I’ve learned a lot about my body over the 20 years I have been a student at Pilates in Holland. I engage my core more often, pay attention to my body mechanics, and use my breath to support both exertion and calm. That use of breath didn’t always come naturally to me. It took years of week-after-week-after-week repetition to fully embody and understand the different ways our breath can support us in both stability and release, effort and ease.
Joseph Pilates taught that breathing was an integral part of any movement. He considered learning to breathe correctly the most important of all the Pilates principles — “Above all, learn how to breathe correctly,” he famously said — which is why most Pilates exercises are taught with specific breathing patterns.
One of the first instructions I remember learning from Mandy back in 2005 was, “inhale to prepare, exhale to work.” The inhale supports your body with oxygen and expands the ribcage, creating a sense of length. The exhale invites the deep abdominal wall to participate without bracing or aggressively pulling your belly toward the spine. The ribs lower and close inward, while the deep belly muscles draw the navel in and round the lower spine, creating stability before you challenge them with movement. This is why exhalation is paired with movements that involve flexion or greater exertion. Both play a noticeable role in rotation or twisting: exhalation often provides the “wringing” sensation and inhalation provides the length to allow better rotation. This syncing of breath and movement is called coordinated breathing, and it’s at the very heart of any Pilates practice. It is one of the first things we teach in our Newcomer Privates and one of our most-used handouts.
Jayne, who uses her breath for both Pilates and playing the flute and once wrote a great blog about breathing, marvels at how an exhale in normal, everyday breathing is not the work, the inhale is the work. But in Pilates, or any effort-inducing movement, the exhale becomes the work because the diaphragm is connected to the abdominal muscles.
The two halves of the breath allow us to use it in different ways. It makes me think of a quote from a book I read many years ago: “We consider breath to be a sacrament,” my partner slipped in as an aside…. His statement made me think of a Buddhist master I had recently met, who had said that the East’s “most profound gift” to the West had been “the ancient science and discipline of the breath.” Simply coming to think of my breath as malleable, as a tool that should be sharpened and used, was a revelation to me, having subsisted on shallow, stunted half breaths for most of my life.
A revelation indeed. And this idea of breath as both sacred and practical stayed with me.
That idea resurfaced recently in class with Debra. She pointed out how we usually use one type of breathing in class, lateral or intercostal breathing, and another kind at the end of class when we’re recovering, diaphragmatic or belly breathing. I’ve written about diaphragmatic breathing before, but I’ve never really explored the ins and outs of intercostal breathing, so I started digging into it.
Diaphragmatic or belly breathing expands the lower abdomen outward on the inhale. As you inhale, the diaphragm contracts, flattening out and moving downward toward your pelvis, creating space for the lungs to fill and allowing the ribcage to widen. The belly expands because when the diaphragm pushes downward, so do the organs; they compress and shift forward, pressing against your belly wall and making your stomach expand. This type of breathing is incredibly useful for getting more oxygen quickly during cardio or endurance work. It also promotes deep relaxation and lower stress. A long exhale can help during stretching by reducing unnecessary tension and allowing the body to settle. In fact, your heart rate increases slightly on the inhale and decreases on the exhale. A long, slow exhale can be very calming. In Pilates, diaphragmatic breathing often activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the rest‑and‑digest system that lowers your heart rate and helps you recover. Look at a baby sleeping and you’ll see their natural diaphragmatic breath.
Lateral, or intercostal, breathing directs air into the sides and back of the ribcage rather than the belly. It’s less intuitive, but it invites the core muscles to stay activated while your mind stays calm and focused. Instead of the downward movement of the diaphragm, this breath expands the ribs outward. It’s called intercostal breathing because the intercostal muscles between the ribs help stabilize the ribcage and support the breath. This technique lets you take a deep breath while your abdominals continue to support your spine and movement. One study shows that lateral breathing leads to higher muscle activation in the abdominals and back.
Every time a teacher cues breath mid‑exercise rather than during rest, this is why. Of course, as we progress in our Pilates practice, this gets more complicated: we don’t necessarily want to exhale every time we need core support. The deep core needs to learn to maintain pressure and support while breathing in and out. So sometimes teachers cue movements a little differently to build that skill.
This video shows the rib movement beautifully.
Knowing the mechanics is one thing; knowing when to reach for each type is what actually changes how you move through your day. Diaphragmatic breathing is your go‑to for daily stress reduction, meditation, yoga, lowering your heart rate, and recovering after a workout. Pilates breathing is built for dynamic core exercise, spine support, and maintaining posture while you’re training. Belly breathing brings oxygen and reduces cortisol. Lateral breathing keeps your center stable while you work.
Twenty years in, I still hear Mandy’s voice telling me to inhale to prepare, and I still hear Debra reminding me that the breath changes as the work changes. That’s really the heart of it: your breath isn’t one tool; it’s two, and knowing which one to reach for is its own kind of body literacy. Belly breathing brings you back down, the release after the effort. Lateral breathing holds you steady while you push, the stability that makes the effort possible in the first place.
Jayne points out that this distinction is really just an extension of something we already say in everyday life. Before someone jumps into a hard task or a hard life change, we tell them to take a deep breath, letting that breath prepare them for the work ahead. And when something just happened and we’re anxious or keyed up, we say the same thing to calm down. It’s the same instruction doing two different jobs, depending on what the moment calls for.
Learning to move between the two is one of the quieter gifts this practice has given me — proof that stability and release, effort and ease, were never opposites. They were always meant to work as a pair.
