Connecting Nasal Breathing & Performance

Everyone that trains hard for an athletic event wants to improve their abilities to some degree.  The common things that are looked at most, include exercise selection, frequency, diet, sleep, and many other contributing factors.

One thing that is commonly overlooked is how well they breathe or how efficiently they do. The biggest asset we have for this is our nose, and it doesn’t cost anything to use it (unless you actually have some serious dysfunctions with it). Continue on and you can see how nasal breathing can make a great impact on your ability to perform. 

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Most times when people think about improving their cardio and performance output, they think of gasping for air at the end of a workout and feeling completely drained. 

Awesome Cardio Bro
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Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for that kind of workout, but it’s very sparing and needs to be intelligently placed in your program.

What we want to talk about today is how nasal breathing in exercise can make a great benefit to your performance.
Patrick McKeown is the author of the book The Oxygen Advantage and has been a researcher and leading expert in the field of nasal breathing and its relationships to sports performance and health. Below we can talk about some of the benefits nasal breathing has had on sports performance through his eyes.

 Improves Oxygenation

• Nasal breathing increases blood oxygenation by 10-20%. It also improves our gas exchange of CO2 to decrease our sensitivity to CO2.  With increased CO2 levels in the body, we tend to breathe quicker and deeper, having a greater sensitivity in the rising levels in the body. This can cause more muscle activity use to breathe more and not keep the CO2 levels relatively level. Nasal breaths allow you to stay at this level and decrease the sensitivity in CO2 changes, resulting in fewer breaths needed.

Reduces Excessive Muscle Activity

• As stated above, with mouth breathing and heavier rates of breathing, we tend to use more muscles in the body to suck air in. This increases tension in the body and results in a reduction of smooth motions, which can negatively impact performance.

Improves Aerobic Capacity

• When we are performing endurance based activities, we have a level called our aerobic threshold. This is when our ability to use oxygen efficiently switches over to an anaerobic system (without oxygen). Anaerobic capacity is when we have high force output, but we are only able to be there for very short periods of time. The heart rate reaches near maximum here, and we have a certain level at our threshold that our heart rate hits and we kick into the big huffing and puffing to try and keep up.
• For example, if your aerobic threshold is at a line where our heart rate is around 160bpm, we can suspect that when we push harder we need to switch systems and utilize a less efficient, but more powerful system. This ramps up our muscle activity and puts us in that all out feeling. You probably can only last here for about 10-30s before completely failing and needing to go back down below the aerobic threshold.
• Being at the line of our aerobic threshold is where we can sustain nasal breaths most efficiently and where we can push for sustained periods of time. The whole idea of improving oxygenation and utilizing nasal breathing in a less effortful way during activity, we can actually raise the threshold. So back to the example of us being at 160bpm, we could potentially push that to 165-170bpm over time. This would mean you can sustain a higher output with less effort and only use your anaerobic system when absolutely necessary and more efficiently.

Many of the points noted in this have been taken from the article listed below by Patrick Mckeown.
Mckeown, Patrick. “Nasal Breathing Running.” Oxygen Advantage, 5 Aug. 2020, https://oxygenadvantage.com/nasal-breathing-running/.

It can be difficult to get started in implementing nasal breathing in your training, especially if you have never done it before. One way to get started is to just practice at rest, and an easy way to do that is use the box breathing method.
We can use a 5 second count where we inhale for 5s, pause for 5s, exhale for 5s, then pause for 5s. You SHOULD NOT be trying to force the air in or out with much effort, nor should you be trying to clench on the pauses.

The airflow should be pretty consistent all the way in and out. You shouldn’t feel like you have to gasp a lot of air in on the first 1-2s. It stays in the same flow from the first second to the fifth second.

So you can even try it for one or two rounds right here.
Inhale 5s
Pause 5s
Exhale 5s
Pause 5s
Repeat.

If you feel too uncomfortable or this count is too long, you can always shorten the length to 3 or 4s on all the measures, and build your way up to 5s.

You ideally want to perform this for 5-15min/day to start to get the full benefits of this method.

During your training, you want the nasal breathing to never be a high force strategy where the neck and other muscles are tensing just for the sake of keeping the mouth closed. You are basically creating the same tension as you would with a mouth breath in this instance.

Ideally, your nasal breaths should have slight resistance felt. If you go to hard and need to mouth breathe, that is ok. It just tells you where your threshold is at and where you need to work from.

Still needing help with implementing this strategy in your program?

Send us an email at staff@dynamicprri.com and we can answer your question personally.