Pilates key principles: Breathing

Breathing, or the way you breathe is an important part of the development of your Pilates practice.

As a Pilates teacher I meet lots of clients, all at different stages of their Pilates journey. When your journey starts, your focus is on core activation and generally just getting through a lesson trying to understand and translate the instructions from your teacher into movement.

Once your core strength begins to develop and all your concentration is not used up in surviving your Pilates class, it is time to start thinking about your breathing. In Pilates we use a technique called lateral breathing. When you take in a breath to power movement we ask that you breathe into your ribs raising your chest up and out. But why? To take a large breath in you can either breathe into your tummy, or breathe into your ribs expanding them up and out. It is very difficult (possibly impossible) to breathe into your tummy and engage your core muscles at the same time, therefore we use lateral breathing.

In my classes I teach abdominal muscle activation (or core engagement) on the out breath (you can find a reminder on How to engage your core). Over the next few weeks and months we will be developing our use of our breathing, practicing keeping the core activated not only on the out breath, but also as we breathe in. As our Pilates skill improves and we start to face more challenging exercises, we need to use every tool we have. Including a good breathing pattern. As soon as we start to hold our breath or our breathing becomes shallow (usually because things are hard) we are making the movement harder because we are not using the power from our breath. In class we will be looking at the way we can use breathing to help establish a pattern or rhythm to an exercise. We will be looking at techniques we can use to encourage the use of breathing, like encouraging exhalation during the phase of an exercise that we find hardest.

For most Pilates exercises that we regularly use today Joseph Pilates never set a breathing pattern. However for all the reasons above a good breathing pattern will improve your Pilates practice and take you into the next stage of your Pilates journey.

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