The Pickleball Diaphragm Welcome to our session on Building a Strong Diaphragm for your pickleball game.. I am Dr. Gordon Jones, your brain fitness and pickleball performance coach. Your access to this series is freely given, so would you consider making a contribution to our non-profit mission of spreading the benefits of pickleball to the world? This session is going to do two things. First, in the next few minutes, you will understand more about how breathing affects your body, your brain, and your performance than most pickleball players ever learn. Then we will move into the practical work with exercises that build the muscle responsible for everything we just discussed. Find a comfortable seated position. Your back should be straight and tall, but not rigid. Your feet should be flat on the floor with your hands resting on your thighs. Your eyes can be open with a soft gaze or closed, whichever helps you stay present in your body without drifting, because we will be working. Let’s start with what most players never get told. The way you breathe is not a passive function happening in the background of your life. It is one of the most powerful regulators of your entire physiology. Every breath you take sends signals to your heart, your muscles, your brain, your blood vessels, and your digestive system. The breath is the one input you have into the autonomic nervous system, the part of your body that controls your heart rate, muscle tension, hormone release, and emotional state. You cannot directly slow your heart, but you can change your breath, and when you do, the entire system responds. This is why the way you breath matters in pickleball, and in everything else in life. When you breathe shallow and high in the chest, which most adults do under any kind of pressure, your body interprets it as a threat signal and your sympathetic nervous system activates. Adrenaline and cortisol release into the bloodstream and your heart rate climbs. Blood is pulled away from your brain’s higher reasoning centers, sending it toward the large muscles of your arms and legs in preparation for fight or flight. Your peripheral vision narrows. Your fine motor control degrades. Your sense of time speeds up, which is why everything feels so fast under pressure even when the actual ball speed has not changed. This is the breath that loses points, Not because the player ran out of skill, but because the player ran out of access to their skill. The skills are still there. The pathway to them has been narrowed by the swallow breath. Better is slow, deep breathing where the breath fills the abdomen first and then the chest, drawing air low into the belly rather than high into the chest. This breath tells your nervous system that the situation is safe enough to perform at your full capability. Your heart rate slows, the blood returns to your brain. Your peripheral vision widens. Your fine motor control sharpens. Your sense of time slows back to normal and you can think clearly. You can see the whole court. Your dinks land soft, your placement is refined and exact. Your decisions are clean. Why is this? There is a specific muscle at the center of it all. It is called the diaphragm, and it sits just beneath your lungs. It’s a dome-shaped sheet of muscle that separates your chest from your belly. When the diaphragm contracts and flattens downward, it pulls air into your lungs. When it relaxes and domes back up, it pushes air out. Every full descent of the diaphragm physically stimulates a major nerve called the vagus nerve, which is the main pathway your body uses to calm itself down. The diaphragm is literally a calming mechanism built into your body. But here is the problem most pickleball players don’t know they have. The diaphragm is a muscle. And like every other muscle in your body, it gets stronger when you train it and weaker when you don’t. For most adults, our sedentary jobs, chronic stress, decades of shallow chest breathing has made the diaphragm weak. It has difficulty descending fully. It cannot generate the pressure needed to stabilize your core during athletic movement. It cannot sustain long, slow exhales without fatigue. So when you walk onto a court and ask it to perform, it cannot. Instead, your body recruits the small muscles of your chest, neck, and shoulders to do the work of breathing, something those muscles cannot do as well as the diaphragm does. Additionally, contracting those muscles produces more complexity to your overall movements causing reduced control of your shots. The good news is for those who have been working through each of the series sessions, you’ve already started training your diaphragm. The same way your legs respond to training, or your arms respond to practicing specific pickleball shots, the diaphragm gets stronger and more reliable with progressive, consistent work. A few weeks of dedicated practice can produce measurable changes including increased lung capacity, more efficient heart-rate-variability, more productive recovery time, stability of your core, and in your ability to stay composed under pressure. Today’s session is designed to help you make that muscle strong, so that the breath does what it is built to do, not what today’s world dictates it to do. Let’s begin. Place one hand on your lower belly, just below the navel. Place the other hand on your upper chest, just below the collarbone. Take a normal breath, however you naturally breathe. Notice which hand moves more. If the chest hand moves more than the belly hand, you have been breathing high and your diaphragm has been underused. That is exactly what we are going to change. Now, deliberately, breathe so that the belly hand moves and the chest hand stays still. Inhale through your nose, and let the belly rise. Exhale through your mouth, and let the belly fall. That is the diaphragm doing its job. Feel where the movement is coming from low in the torso. Deep behind the navel. The muscle pulls down, pushing the belly outward. That is the muscle we are going to strengthen. The first quality of a strong diaphragm is full range of motion and the muscle’s ability to descend completely on each inhale. Most adults use only a fraction of their available range. We are going to expand yours. In this exercise, you will perform six breaths. Each one fills the belly completely, then empties it completely. The inhale is four seconds, full and unhurried. The exhale is six seconds, slow and controlled. Between each breath, pause for 2 seconds of stillness before the next. Hands stay on the belly and chest. The belly should move significantly. The chest should barely move at all. Begin. Inhale through the nose, 1, 2, 3, 4, fill the belly completely... Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, fill the belly... 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, fill the belly... 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, fill the belly... 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Pause again for 1, 2 Two more. Continue the pattern. Belly rising fully. Belly emptying fully. The diaphragm working through its full range. Inhale, fill the belly... 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, fill the belly... 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Pause again for 1, 2 Now let your breath return to normal for a moment. Notice how the diaphragm feels. It may feel slightly worked or even a bit tired if this is your first time doing breathing exercises. That is the muscle responding to load. That is the training effect beginning its work. The second quality of a strong diaphragm is endurance and the ability to sustain effort across long breath cycles without fatigue. This is what allows you to maintain composure during a long rally, or to recover within seconds after one ends. You will perform eight breaths. Each one has a longer exhale than inhale, which trains the diaphragm to control its release rather than just dump the air. The inhale is four seconds. The exhale is eight seconds — twice as long. The longer exhale is where the strength is built. Resist the urge to rush it. Let the air leave slowly and steadily. Ready, begin. Inhale through the nose, 1, 2, 3, 4, fill the belly completely... Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale out the mouth completely for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 Now exhale for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, Pause for 1, 2 exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Pause again for 1, 2 Let your breath return to normal. Your muscle has been working under a sustained load. Do you feel the difference between this rest and the first one? There may be more warmth in the torso, more fatigue. That is the work showing in your body. The third quality of a strong diaphragm is the ability to work against resistance. We add a small amount of physical resistance to the exhale, which forces the muscle to work harder for the same output. This is the most challenging set in the session, and it produces the most strength gain. You will perform six breaths. The inhale is four seconds through the nose. The exhale is eight seconds through pursed lips as if you were exhaling through a narrow straw. The pursed-lip exhale creates back-pressu
