Developing Respiratory Awareness during Training

“When is it ok to use your mouth to breath?”

In our previous article, “Four Ways Proper Breathing will Increase your Endurance,” we outlined the benefits of diaphragmatic breathing to increase your aerobic capacity, improve your mechanics, increase your mental edge, and improve your recovery. Nasal breathing plays an important role in all of this but I am frequently asked: should you be nasal breathing during all of your training and competitions? The short answer is, no.

Nasal breathing is what you should be doing at rest and throughout the majority of your training. More specifically, all aerobic work should be nasal only but as the metabolic demands of your workouts and competitions increase, you will need to switch over to a nose/mouth or mouth/mouth breath pattern. You can work up to 75%-85% of your max heart rate nasal only but that still leaves another 15%-25% on the table.

A majority of athletes will mouth breath from the warm-up to the end of a competition or workout. However, mouth breathing typically leads to breathing into your upper chest, taxing your secondary breathing muscles in the neck and shoulders. As a result, your body sends signals to your brain that you are expending too much energy and need to slow down in order to survive. Nasal breathing activates the primary respiratory muscles, such as the diaphragm, keeping these signals at bay. Mouth breathing into the upper chest also adds more stress to your body, resulting in a drastic effect on your intensity and ability to push at the end of a competition. Learning how to breathe properly, through the nose and switching to your mouth at certain times, will allow you to save energy, increase your output, and allow you to compete at a higher level and for longer than those who are breathing dysfunctionally.

Developing your respiratory awareness during training is similar to learning how to drive a manual transmission. More specifically, you want to be in charge of how you are breathing and have the ability to consciously switch your patterns. With practice, you will have the ability to ramp yourself up and down as the metabolic demands of a workout or competition changes.

To develop respiratory awareness, start nasal breathing during your warm-ups. Think about expanding your belly and ribs horizontally with full 360 expansion. As you become comfortable in your warm-ups, use nasal only patterns during your workouts. Try to keep this pattern as long as possible. As the demands of the workout increase, switch to a powerful nasal inhale and a mouth exhale, continuing to focus on the horizontal breath pattern. This practice will allow you to blow off more of the excess CO2 built up in your system. At some point, it is likely that the intensity will increase to a level that you need to inhale through the mouth and out of the mouth. With practice, switching to a mouth breathing pattern at this point will allow you to still breathe with your diaphragm, not your upper chest, providing you with more oxygen and less stress on the body during the most intense part of a workout.

Try out this short workout to gain help you gain respiratory awareness. You can use an assault bike, ski erg, row machine, or running.

Breath Pyramid
2 minutes nasal only
2 minutes power nasal inhale / power mouth exhale
1 minute power mouth inhale / power mouth exhale—Max Effort here
2 minutes power nasal inhale / power mouth exhale
2 minutes nasal only

To Sum it up

Adding a breath focus to your workouts will help you gain an awareness that puts you in control of your body. Starting out focusing on nasal only work will help you work the respiratory muscles and learn to activate the diaphragm properly. You will become much more efficient using oxygen and learn to keep the mind focused on the task at hand. Given that you can only work up to 75-90% of your max heart rate nasal breathing, you still want to learn how to breathe properly when you switch to breathing through your mouth. We want to keep you out of upper-chest, stressed breathing patterns by training you to take full diaphragmatic breaths through the nose or mouth. This will give you a competitive edge, decrease the stress on your body, and allow you to push harder to finish out a competition or workout.

Call to Action

At Symmetry, we can develop an individualized plan to help you improve your aerobic efficiency and capacity, improve your breathing mechanics and your recovery, please contact us through our website www.symmetry.live to achieve your goals. We have also created an Introduction to Breath downloadable program that will help you become more efficient using oxygen, better handle stress and improve your sleep. You can purchase it here. Be on the lookout for our Breathwork for Endurance program coming out soon.