We’ve reached the end of our breathing series and this week we are going to look at some exercises you can do to help your breathing.

Practising breathing exercises can help you control your breathing or strengthen your lungs and increase your ability to breathe freely.

It’s really important to sit down or take a break if you feel dizzy or lightheaded when carrying out these exercises.

And I always suggest doing these exercises either with your back to a bed or to a sofa so that if you need to sit down quickly or if your legs go, you are landing on something soft.

And if you already have a heart condition or lung conditions or are in any way concerned about your health, please make sure you do not do these when you’re on your own. Also, consult a doctor before you do any of these.

Simple breathing exercise

I like to call the four fours. As musicians we like to count in beats that all count together nicely. So I’m going to work over a beat of 16, so that would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 4, 2, 3, 4.

And then you stop.

Here’s a run down of what you’ll do during those count:

First group: relax and get yourself ready.
Second group: breathe in slowly throughout those four beats.
Third group: breathe out to the four beats
Fourth Group: relax again.

And then you’ve got another four beats at the beginning of the next set of four to breathe in. If you have a smartphone, you can download metronome apps really easily. I actually make noises when I do this. I make hisses and sips. I was creating a bit of friction so I could hear how steady my breath in was with the sip. And then I was breathing it out with a hiss so I can hear again how steady it is.

What we’re looking at here is just the diaphragm, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. So we’re wanting to just use the diaphragm for this breathing exercise. The diaphragm muscle comes down and out. Nothing is moving in the chest or shoulder area, just from the stomach area.

If you’re using a metronome set it to 90bpm but feel free to speed it up or slow it down. Whatever’s more comfortable. It is beneficial to work on trying to slow this exercise down over time.

Let’s try the next bit, which is over the same beats of 16, but we are jigging it around a bit.

This is how it will look:

First group: relax and get yourself ready
Second group: breathe in slowly throughout those four beats
Third group: hold your breath in
Fourth Group: breathe out slowly

So we’ve slotted an extra thing in between the breathing in and the breathing out. So what you are aiming for is to be able to slow that down a little bit if you can and not feel like you are struggling for air.

Box breathing

Box breathing has a huge amount of health benefits.

This is now the next step on from the exercise we did before because now we are not just going to hold our breath on the intake, we are going to hold our breath on the outtake.

Box breathing is this:

Breathe in for four
Hold for four
Breathe out for four
Hold for four

So we no longer have any space outside of that area to breathe just to relax and breathe. We’re constrained within that. Now what that also means is that you now have to think about how much air you are taking in. Because if you’re taking a huge amount of air that you don’t actually need, it’s gonna take quite a long time to take to push that out as well.

But this is a great way to control your breathing when you need to. If you’d like to receive this kind of information straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.