Guest Author - Lisa Shea

It's very common that people have trouble breathing. Here are the muscles involved in breathing, and how to take good care of them so you can breathe more easily.

First, what is breathing? You have a pair of lungs in your chest cavity. You need to have as healthy a posture as possible so that your chest cavity is not "squished in", so your lungs have room in which to work. Muscles in your lower chest then pull down on the lungs - or push up on the lungs - which suck in air or push out air.

Therefore the main muscle used in breathing is your diaphragm. This muscle stretches across your lower chest area. It goes up towards your head, and then down towards your feet. There are many exercises you can do to strengthen your diaphragm to help it do its job more easily.

Next, there are a set of muscles that help your diaphragm on the "push air out" part. These are your abdominals. When men do trillions of sit-ups to build up a "six pack" of muscles, these are the abdominal muscles they are working on. There are four main areas of abdominal muscles -
* transverse - the main muscles that hold your body insides ... inside :)
* rectus - this is the "six pack" area
* external oblique - the left and right side "twisting" muscles
* internal oblique - inner muscles that counterpart the externals to help with twisting

Finally, there are the set of muscles that help your chest cavity area expand, so that air can come in to it. These are the intercostals. These are the muscles in your rib area, that help your rib cage expand. There are two main areas of intercostal muscles -
* internal - the ones inside the ribs
* external - the ones outside the ribs

All of these muscles can be exercised, just like you exercise your leg muscles by running and your arm muscles by throwing baseballs. If you'd like to have better health, less pain and more oxygen running through your brain, be sure to find an ergonomic position that allows your chest cavity to be as open as possible - and do exercises to help strengthen those muscles.