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Breathing

Breathing
Disclaimer: I am not trying to reconstruct anyone’s breathing with this post. I am just offering a few of my thoughts that I feel are not commonly expressed in typical breath training. These are just ideas that I have picked up along the way that I feel have helped my students a lot and are things that they have never heard.
The first is where your air is going inside of your body. You will hear a lot of explanations saying to “breathe into your stomach” so that your stomach expands. This is a great concept, however...your lungs are behind your stomach/other organs and while yes, the stomach does expand, if you change your thinking to filling up your lower back, I have noticed less physical stress becomes incorporated. By placing your palms into the sides of your lower back and aiming your air into your palms, you will learn you to take deeper breaths more easily in a relaxed manner.

You will often hear comments about keeping your air column deep and wide when the air is entering so that you can get the air in as fast as possible. This is great advice, but if we take it one step further and add a word to your inhalation, we can create a more relaxed entry of air. When you inhale, say the word “how.” This begins with a nice and open passage for the air to move through and ends with the mouth in a shape that gets us closer to being ready to play. You can pace this type of inhalation over however much time you need. You could also change the pitch of the breath to better match your starting note to create better accuracy. When you exhale to begin your attack, use the word “too” for the easiest start. Therefore, the breath becomes a “how too” breath.

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