Why Your Breathing Exercises Aren't Working (And What to Do Instead)

I don't do breathing exercises every single day. I don't obsess over PRI patterns, and I definitely don't care about being perfectly neutral all the time. I simply use breathing drills when I need them — sort of like tools in a toolbox.

And I've never been more pain-free, resilient, and stronger than I am right now.

That wasn't always the case. I spent seven years stuck in chronic pain, obsessing over posture, mobility, breathing drills, and biomechanics trying to fix myself. I tried PRI, Functional Patterns, FRC, Egoscue — you name it. And while breathing exercises were part of what eventually helped me, they only worked once I stopped making the same mistakes I see people making every single day.

So here are the five biggest reasons breathing exercises might not be fixing your pain, your asymmetries, or your mobility — and what to actually do about each one.

Prefer to watch? I break down all five mistakes in the full video above

1. You're Treating the Drill Like a Workout

Breathing drills are supposed to reduce tension. That muscle knot, that weird tension between your shoulder blades — they're meant to help your body relax into a new position, not fight its way there.

But a lot of people treat them like a max-effort gym set. Squeezing everything as hard as they can, crunching their abs, clenching their hamstrings, holding on for dear life, and wondering why they don't feel better.

I know because that's exactly what I was doing.

When I first started doing things like the 90/90 hip lift, I attacked it like a gym bro. I thought if I just tried super hard with every single breath, I'd probably get more out of it. So I was overly crunching my abs, driving through my feet too hard, squeezing my hamstrings and glutes until they were practically cramping — turning what was supposed to be a down-regulation drill into some sort of max-effort ab exercise.

Classic gym mindset. But I was fighting fire with fire.

The whole point of breathing drills is to show your body it can let go. It can calm down into positions it normally guards against — not force itself there with even more tension. Once I stopped trying so hard, I actually started getting more out of them. Better mobility, less guarding, less pain.

If your breathing exercises feel like a fight — you're holding tons of tension, your muscles are sore afterward — you're probably missing the point.

2. You're Not Doing Anything With the New Mobility

A breathing drill can absolutely create a window of less pain and more mobility. But if you're not using that new range of motion, your body has no reason to keep it.

So you feel better for a few minutes, maybe even a few hours, and then you go right back to your old patterns. Not because the drill was bad, but because you never taught your body how to own that mobility.

There was a period where I thought I needed to get perfectly neutral, fix all my asymmetries, and restore full mobility before I was allowed to even touch a weight again. So I kept kicking the can down the road — more drills, more resets, more theory. And it got me nowhere. My pain was still there. My mobility wasn't sticking. I felt completely dependent on breathing drills.

What finally changed things was adding strength back into my weekly routine.

I started taking the positions and motions I was unlocking with breathing work and actually loading them. Isometrics, hamstring work, and eventually bigger lifts like squats and deadlifts — all of it teaching my body that these new positions are safe, that it can handle force here.

Breathing was opening the door. Strength was teaching my body how to actually live there.

A great example: the 90/90 hip lift was helping me control my anterior pelvic tilt. But I'd walk around or be on the training floor for hours and just slide right back into the old pattern. It wasn't until I started loading Nordic isometric holds that things really clicked and that pelvis neutrality actually stuck. That eventually led to me resolving hip impingement symptoms I'd been dealing with for years.

3. You're Chasing Patterns Instead of Treating Yourself as an Individual

This is where a lot of people get lost. They hear a bunch of acronyms. They get told they're a PEC pattern, a right BC, a left AIC, or whatever else the internet is diagnosing them with. And suddenly they stop looking at themselves as a person and start treating themselves like a category.

Patterns are useful. They help describe what we're seeing and organize a complex system like the human body. But they are not who you are.

When I first got introduced to this stuff, I was told I needed to get out of a "lefty," which eventually turned into a "pathopc" because they didn't quite know what to do with me. I went all in — chasing the idea, going down rabbit holes, looking at everything through that pattern lens. And in the process, I stopped paying attention to what was actually going on with me: my specific hip limitations, my torso rotation, my compensations, my training history, my injury history, and my actual goals.

A pattern label doesn't tell you that I was a baseball player since age five or that I ran hurdles for years and only led with my right leg. I'd built a body around very specific adaptations — and no acronym captured that.

Once I stopped trying to force myself into a rehab archetype and started treating myself as an individual, things got way more clear. The breathing drills became more useful — not as some end-all-be-all to fix a specific pattern, but as a plug-and-play tool for specific limitations I actually had.

4. You're Not Matching the Drills to Your Actual Mobility

A lot of people are doing the right exercise on paper but doing it with the wrong body.

They'll do a 90/90 hip lift because everyone says it's the move for anything PRI-related. But the second they get into position, they're hiking a hip, arching their back, their knee is twisting in, ribs are flaring — some compensation pattern is running the show. At that point, you're not really doing the exercise. You're just doing your compensation pattern inside that exercise.

I did this for years. I was doing the classic moves — 90/90 hip lift, adductor pullback, right glute max — and I wasn't getting results. I'd feel a little better, but the hip internal rotation improvements wouldn't stick. No real progress. That's because I wasn't asking whether I could actually perform the movements without compensation. And honestly, even a lot of practitioners can't spot when you're compensating during those exercises.

So I changed how I did my mobility testing. Instead of forcing end-range and telling myself "yeah, I've got it," I started stopping the test whenever I saw compensation show up. If my hips started hiking at 45 degrees, that became my actual starting point.

Then I matched the drills to my usable range of motion — the range before the compensations kicked in. And that's when things actually started to change. My pain reduced significantly because the exercises were finally meeting me where I was, instead of feeding into the exact strategies I was trying to get away from.

If you're doing a drill but clearly compensating through it, or you're not seeing actual improvement on your mobility tests after the exercise, the drill is either too advanced for where you're at right now, or you need a more specific exercise for your current limitations.

5. The Problem Isn't Muscle Tension

This is the one a lot of people don't want to hear. But sometimes the issue just isn't a muscle tension problem.

Sometimes it's connective tissue, scar tissue, post-surgical changes, long-standing tissue adaptations, or even how your skeleton is shaped. Think: functional scoliosis versus structural scoliosis. These things aren't going to magically melt away because you got your nervous system to relax for two minutes.

I recently worked with a client who was seriously lacking shoulder external rotation. We tried breathing drills, soft tissue work, the cross ball, foam roller — everything. Nothing was changing. When we shifted to direct loading with isometric work (more of an FRC pails-and-rails approach), that actually helped. Much more than any breathing drill.

Why? Because he'd had multiple surgeries on that shoulder and a ton of scar tissue. His surgeon had literally told him, "I tightened that guy up to make sure you don't have problems in the future." No matter how much we relaxed the muscles, the tissue itself wasn't going to give us what we wanted. He needed more time, more loading, the right kinds of stress to stimulate change in the connective tissue — not more relaxation.

Breathing drills aren't weak or bad. They're just very specific to neurological adaptations and reducing muscle tension. When the issue lives elsewhere, you need a different tool.

The Bottom Line: Breathing Exercises Are a Starting Point, Not the Destination

I still use breathing exercises. I use them essentially every day with clients, and I think they can be incredibly helpful for improving mobility, posture, and reducing chronic pain.

But they're not the destination. They're the starting point — what helps create space, reduce tension, and give you access to new motion. After that, you have to do something with it. Load it, strengthen it, use it in real life. That's how your body builds trust in new movement patterns and keeps the improvements for the long term.

If you've been doing breathing drills for months or years and you're still stuck, the drill probably isn't the problem. How you're using it — or what you're doing after it — might be.

Ready to Stop Spinning Your Wheels?

If any of this sounds familiar and you want help figuring out what's actually going on with your body, I offer a free posture and mobility assessment where we can talk through your specific situation and see if working together makes sense.

You can also check out my free posture and mobility guide for help spotting compensations and finding exercises that actually fit your body right now.

And if you're ready for a structured training program that bridges the gap between rehab and real strength, check out the WaughFit App.

This post is based on my YouTube video "Why Your Breathing Exercises Aren't Working." Watch the full breakdown above or on my YouTube channel.