Claude Gordon Brass Camp 1992 - Larry Miller on The Diaphragm Breathing Fallacy

The photo above comes from Masashi Sugiyama, who is an excellent protege of Claude Gordon with a successful studio and brass camp in Japan.

Today's lecture is really entitled, Respiratory Function in Brass Playing, and how you breathe to play correctly, and that's what Claude's book, Brass Playing, is no harder than deep breathing, is all about.
Today I hope to tell you what this Claude Gordon Chest Up According to Screens method is, how and why it works.
My experience was really what was behind the motivation to do some research to find out about some of the concepts that Claude was talking about. Am I too loud?
I feel like I'm getting some feedback.
Working in the medical profession for 20 years makes you look at things from some would say a cynical aspect. It's not really cynical, but it's a questioning aspect.
And that's exactly the way I came to the first camp that I came to with Claude, about the third one I think that they've had.
And I heard Claude's lectures and I said, you know, a lot of what this guy says makes sense. I'm not sure it all works, but I was convinced of one thing, the guys were really playing that were using it.
I think Larry Susa was there that year, and Carl was there, and some of the guest soloists, and they were all playing unbelievably, and I was convinced that the end product was a good one.
What I wasn't convinced about was some of the things that he was saying. In fact, I remember saying it sounded a little bit like snake oil sales, but I changed my mind.
I began to watch really carefully different players that are professional players, and I got as many videos of professional players as I could.
I went to as many live concerts of professionals that I could and tried to observe as closely as I could, especially how they breathed.
I came to the conclusion, after observing these people, that there was much that what Claude Gordon said that they all did.
Maurice Andre, and Herzeth, and Catarabic, and Maynard, and Doc, and Mendez, and Manny Klein, and these guys, Marcellus, and Vazuti, and Spedvig all included.
We're doing some of the same stuff, especially around the breathing that Claude was teaching.
They all did it the same way, and that brings me to the real point of this lecture, and that is that there is a correct way that the body functions.
If you find the correct way, the body will work in a oneness with itself.
Various people come to these conclusions on their own. Maynard Ferguson has his Eastern religion thing that he does, but it's a oneness with nature that you really seek.
That's an important part of not just trumpet playing, but our total lives.
Music, to me, kind of combines a lot of what we know about science, what we know about the arts, what we don't know about the arts, and helps us solve some of the mystique about how we become artists, how we make things work, especially brass instruments.
There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything. If you're an athlete, you find the best coach, and you learn how to do the sport that you're trying to become the best at in the way that is the best.
There will be slight variations, but basically they all get to the same thing. I've attended lectures by many of the world's leading brass authorities, and though they may fight over semantics, or what words mean, or what words they will use, they basically all are teaching what we're talking about today.
But there's one area that they all get adamant about and get upset about, because it's a bit like part of their religion, and that's the diaphragm. To some people, this is a holy word, and it is scary to them to have somebody suggest a different meaning for what they're talking about.
The diaphragm is very important to our respiration. There's no question about it. But when I was in medical training and in residency, I was impressed with the fact that the diaphragm was pretty much a translucent, thin sheet of tissue with some muscle fibers attaching it to the body wall,
and running through it. But I was tremendously impressed because I was a trumpet player since I was eight years old, and I'd heard this diaphragm thing. I was tremendously impressed with the fact that it was not this big, strong muscle that I expected it to be.
And that made me think that what Claude was talking about when he said, you know, the diaphragm really doesn't contribute in the way that we think it does, made me think he might be right.
Unfortunately, it's deep in the literature. The word diaphragm has been used, and even in Claude's early books, the first systematic approach that was published had some things about the diaphragm.
And so it's not that they were teaching the wrong thing, but the conclusions that we've come to is that they were using the wrong word to describe the same process, and we'll get into that.
But it's amazing what the human body will do if we do things the wrong way. There's a tremendous fudge factor built into our body. We talked a little bit yesterday about cholesterol and hardening of the arteries.
The arteries can narrow about 70 to 80 percent, say, in the coronary arteries that supply the heart before we have any symptoms or any problems, and we may not have any real problems until they're narrowed 90 percent or more.
So the body will take an unbelievable amount of abuse, and brass players seem to be able to find all the wrong ways to do things, and they still kind of get by.
They can make things work to a certain degree, but they don't get the full meaning and the full ability unless they do it the right way.
The lungs are another example of how the body will put up with a lot of abuse. They don't give you warning until they're in real trouble.
We see people with all sorts of health problems, and it just amazes me that they're doing as well as they are.
But the body wants to do things in certain ways, and it wants to keep things in narrow parameters.
The body has lots of feedback mechanisms built into it to maintain what we call a homeostatic situation.
That means to maintain the status quo, to not rock the boat.
For instance, the blood has a very narrow range of acid and base control, what we call the pH.
And the body uses the lungs and the kidneys to carefully control the pH of the blood.
If the blood becomes too acid and we get a buildup of CO2, automatically our respiration rate will go up to breathe off that CO2 and bring the pH back down where it needs to go.
So one of the things that we now do to watch patients who have problems is we measure their blood gases.
We'll take it right out of the artery and we can tell how much oxygen they have in their blood, how much carbon dioxide they have in their blood,
how much bicarbonate they have in their blood, and we can also calculate the pH.
We can make changes by putting them on the respirator or giving them certain medications which will help control that.
Because if the body gets outside that narrow range, you die.
Trouble playing is not quite that critical, but you can die on the stand pretty easily if you don't blow right.
The body maintains blood pressure in the same way.
When you go out to exercise after you've been sitting in a chair here, you need more blood to the peripheral arteries so that your muscles can get more blood.
So the heart picks up its rate, the blood pressure on the top number particularly will go up, and you will get enough oxygen to do the task that you want to do.
This is happening all the time in your body.
These tremendous chemical reactions that you don't even think about are going on all the time.
This kind of change takes place when you practice or when you play.
All kinds of physiological things are happening in your body.
Let's take a look at the mechanism of respiration.
I'd first like to get the concept of the, my friend here, that's what I'm wanting.
Tom was out with this gal last night, she took it pretty hard.
He left her sucking her thumb.
Okay, the bones of the chest are important because they are the gas tank that contains the air.
We're talking about medically the thorax, that being the part of the body below the neck and above the abdomen.
And it includes the bones connected to the sternum.
This bone that comes down the middle of the chest is called the sternum and it has some cartilaginous parts that hook up to the ribs.
And the ribs hook back to the spine back here to the vertebrae.
And these, the ribs and the sternum can all be moved by the muscles that are attached to them.
And that's what we do when we move air is we move the muscles in order to create changes in pressure around the lungs which are inside this rigid gas tank here.
In the back, what was her name Tom?
In the back you can take a look at the vertebrae and they have muscles attached to them as well.
These muscles connect the vertebrae together, they connect different parts of the vertebrae together as well.
And then there's long ribbons of muscle that come down the back and connect here as well.
The shoulders here are made up of the scapula and the clavicle and the humerus or arm bone.
And they're all connected to the thorax by muscles that also help us move.
When we take that big breath in, what happens?
The sternum goes up like this.
The ribs then become more horizontal and they open the thorax and what we call the anterior-posterior diameter.
Things get wider this way.
If you watch the guys that have played for a long time and breathe correctly, they've got pretty good sized barrel chests.
And to a physician, he's been taught that people with increased anterior-posterior diameters
that are greater than what they should be probably have emphysema.
And so a lot of trumpet players have been told they have emphysema.
In fact, when we talked at the New York Brass Conference, there was a lot of old fellows who had been trumpet players
and they said, you know, their doctor told them they had emphysema and they had pulmonary function tests.
And indeed, they thought those confirmed them.
And when we looked at them, there were some real interesting reasons why they didn't have emphysema.
And that once again, there is not a medical explanation because they don't understand the respirations of trumpet playing or brass playing.
So why is it important to increase this anterior-posterior diameter?
It's because for every two centimeters, that's less than an inch, that you can go out this way.
You increase the volume of the lungs, the gas tank, by 300 cc.
My son's motorcycle only has 100.
So you're looking at a pretty good increase in the volume if you can get that chest up.
And that's another reason why the muscles of the neck become so important because they you'll see them when we show you these slides.
You'll see them fighting to hold this whole thing up.
And that's why the Claude Gordon chest up accordion squeeze is important because we want to keep that chest up
and keep that anterior diameter, that anterior-posterior diameter at its greatest size.
Let's take a look at the muscles that are involved.
Was this Dave's day?
He's not here to defend himself.
It was.
Okay.
These are the muscles that are attached to the bones that I was just mentioning.
And I'm not going to try and tell you all the names of them because you can find that out for yourself.
But just to take you through a layered look, on the front of the chest we have the pectoralis muscles,
which there are two sets of, a major and a minor set.
And then underneath we have muscles that attach along the whole wall of the chest, the serratus anterior.
And we have really important muscles in between the ribs, the intercostal muscles.
I don't know if you can see from back there, but there are the muscles that go between these ribs like this.
And they help expand and contract these ribs when we squeeze.
And they're a reason for a lot of the pain that we feel sometimes when you take a big breath and you get a stick.
Somebody asked about that the other day right there.
And that's those intercostal muscles.
And one of the reasons they cause pain is that there's a nerve in the blood vessel that run right under each rib.
And that, when a muscle's inflamed or if it's in spasm, it involves that nerve right away.
The abdominal muscles are important to breathing.
Remember that.
I'm not saying today anything about the abdominal muscles not being important to breathing.
We do use our abdominal muscles in breathing correctly.
But that's not the diaphragm.
People think about the diaphragm when they think about the abdomen.
They, respiratory therapists, the doctor will write an order for diaphragm breathing training.
And the respiratory therapists will go in and they'll put a weight on the patient's stomach and tell him to push it out and breathe in.
Push it out, breathe in.
Push it out, breathe in.
Or to push it out and blow out.
Because they're strengthening these abdominal muscles.
But they think that's diaphragmatic breathing.
It has nothing to do with what the diaphragm is doing except what is being caused to change with the abdominal muscles.
It's probably a long enough way that you may not be able to see this.
But this is an attempt to show you what the diaphragm looks like.
It separates the abdominal contents.
This is the liver.
Stomach and the intestines here.
The large bowel.
And it's separated from the lungs and the heart which is gone in this patient.
So I know it was day's date.
It separates the abdomen from the chest.
And that's really an important thing to think about because that's really what the diaphragm is all about.
It doesn't do a whole lot more than to separate that and to allow pressures generated around it to affect its position.
It's attached to the chest wall.
If I can take out one of the lungs.
Underneath here is the diaphragm.
And it's attached to the chest wall, these bones that we've been showing you, by some muscle out at the periphery of the diaphragm.
Let's turn the patient around here.
The muscles of the back really contribute to the breathing.
And there are several layers.
The outer layer, the inner layer, and the scapular muscles all combine.
The trapezius, the latissimus dorsi, and the rest of the muscles, the rhomboids, and those things are all important.
But I'm not going to get real technical on those things.
A lot of the squeezing is done by the scapular muscles.
The rhomboids and the muscles that involve the erector spinae and the holus erect in that position.
And when you squeeze down on this skeleton, the pain that you develop often occurs right in this area.
If you're holding the chest up and playing correctly.
Now the muscles of the neck that we talked about are nicely demonstrated here.
The anterior muscles of the neck, the sternocleidomastoid and the other muscles here.
They hold on to this clavicle that we talked about and pull it out.
Okay, let's talk now that we've discussed the skeleton a little bit about the other soft tissues other than the muscles.
The respiratory system really starts at the mouth and the nose where we take the air in.
Comes down through the trachea, that's the hard part out here in front.
And goes into the bronchial tubes.
The big ones and then it separates down into smaller ones.
It finally gets down, the air gets down into the little air sacs.
The alveoli where the blood comes running by and the oxygen from the air crosses that little membrane and gets into the blood.
Which is the whole reason we breathe so that we can keep ourselves oxygenated.
The pedal blowouts that we practiced yesterday in regards to the down portion of the systematic approach where you take the pedal and go down.
Hold it and keep your chest up until you shake.
All aimed at developing these muscles.
That's why we have you blow until you can't feel any more air being moved until it hurts.
That's why we had you go through that today as a breathing exercise.
That's part of the Claude Gordon Chest Up Accordion Squeeze.
And now let's talk directly about the diaphragm.
Really the study that we did was a test of what Claude was telling us.
At the time we did the study I was the medical director of a human performance and adult fitness laboratory.
And we put together a team of experts to observe and comment on our findings.
And they included a radiologist, a sports medicine specialist, a pulmonologist, an exercise physiologist, a team of technicians, RNs and respiratory therapists and the trumpet players themselves.
We had some surgeons also do some observation to confirm what I had been impressed with so that we had more opinions than just my potentially possibly biased opinion if I wanted to believe this.
And we then went to the library at the Chico State University and have a computer hook up to all the index medicus which made it able for us to review all the articles that we wanted to find on the respiratory function in any sort of instrument or singing or any anatomy question that we wanted.
We first checked the neuroanatomy file to see if there was any evidence in any literature that the diaphragm and its innervation, in other words the nerves that went to the diaphragm, were voluntary.
Was there a voluntary nerve that went to the diaphragm?
Could we say there were fibers in the phrenic nerve which we know supplies the diaphragm with nervous information?
Was there any voluntary fibers in there that made it able for us to say I'm going to move my diaphragm now?
You can't move your diaphragm, we found, without doing other things.
And we found no evidence from the time that they began studying anatomy to the present time of any research that said there was a voluntary nerve supply to the diaphragm.
So that confirmed what we were suggesting, actually applying the scientific method to our whole musical idea.
First observing what we were seeing and then drawing some conclusions after examining it and then testing them to see if they really worked.
We asked the hospital's cooperation in order to use their fluoroscopic machine, which is used daily to do upper GI's and barium enemas and those sorts of things.
The radiologists were more than happy to do this because they quickly, when I asked them what they thought about this, they said, you know, I've been one of them.
I've been doing upper GI's for 40 years and I can guarantee you the diaphragm doesn't move on its own and I'll be glad to work with you on this study and one other that joined in with us.
And so it was after some persuasion that we were able to get the hospital to let us use the facilities because in the days of malpractice they worry about the extra radiation from fluoroscopy and those sort of things.
And Larry Sousa was kind enough to be one of our volunteers and I think he's still healthy so he didn't get too much radiation when he had the fluoroscopy.
But they weren't too happy about it at first, having a bunch of trumpet players playing double high C's in the radiology department.
So I threatened to take all my work to the next town and they finally decided that that would probably not be necessary.
So they let us use the hospital. I don't think we'd get away with that today.
There's too many laws and too many liability concerns.
So we felt lucky to get this done at our hospital.
The first thing we did, just move your diaphragm and nothing happened.
It was impossible for the diaphragm to be moved voluntarily.
They were trying to think of moving the diaphragm but while we watched the screen nothing occurred.
So this added to our conclusion that the diaphragm was not a voluntary organ, couldn't be controlled voluntarily.
So we asked them to play an arpeggio at first from C in the staff to high C, C-E-G-C.
We noticed some really interesting things and our slides will show you what we're talking about.
The diaphragm, when a breath was taken in, flattened out.
And as they begin to squeeze to blow the air out, there was some shortening of the chest muscles and some tensing of the diaphragm as it still maintained its flattened position.
They continued to blow from C to E. At G, on the top of the staff, the diaphragm popped like this.
They went on up to the C above the staff and the diaphragm stayed right there in that popped up position.
Didn't push, didn't pop up more, nothing changed.
But they kept squeezing and moving more air out of the lungs and moving air.
When they relaxed, the diaphragm popped back down to its pre-resp inspiration situation, which is just slightly domed.
So this pretty much concluded our observation.
We were convinced that Arvin was really right.
I have my Arvins here someplace, but if somebody wants to look at one of the old Arvins,
Arvin in the first edition, one of the early editions, describes exactly this.
Franco Goldwyn came along and edited it and changed it to diaphragmatic.
And that is where it all began with the confusion in semantics.
So Arvin was really right about the muscles of the chest and the abdomen moving the air.
Let's take a look if we have enough darkness at the slides.
Kent, where are you?
If I can get over there, I'll do it.
Just turn your chairs if you want.
There you are.
Okay, I think you can hear me without the mic.
Basically, again, we're looking at the bone in the forearm and the back.
Okay.
There it is.
That's the diaphragm in all its glory.
Let's look at that.
I want you guys to take a good look at that.
Especially you doubting Thomas.
And I'd like to have all the inhalation therapists and physicians that are here
and want to question this, come up and look.
Because this is the diaphragm.
This came out of a cadaver.
One of our students here is the head of pathology at Harvard General Hospital.
He was trying to get this forming after one of the elections I gave
from one of the donors there who died.
And so you can see there's not very much in terms of the muscles of the chest.
This is where it attaches to the chest wall.
This is the hole where the esophagus and the trachea come on up through the diaphragm
from the esophagus and then through the aorta.
As you can see, there's some muscle attachments down here.
Look at this.
I want you to keep this firmly in mind when you're challenged by the people who don't understand.
Most of the people who don't understand are high-end students,
the people who've been certified smart
and really haven't had this haunting experience.
And I hate to have to debate these things.
It's a confrontation with these people.
But they get real emotional about it.
And students after these elections come up and say,
last ever election, if somebody challenged me
and they made me feel terrible and they said,
you are a dummy and this couldn't possibly be.
So when you go home, I want you to remember what this looked like.
How have you seen the diaphragm, later in the world,
I checked it out a lot of times.
The diaphragm separation and everything,
you can look at it recently.
The diaphragm was alive a day ago.
And you'll see what it looks like.
This is the diaphragm.
How have you seen it?
It doesn't have a lot of holes in it.
And how close is it going to be?
The rest is going to know your face.
Okay.
This is the diaphragm.
That great muscle that all the books say
you can hypertrophy by exercise,
that you can make the road, that you can develop,
and that you can improve your wind power by strengthening.
What do you think?
It looks like parts of the moon.
This is a picture with some light from below
so that we can see how translucent
is the light actually shining through.
Okay, now here's the diaphragm.
Dr. Meier, who did this for us,
is trying not to put this in an anatomical position
as it lies or sits.
So we're going to check that rest.
We're going to do it.
Have you seen the muscle there?
Anybody here seen the muscle?
Have you ever seen the diaphragm?
Anybody want to show me the muscle?
Have you seen anybody?
That's the natural position.
The pressures around it make it lie in that position.
The bottom line is it responds to the pressures around it.
The pressures around it, they rest and make it do this.
Yeah, I mean, I've got more contact with it.
I hope you see this better than I do.
Kind of fade it out.
This is really important.
Can you shoot back here?
You can see it.
Yeah, both are in the middle.
This is the front view.
This is the side view.
We checked the rest.
The diaphragm is right here in the front view.
There's a little bit of a ray-in like we were seeing earlier.
This is the side view plane.
Where there's inhalation, the lungs expand through the air.
The diaphragm flaps.
Same thing here.
The drone effect is being locked.
There's exhalation.
The lungs begin to reflect this way and this way.
The diaphragm is still flatted.
There's a taking of these peripheral muscles.
Forced exhalation.
We think that for most people it may be on the staff.
That kind of pressure.
It pops up.
That's where it's safe.
What we call fun exhalation.
That's the function of how hard you're going.
That's the function of the pressure changes around the diaphragm.
How much you're squeezing.
How much you're moving the air.
It's like the abdominal muscles.
All the muscles.
The muscles in the chest.
And the abdomen.
Where they get this idea of diaphragm and breathing in that
if you feel pressure coming out,
boy, don't necessarily apply that.
That's just what I say.
But if the abdomen is out here,
you've got further to prove those muscles that you can add to it.
That push.
You can turn down there if you're playing.
Some people are more rigid.
Yeah.
Some are very flexible in the diaphragm.
I mean, yeah.
And they're engaged in the stamina.
Yeah.
And some people can.
The vertebrae, they still function quite well.
I'll tell you what I think from having watched a lot of people
who are overweight.
They tend to stretch the abdominal muscles.
And if you can eventually get that out there,
then it's for people who are thin,
because the muscles have stayed rather long.
And they're absolutely different.
So that's why we don't put the emphasis on doing any of this.
It just messes up your whole train of thought.
That happens to you naturally, and that happens.
But the idea is that.
I'm putting this part of my abdomen.
But it isn't doing any of this in and out stuff
that I need to take a broke stick and make it stronger.
Okay?
Let's do the next part.
This is Larry.
He's actually in my office.
He's running a little conference.
He's working four hours a day.
Hi, Larry.
Hi, Bob.
How are you?
There's Larry.
Look how young Larry is.
At least I'm old.
Larry.
I know him.
The only thing I know for sure is the rest of them are dead.
And there's Tom.
Oh, he was right there.
Okay.
I miss this guy.
He was usually here every year,
and he was a part of the study.
Okay.
In addition to the diagram studies that we did,
I also did some flexibility studies
and pulmonary function studies
that parted back the stress test on the guy.
I wanted to see what kind of condition they were in overall.
I didn't even write up that as part of their study.
Okay.
Okay.
Just so you know how the thing works,
we won't go through each slide,
but that guy's right in front of a grid which we made.
Actually, this grid we used to study sports medicine functions.
We determined whatever angles and distances that he did.
Also, we're going to check the extremities
of different types of movements.
There's a little black thing.
That's not what you might wonder.
Yeah.
Yeah, no problem.
Anyway, so we can measure actually
how much the chest moves in each of the movements.
We can quantitate.
Okay.
Oh, these things are so bad.
I wish you could see.
Look at the neck muscles in here.
Can you see that?
Look at that.
What they're doing here is hold the gas tank wide open
and bring all the pressure that can be brought to bear
on the thorax.
Yeah.
I don't know if we can see the anatomy.
Hey, hey, hey.
Come on, man.
This was, I think, 1980.
I don't think you can see my eyes, though.
Okay.
I think it's going down a bit.
I can't see a big thing.
It's too dark in here.
It's a little better here.
You can see what's happening with the neck muscles.
Now, they're fighting.
This big muscle here is next to the clavicle of it.
Holding that clavicle up as it bears down
with the squeezing muscles.
All the muscles in the back of the neck are expanded.
Okay?
I'm sorry about the light.
You don't.
I know it feels bad.
You can't have the plane both left and right-handed.
It's not that much fun.
Okay.
Again, let's review what we see.
The diaphragm is forced to expiration.
Take a breath in.
It's flat.
Start to push.
It's tensed up a bit tighter.
Chest narrowed.
You can see the chest narrowed.
And when you do a vertical pression, it pops up.
Okay.
It's narrowed in the chest.
That's like Hennessy.
Okay.
You can start to see the neck muscles pulling things up
and the benching in.
You can press around the chest.
This is just an explanation of the same thing
that I always told you.
Keep going.
Keep going.
There's one right here.
Same thing.
Here's quad.
I'm amazed at the neck development.
This guy.
He was, uh,
educated early on.
Before the heart attack.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Keep going.
It's interesting to see where the noxious place in the body is.
That's another thing I wanted to do this day,
for this week.
Okay.
I think that's a good one.
I can see this going forward.
I know it was upset that it wasn't loud enough
the first time you went through it.
Put it down.
Yeah, we made you right down.
I was right after the dog.
Yeah.
It was interesting.
You know, this was the first time that we noticed
that there might be something
arrived upon us
a little bit of a warning.
I was with the nire.
He said to me one time
when I went to take my lesson today,
do you think there's a thing I have in my chest
that seems to be back before the nire?
I said, well, when did you get it?
Just when I carried my suitcase
in the airport.
Yeah.
I think you're going to have to know
when I got this place to go with.
You go through as Washington.
I thought I'd better not go.
I'm down in San Francisco.
So we went home to Los Angeles
and went on into Washington
to get back after the lecture
ahead of this heart attack
in the airport experience.
Same thing.
You can see this a little better.
The diaphragm's relaxed on the far left.
There's no shake.
I breathe a breath in and it flattens out.
And the chest begins to tense.
There's this side view.
And then the diaphragm pops.
Critical pressures are there.
So that has to do with bonding
and it has to do with practice.
Otherwise, you can pull air and pop it
with a lot of pressure.
Volume and pressure are relative.
The more volume you have,
the more pressure you have.
But if you don't have any pressure
to contain anything,
you don't have something to contain the volume.
You don't have the pressure.
The muscles contain the volume.
The more air you can get in,
the more pressure you can develop
with the strength that you have
around that volume.
Pressure is a function of containment
and bonding.
Pressure and volume,
you can have a full breath
and go for a balance.
What he's talking about,
there's some pretty fast
with a low volume.
I think that has to do with
your ability to generate that volume.
Now, this is interesting.
They studied the sneeze.
And the sneeze moved the air
about five hundred and sixty percent.
If we could generate that much movement.
And when we sneeze,
I mean, not only the sneeze,
but you get that kind of compression.
I don't know, really.
Something like that.
Okay, let's keep moving.
Wait a minute.
This is the almighty diaphragm again.
I want you to look at that.
It's good luck to say I have seen
the diaphragm.
This is a human diaphragm.
Now I believe.
Brothers and sisters.
Okay.
Let's see.
If we have time,
I'll dissect this out.
I haven't seen it yet.
I know you guys have been on.
Since you guys have all been on a low protein vegetarian diet,
I brought you some meat.
Any of you that eat organs, that is.
Somebody put their Pepsi can in here.
Caffeine free.
We got some real class acts in this room.
Okay.
I'm going to put this on
just because I want to stay clean.
Yeah, you can take all that off.
Do you want to, Tom?
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Every day when I put these gloves on,
I usually pop one or two.
And I'm often reminded these are the same guys
that make condoms.
And I think, Japers, if this is what's protecting us
from AIDS, we're in real trouble.
Because they break
real easily.
Okay.
I might mention I'm really glad to be
here at La Sierra.
They're so helpful with the biology department
right across the street.
They obtain these samples for us
and they get everything ready for us
and make it a lot easier than when I used to have to
drag this thing on ice
to La Honda
up in the San Francisco Mountains
in a YMCA camp.
You know, I bet we're going to have to have them kind of get around it.
So that's a good idea.
Thanks. Yeah.
Okay.
Huh?
Yeah.
This isn't really the way it goes.
This is a sheep preparation.
And
the lungs look pretty
nice.
They're nice and pink.
Really.
This is a sheep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you guys would like me to turn this in down there
for a meal tonight.
This is the trachea.
The top of the respiratory
system there comes in down through the
trachea into the bronchial
tree into the lungs.
They've left me a little bit of the diaphragm.
You can see
here, you want to
see what
you can see from back here.
Here's how it attaches to the chest wall.
This muscle is attached to the outside.
But here's
the diaphragm.
This is part of the diaphragm, can you?
Those of you that have doubting thomas's
to convince Eric, you need to get some pictures
for this thing.
Okay, I'll spread that out.
See what we've got over here.
This is the heart.
The diaphragm
contains
muscles at its periphery
that attach it to the skeleton.
The misnomer
comes when they try to add the abdominal
musculature to the diaphragm.
That's what they all want to say. They all want to make
the abdominal movement
part of the diaphragm because
what they really mean is that that abdominal movement
moves the diaphragm.
But it isn't part of the diaphragm. It's not
the diaphragm itself.
It's a misnomer. It's semantics
that we're debating because everybody
really is agreeing
when you come right down to it.
The muscles moving out, does it affect
that membrane?
It affects the pressures around the membrane
and thereby moves
it, but it doesn't affect it
directly. It's not connected to
it.
Let's see if this one gets any better.
I know it gets bloodier.
Okay, this is even better.
Yeah, we've got quite a bit of diaphragm here.
You can see how it resembles
what we have in the picture
because it's got
those little striations
of a little bit of muscle in it.
You can almost see through that, can't you?
Let's see if I can get you a better side.
Come and get pictures of those of you who want them
because you need to have this
to prove your point.
Come up closer, Chris, if you want.
Just get right up on top of it
and take a look at it.
Let's see if we get a little bit better view of it.
Yeah, here's a big
piece of it here. You know what we ought to do
is I ought to
cut it up in little pieces and let you take
pieces home with you.
I wonder if they get through the airport
with this.
Yeah, we had a
burning of the diaphragm at the campfire
one year.
You know, if we could get the light behind that,
it might show through it.
What do you think?
How's that?
Not much difference.
Okay, does anybody come and take a look
if you want to get close?
You can even take your
put on some gloves and touch it.
I don't want anybody to be able to say
to you
to make you confused.
That's the diaphragm
right there.
So you take it
and dissect it yourself.
You can say I dissected
the diaphragm.
Here, get some gloves on. Here, take this.
Yeah, that's the muscle fibers
that are at the periphery
of the diaphragm.
These little strided
lines, you'll see
a little bit of
fiber in it. Occasionally, in some
human diaphragms, you'll see a little bit of
musculature.
Yeah, look at that.
It's really impressive, isn't it?
Go work on your diaphragm.
I think you ought to
look at this like an expert.
Here, take these.
That's it.
No, you've got to have it in there to transfer
the pressures, otherwise you'd have
random movements of the bowel
and the liver.
Yeah, that's why I keep calling
it a transducer. It changes
pressure.
Mechanical movement into pressure.
Muscle.
The muscles are responsible, yeah.
That's the attachment to the
wall of the...
It doesn't equalize it.
It transfers pressures from abdomen
to thorax and back and forth.
Not too far off. That's why I choose
this sheet. It's not too far.
Here.
Well, I don't know. This has kind of been split up.
Let's see if we can... Yeah.
Yeah, see, look at this.
You can really see
it's just like paper-thin
there. Look at that.
Not very impressive, is it?
We sent this research into the ITG
and they wouldn't publish it.
Why? Because they...
Because it's contra-manded what they
want to think, what they want to believe.
Let me get a good corner here.
Let's see if we can get that real translucent spot.
It's right under here.
Here's where you need to be.
Over here?
Yeah.
Hold this a little bit.
It's like in three weeks.
It's just twisted.
I think...
How does it separate?
See how it's like in three sections?
Yeah, it's just the way they dissected
it out with the sheet.
You know, I always like to,
if I have the time to go to the slaughterhouse
and tell them, you know,
go right around the thorax and get the whole thing out.
But, you know, here I just had to take
what they get us.
So Larry, it seems that what the problem is
when people communicate about breathing
is they tell you to push down here
or push here instead of
the emphasis up here. Is that correct?
The emphasis needs to be strengthening
and coordinating all those muscles to squeeze
like a tube of toothpaste.
Instead of saying develop here,
that's the problem.
And they think that developing the
abdominal muscles is the diaphragm.
That's the best analogy you can get there.
That's good for me.
Yeah, it's the tube of toothpaste.
That's right. And it helps you move the air.
The abdominal muscles
definitely help you move air.
There's no question about it.
But they're not the diaphragm.
They're not actually as important as the muscles
in the back or the sides here.
All of it's important.
But the upper chest
development is probably the most important.
What about being as thin as it is like that
or with that great amount of pressure
you can put on it?
I don't know.
People herniate their diaphragms
and get in real trouble.
They get hiatal hernias
where they get stretching
of that hole where the
esophagus comes up through
and the stomach will slip up through
and it will perforate.
Some babies are born with perforated
diaphragms.
Have to go in and sew it up.
I've done it many times.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anybody want to look at the heart?
Let's see if we can...
Yeah, they cut it open.
This is a valve here.
This is, let's see, left atrium
left ventricle.
So that's a
mitral valve. See how these little leaflets
hold the little parachute-like
tendons? They're called cordy tendons.
They hold the valves
and they open and shut
the valve like a parachute cord.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Yeah.
Just amazing that it works like it does.
Yeah, actually
let me see if I can find
coronary arteries on this
thing. They're pretty inlaid
with fat.
One year I dissected them all out.
Yeah.
Let me see.
Rooted the aorta.
It's different than a human
being.
Yeah. They're deep in the
muscle. Real deep. You can't really
get a good look at it.
That's a vein.
Yeah. Okay.
Anybody else want to
touch and feel?
Yeah.
This is love.
I don't smell it.
Do you smell it?
They just never responded.
Yeah, I'd love to give this lecture to the
ITG.
That's a top.