Taking a Breath
Posing with my guitar in Loretto, PA, 1999.
In addition to my writing, video production and working out, I also am a musician. I sing, play guitar and penny whistle in a Celtic band. There are songs we do in my band (Banna) that involve me singing and then playing whistle during my “breaks”. It takes a lot of breath control. Sometimes I wonder why I do that to myself, but it does add an extra element of challenge to performing.
Breathing is at the heart of everything we do. Not exactly a newsflash, that. But proper breathing can change how we do everything. If I hadn’t learned how to control my breathing, I doubt I’d be singing half the songs we perform. However, my path to good breathing was convoluted to say the least.
My first singing lessons were during senior year of high school. I found a private teacher, and he was the first person to try to show me how to breath properly so I could sing better. The general idea of “good breath = better singing” lodged in my brain somewhere, but I don’t think I actually practiced anything he taught me.
Around this time I started playing guitar and singing at the same time. I was all hunched over and forcing everything through sheer stubbornness, I think. In college I took more singing lessons, and again started to understand that maybe I ought to really figure this out. I worked on my posture and really tried to focus on breathing from my diaphragm instead of my chest.
I performed in musicals throughout college, and one in particular I had to hit a high note and hold it for several measures. I would almost pass out every time I did it, but I really couldn’t figure out why.
So, I took some of the lessons out into the world, but mostly just kept doing what I was doing. Forcing my breath out to help me sing. There was nothing gentle about it, I had developed some strong lungs and just used the muscles to get air out.
And then I joined the tae kwon do school and finally got a real lesson in how to breathe. Breath is important because control of breath means control of the body. Proper breathing allows you to absorb hits, and also focuses your own attacks. But more importantly it allows you to outlast an opponent and recover quickly.
What I heard from several teachers was to look at how a baby breathes - belly rising, not chest. Babies instinctively breath with their diaphragms and it’s not until we get older that we forget how to do that.
Master Kwon had a simple technique to get us to breathe properly: we had to hold a piece of paper between our lips and then start training, If the paper fell out, it was pushups for everyone. Breathing through the nose is hard at first, but becomes more natural the more you do it. And the incentive of not having to do pushups really helped us all adapt to this way of breathing.
Recovery is of major importance to top-level athletes. I don’t mean recovery from an injury (though that is also important) but rather recovery during a match. Let’s say there are two athletes where everything else is equal: speed, strength, ability. But one has learned better breathing techniques. If they both come to the sideline after three minutes of exertion, the one with the better breathing technique will be ready to go back in the game in a matter of seconds. The other might take a minute or two to recover.
I am fortunate in that the disciplines of vocal training and athletics focus on breathing in different ways, so I’ve been able to learn more about it than I would have just doing one or the other. I know I’m not perfect at it, and still have much to learn. My yoga practice over the past several months has helped me refocus on breathing and I hope that will help me as ultimate starts back up later this year.
