Take a breath right now. Did you breathe into your chest or your belly? Did your shoulders rise? How long was the exhale compared to the inhale? Most people have no idea how they breathe—it’s automatic, unconscious, and rarely examined. Yet how you breathe affects literally every system in your body, from your nervous system to your core strength to your mental state.
At InnerCore, we don’t just teach exercises—we teach breathing. It’s the foundation of everything we do, and for many clients, it’s the most transformative aspect of their Pilates practice.
How Most People Breathe (Incorrectly)
Modern life has created epidemic levels of dysfunctional breathing. Stress triggers shallow chest breathing, poor posture restricts diaphragm movement, chronic tension keeps muscles contracted during inhalation, and mouth breathing bypasses the nose’s important filtering and regulation functions.
This dysfunctional breathing creates a cascade of problems: reduced oxygen intake, increased stress hormone production, poor core muscle activation, neck and shoulder tension, reduced athletic performance, and even digestive issues. You’re functioning at a fraction of your capacity simply because you’re not breathing optimally.
What Proper Breathing Looks Like
Optimal breathing engages your diaphragm—the dome-shaped muscle that separates your chest from your abdomen. When you inhale, your diaphragm contracts and moves downward, creating space in your lungs and allowing your belly to expand. When you exhale, your diaphragm relaxes upward, and your belly naturally draws in.
This diaphragmatic breathing is how you breathed as a baby, before stress and poor posture disrupted the pattern. Returning to this natural breathing rhythm requires awareness and practice—exactly what Pilates provides.
The Breath-Core Connection
Your diaphragm doesn’t work alone—it’s part of your deep core stabilisation system. Your diaphragm forms the top of your core cylinder, your pelvic floor forms the bottom, your transverse abdominis wraps around the sides, and your multifidus supports your spine from the back.
These structures work together as a coordinated pressure system. When you breathe properly, your pelvic floor and diaphragm move in synchrony, and your deep core muscles engage reflexively. When you breathe dysfunctionally, this coordination breaks down, and your core cannot stabilise your spine effectively.
This is why breath is the first principle in the STOTT PILATES® method we use at our Chelsea studio. Without proper breathing, nothing else works optimally.
Breathing for Nervous System Regulation
Your breath is the most direct tool you have for influencing your nervous system. Slow, deep, rhythmic breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system—the “rest and digest” response that counteracts stress. Short, shallow, irregular breathing maintains sympathetic activation—the “fight or flight” response that’s useful in emergencies but harmful when chronic.
Many of our London clients arrive in a state of chronic sympathetic activation—their modern lives keep them constantly on alert. The breathing practice they learn in Pilates provides a tool they can use anywhere to shift their nervous system state. Stuck in traffic? Breathe. Stressful meeting? Breathe. Can’t sleep? Breathe.
The Posture-Breathing Cycle
Poor posture restricts breathing, and restricted breathing reinforces poor posture—it’s a vicious cycle. When you’re slumped forward, your rib cage cannot expand fully, and your diaphragm cannot move through its full range. This forces you to compensate with shoulder and neck muscles, creating tension and inefficiency.
Pilates addresses both sides of this cycle. The postural corrections open your chest and ribcage, allowing fuller breathing. The breathing practice itself helps support better posture by engaging core muscles that stabilise your spine.
Breathing Patterns for Different Needs
Different breathing patterns create different effects, and in Pilates, we use this knowledge strategically. Lateral thoracic breathing (expanding your rib cage sideways) maintains core engagement during exercise, slow exhales through pursed lips calm your nervous system, deeper inhalations increase oxygen delivery for more demanding exercises, and breath holds at specific points create stability during transitions.
Your instructor at InnerCore teaches you which breath pattern to use for each exercise and why. This isn’t arbitrary—it’s based on biomechanics and physiology.
Common Breathing Mistakes
Even when people know they should breathe properly, they often make mistakes: holding breath during difficult movements, breathing too shallowly or too forcefully, inverting the pattern (belly in on inhale, out on exhale), breathing too quickly without allowing full exhales, and gripping or creating tension while trying to breathe deeply.
In your private 1to1 sessions, your instructor observes and corrects these patterns immediately, ensuring you’re building proper habits from the start.
The Athletic Performance Connection
Athletes are discovering that breathing training enhances performance. Proper breathing improves oxygen delivery to working muscles, delays fatigue during endurance activities, helps regulate heart rate and effort, supports core stability during dynamic movements, and aids recovery between high-intensity intervals.
For clients training for marathons, cycling events, or other athletic pursuits, the breathing work we do in Pilates directly translates to better sport performance.
Breathing for Better Sleep
The breathing patterns you practice during Pilates sessions become tools for better sleep. The slow, rhythmic breath that helps you through a challenging exercise is the same breath that can calm your mind at bedtime. Many clients report using Pilates breathing techniques when they wake during the night, finding it helps them return to sleep more easily than lying there with a racing mind.
Starting Your Breathing Practice
You don’t need to wait for your Pilates session to begin improving your breathing. Throughout your day, pause and notice: where is your breath going? Are you holding tension anywhere? Can you slow and deepen your breath slightly? These small moments of awareness compound over time.
During your sessions at InnerCore, we take this awareness much deeper, teaching you precise control over your breathing and its integration with movement. Your first session is free—an opportunity to discover what a difference proper breathing can make to how you move, feel, and function throughout your day.
