Plie' Breathing

Body: 

When do you inhale and exhale on the 1st and 2nd position?

Forum:

Hi daughter and welcome. I do very slow plies in an exaggerated WW stance. I’m not rocking my pelvis while I do them. So I just basically breathe through them – I don’t have a pattern for inhaling and exhaling, the way I would if I was doing firebreathing or any of the other moves where the pelvis is in motion. Can you be a little more specific, is there are particular spot on a DVD that you are referring to? We’ll try to help. - Surviving

I'm referring to lesson 5 in the book where you do plie' in first position then second position. It seems natural in the first position to inhale when going down. But in the second position when it says to consciously tighten pelvis diaphragm as you rise out I wanted to be sure my breathing wasn't working against me. I'm also assuming that tightening your pelvis diaphragm is similar to a kegel. Is that correct?

Do you have the first edition (orange cover) or second edition (blue cover)?

2nd edition (blue cover)

I see where you are on the top of page 129. I do not believe this is a reference to a kegel. You can read about kegels on pages 81 to 84, and in numerous articles on the Blog, as well as an infinite number of threads on this forum. Basically, not helpful for prolapse, potentially bad for it in fact.

So what is she referring to here? I do a lot of plies and I do them in a really exaggerated posture because the organs are at their most stable in this position. I consciously create a really tight smooth line up and down the front of my body when I do this. Tightening my diaphragm, maybe, though that terminology just confuses me.

Because my pelvis in stable (not tilting to and fro as in other exercises, which makes the breathing sequence critical), I think you can just breathe through these moves. If there was a critical breathing pattern, she would have mentioned it.

This is my answer, but I do not have a teacher-level of expertise, so someone can chime in here if necessary. - Surviving

Many of the exercises have a firebreathing-like breath pattern. If you want to stick to this pattern in any exercise, you can do it by ensuring that when your lumbar curve is increased, you are inhaling. When your lumbar curve is more flexed you can exhale. The opposite always happens. When we WW breathe, on the inhale our abdominal and other musculature will increase the lumbar curve. When we WW breathe, our lumbar curve will decrease when we exhale. This is simply an 'engineering' fact, caused by the way our bones and muscles are connected to each other. There are many respiratory muscles which drive the changes to the shape of our bodies as we breathe. They are around our hip joints and the pelvic bones, our abdomens, between our ribs, along our spine and in our shoulder girdle. They are *all* joined to each other by the fascial network of our bodies, and driven by the same nervous systems.

I can visualise this working with plies. Tell me if you cannot, and we can discuss it further.