Ujjayi

Ujjayi comes from ud, upwards or expanding, and jaya, victory or conquest. It is usually rendered as victorious breath, and in English classes it is called ocean breath for the obvious reason: it sounds like distant surf.

Physically it is very simple. You narrow the glottis, the opening between the vocal cords, slightly, so that air moving in and out makes a soft, low friction sound. That narrowing does two things. It slows the breath down, because air cannot rush through a smaller opening, and it makes the breath audible, which means you have continuous feedback on a process you would otherwise have no way of monitoring.

The count taught here is 20 breaths, about five minutes, at a 1:1 ratio of roughly six seconds in and six seconds out. That works out at five or six breaths a minute, which is not an arbitrary number: it is the rate that the slow breathing literature repeatedly identifies as the point of maximum effect on blood pressure and on the baroreflex.

The single most useful thing about Ujjayi, though, is not physiological. It is that it turns your breath into something you can hear, and therefore into something you can supervise yourself. A pose that roughens the sound is too much for you today. That is a judgement a student can make alone at home, and there is very little else in yoga that a student can.

Ujjayi is usually presented as strictly better than ordinary slow breathing. The best study on the question does not say that, and it is worth reading carefully before you decide what to practise.

Researchers took seventeen people with no yoga experience and compared four things: normal breathing, slow breathing at six a minute with an equal inhale and exhale, slow breathing with Ujjayi on the exhale only, and slow breathing with Ujjayi on both. The finding was that plain equal ratio slow breathing produced the largest improvement in baroreflex sensitivity and the largest fall in systolic and diastolic pressure. Ujjayi on the exhale reduced that gain. Ujjayi on both phases showed no significant baroreflex improvement over baseline at all. Ujjayi did raise oxygen saturation marginally more, by a tenth or two of a per cent from an already normal baseline, which is not a difference that means anything clinically.

Seventeen people is a small study, and the authors are describing beginners rather than experienced practitioners. But the honest conclusion follows anyway: if your reason for practising is blood pressure, practise plain slow breathing at six breaths a minute, or Anulom Vilom, rather than Ujjayi. If your reason is to govern a movement practice, to keep your attention on the breath, or to have an audible signal that you are working too hard, Ujjayi is exactly the right tool and nothing else does that job.

The wider slow breathing literature does support the general case. A review of fifteen studies of breathing below ten a minute found consistent increases in heart rate variability, a shift in the EEG towards alpha, and reported reductions in anxiety, anger and confusion. Ujjayi is one way of getting there. It is not the only one, and for one specific purpose it is not the best one.

Ujjayi is the only pranayama I teach that is meant to run underneath something else. The others are practised sitting still. This one is practised while you move, and that is where it earns its place.

How to use it. Start the sound standing in Tadasana before the first movement. Keep it going through the whole sequence, including the pauses. One movement to one breath in a flowing sequence such as Surya Namaskar; in a held pose, keep the sound running for the whole hold and count the breaths rather than the seconds.

What it tells you. Four things, and I use all of them from the front of the room.

• The sound roughens: the pose is too strong today. Come back a little.
• The sound stops: you are holding your breath, which almost everyone does at the hardest moment of a pose without knowing it.
• The exhale gets short: you are gripping the abdomen.
• The rate speeds up: you are rushing the sequence.

Where to drop it. Let the sound go for the final Savasana and for seated meditation. Ujjayi is a working breath. Relaxation wants an unmanaged one.

• Learning it: ten breaths with the mouth open, then ten with the mouth closed. Two minutes. Do that daily for a week and the sound will arrive.
• Seated practice: 20 breaths at a 6 second inhale and a 6 second exhale. About five minutes. Once or twice a day.
• During movement: for the whole class or sequence, however long that is. There is no round count here.
• Building the length: go from 5 seconds each way to 6, and no further than 8. Beyond that most people start straining, and a strained Ujjayi is worse than an easy ordinary breath.
• What not to do: do not add breath retention on your own, and do not practise it for half an hour because it seems harmless. The throat gets tired, and a tired throat is how people end up hoarse.

If you have five minutes and a blood pressure reading you want to change, the honest recommendation is Anulom Vilom or plain slow breathing. If you have an hour of movement ahead of you, use Ujjayi throughout it. The two are answers to different questions.

Students with anxious minds often do better with Ujjayi than with any counted practice, and the reason is not physiological.

A counted breath gives an anxious mind something new to fail at. People arrive convinced they are breathing wrongly, and a ratio to hit confirms the suspicion. Ujjayi has no count that matters and no hand position to get wrong. There is only a sound, and either you can hear it or you cannot.

The second reason is that it is continuous. Anulom Vilom has gaps, and an anxious mind fills gaps. The sound of Ujjayi runs unbroken for five minutes and leaves less room.

What I would not claim is that there is a trial showing Ujjayi treats anxiety. There is not one worth quoting. What there is, is good evidence that breathing slowly reduces reported anxiety and anger in healthy people, and Ujjayi is a straightforward way to breathe slowly. The yoga for anxiety page sets out the whole approach, of which this is one part. If breath practices make you more anxious rather than less, which happens to a real minority, stop and say so to a teacher: that is information, not failure.

Counted in breaths rather than rounds, because there is nothing to alternate. The variable that matters is loudness, and it goes down rather than up.

Throat resistance raises blood pressure while it is being done, which is a reason to keep the sound soft and a reason to ask a doctor first if yours is high.

Ujjayi is the only practice here that is done while moving as well as while sitting, which is why it turns up on the pages it does.

• Yoga for weight loss uses it during the standing work, because a breath you can hear is a breath you can pace yourself by, and pacing is what lets somebody keep going for thirty minutes.
• Yoga for thyroid uses it as the sitting practice, kept whisper soft.
• Yoga for neck and shoulder pain uses it with one warning attached: the sound is made at the back of the throat and not by gripping the jaw, and a gripped jaw is half of what a sore neck is made of.

Softness is the whole instruction. If somebody across the room can hear you, it is too loud, and the throat resistance is doing something you did not ask for. Sit in Vajrasana, or use it while you move through Surya Namaskar slowly. Finish in Savasana and let the breath go back to normal.

Two more things worth knowing. It is the breath used throughout an Ashtanga practice and is the one part of that method that transfers usefully to any other class. And it is the easiest breathing practice to overdo, because the sound is satisfying: if the throat feels scraped afterwards, it was too loud for too long. Learn it sitting before you use it moving, warm up with Marjariasana, and if a counted practice is what you actually want, Nadi Shodhana is the better place to spend the time. The Sanskrit and its six English names are in the yoga glossary, and being listened to once, in a class, saves a month of guessing.