Breathing with proper breath support

Breathing and breath support articles

1. These three articles describe how good and bad breathing work

2. Carl Stough’s priceless video x-ray of good breathing

This page in Jessica Wolfe’s website shows a video x-ray of someone breathing correctly. There’s nothing like seeing it to help you understand the correct breathing that I describe and analyse in the above three articles. You really should take a look. Click on the video at the bottom of the page.

The breathing in this demonstration is, however, much too fast. Someone breathing as efficiently as this would need to take less than four breaths a minute. Continuous breathing at this speed would quickly result in hyper-ventilation (an oxygen overdose).

The video was taken by Carl Stough. Carl Stough, who died in October 2000, did some excellent work on breathing. He was lucky enough to be the first person ever to use the technology of cinefluorography to see exactly what happens in breathing. He was gifted enough to put his findings to very good use. Jessica is a fellow Alexander Technique teacher who also studied breathing with Carl Stough.

So far as I know, there is no other such video available anywhere, so this one is truly priceless.

There is, however one thing about the person breathing in that cinefluorograph: they are breathing far too fast. Anybody breathing that efficiently shouldn’t need to take more than four breaths a minute. (If the person in the cinefluorograph continued to breathe that fast, they would soon suffer from hyper-ventilation).

3. My other breathing articles help you improve your breathing

(but, even if you’re already an expert on breathing, you do need to read the three articles in section one first).