Buteyko never said shallow — a translation error and the people who hold their breath for it

The second paper of the series After Buteyko, following No. 1, The invisible breath. Konstantin Buteyko named his method the volitional elimination of deep breathing and defined the key word himself, in a lecture at Moscow State University in 1972: depth is the amount of air one breath moves, tidal volume in the language of physiology. Deep breathing is a breath larger than the norm, shallow breathing a breath smaller than the norm, and the aim is the norm. He also used the word shallow with approval, for a breath that stays at the surface with nothing to show, and in 1997 he put the method in one sentence: bring the deep breath back to the norm, gradually, and never by holding it. In English the method became a shallow one. Wikipedia describes its aim as shallower, slower breathing, Taber's Medical Dictionary defines it by shallow breaths and pauses, and a nursing study published in 2026 supports its "slow, shallow breathing exercises" with a reference whose journal name and ISSN belong to a German journal of Italian studies. In German the word fails the other way round: Tiefatmung, deep breathing, is what every voice teacher wants, and Buteyko appears to be against it. The paper follows the word from Buteyko's mouth to the dictionary and separates three quantities that the translation fused into one: the size of a breath, the depth to which the diaphragm works, and the stillness of the abdominal wall. A still belly can come from a wall that holds while the diaphragm works or from a breath that is held. Instructional videos, among them an interview from 2025, show people holding their breath to keep the belly still.