Your style of breathing reflects everything you have experienced and engaged in since birth—it is as unique to you as the sound of your voice. This column will discuss the ways your breathing apparatus supports your singing, help you take inventory of physical habits and other conditions that impact your breathing, and offer resources to bring your breathing habits into closer alignment with the demands of your vocal technique.
Breathing for Singing
Let’s first examine the roles that breathing plays in singing and the physical attributes and coordination required to carry them out.
Where breathing is concerned, singers must cultivate proficiency in three main areas:
• Inhaling—the ability to take in a desired quantity of air swiftly and silently.
• Exhaling—the ability to release and regulate airflow with adequate skill to elicit and sustain vocal fold vibration at all pitches and dynamic levels for a specified duration.
• At all times—the ability to metabolize oxygen efficiently enough to sustain moderate physical activity throughout performances.
Inspiration
While singers tend to focus only on the breath’s role in generating sound while exhaling, proficiency in all three of these areas is vital for your technique.
The ability to breathe fully, swiftly, and silently requires good coordination and range of motion in the muscles of both diaphragmatic and costal respiration, supported by excellent alignment as well as an absence of resistance in the airways. The diaphragm must be able to contract and descend freely. The muscles acting on the sternum, ribs, and thoracic spine must facilitate full expansion of the lungs. The shoulders should not elevate. The throat must be open and relaxed.
Breath Release and Regulation
Free singing relies on a generous, continuous stream of airflow supplied at an optimal level of pressure. While there are different schools of thought on how to best generate these conditions, they all involve the same physical components. The diaphragm must be free to relax and ascend. The upper torso must maintain good alignment, with the sternum remaining elevated throughout the exhalation. The ribs should continue to expand rather than squeeze air out. The core musculature must provide stability for the entire mechanism. Whatever strategy you employ to optimize and regulate breath, it must not cause the larynx to elevate or the vocal folds to over-adduct.
Oxygen Consumption
Your respiratory system’s primary responsibility is delivering oxygen to your body, and singing places additional demands on it. Good cardiorespiratory fitness is therefore essential for singing, particularly when stage movement is involved. Excellent oxygen consumption is also necessary for sustaining long phrases because it is the need for oxygen rather than a low level of remaining air in your lungs that causes you to feel like you’ve run out of breath.
Assessing Your Breathing
How proficient are you in the skills, coordination, and stamina described above? If you’re like most singers, you’re much better at some than you are at others.
One theme that I’ll visit with some frequency in this column is the wide range of demands placed on your chosen instrument. Your style of breathing develops in response to all of these demands, not just the ones required for singing. Many things contribute to your breathing habits, including the level and type of athletic activity you’ve engaged in over the years, the need to regulate the flow and intensity of your emotions, and health issues.
Physical Activity
Your breathing develops not only in response to how active you are but also to the kind of physical activities you engage in.
Different sports cultivate different breathing styles, most of which offer both advantages and disadvantages for singing. Swimmers learn to inhale swiftly and release their breath slowly. Endurance runners and cyclists develop a rhythmic cycle of inhalation and exhalation. Sports involving explosive movements, like tennis and baseball, often incorporate forceful exhalations when it’s time to hit or throw the ball. Other sports like boxing or archery require you to hold your breath at key moments, like bracing for impact or taking aim.
I’m not advocating for or against any of these sports—I’m just asking you to investigate the way that your breathing has been influenced by the things you do. If you enjoy swimming, you may be very good at inhaling quickly but may find it difficult to release your breath fully. If you’re a tennis player, you may be inclined to exhale forcefully on your onsets. The heightened breathing activity required for most sports tends to influence your default breathing style, so it’s important to examine any habits you may have developed to ensure that they do not negatively impact your breathing for singing.
Wherever you are on the spectrum from very active to relatively sedentary, I recommend that you have your oxygen consumption (VO2 max; see figure) assessed regularly by a doctor or a qualified fitness professional. If you find that your technique becomes less efficient when you’re required to perform complex stage movement or you feel like you’re running out of breath at the end of long phrases, it’s quite possibly your level of cardiorespiratory fitness that needs improvement, not your vocal technique.
Emotional Regulation
Have you ever spontaneously burst into tears or laughter in the middle of a voice lesson or practice session for no apparent reason? It’s probably because the way you were using your breath freed up some physical tension that was chronically limiting movement and expression.
Breathing is a crucial means of regulating your emotions. When breathing is full and expansive, you experience physical sensations and emotions fully and expansively as well. When your physical sensations and emotions become intolerably strong, shutting down your breathing will dial back the intensity.
This is true for both pleasant and unpleasant sensations and emotions. We tend to think that only the unpleasant ones can become intolerably strong, but think about it: if you find yourself moved to laughter in situations where it would be considered inappropriate or realize that you’re excited by something you think you’re supposed to find repellent, you may shut down your breathing to restore a sense of self-control. If you habitually do this, it creates chronic tension in the muscles of respiration, and full mobility needs to be restored to these muscles in order to optimize your breathing for singing. I would argue that even the healthiest of you needs some rehabilitation in this area, because in our culture even the most trauma-free childhood still involves many years of having to sit still and be quiet in elementary school classrooms when what you really want to do is run around and yell.
F. Matthias Alexander, the creator of the Alexander Technique, emphasized balancing our dual abilities of volition and inhibition. He spoke eloquently about how relatively bad we are at cultivating healthy powers of inhibition—the ability to experience an impulse and then choose not to act on it, without judging yourself for having the impulse in the first place and habitually restricting your own movement to prevent yourself from acting on it.
Habitually restricting movement and breathing in this way will compromise full range of motion in your muscles of respiration. Fortunately, it is possible to regain full mobility and flexibility in these muscles. Various forms of exercise and bodywork can greatly accelerate this process.
Health History
If you have a history of asthma, pneumonia, or other respiratory disease, this may continue to influence your breathing style even if your symptoms vanished or became well managed years ago. Respiratory disease often instills a habit of taking shallow, quick, frequent breaths with an emphasis on costal rather than diaphragmatic breathing. If your teacher has been admonishing you to work on “low” breathing but you’re not making much progress, it may be that you are experiencing the residual effects of an old respiratory problem. See a doctor for a lung function test and some exercises to restore your full breathing capacity.
Other Common Habits
In my studio over the years, I’ve observed quite a variety of unconscious physical habits that impact breathing. In most cases, becoming aware of these habits is enough to begin alleviating them:
• Continually sucking the stomach in. While it’s important for singers to have a strong core and good alignment, a relaxed belly is necessary for full breathing.
• Habitually retracting the tongue on inhalation. I have no idea how this one develops—I just know that I’ve observed it with some frequency. You do not need your tongue’s help to inhale, so make sure you’re not tightening it up when you breathe.
• The swift, shallow, noisy, rhythmic inhalation that often develops in young choristers. Singers do this because they want to make sure to come in on time and breathe with the rest of their section. Don’t let this habit influence your solo singing—you probably shouldn’t be doing it in choral singing, either.
Also, bear in mind that in natural, healthy breathing, the sternum rises on inhalation and descends on exhalation. Maintaining an elevated sternum while you sing is therefore highly counterintuitive. While I don’t recommend that you keep your sternum elevated on exhalation when you’re not singing, it’s a habit that needs to be consciously cultivated when you are.
Bring Your Breathing into Balance
By now you should have a better idea of how your breathing strategies are working for you and where there is room for improvement. Here are some suggestions to get you started.
Enhance Your Awareness
Just as I recommended last month for working on alignment, improving your breathing begins with enhancing kinesthetic awareness. Some crucial components of your breathing apparatus provide you with very little neuromuscular feedback. For example, the diaphragm—easily the most important muscle of inspiration—contains no sensory nerve endings, whereas it is easy to feel and see what the muscles governing costal respiration are up to. Also, habits are by their very nature unconscious. It’s not enough to point out to one of my students that they are pushing with their abdominal muscles. I have to help them become aware of exactly what they’re doing because the movements I want them to inhibit are inextricably integrated with their present experience of exhaling.
Comprehensive awareness of how your respiratory system functions, therefore, depends on focused, repeated observation. A silent sitting meditation practice using the breath as your object of meditation is an excellent technique for achieving this. Vipassana Meditation techniques are ideal because they focus on noting fine distinctions between sensations, thoughts, and other categories of experience.
Expand in All Directions
Practicing yoga is one of the best ways to improve range of motion, strength, and coordination throughout all the muscles and joints involved in breathing, and it also helps expand kinesthetic awareness. Holistic voice and yoga coach Elissa Weinzimmer relies on yoga movements and techniques to help singers and actors integrate body, breath, and voice.
“A lot of people carry habitual tension in their ribcage, especially at the sides of the body under the armpits,” she points out. “Crisscross your arms for a moment to reach your hands underneath the opposite armpit and you’ll feel that there are indeed ribs under there and they can move when you take a nice big breath. The holding here can occur for all sorts of reasons: you might have suffered from asthma or it could be a postural habit. More movement in this area will allow greater freedom in the breath.”
Weinzimmer believes that a yoga practice or other fitness regimen can go a long way toward changing your pattern of holding. “Even the simple act of raising your arms above your head can encourage the upper ribs to expand beyond their habitual range of motion,” she says.
Improve Your Oxygen Consumption
Beyond concern for singing, I don’t know anyone whose life wouldn’t be enhanced by a boost to their stamina! If you’re not currently engaging in a form of exercise that elevates your heart rate, start. A 20-minute session two to three times a week will do you a world of good, even if it’s just a brisk walk around your neighborhood.
If you do regularly engage in cardiovascular exercise, you can adapt your regimen to improve oxygen consumption by including some form of interval training. This means alternately pushing yourself hard and then backing off again for repeated 30- or 60-second intervals. Most spinning classes are designed around interval training, but you can apply this approach to any form of cardiovascular exercise—running, cycling, an elliptical machine, or just alternating jumping jacks with marching in place.
You’ll know that you’re improving when you have to work harder to get your heart rate up on the intervals where you’re pushing yourself but your pulse cools down more swiftly on the easy intervals. For the swiftest and safest results, get assistance from a fitness professional or use a calculator like the one on www.active.com to determine your high and low heart rate targets, and also invest in a heart rate monitor.
The way you breathe represents the culmination of all your life experiences and endeavors. Some of your breathing habits are ideal for singing. Others are not. It is within your power to completely transform everything about your own physiology that has an impact on your voice, so don’t take your habitual breathing strategies as a given. Take inventory of how well your breath release, inspiration, and oxygen consumption all serve your vocal technique and adopt strategies for enhancing your respiratory function wherever you may have room for improvement.
