health and Human Performance Foundation.

From age 13, I started doing abdominal breathing exercises when I first enrolled in my first Singing Academy. My teacher had me for at least 3 months lying down on the floor, by myself, focusing on my abdomen for breathing, while I could hear the more advanced students practising their singing. “I wanna sing like Madonna, wtf is this, I don’t wanna be lying down here lesson after lesson doing nothing” – I was thinking to myself. Little did I know that this foundation would be essential for my development as a singer, and I am so, so, so grateful that it happened this way! It opened me in ways that I could have never imagined, not only as a singer but as a human being and a woman.

Breathing by consciously expanding, contracting and putting pressure on the diaphragm, not only makes you grab more air and therefore oxygenate better, but also:

• YOU ARE MORE RELAXED AND MORE AT PEACE, as the vagus nerve gets stimulated, the parasympathetic nervous system gets activated, leading to a decreased heart rate.
• YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE LOWERS. As the parasympathetic nervous system gets activated, the blood vessels dilate, lowering blood pressure. The Baroreflex system, which is in charge of detecting and regulating blood pressure fluctuations, becomes more efficient, preventing sudden drops or spikes.
• YOU FATIGUE LESS AND LAST LONGER IN PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. Since there is better oxygenation, and since there’s more production of nitric oxide (a molecule that helps widen blood vessels and improve overall blood flow), the rate of breathing and the energy needed to breathe is reduced, which helps delay muscle fatigue, allowing muscles to work efficiently for longer.
• YOU RECOVER FASTER. Better oxygenation means that the removal of waste products like carbon dioxide and lactic acid from muscles (which produces muscle stiffness), is faster, allowing for a quicker recovery. There is less muscular tension, and since CO2 is expulsed more optimally, the body’s inflammatory response gets reduced.
• YOU PREVENT INJURIES & REDUCE PAIN: Breathing using the diaphragm to its maximum potential stabilises the core for better posture and lifting weights, reducing strain by avoiding breath-holding (valsalva manoeuvre), and distributing impact forces more effectively, especially in activities like running, all of which enhance stability, performance, and overall bodily resilience. We also get decreased cortisol levels (which can amplify pain perception), and also lower adrenaline levels (‘stress’ hormones, which produce an increased heart rate and constrict the blood vessels).
• YOU ACHIEVE MORE POWER WITH LESS EFFORT. Proper diaphragmatic breathing in conjunction with the abdominal muscles creates high intra-abdominal pressure. This pressurised cylinder acts like a natural “weight belt” or “corset” (air column in singing), stabilising the spine and providing a solid core from which limbs can produce more force and power. By letting the diaphragm do the work, you reduce the strain on the neck, jaw and shoulders, preventing premature fatigue and allowing for better, more controlled, and smoother movement. Relying on the diaphragm rather than the upper muscles reduces the metabolic work (and thus the effort) required to breathe, so there’s less energy expenditure, less energy wasted in unnecessary places and more focused in the places that are needed.
• YOU IMPROVE YOUR CORE STRENGTH: Due to the fact that you need to engage your core when you put pressure on your abdomen (creating intra-abdominal pressure), you are working out on your core and abs, and you’re also helping stabilise your spine. Lower breathing connects the diaphragm, transversus abdomini, quadratus lumborum and pelvic floor as one single unit (inner unit). It promotes better alignment and reduces tension in the back, neck and shoulders.

But… what IS the Diaphragm?

The Diaphragm is a large, thin, strong, incredibly resilient, high-endurance, dome-shaped muscle that sits in between the thoracic cavity and the abdominal cavity, acting as a divider (or a unifier, depending on how you see it) between both. It has 3 holes through which the aorta, vena cava and esophagus pass. It is innervated by the vagus nerve and the phrenic nerve. Through the fascia, the movement of the diaphragm affects from the base of the tongue all the way down to the pelvic floor muscles (even all the way down to the feet!) connecting all the muscles and affecting the organs in between, and how they pump/release their correspondent fluids. The Diaphragm is also intimately connected to the psoas – another great muscle responsible for storing emotions and stresses! – through two tendons that go from the diaphragm down the psoas to the spine.

The Diaphragm works 24/7 from birth til death, like the heart. A powerful peculiarity of the diaphragm is that it acts both voluntarily and involuntarily. No other muscle in the body does that. Likewise, our breathing is both voluntary and involuntary. We can control it, but it also works on its own. This is because how the Vagus Nerve (king of the PNS, Parasympathetic Nervous System) is placed in the diaphragm, it runs right through the oesophageal orifice, and the movement of the diaphragm around it stimulates the parasympathetic response. That’s why diaphragmatic breathing promotes relaxation.

The Diaphragm also affects our posture and all its implications, and it all depends on its mobility. A flexible diaphragm (hence the important of diaphragmatic breathing for everything) allows the respiratory, metabolic, digestive, lymphatic and circulatory systems to function optimally. If our posture is compromised, all our systems slow down. So when we breathe properly, we also have a proper posture, and everything flows. We change posture from the inside out, and not the other way round.

Our modern life keeps us seated for long periods of time, staring at a screen. This shrinks/constricts our abdominal cavity for breathing, our chins are out and our shoulders slouched, this makes our fluids stagnant, and our breathing shallow. Specially because our point of attention is on the screen, while watching something, scrolling, or texting, focused on a single or very small area, it’s like a predator in vigilant mode watching for its prey, which makes us take very small breaths and not move a lot. We do not expand, there’s no place for long, deep breaths.

Look at babies when they cry, or a dog panting… their abdomens expand and shrink with the breathing… we lose it all when we start going to school and we become programmed with societal norms, and as we go into adulthood we accumulate stresses that also makes us stiff in various different ways, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Together with the diaphragm, it is all the surrounding muscles of the thorax and abdomen that help the breathing and also the postural adaptations. I speak about it deeply in my upcoming book “True Singing”.

“Since the diaphragm surrounds the vena cava and aorta, it also acts as a cardiac synergist muscle. Not only does it stroke that vasculature and help move blood around, but it’s also a bed for your heart. The heart is sitting right on top of the diaphragm inside a fascial sack called the pericardium.”– Jill Miller

Cultivating an awareness on how we breath is linked to everything we do. Once you have located for the first time (after a long time practising) the lower origin of the movement of breath (somewhere in the pelvic floor), that’s it, there’s no going back. That’s the moment of your true birth! From then onwards I encourage you to practice to exercise your breathing muscles: the diaphragm and the surrounding muscles, with exercises that combine pressure with sound, and in order for it to become natural, you have to exercise them to exhaustion, like any other muscle in the body. The breathing exercises for the diaphragm are a combination of “letting it” and “forcing it”, sometimes more “forcing it” than “letting it”, until the “letting it” happens automatically and naturally.

Spiritually, the Diaphragm represents a bridge between the lower, instinctual chakras and the higher, spiritual energy centres. It manages the flow of energy between the lower, primal emotions and the upper, heart-centered, and intellectual areas. It also stores repressed emotions, particularly grief, tension and fear. A tight diaphragm is often linked to an inability to surrender, letting go, or trust. If we translate the ‘spiritual’ into our biology, we look at the vagus nerve and the energy meridians. All 14 main meridians pass through the diaphragm, and every nerve that springs from the vagus nerve is also connected to those meridians, so imagine: since each meridian and nerve connects to every organ, the diaphragm has tremendous influence in all our body, that’s why keeping it flowy is a sign of overall health.

Learning Classical Singing gave me the biggest gift in ways that I am still discovering today! Here I am, 35 years after my first singing (breathing) lesson ever, marvelling at this magnus opus of creation that is this majestic muscle. True, connected, honest, authentic, raw, pure breathing happens when you just ARE. But, to BE, we have to UNDO everything that does not serve us, everything that was thrown onto us without our permission, and we took it and made it ours, knowing that it was foreign. To find happiness in adulthood one has to undo everything we were taught as kids that would make us happy. All the external outputs have to go. All the remedies, the herbs, the protocols, the programmes, the supplements, the diets, the medicines, the therapies… We have a Magnus Opu inside our body, a true healer. Why look outside, when we have it all inside?

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Links of interest:

Breathe: The Simple, Revolutionary 14-Day Program to Improve Your Mental and Physical Health

Anatomic connections of the diaphragm: influence of respiration on the body system

The Power of the Diaphragm – Part II

The Role of the Diaphragm in Self-Awareness and Transformation