Breathing in Pilates: Why It Is Not an Afterthought

Every Pilates class includes a moment where the instructor says "don't forget to breathe," and every class contains at least one person who had, in fact, forgotten. This is not a wellness platitude. Breath does specific mechanical work in Pilates, and once you understand what it is doing, the cue stops sounding like filler.

Lateral Breathing

The breathing style most associated with Pilates is lateral, or intercostal, breathing: you direct the breath into the sides and back of the ribcage rather than letting the belly balloon forward. The reason is practical. Much of Pilates asks you to maintain gentle abdominal engagement, and a big belly breath releases exactly that. Lateral breathing lets you take in a full breath without abandoning your core support.

To find it, wrap your hands around the sides of your lower ribs and breathe in. You are aiming to feel your hands pushed outward and slightly back. It feels strange for the first week and automatic within a month.

Exhale on Effort

The general rule is to exhale during the most demanding part of a movement. There are two reasons. Exhaling naturally recruits your deep abdominals, so the support arrives exactly when the load does. And it prevents breath-holding, which spikes pressure and leaves you light-headed at the top of a set.

You will find exceptions — some exercises deliberately invert this to create a different challenge — but as a default it holds up well.

Why Breath-Holding Happens

Holding your breath under effort is an instinct, not a mistake in judgment. Bracing the whole trunk feels stabilising. The trouble is that it is indiscriminate: you grip muscles you do not need, fatigue faster, and lose the fine control that the exercise is supposed to be training. When you notice you have stopped breathing, it is usually a reliable sign that the exercise has become slightly too hard — which is useful information.

The Nervous System Part

There is a real, non-mystical effect here. A long, controlled exhale nudges your nervous system toward its rest-and-recover state. This is a large part of why people leave a Pilates class feeling calmer than when they arrived, even though they have just worked hard. It also explains why the breathing work at the start and end of class is worth taking seriously instead of treating as padding.

Practising It

• Spend two minutes before bed with your hands on your ribs, practising lateral breaths. Nothing else required.
• In class, pick one exercise per session to focus on breath rather than performance.
• If you lose the rhythm mid-exercise, take one reset breath rather than trying to catch up.

Be Patient With It

Coordinating breath with movement is genuinely one of the harder parts of learning Pilates, and it is the part people are hardest on themselves about. It comes. Ask your instructor at Bespoke Studio to watch your breathing specifically — it is the kind of thing that is very hard to assess from the inside and very easy to spot from the outside.