How To Do Breathing Exercises For Singers

 If you keep on hearing about how important breathing is for singing but you have no idea how to get started, this video is for you.  

In this video, I’m going to tell you why breathing is important for singing and how to improve your breathing for singing so you can get better in no time.

 Your breathing and your voice are intimately connected and you can’t work one without the other. Even if you’re not working on your breathing, your breathing is still affecting your voice.

In the process of singing,  the air is the fuel of your voice and it affects it in many, many different ways. Today I’m going to tell you three of them.

The first one is   the amount of air that you inhale and the way you inhale, the way your body expands to breathe in, it’s going to determine  how much pressure you use to sing. If you breathe in adequately for singing, you are going to be able to use low air pressure to sing and that is going to allow you to work on your vocal cords in a very differentiated way which is going to make your singing much more effective.

 Secondly, the way you breathe in is going to activate different muscles, and if you activate the wrong  muscles they are going to get in the way of singing. For example, if you breathe in and you are activating a lot of accessory muscles It’s going to affect negatively your ability to work with your internal muscles of the voice in a differentiated way rather than overusing the external muscles to compensate for that.

A third way in which you’re breathing affects your voice is actually the way you exhale, your body can associate it  with a threat.  That happens when we develop a low tolerance to CO2.   if you have a low tolerance to CO2, when you have to sing things that require you to sing for a prolonged period of time, like holding low notes, your brain is going to perceive that as a threat and it’s going to shut down your voice.

An exercise that I would like to share with you today: this exercise is going to help you determine whether you have more difficulty inhaling or exhaling.  You’re going to breathe in in eight counts, slowly, connecting your breath with your movement of the arms while you’re bringing the arms up.

And then we’re going to exhale by bringing the arms. down in eight counts as well. We’re going to try to connect the movement with the breath, which means we’re going to inhale through the whole movement and then we’re going to exhale through the whole movement. Very important. Pay attention. Is it easy to last eight seconds of breathing?

Is it possible to inhale slowly or do you inhale fast and then you can’t inhale anymore? And when you exhale, is it possible to exhale slowly through the eight counts or do you need to exhale everything in one go? Let’s find  out. Let’s do that together. Here we go. We inhale. One, two, three. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

This is an exercise that can help you determine whether you’re breathing in needs a little bit of working or whether you’re exhaling needs a little bit of working. This is an exercise that you can also use to balance those. The way you do it if you’re doing it for practicing is the same way, you’re breathing in eight counts, then you hold for eight counts as well, and then you exhale in eight counts.

If you do this every day you are going to get better in no time!