The Three Regions of the Breath: Diaphragm, Ribs, Collarbones

Take a deep breath in. Most likely, your belly pushed forward and that was that. It felt full. Here is the surprise: you probably used about a third of what is available to you.

The breath has three regions, three different parts of the body that can expand to take in air. Most people have only ever met the first. Learning the other two does not just increase how much you can breathe. It changes what the breath can do for you, and lets you breathe fully in almost any position or circumstance. Here is each region in turn, and why the order matters.

Region one: the diaphragm, the foundation

The diaphragm is the primary muscle of breathing, a dome sitting beneath the lungs. When you take that "deep breath" and your belly moves, this is the muscle doing the work.

Two things about it are worth knowing. First, it is a muscle like any other, which means it responds to training and weakens without it. From around the age of thirty, its responsiveness tends to fade unless you keep it awake. Second, it actually produces two movements, not one. There is the familiar downward flattening that pushes the belly forward, and there is a lateral, sideways expansion at the base of the ribs that most people never access at all. Without the second movement, the muscles between your lower ribs stay asleep.

The diaphragm comes first for a reason. The part of the brainstem that governs breathing depends heavily on feedback from this muscle. Wake it up, and you have built the foundation everything else rests on. This is what most people mean by diaphragmatic breathing, and it is only the ground floor.

Region two: the intercostals, the forgotten breath

Between your ribs sit small muscles called the intercostals. When they engage, the ribcage expands sideways, in three dimensions, like a bellows opening. Most people have never consciously felt this happen.

If the diaphragm lengthens the lungs downward, the intercostals widen them. Both matter. Most of us only have one. There is also a physical and energetic line that runs between the hips and the shoulders, and it tends to open up once the ribs start moving, which is why this kind of work usually begins by loosening the hips first.

You can feel the start of it now. Put your hands on your lower ribs, thumbs to the front, fingers reaching round the back. Breathe in and try to push your hands apart sideways, without letting the belly do all the work. For many people the first response is surprise, simply at discovering the ribs can move that way at all. It is also completely normal for one side to open more freely than the other. Bodies are rarely symmetrical, and this is nothing to fix.

Region three: the clavicular, the completion

The third region is the upper chest, the collarbones and the top of the lungs, just beneath the shoulders. This completes the breath upward, into a part of the body that screen work, desk posture and accumulated tension keep almost permanently compressed.

This region matters out of proportion to its size. The area around the collarbones and upper chest is rich in the nerve pathways that govern the body's settling response, so easing tension here has a direct, settling effect on the whole system. Releasing the upper chest is not only about taking in a little more air. It tends to free something that most of us have been holding tight for years.

When all three regions are available, length from the diaphragm, width from the ribs, height from the upper chest, the breath becomes fully three-dimensional. You can breathe adequately in any position, any posture, any circumstance. The breath stops being something that only works when you are lying calmly on a mat, and becomes a tool you can use anywhere.

Why the order matters

You cannot skip to the top. The three regions build on each other in sequence, and there is a logic to it.

The diaphragm comes first because it is the foundation and the part the breathing brain listens to most. The ribs come next, opening the width, and they open more easily once the diaphragm is awake and the hips are loose. The upper chest comes last, because it is the most guarded and the most likely to release something, and it lands more safely once the two lower regions are already moving and steady beneath it.

Worked in order, the breath opens like a building filling from the ground up. Rushed or reversed, it tends to stay shallow and tight, which is exactly where most people start.

Where to take it next

These three regions are the physical heart of how a full breath actually works. If you'd like to understand the breath they add up to, start with our guide to Conscious Connected Breath, and the rest of our Breath articles carry the thread on.

Feeling all three regions wake up is hard to do from reading alone. It tends to happen in a room, with guidance and partner work, over a few days. That is exactly what the Live Residential Facilitator Training at ASHA in Tuscany is built around, three regions explored one at a time, in the body. See the 2026 dates →