Breathing
In my opinion breathing is one of those areas in voice training that have to be tackled, sorted out, and then sustained with minimal effort. If not, you may end up sucking breath up into your shoulders, or doing some odd goldfish breathing like a certain well known Prime Minister!
Breathing is a very complex activity, and one which the body was designed to operate without your conscious interference. So the ultimate goal of breathing training is to teach you to stop interfering with the process. And if that fails it is to teach you to interfere minimally. However, first you need to understand the biology of breathing, then you need to explore how to engage with the biology to improve your breathing fitness and capacity, and then as I have mentioned, you have to learn to let go of your desire to control your breathing, and just breathe properly.
It is vitally important for actors to really understand how their breathing apparatus works, as it is the powerhouse on which their thoughts and emotions ride. And when actors do not know how to breathe properly, they derail almost every part of the job of acting. So, let us explore breathing and free you from the tyranny of a shallow muscle bound breath!
Let me start by stating the obvious. In its simplest form breathing can be described as air moving into and out of the lungs through the nose or mouth. But breathing is far more complicated than that.
There are two impulses that stimulate the body to breathe. The first is the body’s need for oxygen, and the other is the body’s need to take in breath to use for speech! And in both instances the muscular chain of events is the same. Now I should start to describe the process from the moment of taking in breath, but I find that when actors understand how breath is moved out of the body, they seem to grasp more easily how to breathe in (which is normally where things do wrong). So I will begin by explaining the process of breathing out.
Breathing out:
In order to move breath out of the body, the body needs to tighten to reduce the space occupied by the lungs. But how does it do this? Well, believe it or not it begins in your thighs. The muscles attached to the top of your knees tighten almost imperceptibly. This sets off a chain reaction. And your glutes and the muscles in your lower torso follow suit almost immediately. Your sphincter muscles tighten as do your abdominals and all the related muscles around the stomach. The tightening of these muscles causes the contents of your lower torso (your organs and intestines) to be lifted or displaced upwards towards your diaphragm. As soon as your diaphragm feels this pressure from below, it relaxes in order to allow intestines to keep moving upwards. And as it relaxes so it also moves up into the space occupied by the lower part of your lungs. At the same time as this happens, your inter-costal muscles tighten slightly, moving your ribs down in towards the lungs. This whole process puts pressure on your lungs causing the air in your lungs to be displaced and so to move up and out.Â
Breathing in:
Now that expiration has occurred the breathing system remains inactive for a split second, until the body realises that it needs more oxygen. As it does so, so the brain prompts the body to breathe in. At this point the process begins at exactly the same spot as expiration began – right down near the knees. The muscles that tightened near the knees earlier suddenly release, once again setting off a chain reaction. And all the muscles that tightened earlier suddenly release. With the muscles released, gravity pulls the abdominal contents downwards, and the ribs which are ‘bent’ automatically spring out again. And the diaphragm which was relaxed (in its dome shape) involuntarily tightens, flattens and in so doing moves downwards. All of these actions cause the lungs to effortlessly expand down and out and to effortlessly fill up once again with air. This air is now available to you the actor to use again for sound. And the great joy is that in order to use it, all you have to do is start speaking. After all – isn’t that what you normally just do everyday when speaking to your friends and family?
© Donald Woodburn
Breathing
In my opinion breathing is one of those areas in voice training that have to be tackled, sorted out, and then sustained with minimal effort. If not, you may end up sucking breath up into your shoulders, or doing some odd goldfish breathing like a certain well known Prime Minister!
Breathing is a very complex activity, and one which the body was designed to operate without your conscious interference. So the ultimate goal of breathing training is to teach you to stop interfering with the process. And if that fails it is to teach you to interfere minimally. However, first you need to understand the biology of breathing, then you need to explore how to engage with the biology to improve your breathing fitness and capacity, and then as I have mentioned, you have to learn to let go of your desire to control your breathing, and just breathe properly.
It is vitally important for actors to really understand how their breathing apparatus works, as it is the powerhouse on which their thoughts and emotions ride. And when actors do not know how to breathe properly, they derail almost every part of the job of acting. So, let us explore breathing and free you from the tyranny of a shallow muscle bound breath!
Let me start by stating the obvious. In its simplest form breathing can be described as air moving into and out of the lungs through the nose or mouth. But breathing is far more complicated than that.
There are two impulses that stimulate the body to breathe. The first is the body’s need for oxygen, and the other is the body’s need to take in breath to use for speech! And in both instances the muscular chain of events is the same. Now I should start to describe the process from the moment of taking in breath, but I find that when actors understand how breath is moved out of the body, they seem to grasp more easily how to breathe in (which is normally where things do wrong). So I will begin by explaining the process of breathing out.
Breathing out:
In order to move breath out of the body, the body needs to tighten to reduce the space occupied by the lungs. But how does it do this? Well, believe it or not it begins in your thighs. The muscles attached to the top of your knees tighten almost imperceptibly. This sets off a chain reaction. And your glutes and the muscles in your lower torso follow suit almost immediately. Your sphincter muscles tighten as do your abdominals and all the related muscles around the stomach. The tightening of these muscles causes the contents of your lower torso (your organs and intestines) to be lifted or displaced upwards towards your diaphragm. As soon as your diaphragm feels this pressure from below, it relaxes in order to allow intestines to keep moving upwards. And as it relaxes so it also moves up into the space occupied by the lower part of your lungs. At the same time as this happens, your inter-costal muscles tighten slightly, moving your ribs down in towards the lungs. This whole process puts pressure on your lungs causing the air in your lungs to be displaced and so to move up and out.Â
Breathing in:
Now that expiration has occurred the breathing system remains inactive for a split second, until the body realises that it needs more oxygen. As it does so, so the brain prompts the body to breathe in. At this point the process begins at exactly the same spot as expiration began – right down near the knees. The muscles that tightened near the knees earlier suddenly release, once again setting off a chain reaction. And all the muscles that tightened earlier suddenly release. With the muscles released, gravity pulls the abdominal contents downwards, and the ribs which are ‘bent’ automatically spring out again. And the diaphragm which was relaxed (in its dome shape) involuntarily tightens, flattens and in so doing moves downwards. All of these actions cause the lungs to effortlessly expand down and out and to effortlessly fill up once again with air. This air is now available to you the actor to use again for sound. And the great joy is that in order to use it, all you have to do is start speaking. After all – isn’t that what you normally just do everyday when speaking to your friends and family?
© Donald Woodburn