What is Pilates Breathing?
In life, breath is an event that happens outside of you, right in front of your face. You pull air in from your nose from the space in front of your face and deposit it right back into the space you took it from. In movement, breath is an inside event. It is initiated deep inside you, manifesting from your abdominal cavity, diaphragm, and pelvic floor.
In a Pilates studio, you don't breathe to live; you breathe for an abdominal response.
Your inhale is a suction that begins pulling from deep in the pelvic floor. The feeling is like you are lifting yourself up from the space between the sits bones. From there, pull behind your belly button, behind your stomach, behind your heart, behind your throat, behind your eyes, and out through the top of your head.
Your last inhale, pull air in from the outside of you, through your nose. When you do inhale, only take the amount of air that you need. Inhales in connected movement like Pilates, Yoga, Dance, and Gyrotonic are like desserts, don't eat the whole cake; just a bite will do. On your exhale, your pelvic floor lifts, your abdominals pull inward and upward, and they gently push the air out of your lungs. Once you feel your abdominals' upward pull, your spine responds by reaching upward and out through the top of your head. Your legs respond by lengthening downward and away from that upward pulling feeling in your abs. If you get an upward feeling, it's excellent to counter it with a downward sense so you can get a frame of reference for doing more of each.
If you are a beginner in Pilates, Gyrotonic, or Yoga, you can be pretty good at this inside-outside integration. In the beginning days of learning, you can be focused on the idea of this relationship of external movements with internal breathing. As you become more advanced, you can fall into the trap of memorizing and executing exercises with very little consciousness or attention.
A good thing to remember is to only move as fast as you can feel the integration of breath and abdominals. This will help you keep that connected integration with external movement and internal breathing. It also makes the work a complete neurological package.
Breath teaches flow, timing, and control of exercises; it creates new ways of repeating the exact choreography of exercises; it connects the external expression of movement with the inside expression of a person. When you execute the action from the inside, you make it your own. Instead of repeating and executing exercises and focusing on doing them 'right', you perform them, for that day, and for that session, and for you wherever you are at, at that moment.
Breathing is what makes movement live in that moment. Once it is performed, it's over, never to be done the same again.
Just like you can't hang onto the breath, you can't hang onto the movement. You have to let it go and move on.
Tracy Fitzpatrick, Aline Studios