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Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 15:44:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: Winslow Yerxa
Subject: Breathing, harmonica playing and the lower back

Several days ago I injured my lower back moving
furniture. Not medically serious and evidently
temporary, but very unpleasant and debilitating
nonetheless.

To my surprise, one of the many ordinary movement that
suddenly became forbiddingly painful was deep
breathing.

This caught me off guard. I'm always telling my
students to lift the ribcage out of the way and let
the belly do the breathing. But when I'm breathing
deeply, as some sharp jolts of pain have taught me,
the abdominal expansion seems to go beyond the frontal
"tummy" area and include the muscles of the lower
back, if only to shift them out of the way of the
expansion (I'm guessing about that bit). I first
noticed this while walking. Later, when I tried
bending notes on a low E harp, I found that lower-back
breathing seemed to be involved there, as well.

Dizzy Gillespie once made a comment on film to the
effect that a trumpet player needed a strong sphincter
to avoid losing his internal organs out the back end,
due to the back-pressure involved in trumpet playing.
Harmonica playing however, even while bending or
overbending, requires very little in the way of
full-body back pressure. But it seems that the large
abdominal cavity induced by very deep breathing gets
involved in playing (especially in bending) very low
notes. Perhaps it's a case of making the hammer bigger
- - a light tap with a very big hammer having more
effect that flailing away with a very small hammer.

Can anyone shed light on this?

By the way, I'm on the mend and should be perfectly
fine soon, as long as I don't do anything stupid (I
won't be entering the caber-toss at the Scottish
Games).

Winslow

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