In 2020 I relocated my practice from L.A. to Saint George, Utah and am teaching in person at my studio, or via the Zoom if you prefer.
If you have questions about optimal breathing, vocal technique, audition and performance technique, please feel free to contact me at 435-767-2211 or elizabethprescott@me.com.
Optimal Breathing:
The breath work is firmly rooted in functional anatomy and was proven in extensive medical studies (East Orange Naval Hospital and Saint Albans Veterans Hospital back in the early 1960’s) to be highly effective in redeveloping the diaphragm in patients with advanced lung ailments and weakened breathing mechanisms. The distance traveled by the diaphragm in a breathing cycle was measurably increased, as well as tonicity of the muscle visibly improved on images. Exhales become measurably longer even as the patients expressed increased ease in breathing. All patients showed marked improvement in condition, and many improved enough to go from being “terminally ill” bed patients to leaving the hospital and going home to live relatively normal lives.
On the other end of the health spectrum, elite athletes generally show recovery times after exertion cut in half. The 1968 Olympic Track & Field Team (with whom Carl Stough worked in the final weeks prior to the events in high-altitude Mexico City) were unique in the games in not requiring supplemental oxygen after events. This was above and beyond the stunning results they achieved, breaking records, setting records that lasted as long as ten years, bringing home 20 medals including 12 gold. Lee Evans credited Stough and the breathing method with enabling his legendary performance, but he also described the practice as being something that he realized would be an important part of the rest of his life, not just for athletics.
You may also find information about Breathing Coordination MDH at www.breathingcoordination.ch.
On October 13, 2017, Breathing Coordination was featured on the national news channel in Switzerland in a wonderful two-and-a-half minute piece:
Below is a link to my presentation in 2016 at UCLA Medical Center for the LUPUS LA 2016 Patient Conference. Skip the first minute, and forget the part of the intro referring to getting “more breath” since that’s absolutely not the point. But she was graciously doing the best she could. The practice is about optimal breathing with minimal effort, and many people are over-inhaling. Anyway, they also didn’t mention that there would be a video, so I walk off camera as did the other presenters. 18 minutes isn’t much to explain the practice, history, and try to give some quick tips to easier breathing to these lupus patients, each different from the next. Still, I received great feedback that it was enlightening and helpful, and hope you find it interesting.
First introduced to Breathing Coordination in 2011 at a voice lesson in New York with my long-time classical voice teacher David Jones, I’ve began receiving training from Robin De Haas and Lynn Martin beginning in 2012, and after roughly 350 hours of intensive training. I became the first certified practitioner in the United States. The demand for this technique has been staggering to me. What begins with introducing an existing voice student to Breathing Coordination inevitably leads to a chain of referrals of other singers, teachers, and a whole range of people with breathing challenges. These can be high-performance athletes or the very ill suffering with COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, the third highest cause of death in the U.S. and much of the world.
Of course the technique serves singers beautifully, and I’ve often heard the very words I used myself when I made this discovery: “This is the missing piece!”
Although many in the fields of singing, Pilates, athletics, respiratory therapy etc. have long been aware of the challenge of exhaling more fully without locking the ribs, I’m astounded by the level of precision that Lynn and Robin have brought to the techniques of the late Carl Stough.
Carl Stough was a renowned voice teacher and conductor who, when asked to try to help end-stage emphysema patients to breathe more easily, worked instinctively. Through one-on-one sessions with every imaginable kind of client, he developed Breathing Coordination over many decades of private without being able to explain exactly what he was doing and why he achieved such astounding results, including the 1968 U.S. Olympic track team which swept the gold medals in very smoggy, high-altitude Mexico City. But despite requests from the medical profession to train others to do what he was doing, Carl was unable to spread the techniques effectively. All that remained after Carl passed were a handful of enthusiastic clients who had taken sessions with Carl, only a few of whom attempted to duplicate his work.
It was Lynn Martin’s thirty years of sessions with Carl Stough combined with her accomplishments in Functional Anatomy and Ideokinesis that have brought about the medical understanding of Breathing Coordination. Everything is rooted firmly in functional anatomy. In my own studies with Lynn, we have focused intensely on every structure in the body, whether muscle, bone, or cartilage, which has any part of or influence on on breathing. Every rib, the roughly 100 articulations of the ribcage, intercostal muscles, the abdominal muscles, the spinal column and optimal alignment, the psoas, the crura of the diaphragm, etc.. The list is nearly endless, and the process is truly fascinating. Certainly I find it immensely rewarding to help singers to improve their breath control, but the other benefit for singers is much more important, and that’s vocal health.
Robin De Haas, a voice teacher in Switzerland who’s is renowned all over Europe for his work with repairing damaged voices, has been tremendously informative. I’ll write more in time as much is happening!
In 2016, I began reworking the Robin’s transliteration of his highly acclaimed book, La Voie de la Voix (The Path of the Voice), and it was released in English in 2017. I have copies available, otherwise they have to be shipped from France.