Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath

Question

Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath

In: 680

Answer 1

Professional opera singer’s perspective:

Breathing is super important as an opera singer because the only functional difference between singing opera and singing anything else is we have to fill a large theater and be heard over the orchestra without amplification. Most of learning how to breathe correctly in opera has to do with unlearning the shallow breaths we take while conversing in our everyday lives. So one reason we tend to take shallow breaths is the pace and frequency of modern speech and conversion. We also tend to lift our shoulders a bit while we take these shallow conversation breathes (generally a big no-no in the classical singing world). However, watch a baby breathe – its all deep tummy breathes.