Seven Diaphragms and Pressure Gradients

Your body has seven major diaphragms that create different pressure zones throughout your system: your pelvic floor, breathing diaphragm, thoracic inlet (where your first rib lives), vocal diaphragm, soft palate, cranial base, and tentorium cerebelli. Think of them like a series of flexible floors in a building, each one helping to maintain different air and fluid pressures. These diaphragms work as a team to keep everything flowing properly - from lymph drainage to the wave-like motions that move food through your digestive system. When one diaphragm gets stuck or chronically tight, the pressure relationships throughout your whole system get thrown off. The thoracic inlet diaphragm is especially important because it sits between your head and torso, affecting both how you breathe and how blood flows to your arms. When pressure gradients get disrupted, you can end up with symptoms that seem totally unrelated to breathing - poor lymph drainage, digestive problems, breathing troubles, or circulation issues. When you restore coordinated diaphragm function, you often fix symptoms that seemed completely unrelated to breathing, because pressure relationships affect every fluid system in your body—and your body is, you know, fluid. Your fascial network prefers normalized pressure gradients and this may help ease restrictions once diaphragm coordination improves because pressure relationships affect every fluid system in your body.