Tag Archives: wind musicians

Ian Locke, founder of Thrive Personal Training in Swindon, provides personal training in a private gym as well as nutritional analysis to help clients reach their health and fitness goals.

Here he talks about how and why he came to use the POWERbreathe inspiratory muscle training device, and shares his first experience of using it. In future reports we’ll learn of his progress, so please keep coming back to check on how Ian’s breathing training is going on his POWERbreathe K5...

"As someone who has tried their hand at running, high intensity interval training, boxing and playing a wind instrument, I’ve become more conscious in recent months that the limiting...

Our very own Duncan visited the lovely people at Dawkes Music in Maidenhead recently to present POWERbreathe.

Dawkes Music specialise in woodwind and brass instruments and expressed an interest in POWERbreathe to see if it could be beneficial to the musicians who visit them. But rather than take our word for it, Duncan presented Vicky and Giulia with a POWERbreathe Plus Medium Resistance model each, so that they could experience the breathing training effects for themselves. They plan to use them over the next 4 weeks to see if it helps them hold a note for longer on their instruments.

Before training with their POWERbreathes, Duncan tested them...

Just took another set of readings and am quite excited! It's 9 days since the last post and there have been more definite improvements for me.  Laura is very much looking to catching up where she left off when I meet up with her again.  I haven't managed to do the exercises twice every day, but I have managed at least one set of 30 breaths everyday.

I thought perhaps I wouldn't see as much improvement as I would have liked. But I got a clue to my developing breath control while singing for a wedding in the chapel of the Royal Hospital Chelsea on Saturday.

My ability to sustain long phrases is definitely better.

I have been using the...

Unfortunately we did not keep up with our progress over the last 2 weeks because of moving back to the UK.

Laura is in Belfast now and cannot do her POWERbreathe because I have it with me. She will recommence when i next see her in a couple of weeks.  I am going to start again today.  I have just taken some more readings of how long I can sustain various notes pianissimo on an 'i' vowel, and the results are very similar to the most recent ones.   The figures in brackets are a reminder of the results before starting this challenge. The lowest note is the A below middle C ( I am a counter-tenor).

A           25.13s...

Miles has used the POWERbreathe everyday for two sessions. As you can see there are notable improvements in his performance from the results taken after week one. He will continue this week but move to level 3.

Laura has missed a couple of days this week and you will note that possibly as a result she has not made as significant an improvement. Most of the results have remained very similar to those after week one. Laura will continue on level 2 for a few days before changing to level 3 and is hoping that next week she will not miss any sessions and that there will be a more impressive improvement.

For more detailed results, read more at the Music Tutors

We have now been using POWERbreathe for seven days. For the first day we used setting 0 and since then setting 1. We plan on using setting 2 today as the first setting is noticeably easier now.
Before using POWERbreathe we timed how long we could sing various pitches on an /i/ vowel softly.

These first timings were to the nearest second. A week later we took slightly more precise timings with a stopwatch. Each pitch was sung three times and the average time is given below.

Here are the findings so far

Laura
Week One                       Week Two

A(below middle C)  18.67                                23.42
...