While many types of exercise will develop your lungs, the two exercises below are designed specifically to help breath control when you are using your voice.

Better breath control will help you to speak slower and feel calmer, more confident and in control in any situation.

Exercise 8: The balloon breath

It’s best to practise this first while sitting in your quiet space, but later you can do it while standing or (without the arm movements) walking along.

• Sit comfortably upright with your mouth closed and jaw relaxed and imagine you have a balloon inside you that occupies the space from your navel to your throat.
• Blow up this balloon from bottom to top by taking in 4 sniffs of air through your nose until the balloon feels full. Stay relaxed: imagine you’re smelling a lovely flower and want to inhale as much of the perfume as possible. Then breathe out in one smooth complete breath to the count of four. Repeat about 6 times.
• Now, to the same count, reverse the process by breathing in smoothly and breathing out in 4 ‘reverse sniffs’ (as though gently blowing your nose). Repeat about 6 times.
• Finally breathe in with 4 sniffs and out with 4 reverse sniffs. Repeat about 6 times.
• You can enhance the effect by coupling the breathing with arm movement, as shown in the video below. Move your arms in small steps for each sniff, or one smooth movement for a complete breath.

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You can modify the balloon breath in two ways that will help develop your lungs further:

• by gradually increasing the count from 4 to 5, 6, etc., and
• by introducing a pause of increasing length at the end of both the out-breath and the in-breath.

Exercise 9: Counting your breath

You can count your in-breath and out-breath with any breathing exercise as a way of building up breath control. Here’s an easy one to start with:

• Sit comfortably and silently count 1, 2, 3, etc., at a speed of about one number per second, as you breathe a complete breath in. (See Part One Section 6.4 for a reminder of how to do a complete breath.) Repeat the same count as you breathe a complete breath out. Your breath should feel rhythmic and comfortable, and not strained or hurried. To achieve a good rhythm, if necessary adjust (down or up) the number to which you count.
• Once you’ve got a comfortable rhythm going, add one more number to each out-breath so that you’re counting, for example, ‘1, 2, 3’ every time you breathe in and ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ every time you breathe out.
• If that’s still comfortable, after a few more breaths add another number, and then another, until the out-breath is twice as long as the in-breath.
• Finally, see if you can add a little pause, and then a slightly longer one, at the end of each out-breath and in-breath.

Breath counting works well with walking, matching each count to a step.