Why Train Your Breathing?
You spend hours in the pool, on the bike and hitting the pavement. You’ve added yoga for flexibility, Pilates for core strength. You do sprints, tempo, interval and endurance training in order to take precious seconds off your time. Yet, no matter how hard you train, you always “hit the wall” – that point where you struggle to breathe, your legs or arms feel like lead and you just can’t possibly push further. But what if you discovered a way to push back on the wall?
The Reason for the Wall
Essentially we all have a built in braking system when exercising, to protect our most vital function – breathing. When you hit that point in your workout or race where the intensity level causes you to struggle for breath, the brain puts the brakes on everything else in order to preserve the breathing system. Blood flow is reduced to the exercising muscles and redirected to the breathing muscles (diaphragm and intercostals). Hence, every time you hit your limits, the brakes come on and you can’t train past it. But did you know you can train your breathing muscles independently to a higher level, allowing you to push past your previous limits?
Breathing Retraining
The first step in strengthening your breathing muscles is to ensure that you are indeed using them correctly. Many people - by reason of injury, illness, posture, anxiety or just plain habit - breathe too shallowly (and often too quickly) and don’t adequately use their most powerful breathing muscle, the diaphragm. Retraining your breathing pattern alone can result in significant changes to performance. When you breathe correctly you use up to 4% of your energy just for breathing; when you struggle with your breathing, you can use up to 25% of your energy. And again, once the breathing muscles start to fatigue, they “steal” blood from your exercising muscles. Research has shown that an 8% drop in blood flow to the legs from blood stealing can result in up to a 28% drop in quadriceps power in cyclists. Doesn’t bode well for a new personal best.
Inspiratory Muscle Training
Once you have established a good diaphragmatic breathing pattern, the next step is to strengthen the breathing muscles. Having stronger muscles equals more power, less fatigue and greater endurance. Plus when breathing feels easy you are able to push yourself harder. One such tool to improve respiratory muscle strength is POWERbreathe, nicknamed a “dumbbell for your diaphragm.” POWERbreathe works exactly the same way as any other form of resistance training. It uses a variable, calibrated, spring loaded valve to create a “weight” for your breathing muscles to “lift.” You breathe in against resistance, making your muscles work harder. Several studies have shown that using POWERbreathe for 30 breaths twice a day significantly improved performance, including: increased swimming performance by up to 3.5%; improved cycling time trial performance by 4.6% and accelerated recovery during repeated sprints by 7%. Not bad for about 5 minutes of specific exercise twice a day.
If you’ve hit the plateau in your training, or find yourself disproportionately out of breath at high intensity, then maybe it’s time to consider how important your breathing is.
The Reason for the Wall
Essentially we all have a built in braking system when exercising, to protect our most vital function – breathing. When you hit that point in your workout or race where the intensity level causes you to struggle for breath, the brain puts the brakes on everything else in order to preserve the breathing system. Blood flow is reduced to the exercising muscles and redirected to the breathing muscles (diaphragm and intercostals). Hence, every time you hit your limits, the brakes come on and you can’t train past it. But did you know you can train your breathing muscles independently to a higher level, allowing you to push past your previous limits?
Breathing Retraining
The first step in strengthening your breathing muscles is to ensure that you are indeed using them correctly. Many people - by reason of injury, illness, posture, anxiety or just plain habit - breathe too shallowly (and often too quickly) and don’t adequately use their most powerful breathing muscle, the diaphragm. Retraining your breathing pattern alone can result in significant changes to performance. When you breathe correctly you use up to 4% of your energy just for breathing; when you struggle with your breathing, you can use up to 25% of your energy. And again, once the breathing muscles start to fatigue, they “steal” blood from your exercising muscles. Research has shown that an 8% drop in blood flow to the legs from blood stealing can result in up to a 28% drop in quadriceps power in cyclists. Doesn’t bode well for a new personal best.
Inspiratory Muscle Training
Once you have established a good diaphragmatic breathing pattern, the next step is to strengthen the breathing muscles. Having stronger muscles equals more power, less fatigue and greater endurance. Plus when breathing feels easy you are able to push yourself harder. One such tool to improve respiratory muscle strength is POWERbreathe, nicknamed a “dumbbell for your diaphragm.” POWERbreathe works exactly the same way as any other form of resistance training. It uses a variable, calibrated, spring loaded valve to create a “weight” for your breathing muscles to “lift.” You breathe in against resistance, making your muscles work harder. Several studies have shown that using POWERbreathe for 30 breaths twice a day significantly improved performance, including: increased swimming performance by up to 3.5%; improved cycling time trial performance by 4.6% and accelerated recovery during repeated sprints by 7%. Not bad for about 5 minutes of specific exercise twice a day.
If you’ve hit the plateau in your training, or find yourself disproportionately out of breath at high intensity, then maybe it’s time to consider how important your breathing is.
