So today I asked one of our clients how she was getting on in our Body Maintenance Pilates classes and to my amazement she responded by saying “they are great, they are really helping my with my saxophone lessons”. This has to be one of the more interesting ways in which our Body Maintenance Pilates classes have helped our clients.
We were intrigued and asked her, in what way have the classes helped her? She went on to explain that she can hold a note longer (increased lung capacity), one of the lessons is to hold a note as long as you can with the one breath.
Before she would have been one of the first to run out of breath, but now she is able to out last most of the others in the class. So why is this? well we can speculate that due to the amount of focus we put on diaphragmatic breathing, has helped her increase her lung capacity. By training to use your diaphragm to draw air in and not just your chest and neck muscles, you will increase the volume of air you draw in and utilise the full capacity of the lungs.
The second area she said it has helped is to enable her to practice longer, she found that when sitting practicing she tended to slump forward after an hour . She now feels she can support herself better and practice longer without slumping. By developing a stronger core the body can support itself longer without the use of the back of a chair.
Incidentally this slumping would also restrict her lung capacity, so the combination of core strength and breathing exercises would have contributed to both of these improvements in her saxaphone lessons. She has been attending our Body Maintenance Pilates classes for 2 months and can definitely attribute the improvements to the classes.
So if you want to improve your saxaphone playing, develop core strength and get fitter and stronger, check out our Body Maintenance Classes.