Relaxation Breathing: In—Hold—Out Control!

The Relaxation Breathing Technique is the backbone for all other breathing techniques.
These are the three basic steps for relaxation breathing:

1. Through your mouth only, sip in air for two seconds.
2. Next, hold the breath of air for three seconds without breathing.
3. Finally, exhale the breath of air through your mouth slowly and deliberately for five seconds.

While doing this exercise, you must never move your upper chest when inhaling, and your shoulders must be down, not raised or hunched. All of the movement—the sipping in of air, the holding of the air, and the release of air through exhalation—must take place in the abdominal region. Why?

The abdominal area is where we use our muscles to breathe naturally. In fact, if you observe a dog, cat, or small child, you will clearly see that their abdominal area goes in and out as they breathe. A popular but erroneous idea, passed down from singing teacher to singing teacher, is that breathing takes place in our diaphragm. This is not so. The diaphragm is a thin tissue under the lungs that separates the lungs from the stomach and intestines. Whenever you hear someone tell you that you need to breathe from your diaphragm, you will now know that they really mean the abdominal region.