This post is really aimed at guys over 35. The guys who tinkered with cars back in the day. That said it’s not exclusively for the guys, because I’ve known a few women over the years who have rebuilt more than one engine. So let’s lift the hood on this breathing thing. Let’s start with the carburetor. This regulates the fuel air mixture, and I think more than one of us who have played around with engines have been guilt of dialing up the fuel flow too much. For those who haven’t this cause the engine to run rich. We throw out the ratio to fuel to air, and whist we get more fuel into the engine we actually get less performance. Breathing is exactly the same. If you take in too much air you’ll get diminished performance. It’s true that there are exceptions to this; example: Think of what would happen to a ¼ mile drag car competing a Bathurst. It would blitz the first half of a lap, but then it would most likely overheat before it completed one lap. To round out air intake, if you breathe through your mouth you are much more likely it inadvertently take in too much air. Nasal breathing has a 50% resistance and helps regulate taking in the right amount of air even when running. And think of the air filter in a car as your nose. That said if you need to run a 100 meter sprint at max effort and no further, then breathing through your mouth. This will probably give you better performance. But your heart rate will blow out to 180+
Next and I have not really heard anyone else talk about this but the concept of maintaining the right levels of compression. Car people known that if you attach extractors and a good exhaust on good engine you’ll get significant performance increases. I remember years ago I was driving and I blew a hole in my exhaust and immediately I lost power. To a 20 year old it sounded cool, but I had to push the car significantly harder to get the same results. So does this have anything to do with breathing? Hell yeah and I’ve been testing this quite a lot of late. Breathing both in and out of your nose during exercise helps you maintain a lower heart rate.
For example doing the beep test breathing through my nose. And mid-level in level 9 my heart rate is about 80 beats per minute. Then I switch to mouth breathing and my heart rate shoots to 150+ within seconds. It’s like my old car all over again, blowing a whole in the exhaust. I have to work soooo much harder.
I’d like to say just breathing through your nose will give you supercharged performance, but nose breathing alone won’t. It will definitely help somewhat, but to get the true benefits you need to tune your breathing. One way is to improve your tolerances to CO2. This is what I do with my breathing workshops and trainings, so if this interests you come along.
Glenn