Breathing

Yesterday, I took a bikram yoga class for the first time.

Now I never looked down on Yoga, always knew it was tough, but bikram yoga is that much tougher. Afterwards, you feel very tired but refreshed at the same time. The day after, I can say I'm feeling soreness where I normally don't feel after my usual workouts. 

In the beginning of class, I we started off with a breathing practice. Hard to explain, but basically you try to push your breath starting from your stomach. At the beginning of practice, my breath was quite short. Didn't take that much to fill up my lungs. Not sure if it's the winter or if I'm not in my usual shape, but by the end of the practice I was able to take more breath and fill my lungs more. 

Now what does this have to do with sword? Breath is extremely important for several things. For beginners, it takes one full breath to do a good cut. However you should learn how to be able to control your breath, so that you can do multiple cuts with one breath. 

Remember your muscles run on the air you breathe to send oxygen to your muscles so they can work. Breathing practice is great to help get your muscles more efficient with the o2 you breathe in as well as being able to increase how much o2 you're working with. 

Another great aspect of the breathing practice we did was the reinforcement of where you should control your breath. Which is your stomach or "hara". Kiai is extremely important in the style that we practice. Many people kiai with their throats, but kiai should be done by your hara. It's almost like breathing out should be done by pressing your stomach in. 

When you cut, the pinpoint of your cut should be 3 things

1) Proper sword extension (reaching) 

2) Hasuji of course 

3) Cutting with your hara. 

So your kiai should be strongest at the point where your sword has the biggest extension and goes through the target. Much like a punch. 

The biggest thing also was body posture and position. You would think yoga has all these crazy postures, but to get the right breath, how you position your body and posture is quite important. I stress posture a lot but to get a good control of breath is another reason as much as not getting your face cut. 

Although I knew most of this, it was more of a thought of how funny it was to find these things parallel in doing yoga and no matter what you know, a reminder from different perspectives are always good to have.