Breathing Part 1
This is a guest article by Jack Anderson
Introduction – Why Breath?
The power of breath is undeniable. Our relationship with air is essential for life. How we interact with the air through breath can make or break health and performance goals.
Yet something so prevalent in our lives is often overlooked. We obsess over step counts, diets, sleep and training – all good things – and forget about something so fundamental that in reality makes perhaps the biggest difference of all.
While talking about breath is far from appealing to most, there is a way to incorporate it into our daily habits and allow it to influence the aforementioned topics for the better. Engraining better breathing habits may in fact reduce the need for some of the load we put on our bodies in training, can improve sleep quality and together with proper nutrition can be the base of a healthy, thriving life.
Having delved into this topic at length this past summer, I am blown away by how simple changes to breathing can influence aerobic performance, daily readiness and recoverability during exercise.
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Below I’ll detail the components of breath, mouth breathing vs. nasal breathing and some of the breathing practices I’ve been having success with. This is far from comprehensive and full credit goes to James Nestor, Chuck McGee, Patrick McKeown and many researchers for their extensive work on this subject.
Breathing Basics
Breath frequency, force and volume are three key variables in breath. We alter these variables based on our environment, task and readiness. Frequency is how often we breathe; force is the intensity at which air is inhaled or exhaled; and volume is the amount of air inhaled/exhaled with each breath cycle.
All three have a powerful effect on heart rate, heart rate variability, the autonomic nervous system and more. How we regulate each variable can affect our physical state and this gives us a lot of control over how we prepare our bodies for various situations.
For performance, an ideal goal would be to impose increasing amounts of stress while maintaining efficient breathing. The more stress we can undergo while breathing in a controlled fashion, the easier it will be to respond to stimuli in competition.
Think about it. Measured breathing works hand in hand with our ability to utilize our peripheral vision and make better decisions via parasympathetic drive. The best athletes can often express higher outputs at less of a cost than inferior athletes. This can be attributed to numerous factors, but a critical component is unquestionably breathing.
Mouth Breathing vs. Nasal Breathing
When we elevate any combination of frequency, force or volume via mouth breathing, we are usually offloading more carbon dioxide (CO2) and taking in more oxygen (O2). At first glance this might seem positive, but considering blood O2 levels rarely dip below 95%, taking in more oxygen isn’t often necessary. In fact, when we take in more air, we often don’t even utilize the O2 being inhaled and exhale most of it out. While excess O2 is one factor in over-breathing, CO2 shortage is another.
While CO2 is often thought of as problematic, it acts a vasodilator of arteries, which promotes increased blood-flow. It also facilitates the detachment of O2 from hemoglobin when blood is delivered to a tissue. Without CO2, exchange of gases at the tissue level is limited and the full re-oxygenation of a tissue will be hampered.
As we can see above, CO2 is not just a waste product, but necessary for proper respiratory function and O2 delivery/utilization. However, mouth breathers have a low tolerance to it and will over-breathe in order to offload as much as possible.
The higher our CO2 tolerance, the more we can operate at sub-maximal intensities and recover from higher intensities with a lower cost to the body. We might condition for weeks and develop some robust systems, but without learning to improve CO2 tolerance, we are skipping a crucial step in energy systems development.
In addition, excess breathing requires increased use of respiratory muscles. When playing a sport, work is being done by muscles involved in respiration, not just muscles involved in sporting actions. Increased loading in sport is not just a result of the miles being logged or speeds being hit, but also the manner in which we breathe through them. Poor breathing is highly inefficient and results in higher heart rates, prolonged recovery times and higher training loads.
Mouth breathing also fails to properly humidify and heat air before it enters the lungs, it does not filter bacteria and germs from the air and can lead to increased risk of dehydration due to the excess vapor that escapes when exhaling through it.
All of these problems can be remedied quite easily by switching to nasal breathing. This is obviously a trendy topic in the field of performance, but I feel we nod our heads when we see it without actually examining how effective it might be.
Here are the benefits of nasal breathing:
1. Increased CO2 tolerance. Less volume of breath increases CO2 in the body and aids in improved O2 utilization.
2. Increased resistance to airstream leading to increased O2 uptake.
3. Warms the air to body temp by the time it reaches the lungs.
4. Nitric Oxide (NO) found in the nose will follow the airstream deeper into the body upon inhalation. NO is linked to increased immune system function, dilates air passages for improved respiratory function, benefits heart health, and improves neurotransmission qualities.
With nasal breathing we breathe less in both volume and frequency, operate at lower heart rates, recover more quickly and have more efficient respiratory musculature and function. We tend to offload less CO2 when exhaling through the nose, which can be uncomfortable for those with low CO2 tolerance, but building that up over time will allow us to experience improved transfer of O2 and CO2 at the tissue level.
Finally, nasal breathing’s positive effect on neural pathways and signaling can help with muscle firing patterns, decision-making, etc. The Increased circulation of air and blood from nasal breathing is also crucial in developing aerobic capacity.
Practical application: Be mindful of nasal breathing throughout the day. Practice it. Tape your mouth shut at night. You can purchase mouth tape on Amazon that can be safely worn. This could aid in attaining more REM sleep (mouth breathing leads to interruptions in the sleep cycle) in addition towards building up better CO2 tolerance and expanded airways.
Athletic Considerations
Our tolerance to CO2 will dictate how long we can maintain efficient nasal breathing, but even those well accustomed to it must resort to mouth breathing if CO2 levels get too high during especially strenuous efforts.
Breathing at higher frequencies, forces and volumes can facilitate the air necessary to elicit faster speeds or higher intensities of work. However, it is less efficient and can lead to increased onset of fatigue so it must be used only when necessary. If we can re-establish controlled breathing after high intensity efforts, we are reducing the amount of work required to elicit recovery for the next high intensity demand. This will prolong our ability to express high outputs through the course of an athletic event.
In short, when intensity is not in high demand, we should breathe through the nose to create more efficient intake of oxygen and a higher tolerance of CO2. This reduces peripheral muscle workload to intake air and helps in the exchange of gases at the tissue level. However, when intensity is increased mouth breathing is an acceptable to strategy so the respiratory rate can assist in achieving the desired performance output.
On a separate note, some of the recent literature is suggesting that O2 is utilized from the onset of exercise to offset lower pH and to convert lactate back into pyruvate. In short, O2 is playing an integral role in maintaining balanced performance as soon activity begins. If we can improve respiration and blood flow (aka the transportation of O2) through nasal breathing, that is a major win in regulating efficient performance.
This is especially important when considering the need for O2 in the re-synthesis of phosphocreatine. PCr is limited and is used in high intensity efforts. O2 is needed to resupply the body with PCr. O2 is not just for low level aerobic work. It is essential for explosive power as well.
In this case nasal breathing can be used to recover more effectively between efforts, but during the efforts themselves, mouth breathing will be preferable. Do not forget that mouth breathing is a backup breathing system.
Practical application: Running within 10 bpm of aerobic threshold (or between 130-150 bpm if you don’t know your AT) while nasal breathing.
Stay tuned for more practical applications in part 2
Jack Anderson is a performance coach out of Santa Barbara, CA with experience working in professional, collegiate and tactical strength and conditioning. He also hosts the Upper Left Performance Podcast which can be found here https://anchor.fm/jack-anderson74.
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