Over the next few Wednesdays, I am going to be writing about some Pilates principles. They are, of course, central to Pilates practice, but they apply to movement generally. The first principle is a simple one: breathing.
We are all breathing (at least I hope so! Reading after death is impressive…). Becoming conscious of how and when we breathe, however, can change how we feel and how we move.
A lot of us think that when we breathe in, the front of our body expands. We know our chests lift and our abdomens fill. This is, of course, true, but it’s not the whole picture. In fact, our whole torso, front, back, and sides, expands when we inhale. Depending on how mobile the joints are in our spines and ribs, the expansion can be large or small. Improving the mobility of joints gives us flexibility in our breathing.
That flexibility in breathing in turn facilitates our other movement. If we have, for example, the ability to breathe into the sides of our body, side-bending movements become easier. When we are bent forward, we can use the expansiveness of our backs to give us a way to get breath into our bodies and we can use the exhale to increase our ability to flex our spines forward.
Pilates offers a number of opinions on the best way to breathe for different kinds of movement. Some options make the movements easier and some challenge us more deeply. At first, thinking about how and when to breathe while doing new exercises can be one thing too many, so it is absolutely all right to breathe any way that works. We can experiment and refine later.
It can be fun, though, to try different kinds of breathing in exercises we already know well. For example, we can try breathing in during the lowering phase of pushups and breathing out in the raising phase. Then we can try the other way around and see what happens. I would love to hear what folks discover!
Bottom line: keep breathing.
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