I get a little twitchy when I hear folx in the voice world declare that we are all born as breathing experts. Those same people are often heard telling us that babies offer us the finest example of good breathing.

Infants have ribcages that are more triangular in shape and bones that are quite soft. Their ribs are more horizontal than an adults and their diaphragms have a different function than in an adult body. Their little bodies work so much more than ours to breathe and they breathe at a much higher rate. As babies grow into children their breathing changes as the intercostal and diaphragm muscles shift their roles. 

I might amend the ‘babies are breathing experts and we should all breathe like babies’ statement to say this: we are born as experts in survival. We are designed to do what it takes to survive and our bodies are quite adaptable to make that happen. That means that as an autonomic function in the body, breathing will go on for as long as we are alive, no matter what.

But, does that mean our breathing skills make us an expert? Nope and nope. Our breathing skills may, at best, make us a survival specialist.

The most primal purpose of breath is the delivery of oxygen on a cellular level (survival). The thoracic cavity is built out of flexible walls that allow us to assume different shapes – shoulders can rise, ribs can rotate and raise, the diaphragm can flatten. Our abdominal cavity also has some flexibility too as our belly can distend and we can push pressure into the back wall as well. The pelvic floor can also respond to the load of the breath with a shape change.

Our body has the ability to breathe in so many different ways to enable us to breathe while in many different positions, under many different conditions.

The question of how expert we are at it comes into play when we think about what happens when we’ve assumed only a few positions over the course of the day, month after month, and year after year. Our breathing patterns shape us from the inside out.

The way our body changes shape when we breathe is in response to the ways we move (and haven’t moved). We also have to understand the ways in which the breath is impacted by the big T (meaning major) and little t (meaning less major) traumas we have experienced in life.

I would argue that both position and emotion can push us farther into survival breathing and limit the true breadth of our breathing options.

The general sedentarism of our lives (in other words, we sit more than we move) and the lack of variety of shapes we put our bodies in means we have a limited ability to change shape well and that translates to a breath that isn’t as expert as we might like.

At this point you might be wondering, but I’m a singer, I exchange high volumes of air often, doesn’t that make me an expert? The answer is no. You might be breathing for singing into a body that has compensations that keep it from breathing as easily as it can. Also breathing for singing is repetitive and therefore limiting to our bodies that thrive on variety.

As an example of this think about twisting the body.

When we twist the body like this many people will report that it feels like it is hard to take an easy breath. It feels harder because we don’t twist in static and active ways much in our every day and we are lacking in suppleness in the torso. The volume of air you exchange while singing or running won’t necessarily help you in a twist. What will help make the breath less constricted in a twist is to do more twisting in a variety of ways in our every day. Which will help you when you are cast in a production that requires you to twist around and sing a long demanding phrase in a position that isn’t just park and bark.

Because we are survival specialists, and we need to exchange high volumes of air when we sing means our bodies will find a way of doing that through adaptation, but that doesn’t mean we are doing it particularly well.

How can we tell if we’re a survival specialist breather? We see through the suppleness of the torso. A few examples of things we can look for:

• Is there movement of the ribcage over 3 dimensions?  When we lack good movement in one direction or more, we’ve got a place to improve. 
• Does the abdomen have patterns of bracing and resting tension – when there’s a big set on the onset of breath, we’ve got a place to improve. 
• What is the pelvic floor doing? – When we leak when we sing high notes, or can feel no connection to the breath or our sound, we’ve got a place to improve. 
• Can we feel an increase in pressure in the back body either around the kidneys or higher up near the shoulder? If we can’t we’ve got a place to improve.
• Are we living with low back pain or even shoulder pain? Those are strong indicators that we could improve our breathing patterns.

So, how do we become expert breathers? We don’t do it by focusing on breath work alone.

First, We need to understand the state of our nervous system and find ways to address the traumas we’ve experienced. The type of trauma and the person you are will require your own unique set of skills to address it. It might include talk therapy, movement of some kind, energy work, meditation and even some focused breath work.

We also need to be creating diverse shapes with our bodies over the course of every day. In particular we need to be doing more activities that challenge our upper bodies by changing and adding load. I like to do some focused, intentional breath work before moving to help set my body up for success. I find people’s bodies respond well when we use external props like soft(ish) balls to increase our ability to feel the breath and ‘push’ it where we need it to go.

A few ideas to get your started:

1. Sit in a chair and place a soft, coregeous style ball, or pillow, under your front ribs and fold over it. Breathe, feeling air pushed into the back body.
2. Hang from a pull-up bar. You can keep your feet on the ground, but get used to supporting more of your body weight in your arms by bending your knees.
3. Walk while holding something heavy in your arms. As anyone who has paced the floor while holding a 6 pound newborn will tell you, this can be surprisingly challenging! You may want to start with a shorter distance and a lighter weight – walk around the block holding your New Grove Dictionary.
4. Do a move like a wood chopper while holding a medicine ball (or your New Grove!). Click here to see what this looks like if you aren’t sure. You get twist and load with this move.

I’m sorry to say I don’t think you were born a breathing expert. BUT, you were born with a body that is meant to move, move more and move well. That means you can start today to move in ways that ask more of the way you create different shapes with your body, breathing while your body is in a variety of configurations under a variety of different circumstances. That will translate to more suppleness in your torso and more expertise in your breathing.