Why I Stopped Teaching Traditional Pilates Breathing

If you have ever taken a Pilates class of any kind, you have undoubtedly been asked to focus on or control your breath in some capacity. Traditional Pilates breathing is an inhale to prepare the body for movement, and exhale to engage into the movement. It took me years of teaching and observing bodies in motion to realize that I felt the traditional Pilates breath was actually a bit restrictive, and didn’t allow the body enough release.

While that may seem like a sound, logical pattern, I began to wonder in my own practice and with my clients, what does preparing the body for movement mean? Don’t we want healthy, able bodies to always be prepared for movement? With every breath we take, even if we are lying supine on the floor, our body is in some kind of movement. Ideally, the human body in motion will experience at least some if not a lot of freedom in their bodies. Training the body to exhale on movement, however, only takes the body into a place of contraction, tightness; and a non-yielding body can be a body in pain, or in some type of discomfort.

I watched as people couldn’t make the connection between the breathing and muscle work we did in their Pilates sessions and out in the real world. If I need my low belly to stay active all the time in order to protect my low back, am I supposed to be squeezing my belly all the time? This sort of question came up a few times, and really stuck with me. It’s a question that made me think; how can I teach people to feel freedom in their bodies, while teaching them that one must brace and tighten the muscles in order to use them effectively. It just didn’t connect for me anymore. I could see it wasn’t resonating or helping my clients anymore either. Both myself and my clients had moved beyond that traditional breath pattern, and both parties were ready to explore the power of the inhale as well as the exhale to better the body's movement.

I knew that with each inhale, many muscle groups (if not all of them in some small way) contract both eccentrically and concentrically. With every single inhale. It’s essentially involuntary, and yet I wasn’t teaching people or myself even, to harness the natural strength and movement of that inhale. By that same token, knowing that each exhale brings natural, deep core connection, wouldn’t it make sense to use that natural muscle work for a body in motion?

I shifted slowly, with simple cues, like asking someone to inhale when they were moving in a way that didn’t feel comfortable to them. Asking them to notice if it changed anything, if they felt more openness with each breath and repetition. Before changing the motion, changing how the body makes space for the movement by changing the breath. Pretty much across the board, the result was a movement that once felt uncomfortable, or even impossible felt easier to connect to, and more comfortable to execute. Sometimes finding more range in general, and other times finding a range that offered the body a feeling of ease. I started asking clients to focus on their breath, and the muscle movement that breath naturally required. Getting a person to connect to the feeling in their own body with such a basic exercise like lying still and breathing meant that the body could feel safe, began to take deeper breaths, and overall felt this inherent sense of release in motion.

No matter the body, breathing into a movement, imagining that breath lighting up or expanding the moving area makes a profound difference, and it offers the body in question a much more exploratory approach to exercise and movement.

Just like in any meditative breath practice, where both the inhale and exhale are important, where there can be no true inhale without a full, deep exhale; with the body too, there can be no muscle contraction or strengthening on an exhale without the opening and lengthening of the inhale first. Playing with breath, not being so locked in by the traditional teaching of Pilates breath meant that I had access to helping more bodies in motion, finding a simple, basic way to build ease in a body in motion. A body that feels comfortable and safe in movement, is a body that is comfortable to live in.