[00:00:00] Welcome to Pilates Students' Manual, everything you want to know about Pilates in one place. I'm Olivia, and I'll be your host. Jump in the conversation on Instagram @pilatesstudentsmanual, and be sure to subscribe for updates on new episodes. Let's learn something new together.

Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back. Exciting adventures starting today. I'm going to be reviewing the six principles of Pilates. Not all in one episode, that would be like super speed, and perhaps not all in their own individual episodes, but I will be discussing the principles of Pilates [00:01:00] in the upcoming episodes. So very exciting there. 

There are six principles, which I think I've shared before, but I'm sharing them now. The six principles are breathing, control, centering, concentration, precision, and rhythm. And the way I remember them, when I was going through teacher training in alphabetical order, they are B triple C P R.

The only not useful part about that mnemonic is sometimes rhythm is also called flow, which really throws off the flow of that mnemonic, which is fine. B triple C P R are the Pilates principles. Today, we're going to be talking about breathing, which is definitely the first principle, even though Joe himself didn't really enumerate his principles.

These are things that are gleaned from the books that he's written and just where the emphasis is in his exercises. I do have a quote from Return to Life in the little blurb that he has [00:02:00] before he goes through the exercises. 

In Return to Life, Joe says "breathing is the first act of life and the last. Our very life depends on it. Since we cannot live without breathing. It is tragically deplorable to contemplate the millions and millions who have never learned to master the art of correct breathing." Joe definitely has a flair for the dramatic. In Your Health, everything is like the end of the world. And he's very passionate about this, as you can tell. 

Breath is a huge component of all movement disciplines, yoga to Tai Chi or other martial arts, in swimming. Pretty much all forms of exercise have some breath component and Pilates is no different. So today we'll be discussing what is involved in the mechanics of breathing. What is Pilates breathing specifically? And why is that so important? Why should you know that? Why should you practice that? 

So in all forms of exercise, Pilates included, we're really just [00:03:00] interested in the inhalation and the exhalation. We're not really interested in like the process by which our blood takes oxygen and then delivers it to our tissues and then brings carbon dioxide back to the lungs, but that is also components of breathing. 

But we're just going to be talking about the inhalation and the exhalation also called the inspiration and the expiration, which is kind of beautiful, I think, because you really get that cyclical nature of life happening in every single breath, this inspiration and expiration. 

When you're breathing passively, which is likely what you were doing before I started talking about breathing and now you're thinking about it. When you breathe passively, you inhale and your diaphragm, which is that muscle that we know from the, What Is The Core episode. We talked about the diaphragm a bit. It's a muscle at the bottom of your rib cage that kind of connects into itself. It creates a dome. It kind of, when it's relaxed is a little bit up into your rib cage towards your heart. When you inhale that muscle contracts and drops down towards your [00:04:00] belly, the dome flattens out, and it creates a pressure difference, right? It creates that space for your air to pretty much just rush in, going into that vacuum from the highway pressure system to the low pressure system created by your diaphragm. And then when you exhale passively, your diaphragm muscle just relaxes to its resting dome-like state and the air is pressed out. 

Breathing can also be active. We know this. You can very forcefully inhale and recruit some muscles in your ribs, your intercostals, your scalenes, your sternocleidomastoid these neck muscles can get recruited to really expand the ribcage, lift your ribs up towards your face, actually, to like get more breath in. And you can also forcefully exhale where you are actively contracting your abdominal muscles too, press even more completely the air out of the body. 

Passively, we're doing this all the time. We're often not thinking about [00:05:00] it. There's lots of ways to breathe. Every movement discipline has its own way of breathing and we've been doing it our entire lives. A lot of us have breathing habits already established.

Those habits can be very easily dysfunctional or at the very least inefficient. I'm going to go over some of the inefficient or dysfunctional breathing patterns that I've seen as a teacher and even that I felt in my own body. You may also identify with some of these or be like, Oh my gosh, yes, I totally used to breathe like that. Or maybe that's something you're still working on. 

There's a type of breathing where you're only breathing into your upper chest, and your collarbones and shoulders kind of go up and down. It's kind of a short, shallow, almost like hyperventilating-y breathing. But there are people who just breathe using that upper part of their lungs. On the flip side of that, there are people who just breathe deeply into the belly and there's like a really big expansion and [00:06:00] contraction of the belly with each breath. Another dysfunctional breathing pattern is holding the breath, specifically on it exertion, but really ever. We do want to breathe continuously.

And then a really tricky one is reciprocal breathing, where you inhale. And draw your belly in and exhale and push your belly, which is the opposite of what you should do when breathe. Like when you inhale, you should expand. And when you exhale, you should contract. 

And I personally blame movies for this. If you've ever seen a girl trying to fit into a dress that is too tight in a movie, the first thing she does is take a really big inhale and try to suck it in which makes zero sense because why would you to put more air into your shape and causing yourself to expand in order to get smaller? Like it's the opposite of what you want. So that's reciprocal breathing. So now when you see that in movies, you can be annoyed with me. 

Our breathing affects our nervous system and our posture. So if you think about that short, shallow breathing [00:07:00] pattern, that posture that goes with it, or that nervous system feeling that goes with it is usually one of anxiety, and like high alert feeling. It's usually chest very lifted, often chest like pressed forward. And then it's those short breaths that aren't very calming. They're very like high strung. 

If you were only breathing into your belly, a body position that facilitates that is the really rounded rib cage, that hyper kyphotic curve in the upper spine, and then shoulders kind of drooped forward, head kind of drooped forward. It's a very defeated body position. And that body position also creates a feeling in the body. Right? If you think about those power poses, like the reason it makes you feel powerful is, you know, you're standing tall, like a hands on your hips or whatever pose you're doing. But that collapsed chest and that like, sort of just moving in the belly is going to create like a very like low energy feeling in the body as well. So we know that our breath impacts the way we feel [00:08:00] and the way we move and the way we exercise. 

So one of the first things that happens when someone comes into one of my classes or, you know, if I catch myself falling into a habit. Usually the holding breath habit can still sneak up on you when you're doing some exertion, and you get so focused on something else that you forget to breathe, like that can happen. Even if you have great breathing habits that can still happen. 

So the primary thing that I want from students in terms of breathing is first is to get them to breathe. So if you are holding your breath at all, resume this continuous flow of breath. And then the second thing that I want is you to think about making it the Pilates breath. 

The most important thing is that you continue to breathe. As you get more comfortable with the exercises and the equipment and just yourself doing those exercises, then you can really get into the nuanced Pilates breath. The most important thing is going to be always, always to breathe. 

Coming up [00:09:00] after the break, I'm going to share a little more about Pilates breathing and why it's so important to breathe when you exercise.

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Joe was obviously very interested in people breathing correctly. In his book, Your Health, he talks about, you know, starting teaching children how to breathe completely, how to press all of the air out of their lungs when they exhale, because he saw this as a way of beating disease, specifically tuberculosis. You know, he [00:10:00] also had asthma and stuff going on when he was a kid. These deep breathing practices really important in terms of maintaining your health. 

In Return to Life through Contrology, when he's cuing breath, he always says, inhale slowly, exhale slowly. And he'll tell you a bunch of things to do while you're inhaling and a bunch of things to do while you're exhaling. But every time you're breathing, it's inhale slowly. Exhale slowly. 

In Pilates style breath, you inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. And I was actually curious about why the exhale through the mouth, because I came to Pilates from doing yoga first. And in yoga, you inhale and exhale through the nose.

So when I was looking into it and to the vast wide world of the internet, you breathe through your nose because your nose has lots of hairs in it. And those hairs will filter the air and sort of get anything that you don't want to be breathing in out of the way. And that's why we blow our nose right? Get rid of all of that gunk. And you exhale through your mouth because you can get [00:11:00] more air out of your mouth faster. And I was like, solid. That sounds about right. 

Joseph Pilates was really interested in this full exhalation that if you exhale really completely, you can then just inhale with a greater degree of ease. There's like more space that you've really pressed all of the stale air out. He talks about that in some of his books as well. And then you can really take advantage of the pressure difference. 

I don't know if you've ever done a breathing competition with a friend where it's like, who can hold their breath the longest. Maybe that's childish, I don't know. But the way that you win that, I don't think any children are listening to this, but if you wanted to have a breathing contest and be a hustler, the way you win that, as you start deepening your breath before the breathing competition. You start slowing down your breathing and taking fuller breaths so that you use more of your lung capacity and you want to take those really full exhales that have some real muscular contraction so that your muscles are like primed to expand. And that's [00:12:00] how you win a breathing competition, side note. 

In Pilates, in addition to breathing through your nose and exhaling through your mouth, you're also focusing on breathing really deeply into the rib cage and not so much breathing into the belly, because if you think about Pilates exercises, they require a degree of core engagement in all of the exercises. If you are relaxing those abdominal muscles so that they can stretch and expand every time you inhale, you're not going to be able to execute the exercises because you're losing that abdominal connection with every in breath, which seems silly. 

So Joseph talks about keeping those abdominals drawn in as you inhale and really sending your breath laterally to the sides of the rib cage and really almost ballooning the chest, really expanding the chest with your inhale. If you see any pictures of Joe, he's like very barrel chested, very broad chested, because he wants you to breathe really fully into the rib cage. Then he has this little tiny waist where you can draw it in, even when you're inhaling. 

In [00:13:00] Pilates, we also exhale on the exertion or on the flexion movement. When you exhale really forcefully that contraction of your abdominals causes your spine to flex slightly to round slightly. So you can recruit more abdominal muscles, recruit that flexion, and then use it in the exercises. That's why we always say that we exhale on the exertion. 

Whether you are breathing in Pilates breath or not just breathing continuously, it's very important that you do because not breathing is a recipe for disaster. And the fancy thing I'm going to share with you today is called intra-abdominal pressure. It is just the pressure in that abdominal canister. So thinking back to the What Is The Core episode, your abdominal canister is your diaphragm, your transverse abdominis, some of those internal oblique fibers, your multifidus, and your pelvic floor. That is that abdominal canister, and the [00:14:00] pressure that is inside of it is the intra-abdominal pressure. Aptly named. 

When you exert effort, you raise the pressure in that canister. Some pressure is okay, because the way we stabilize our spine, specifically, our low spine or lumbar spine is through some pressure. We contract the muscles and that's how we create stability. But when you exert that effort, especially like excessive or like a lot of effort, your blood pressure raises and all of that pressure begins to look for a way out. 

I have an analogy for you. I'm very proud of this. Imagine that canister as like a can of soda or any carbonated beverage. There's pressure in that can. If you were to just have the can sitting on the counter and then open it, there would be a release of carbonation, a release of that pressure when you opened it.

And if you shook that can, and then didn't open it, the pressure would just get higher and you could keep shaking can, and eventually that can, would have so [00:15:00] much pressure inside of it, hypothetically, that whatever is the weakest point of the can would be the part that gives way. 

When you're breathing passively, just inhaling and exhaling as per the usual, that's like opening a can that hasn't been shook. There is some pressure into it and every time you're opening that can, you're releasing it with the exhale. As you're inhaling, you're creating more pressure again, for the same reason that it's silly to inhale and then try to put on a piece of clothing that's tight, that you are creating more pressure. Your lungs are expanding. Your diaphragm is expanding. You're trying to fit more into the same space. So the pressure goes up. Then you exhale, you release that pressure. 

We're always exhaling to manage our intra-abdominal pressure. If you don't exhale and you are just doing this really intense, strenuous exercise, that's when things happen, like you pass gas or you might leak a little bit, there might be some urinary incontinence. In extreme situations, just [00:16:00] like that shook can, you also give way at the weakest point. And that's where hernias happened, whether it's a herniated disc, whether that's an inguinal hernia or a diastasis recti, where your linea alba is getting stretched, it could be a pelvic floor issue. That whatever's the weakest part of that canister is eventually going to give way. So the first thing you always have to do, especially in a difficult exercise is to breathe so that your body doesn't have to create a release for that pressure. 

There's some discussion about the best way to breathe. You know, Pilates says breathe through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Yoga says in and out through your nose. Other styles have totally different ways of breathing. Even within Pilates, there's some discussion- I don't want to say debate because it's not that level of heated- but, you know, where is the exertion of the exercise is a question. 

If you look at a reclined [00:17:00] twist, right, you're lying on your back, your knees are bent, soles of the feet on the floor. Both knees are going to go to the right and then you'll bring them back to center, both knees will go to the left, you'll bring them back to center. In yoga, you would exhale to twist, inhale to come back to center, exhale to twist, inhale to come back to center. Pilates is the opposite. You would inhale the twist, exhale to recruit your obliques, to then lift your legs back to center and same thing on the other side.

So it depends on where the focus is and how you breathe is going to change where the focus of the exercise is. Where are you trying to recruit some extra muscles? Where is that exertion for you? I'm not going to say that there's a right way to do it. Joe has definite instructions about where you're breathing, but so much Pilates matwork and equipment exercises have gone beyond his original choreography that I think it's really up to the teacher and the student how you're going to breathe through it. As long as you do breathe through it. 

And just know that you're breath [00:18:00] also creates a little bit of flow or rhythm, which is another of those Pilates principles. Where you choose to inhale, what you're doing while you're inhaling, where you choose to exhale, what you're doing as you exhale is going to create some internal flow to the exercise. For better, for worse, most important thing is that you're breathing. 

Hit me up on Instagram. Share if you learned something new, if you had any of those inefficient or dysfunctional breathing patterns, I'd love to hear about it. The biggest thing for me as a yoga person was learning to exhale out of my mouth. And now sometimes when I do yoga, I end up exhaling out of my mouth. So it's a fun time. 

Happy breathing, everyone. Have a great week and I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for stopping by for today's episode of Pilates Students' Manual. Subscribe to follow the [00:19:00] podcast and join the community of Pilates lovers on Instagram @pilatesstudentsmanual. You can reach out to me there with questions, comments, or feedback, or send me an email at pilatesstudentsmanual@oliviabioni.com.

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