A Little About Breathing

There are many ways to breathe. I feel that the exer­cises I will out­line below can lead stu­dents to develop a bet­ter method of breath­ing for Taido. They lead to a very nat­ural way of breath­ing while mov­ing that is highly adapt­able to Taido tech­nique (adap­ta­tion being one of the five tenets of Taido’s phi­los­o­phy). Because I want to encour­age oth­ers to exper­i­ment with these exer­cises, I will first present my alter­na­tive method before attempt­ing to write an analy­sis of other breath­ing methods.

I totally believe that exper­i­men­ta­tion with var­i­ous meth­ods leads to far greater mas­tery than blind accep­tance of any estab­lished method. So please try the exer­cises below sev­eral times over the course of a cou­ple of weeks. If, after giv­ing them a shot, you can’t fig­ure out how they may be applic­a­ble to your Taido prac­tice, feel free to drop me a line.

Now let's work on developing some better breath skills...

You need to under­stand one fun­da­men­tal that con­trasts with the man­ner in which most peo­ple nor­mally breathe. Basically, I am going to ask you to exhale actively and inhale pas­sively. Usually when we think about our breath (which is rare for most folks), we begin by tak­ing a deep inhala­tion into our chests and then let­ting it fall to exhale. This requires a good bit of energy if you think about it (which is why we don’t nat­u­rally breath that way) and doesn’t really incor­po­rate the lower half of the lungs (the larger half) or the diaphragm.

First thing’s first: you have got to start breath­ing lower into your abdomen before we can do very much else. If you ever notice your breath­ing when you are very relaxed or after you just wake up on a sat­ur­day morn­ing, you will see that you breathe most nat­u­rally by expand­ing (actively, though unconsciously)and con­tract­ing (pas­sively) the belly. This brings air deep into the bot­tom of the lungs and allows more oxy­gen to be absorbed into your blood. This equals greater efficiency.

Why do we kiai in Taido? The kiai is to remind us to tighten the body, espe­cially the abdomen, and focus our air out in a pow­er­ful burst when we strike. Since most strikes include a gen­eral bod­ily con­trac­tion, the kiai (exhale) here makes good sense, as we will see later. Anyway, using kiai teaches us to breathe with our bel­lies when we are doing ath­letic move­ments that require our bod­ies’ opti­mal output.

Understanding this, we can now “reverse” the empha­sis of the breath by focus­ing on the exhale. In all of the exer­cises below (except the first one), you will con­cen­trate on remov­ing the air form your lungs by putting pres­sure (either mechan­i­cal or mus­cu­lar) on your lower abdomen. Inhalation will take place as a nat­ural con­se­quence of the release of this pressure.

Some Preliminaries

preliminary exercise #1

Standing or sit­ting with good pos­ture (feel­ing as if your head is filled with helium — spine long and head high. Posture is super-important for your tech­niques and health. I sug­gest you spend some time pay­ing close atten­tion to this), fully expand your chest, though not to the point of dis­com­fort. Breathe deeply into the bot­tom of the lungs by expand­ing the abdomen (thereby pulling the diaphragm down­ward). By doing this, air is sucked through the entirety of the lung, from top to bot­tom. In other words, you are breath­ing with the entire lung instead of just the top por­tion of it. If you don’t con­tin­u­ally fill and empty the lower lung, it stag­nates with stale air that offers no ben­e­fit. This is inef­fi­cient and could poten­tially allow greater chances of var­i­ous infections.

So that is step one. Breathing into the belly. Now the next part is a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult to get the hang of. I want you to reverse your breath. What I mean is this: instead of expand­ing the belly out­ward and then let­ting it fall, I want you to suck the belly in, forc­ing all the air out of your lungs. Then relax the abdomen and let the vac­uum pres­sure pull air in passively.

preliminary exercise #2

Standing or sit­ting with good pos­ture, try to squeeze your abdom­i­nal mus­cles as tightly as pos­si­ble. Feel as if you are going to press your belly but­ton into your spine. Hold this for a few sec­onds and then relax. When you hold the con­trac­tion in your abs, take care not to close the epiglot­tis (the skin flap in your throat that “caps” the lungs). You want to relax your throat and let your stom­ach do all the work.

Contract again, and really try to hold a tight ten­sion in your gut. Contract a lit­tle tighter and exhale, try­ing to remove as much air from your lungs as pos­si­ble. After a few sec­onds, relax again and let the lungs nat­u­rally fill up as the abdomen drops, tak­ing the diaphragm with it. Do this sev­eral times and try to feel as if your entire breath is work­ing as a result of your con­trac­tion and relax­ation of your stomach.

This is actu­ally one hell of an excel­lent ab work­out, if you haven’t already noticed. The inter­est­ing thing is that you are work­ing an entirely dif­fer­ent set of abdom­i­nal mus­cles here — you inner abdom­i­nals (the tech­ni­cal name of which I can’t seem to remem­ber off-hand). These mus­cles are sel­dom exer­cised in most peo­ples’ daily lives, so they get weak. Our cul­ture is obsessed with the appear­ance of the outer abdom­i­nal mus­cles (every­one wants the six-pack), but as impor­tant as these mus­cles are, they aren’t nearly as vital as the ones below (behind?) them.

When I teach this in classes, some peo­ple have trou­ble feel­ing as if they are get­ting a full inhala­tion by sim­ply relax­ing and releas­ing the abdom­i­nals after con­trac­tion. I’ve been doing some think­ing about this, and the best expla­na­tion is can think of this that these inner abdom­i­nals aren’t yet strong enough to con­tract fully yet. If you can’t con­tract tightly, there won’t be enough pres­sure to fill the lungs ade­quately. This has noth­ing to do with your over­all fit­ness, it’s just that some folks don’t really develop these mus­cles enough in their day-to-day expe­ri­ence. The good news is that by prac­tic­ing this breath­ing tech­nique, you can strengthen the inner abs to the point that a full con­trac­tion and sub­se­quent release is possible.

preliminary exercise #3

If you have trou­ble expe­ri­enc­ing this sit­ting or stand­ing, I would sug­gest try­ing to prac­tice lying down. Relax your spine (and ele­vate your head a cou­ple of inches to retain the nat­ural curve of your neck) and bend your knees, with you feet about shoulder-width apart. You can put your hands on you stom­ach if it helps you be aware of your body.

When you make the con­trac­tion, tighten your abs enough to actu­ally lift your butt off the floor. You want to feel your hips tilt up towards your head, mean­while press­ing your lower back to the floor. At the same time, you should squeeze your cheeks. Pranayama yoga (which is where this style of breath­ing orig­i­nates) teaches that you should bring your belly but­ton and your anus as close together as pos­si­ble. Of course they don’t actu­ally move any closer together, but the visu­al­iza­tion may help you get the hang of this. Finally, remem­ber not to force-hold the breath by clos­ing the glo­tis, use your muscles.

I would sug­gest prac­tic­ing this sev­eral times a day if you can. Just lie down and exhale and hold. After about five sec­onds, sim­ply let your hips fall and your belly relax. If you don’t feel you’ve had an ade­quate inhala­tion, you can breathe nor­mally once or twice before the next rep­e­ti­tion. Do this five to ten times in a set, and then rest. If you do this a cou­ple times a day for a cou­ple of weeks, I believe you will notice some changes in your breath­ing and pos­ture even with­out con­sciously attempt­ing to improve them.

So that is the basic breath. Squeeze the inner abs to exhale. Relax and release to inhale.

Now let's go over some further explorations.

exploratory exercise #1

Standing with your feet apart (about fudodachi-width) and your back straight but relaxed, I want you to allow your body to sim­ply drop for­ward, bend­ing at the waist. Provided your glot­tis is relaxed, you will find that this motion nat­u­rally expels much of the air from your lungs by com­press­ing your trunk. In this case, you don’t have to con­tract the mus­cles at all — grav­ity is exhal­ing for you. Next, I want you to bend back­wards (as in our warm-up cal­is­then­ics) a lit­tle beyond straight while stay­ing very relaxed. Notice what hap­pens. If you make an effort not to inter­fere with your breath­ing, you will find that your lungs “mag­i­cally” fill up as you open upward and back.

Try this sev­eral times, slowly at first, and then at vary­ing speeds. Think as if your mid­sec­tion is an accor­dion or bel­lows. Your breath­ing should require no effort, instead occur­ring as a mechan­i­cal byprod­uct of your motion. Try to keep your spine elon­gated and your lungs fully expanded as you do this to feel the full effects.

exploratory exercise #2

Now we’re ready for the half-backroll. Same thing as before, only this time, you are actu­ally using your abdom­i­nals to lift your legs over­head, so the feel­ing of “auto-breathing” should be even more pronounced.

Sit with your knees bent and roll back­wards, care­ful not to put any stress on your neck. When your feet reach the floor, stop. Then roll back to the orig­i­nal posi­tion. If you relax, you will notice the air being expelled as you com­press your abdomen by fold­ing your legs over­head. When you release this com­pres­sion, you will inhale.

When you roll back for­ward, try not to rock for­ward from your shoul­ders to your hips, but rather to relax the spine while using your back mus­cles to shift the hips for­ward. You should feel as if each ver­te­bra touches the floor in turn until you are lying flat. As you relax into this supine posi­tion, your lungs should mechan­i­cally fill with air as the back straight­ens. Sit up and try again.

exploratory exercise #3

When you have mas­tered the back­ward por­tion of the exer­cise, you can add a sec­ond out/in to the exer­cise. You do this by rolling for­ward (to a posi­tion akin to a a ham­string stretch) instead of lying down. Doing this requires using the abs, so again, you can really feel how the mech­a­nism oper­ates. So the way this works is that, from sit­ting with your legs straight out, you: lay back (inhale), pull your legs over your head (exhale), roll your legs back to the front (inhale), bring the upper body with them and allow it to col­lapse as far for­ward as your flex­i­bil­ity allows (exhale). Repeat.

exploratory exercise #4

After you get com­fort­able with this, you can try the same exer­cise with front rolls. Tighten into a ball and exhale. Roll and then open into a squat or stand­ing and inhale. All of your front and back rolls and flips are obvi­ous con­tenders for prac­tice along these lines.

exploratory exercise #5

When you are start­ing to feel sen­si­tive to your breath and want to feel some­thing a lit­tle freaky, revisit the stand­ing ver­sion. Same as before, drop for­ward and let grav­ity pas­sively empty your lungs. This time, instead of lean­ing straight back, I want you to roll back across either side (like half a trunk rota­tion) until you are lean­ing back. If you are really in tune with your breath and totally relaxed, you will be able to feel one lung fill­ing before the other one. This is because the side to which you are rolling is com­pressed, but the other side expands. When you reach the fully-back posi­tion, both sides will be expanded.

Drop for­ward again, and this time roll up the other side. Practice this sev­eral times, alter­nat­ing sides. Then reverse the direc­tion: after exhal­ing for­ward, lean straight back and breath in. Then roll down one side and feel the air expel from first one lung, then the other. Lean back and inhale, and do the oppo­site side. By this point, if you are able to “feel the magic,” you should be pretty excited.

And now...

Though I won’t go into them here, there are also plenty of Tantric prac­tices that work on this same prin­ci­ple. Of course, I wouldn’t know any­thing about it per­son­ally, but I have heard that sex­ual sta­mina and plea­sure can both be greatly enhanced by inte­grat­ing breath­ing with, uh… Motion. Feel free to explore this aspect of Taido with your partner.

Aside from the mys­te­ri­ous les­son num­ber 23 of Master Chun’s “chi­nanju” (see Remo Williams for more), there are plenty of Taido tech­niques that can ben­e­fit from this kind of prac­tice. In fact, the more you look into it, i’m con­fi­dent that you will find an expansion/contraction (or even out/in/out) chain in every tech­nique you can think of. Furthermore, you will almost always find that punches and kicks con­nect with the tar­get on a con­trac­tion (hello kiai).

Exploratory Exercises Ad Infinitum

Ebigeri is a pretty easy place to see a con­trac­tion, expan­sion, con­trac­tion. Shajo/manji and mawashi geri are obvi­ous exam­ples in which one side is com­pressed dif­fer­ently from the other, which relates to the final exer­cise I out­lined above. Of course, our tech­niques are a lot more com­pli­cated than the exer­cises pre­sented here, so it’s going to be tough to try and make it through a jis­sen match with­out hav­ing to breathe actively, but if you prac­tice inte­grat­ing your breath and motion, you will find your endurance and energy increas­ing (see Tantra, above) with­out a doubt.

Now here’s where you can really try this con­cept out in Taido to get started: seimei no hokei. Anyone remem­ber the cor­rect breath­ing for that? I doubt it OK, so maybe you do — if so, con­grats). Who cares? Practice seimei no hokei and note the points at which your body tries to breathe for you. Now for the black belts, do the same with ten­tai no hokei — ten­tai is a killer, endurance-wise, but using the tengi do do some of the work for you can really help out.

You have to breathe all the time to stay alive, so it fol­lows that prac­tice breath­ing will improve your qual­ity of life. Feeling healthy? Good. Now go have a beer.