Atemübung Nr. 5

Final Exercise: Breathing and Relaxation

The final exercise involves you putting your hand flat on your chest.

• One hand on your chest.
• In this exercise, I want you to feel the expansion.

Important Note on Expansion

This is really important:

• The expansion is that way.
• It's not, as I mentioned earlier, this way.

So, this is wrong:

• Shoulders moving up.

But this is fine:

• Chest expanding without shoulder movement.

You see, in the second one, I'm not moving my shoulders up, but I can feel my chest expanding and that's absolutely fine.

Demonstration

Just to demonstrate:

• Hand on the chest.
• Breathe in through the mouth.
• Whispered "Ah."

Summary of Exercises

So just to summarize, we've done four exercises there. If you include the one on the floor, it's actually five:

1. Lying on your back with the book on your stomach with the whispered "R"
2. Standing up, hands here
3. Hands at the back
4. Hands at the side
5. One hand on the chest

Daily Practice Tips

You don't have to do all of these exercises every day.

• I think when you first start playing the saxophone, I really recommend especially the one lying on your back on the floor.
• Sometimes, what happens is, you've had a hard day at the office or a tough day at school, you come back feeling a bit stressed.

Lying on your back is a really nice way to just relax for two to five minutes before you start playing.

• It's a nice way of getting nicely relaxed.
• You can even listen to music while you're doing it and remind yourself about how you're going to breathe.

Remember, we want to avoid bringing all the stresses from your day-to-day life into your practice room. Get yourself feeling nice and relaxed before you try and make a sound.