Anatomy of Breathing, Part 3: Breath Management

 

You're reading this blog on a computer, so hopefully you've got that can of compressed air that you use to clean your keyboard somewhere nearby. Grab it and give the nozzle a quick press. An intense burst of air will flow out of the can. 

 
Why does this happen? The air pressure inside the can is much greater than the air pressure outside the can. When you pushed the nozzle, you created an opening for the air to release, and this difference in air pressure caused a significant amount of air to rush swiftly out.*

Breath management is the ability to increase subglottal air pressure – to compress the air in your lungs so that will behave more like the air inside the can – and then regulate the level of subglottal air pressure while singing. 

Increasing subglottal air pressure means that when you release your breath, it will release more swiftly and powerfully and have a potentially greater impact on the vibration of your vocal folds. Regulating this air pressure while your breath releases enables you to determine how much the surface and substance of your vocal folds proximate while singing, providing control over dynamics and vocal color.

 

There are several ways to maximize subglottal air pressure, not all of them ideal for singing:

1. Create a lot of resistance for your voice by over-adducting your vocal folds, pushing the base of your tongue back and down, and/or tightening up your constrictor muscles. Then force a lot of air through by pushing with your abdominal muscles and/or squeezing your rib cage shut. (not recommended) 

This is an exaggerated description of what passes for "breath support" in the concept of many singers, and there's a good reason that so many people do it to a greater or lesser extent. You can see how creating excess resistance and then pushing against it will indeed serve to compress the air in your lungs, increasing subglottal air pressure. The result may be a more powerful, vibrant and resonant sound, but this producing it this way leads to fatigue and hoarseness (or even injury). This is what is going on when you see a singer's face turn red and the veins and tendons on their neck start to pop out. The higher you sing, the less successful this strategy becomes, because singing with this much resistance elevates and limits range of motion for your larynx and compromises resonance space. 

 

2. Gain a lot of weight. (also not recommended)

As I discussed in my previous post, when you release your breath fully the natural elasticity of your lungs causes them to return to their default, un-stretched state and the diaphragm returns to a high relaxed position. Gravity causes the extra weight in your viscera to exert a significant downward pull on your rib cage as the diaphragm strives to return to a relaxed state. The diaphragm ascends more slowly and this creates a kind of vacuum, resulting in greater subglottal air pressure. So extra weight in the abdominal area can indeed contribute a lot of assistance with breath management. This is one reason why heavier singers are sometimes able to produce a more dramatic sound, and why it is so important for singers to carefully retrain their technique after losing a lot of weight. But while a heavy abdomen does help to increase subglottal air pressure, it still doesn't give you any help with regulating air pressure (it's exerting the same downward pull at all times – you can't vary it) and excessive weight may keep you from maintaining optimal health and energy, both very important for a singing career.

 

3. While singing, keep the inhalation muscles associated with costal respiration engaged and maintain dynamic good upper-body alignment. (bingo.)

If you want to increase subglottal air pressure and regulate it as your breath releases, this is the safest and most organic way to do it. Any other strategy creates a lot of stress for your voice and body without being nearly as effective. 

Breath management means doing something to inhibit the outflow of air as it releases. But achieving this by creating resistance in your throat will keep your voice from functioning freely, and slowing the ascent of the diaphragm will keep the breath from releasing fully. This is why it is so important that, to the best of your ability, you learn to sing with relatively little resistance and master releasing your breath fully before you work on breath management – if you haven't gotten these skills down yet, you won't be able to tell whether or not what you're doing to manage your breath is creating more entanglement or keeping your breath from releasing.

With good upper body alignment, take a full, deep breath.

Allow your sternum to rise and your ribs to expand in all directions.

When your lungs are at full capacity, continue trying to inhale.

Hold your breath by continuing to do this for 10 - 15 seconds.

Release your breath fully. 

You should now be able to sense where the effort was being exerted as you were sustaining the movement of inhalation.

Where do you feel it?

Repeat this process.

Do you feel the effort in the same places the second time?

Different places?

Additional ones?

While you were using all of your muscles of inspiration to inhale, the ones where you are likely to feel the exertion are probably related to costal inhalation (the diaphragm contains so few nerve endings that it is difficult to feel its work directly). Everyone senses this movement differently, and you will probably be more aware of some of your inspiratory muscles than others. For most singers, it takes repeated exploration to figure out how to voluntarily engage these muscles independent of the breathing process, but with practice you will get an increasingly clearer sense of how they all move. 

Many elements of good alignment also contribute to inspiratory movement and help keep the muscles of costal inspiration active. 

Blandine Calais-Germain points out that "Because it is rigid, the skeleton provides a well-defined structure to breathing and stabilizes certain actions." With good alignment, the spine is more in a state of extension than flexion. Spinal extension is very helpful for keeping the muscles of costal inspiration engaged while singing:

This illustration is from Calais-Germain's excellent book, Anatomy of Breathing.

 

Keeping the sternum in a high, stable position is useful for many aspects of singing. It contributes to good alignment. A number of the muscles that move and stabilize the larynx are attached to your sternum, so when your sternum stays in one place it helps anchor all of that movement. And maintaining a high, stable position for your sternum while singing requires you to keep some of the costal inspiratory muscles engaged. 

What are these muscles? Any muscle that helps open the rib cage is considered a muscle of costal inspiration. We tend to think of the intercostals as the main muscles of costal inspiration:

However, there is a complex network of muscles around the ribs that keep them open and assist with inspiration. These include:

Pectoralis Major & Pectoralis Minor 

Serratus Anterior
Levatorus costarum

Serratus Posterior Superior

These inspiratory muscles can potentially all work together to stabilize the rib cage in an open position while contributing to good alignment and doing nothing to create resistance anywhere near your larynx and vocal folds. Cultivate the coordination and power to do this consistently, and you will improve your ability to increase subglottal air pressure and become capable of regulating it by varying the intensity with which you engage these muscles. 

Skillful breath management yields great vocal power and dynamic variety. However, I cannot overstate the importance of mastering breath release before building skill in this area. There are countless ways that you can compress your breath and regulate its release that create tremendous resistance and entanglement in your body and your voice.

A free voice powered by the full release of the breath is all you need to sing very, very well. Achieve this, and breath management skills can greatly expand your power, stamina and expressive palate.

 

* A can of compressed air actually has very little in common with the complex human respiratory system. However, it is a useful analogy for what occurs when air concentrated within a container is released into an environment where the air pressure is measureably less than the air pressure inside the container. 

Comments

[David Johnson]

Thank you for this series! Regarding item 2: In my medical school pulmonology course, we were taught that excess body fat affects respiration primarily by the additional weight it puts on the rib cage. This compressive force would certainly increase subglottal pressure relative to a leaner singer's. By contrast, any downward force on the diaphragm would exert an expansile force on the lungs and _decrease_ subglottal pressure. I am not familiar with primary literature that suggests otherwise; could you suggest some sources?

[Claudia Friedlander]

Thanks, David - I'll dig through my sources and see what I can share, but I'm not one to contradict info presented in a medical school pulmonology course!

The important thing for singers to understand is that yes, excess weight does confer a certain advantage for singing by compressing the breath (whatever the specific physiological reasons may be) - but that there are other, better ways to achieve this. Contrary to the fading stereotype, you don't have to be fat to be an opera singer.

[Lkaminoff]

Your whole premise of what creates an exhale is wrong.

You use the example of a spray can with compressed air inside to explain how the human body exhales: "Breath management is the ability to increase subglottal air pressure – to compress the air in your lungs so that will behave more like the air inside the can – and then regulate the level of subglottal air pressure while singing. "

"Subglottal air pressure" is not what makes the air leave the body, and the body is not a rigid container like a can. In normal breathing, there is actually no pressure differential between the subglottal space and the atmosphere because the air is in constant motion to equalize that pressure. The only way to approximate what you describe would be to take a super-deep inhale, hold it in, and reduce the volume of the thoracic cavity by bearing down strongly - thus increasing the inter-thoracic pressure relative to the outside. That would certainly result in "an intense burst of air..." flowing out of your body - but I would hardly call that normal breathing or good voice technique.

The cavity system of the body breathes because it changes shape - unlike a can which cannot change shape and permits its gaseous contents to be compressed within it.

A human exhale is the result of a release of the elastic forces that are stored in the lung tissue, ribcage and abdominal cavity during the act of inhaling. How a teacher of breath and voice does not grasp this simple fact is a mystery to me. You may get results with your teaching techniques, but that's a separate mystery.

[Claudia Friedlander]

I did not use the example of a spray can of compressed air to explain how the human body exhales. My explanation of how the human body exhales is outlined in my previous post (http://www.claudiafriedlander.com/the-liberated-voice/2011/04/anatomy-of-breathing-part-2-releasing-the-breath.html). I also did not say that subglottal air pressure is what makes the air leave the body.

This post is not about exhaling. It is about creating optimal conditions for vocal fold response, which requires eliciting the Bernoulli Effect. There is a good description of this here: http://www.voicesource.co.uk/article/151.

For singers to do this, it is necessary to create conditions such that the air pressure below the vocal folds is adequate to make them vibrate as the air releases. Unfortunately, most singers do this by tightening up their throats and then pushing out the air against the resistance they just created. This is an effortful process that can lead to damage and will never yield completely free, beautiful singing. The correct way for singers to manage their breath and optimize subglottal breath pressure is to keep the costal muscles of inspiration engaged while allowing the breath to release fully. There is a more detailed description of this process in this post: http://www.claudiafriedlander.com/the-liberated-voice/2013/06/build-stamina.html

Of course the human breathing system is not like a can. I'm just using the can of compressed air to demonstrate how it is possible for there to be a difference in air pressure inside vs. outside a container and how this difference can make the release of the air more powerful. It is usually very difficult for singers to understand and master this very important technique of breath management. It's very hard for them to understand how it could be possible to produce a full sound without tightening and pushing. The analogy of the can is usually helpful for them to start getting some concept of how this works.

I am not sure why you decided to comment on this post, as it seems to me that you are not yourself involved in singing or vocal technique. You are a yoga teacher who offers workshops in anatomy. As such, you hopefully know a great deal about the anatomy and physiology of breathing but likely have no experiential knowledge of how this is directly applied for classical singing.

I am also surprised by the insulting tone of your comment. As a yoga teacher, I imagine that mindfulness and detached awareness are among the things you encourage in your students. So my expectation is that were you to come across a post that you felt to be incorrect or misleading, you would simply seek to provide better information and the overall tone would be one of equanimity and good will.

I constantly seek to deepen my understanding of human anatomy. Yoga teachers like Nicole Newman http://www.claudiafriedlander.com/the-liberated-voice/2013/07/nicole-newman.html and Elissa Weinzimmer http://elissaweinzimmer.com/home/ are high on my list of valued colleagues and sources of information.

It's my mission to demystify anatomy to singers, who unfortunately often do not receive instruction in how their instruments actually function. So if I get something wrong I'm eager to be enlightened.

You, however, completely misconstrued the point of this post and used it as an excuse to hurl some vitriol in my direction.

[Coasish .]

Thank you so much for these series! I have just recently found your site and it is so inspiring! One question, do you think it is a good idea to do push ups for better breath support? I am looking all over the place for some instructions as to which sport exercises to do to improve my breath management.
Thank you so much!