Breathing Block

[funkrocker049]

Here's a good rehearsal day:

Breathing block, suicides, afternoon run-through in warm clothes before lunch, evening run-through also in warm clothes....

heaven

[soccerguy315]

is someone who marched a corps that didn't do breathing blocks willing to share what they did instead? I assume you also ran... and did breathing exercises? Just separately I guess.

[Puppet]

Breathing blocks are, or at least the way we did them at Scouts (I was around for 2004 and part of 2007), hard. Essentially, as posters above said, you take air in for a certain amount of counts and then expel the air while running in time. The expulsion of air is done with a "hissing" sound (sssss), which creates resistance and makes one push to get air out. Typically, you'll fill up for four counts, then go out for four, do a "cleansing breath", then rinse and repeat with higher numbers of counts out. At some point, normally when the block gets hard, the cleansing breath will be taken out and you'll just do the sets back to back. I never ran in a breathing block where the counts went higher than forty eight out. The really long sets out aren't really what you have to watch out for. It's repeating the sixteen count sets while going at a brisk run--with a large step size--that really gets you worn out. Blocks at Scouts would last between 15 and 25 minutes, if I remember things correctly. You start out with relatively easy counts, then it gets harder. At the end you'll either do the sprinting the poster above mentioned, or you'll kind of "cool down" as a group, which consists of slowing the pace down and tapering out, hanging your head down, standing still, and praying for death.

OMG! You people are animals. Back in the sixties and early seventies when I marched, we'd just do the drill at full steam and power a few times with interruptions for corrections and at that point the DM or Carmen would yell "Formation A" and we would run back the starting line (even the drum section and I have weird images of the tymp section holding the drums on their heads!) - like I said that would happen a few times during rehearsals, then do the show dry a couple of times then it would be like 10 PM and we'd all put away our gear and have a smoke.

BTW, we were animals, too!

Puppet

Edited October 23, 2008 by Puppet

[Michelle]

is someone who marched a corps that didn't do breathing blocks willing to share what they did instead? I assume you also ran... and did breathing exercises? Just separately I guess.

45 minutes of PT in the morning with everything from stretching, running, and football drills everyday. In sectionals we would march and play in the drill as opposed to tracking.

[Coathope]

45 minutes of PT in the morning with everything from stretching, running, and football drills everyday. In sectionals we would march and play in the drill as opposed to tracking.

PT?

[cmathis]

PT?

Probably "physical training..."

[Coathope]

Probably "physical training..."

Ah. I felt like such a rookie asking.

[whitedawn]

is someone who marched a corps that didn't do breathing blocks willing to share what they did instead? I assume you also ran... and did breathing exercises? Just separately I guess.

well, we did an awful lot of breathing exercises in the winter, to the point where i saw one guy pass out.

then once we moved in, we ran for ten or fifteen minutes in the mornings.

the actual best way to simulate playing and marching is to play and march, so we did an awful lot of playing and marching, as well as lots of marching + air during visual rehearsals. when the show is crazy demanding, it makes little sense to waste time not rehearsing it.

[Dave]

That's great--if you have a corps full of mature musicians who understand what it means to push yourself beyond your normal level. If you're dealing with an immature group, you have to teach them that, and the best way to do it is to strip it down to its basic idea--you're tired but you have to keep going. Once that concept has been planted you can start adding more levels onto it, and breathing blocks are a good way to do it; you're teaching the idea of staying relaxed and controlling your breathing even when you're wearing yourself out in a high-intensity situation. I'm sure there are groups out there who do breathing blocks out there like you described, just for the sake of hyping on them (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, either; sometimes it's good to build in that sense of invincibility in the face of adversity), but honestly, there are a lot of good reasons to do them. We did them every year I marched and they made a big difference for me personally and for the line as a whole.

[ironlips]

I will respectfully correct my good friend (and world-class baritone) Pooh Bear regarding the "origin" of the running and breathing block. Though it's quite possible that others also discovered this technique, we developed it at Garfield in the spring of '77 to prepare for the elevation at Nationals in Denver.

It grew out of my experience of running in tempo in basic training at Ft. Dix, combined with some yoga techniques gleaned from one of my mentors (hissing, timed exhalation...etc.) We reasoned it would help the brass players from sea level New Jersey to quickly adapt to the Mile High city. It did.

When I moved to the BDs after that season, the block came with me. They all thought I was a bit loopy, but soon realized the value of the process and it was folded in to the daily routine. Even the color guard got into the act and swore by the results.

In truth, some grizzled Army sergeant probably invented this while training infantry troops for WWI, having them sing while jogging with full back packs and weapons. It most likely saved lives. I know it improves a brass player's stamina.