833 – Breath Support and Breath Control

2023.04.13 – 0833 – Breath Support and Breath Control

Breath Support and Breath Control

These two terms are often used interchangeably (I do so myself), but there is a specific difference.

Breath Support

Is maximizing the air capacity available to you for speaking, through best posture and best use of the diaphragm, lung health and so on.

Fitness of the diaphragm is key because when you speak the diaphragm is constantly relaxing and stretching. (A quick reminder: your diaphragm is the ‘elastic’ dome-shaped muscle that, when you breath in, drops down, tenses and flattens as the lungs inflate… and then, when you breathe out and the lungs empty, relaxes back into its dome shape.)

Breath Control

This is the regulation of the amount of air that you push past your folds, the amount and pace of the release depending on the need of the sentence or situation.

This is the way we control the airflow from the lungs to the folds, to power the voice. How we use muscles and our mind to increase or decrease the intensity of the flow, depending on the vocal power that we need in that moment. To control your voice well you have to control the breath you power it with.

Think of your lungs as a ‘bagpipe bladder of air’, or the boiler of a house. A small or un-serviced pump unit in a large house with lots of radiators on full, will struggle to cope to keep heat to them all. In a similar way, poorly performing lungs caused by an untrained diaphragm won’t be able to maintain the flow of air to deliver an effective message.

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