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Full Video Transcript

Introduction to Breathing and Performance

does how you breathe matter should you be nasal breathing should you go in through your nose out through your mouth people ask these questions all the time when it comes to running and endurance performance and there’s so many different answers out there today we’re going to break it all down for performance we’ll touch on health a little bit but I really want to focus on performance so you probably have heard of nasal breathing lately it’s kind of the invogue thing where if you breathe through your nose it’ll be more efficient you’ll get some you know activation of nitric oxide you’ll get deeper into your lungs and therefore improve performance let’s break it all down so

Understanding the Oxygen Cascade

step one I think before we go anywhere is we have to understand at least at a basic level you know the oxygen intake process and which you know we reverse it to a degree you get Co2 outtake and what we have here is the number one thing to understand here is we call it the oxygen Cascade so there’s a pressure gradient difference as we go from air okay into lungs or into mouth into lungs from lungs to you know bloodstream all the way down into the muscles etc etc and what happens is that that partial pressure differential is part of what drives things things to go down this Cascade so think of it as like you know a slope on a hill and if the slope is is steep enough we get going if it’s not steep then there’s not as fast of a you know Cascade down things this is why altitude impacts things it’s not that there’s less oxygen per se it’s that the the partial pressure the pressure differential is different um so that impacts how much air or oxygen we get in etc etc so let’s let’s go down this again we’re going to simplify a bit here but so we have air intake whether it’s through your nose or mouth doesn’t matter right now air intake goes down the ferx into the lungs okay from the lungs we go into the um into the broni OR bronchioli kind of smaller tubes which end in a sack like feature that is the Alvi and from there there what happens is that’s where we get this almost crossing two capillaries bloodstream picking up that oxygen or releasing that CO2 to then be expelled outwards now this is really

The Role of Capillaries and Cardiac Output

important here because what we have is I’ve talked about the partial pressure diff or the pressure differential being key here but what is also key is when we have this gas exchange from the lungs of VII to the capillaries the more contact we have or the more capillary beds or density there are in there the easier it is to exchange because think of it like that this blood is whisking through okay and at higher cardio out output so the heart pumping stronger and faster that blood is going through quicker and quicker and we have to have this exchange where essentially the blood hemoglobin all that stuff is is attaching the oxygen releasing the CO2 and is doing so well enough so that there’s a full exchange right so think of it like a conveyor belt in a factory and you have uh workers trying to you know put things on the conveyor belt and take things off when the conveyor belt is going very slow and you have one worker not big not a big deal if it starts going faster and faster one person can’t handle it if you have more than one worker if you get more and more people you can handle that exchange and still keep uh exchanging everything you know at 100% that’s like having these increased capillary uh beds in there that allow you to kind of have this this proper exchange from there again we’re going to go down this path from basically from oxygen intake mode to oxygen transport so we have cardio output pumps the blood throughout hemoglobin concentration matters the total blood volume matters where we’re sending it think of think of it like roads and freeways the more efficient and bigger freeways we have the easier it is to send to the right direction um sometimes you know we also have a prioritization so think of it like a toll road right where we can open up more capacity to send to the muscles that are needed and then we have at the

Oxygen Utilization and Limiting Factors

oxygen utilization part we have the capillaries to deuse oxygen into the muscles we have the transportation into the mitochondria and then the whole aerobic respiration you know electron transport chain to convert that into energy Etc or use oxygen to help convert glycogen glucose all that into usable energy but what I want to focus on here is we’ve gone through you know how oxygen exchange occurs and why it matters but now I want to look at okay is that a limiting factor and the standard take is this if you look at exercise physiology in most situations on that whole oxygen Cascade from intake right to exchange at the lungs into the blood to heart pumping the blood where it needs to go and all the efficient Pathways to utilization at the muscular level the lungs how much air we get in to the lungs is generally not a limiting factor exercise physiologists have basically said that our respiratory system is essentially overbuilt meaning that we have more capacity than we could ever use given the constraints elsewhere okay so if we take in more oxygen somehow it’s not necessarily going to translate down the line because the rest of the system has lining factors there that get in the way that’s traditionally how it’s thought of and that holds up 90 plus% of the time but more recent research has shown that there’s a couple situations where it doesn’t I hinted at one before these are basically altitude and what we call exercise induced arterial hypoxemia which is a fancy word that means essentially we get a drop in oxygen saturation even when we’re at you know sea level because essentially that breathing and then air exchange from lungs to the blood becomes a limiting factor to a degree and you can test this right if you get one of those simple uh oxygen saturation monitors you wear on your finger you can test this you can go work out do a hard exercise in 99% of the time even if you’re working out hard that oxygen saturation is going to be you know 95% Plus of the blood is saturated with oxygen which basically hints at the problem isn’t lung to blood issue because your blood is fully saturated or pretty dang close to it 98% is generally fully saturated but anything 95 plus is pretty dang close what happens is eah the dro in oxygen saturation in the blood occurs because in well-trained endurance athletes their cardiac app put is so large it causes the blood to move through the pulmonary capillaries so quickly that there’s not enough time for full diffusion so going back to that example of the um the workers in the assembly line in the factory they can’t get they can’t make that exchange quick enough because the system’s going through so fast this is why it generally occurs in well-trained athletes so in some highly trained athletes oxygen intake and diffusion more so diffusion can be a limiting factor to things like V2 Max or reduce V2 Max okay similarly when you look at altitude because of the way it it shifts the breathing Dynamics and the pressure differential and you typically see a drop in oxygen saturation um sometimes because the ball isn’t rolling down the hill fast enough there’s a there’s again limiting factor somewhere in that oxygen intake to diffusion in general that’s not the case but I wanted to point that out because that’s going to become important on okay what do we do about that there’s one other case when it comes to breathing where how you breathe

Breathing Techniques and Performance

can contribute to Performance okay and that is that the breathing muscles themselves the respiratory muscles and system itself it needs energy it’s like any other muscle right it has a cost energetic demand it has a oxygen demand in order to keep those going and if we look at some research that shows like how much of that matters respiration at a high level according to a 1998 study by harms at all found that about 15 to 16% of V2 Max is accounted for by respiration meaning a significant amount of you know that oxygen demand is going to fuel the respiratory muscles and respiratory systems other research in cycling not running but cycling has found that inspiratory muscle control or muscle fatigue impacts performance over a 40K time trial now what does this all mean what it means is that like any other muscle there is some validation to if we train the respiratory system will become a little bit more efficient will not experience fatigue in those muscles as much and the oxygen demand won’t be as high because we’re efficient Etc so this is why there is some credence to training your respiratory muscles now not by wearing a a you know one of those altitude masks or whatever that makes it look like breathing is hard but there’s specific inspiratory muscle uh inspiratory trainers that force you to essentially you know have like um it’s like a workout for your respiratory system deep respiratory inspiration expiration system there’s some data data that shows in certain people those will help why it increases the endurance and strength of those muscles decreases the demand their oxygen demand meaning that oxygen can go elsewhere so I want to start with that there is some truth especially along high level athletes where the limiting factor is shifted right we talked about the hypoxemia where the inspir atory muscle training can help okay now what in the world does this mean for

Nasal Breathing: Myths and Realities

nasal breathing or those people who tell you hey this is how you breathe well I’ve got some bad news here unlike the muscle training the data is not good when we’re looking at performance so let’s step back here generally what happens is at easy Paces anything below 75 80% V2 Max you can breathe solely through your nose and there’s not going to be a huge performance differential and it’ll feel relatively comfortable whether you do it or not doesn’t matter to me doesn’t impact things too much okay but once we get past about 75 or 80% V2 Max the intensity gets so high that a nasal breathing becomes uncomfortable so we have this uh sensation of oxygen deprivation n air hunger they sometimes call it where we just feel like we can’t get enough in and we’re just breathing so quickly through our our our nose where it creates a signal of fatigue so our brain interprets that as like oh we don’t have enough oxygen Can’t Get Enough CO2 out we’re in trouble so that’s number one there’s a perception thing and then two there’s a physiological change because what happens is you can’t breathe in in terms of volume or frequency as much through your nose as you can in your mouth or both and what happens is that does if you look at the research that does generally cause a drop in performance because we’ve shifted to a degree that Cascade there’s not as big of a snowball going down the mountain okay if you look at the research there’s some who have said oh we can train that we can get them used to it there’s a little bit of data that shows that some people can get more and more used to it but there’s still a physiological shift that limits performance at higher intensities at best at very best some people will get to where they can get maybe to you know equalize performance but there has been zero data that shows that it improves performance versus breathing through your mouth and I want to reiterate this is performance if we look at the health side there is data that shows you get an increase in nitric oxide when you breathe through your nose which could have some nice you know uh vasil dilation effects and some other effects that could be positive but there’s enough as much data there and that’s why I want to stick to the performance output where there is data is that nasal breathing at rest or even during easy exercise can help you kind of relax essentially why mostly because it slows down your breathing your breathing is one of the signals that your body uses to understand M Min a heightened arousal state or is everything under control so if we slow down our Brea it kind of sends that message like hey sympathetic nervous system you can turn down parasympathetic you can turn up we’re relax a little bit it’s why we do box breathing it’s why when you’re stressed people tell you to Exhale longer Etc that’s just a relaxation effect if we look at the performance side again at higher intensities you can’t make it work but you might have read and I just want to touch on it and

Critique of Popular Breathing Theories

I think it for a second you might have read Because I get this question all this time James Nester breathe which lays out you know a well placed argument for why we should shift our breathing I think neer’s you know a good guy seems like I don’t know him but he’s all the interviews seems like a good guy well intentioned I think some of the research is pretty good from a health standpoint but when we get to a performance standpoint I think he misses the boat in a couple directions one it’s not what the research shows and then two the anecdotal you know stuff in his book misses the mark and I’m going to stick to my expertise but I think this is important here so in the book and this will be brief but in the book he talks about the success of the 1968 Mexico City USA Track Team because they were going to Mexico City to compete high altitude you’re in trouble right breathing is an issue and they found this guy who worked with some of the athletes on the team and Neer outlined them and said hey this guy you know taught them all how to breathe breathe through their nose Etc and they performed great well here’s the problem with that is if you look at the results of the the 68 Olympics for the US team the sprinters really excelled what do you know about spreading 100 200 200 even 400 the robic component isn’t dominant okay and we know at altitude actually all the way up to 400 probably close to 600 M performance has improved and doesn’t decrease this is why NCAA Sprinter indoors always go to altitude to get their 60 M marks and they run these big PRS and then we have these conversion tables to convert them a little bit slower because their performance is improved because of the air density essentially you know same reason why cyclists speed skaters go to altitude to perform well it’s the opposite when we come to distance because of the oxygen limitation so when we look at these claims most of it was around sprinters and some decathletes who they could breathe through their ears and it wouldn’t make a difference if you look at the distance running performance we actually struggled so George Young was probably a highlight I believe you got bronze and Steeple Chase he was leading all the way up until I think 300 to go and then fell apart and got a bronze Jim Ryan was the best in the world 1500 Runner was supposed to win gold medal famously got beat by Kip Kano because the altitude Kano wasn’t a better Runner he was a Kenyan athlete who was adapted to the altitude more than Ryan and performed remarkably well and and Ryan got the silver even though he almost certainly by far the best 1500 meter runner in the world that year that’s how we did we didn’t do that well in the distance work and no amount of breath training was going to change that the Pioneers to help us even Ryan were people like Jack Daniels and others who were experimenting with altitude training to get them to adapted the second part in there he cites Emil zatek one of my personal Heroes as doing some breath holding training yeah zatek did he absolutely did zatek did all sorts of crazy stuff he did some intervals while he was carrying his wife he did intervals with army boots on he did intervals in the bathtub to do laundry by lifting his legs up and down going hard zatek was an experimenter was the breath holding did it do anything most likely not because Mo most of the modern research tells us that breath holding you know doesn’t have that substantial of effect on physiological performance all it does is shift the fatigue a little bit and not in a positive way just doesn’t so I could go on and on but that’s my critique from a performance side of his book I think is fascinating but there’s a lot missing there so what when it comes to health there’s some stuff worth looking into for nasal breathing it does change your facial structure a little bit your teeth how do I know this my dad’s an orthodontist says soft tissue dictates hard tissue soft tissue changes by breathing through your nose will shift the jaw is it a big effect some argue that it it is is too much to cover here I’d argue that most of the research shows that it’s a minor effect and as my dad would say a lot of times it’s either heavy allergies or deviated septum which is something that is preventing it so might as well just get braces be okay from a performance standpoint

Conclusion and Practical Advice

here’s what really matters breathe however you get air in and out if you’re overthinking it you’re probably going to be in trouble there is no advantage to nasal breathing there’s no advantage to breathing in through your nose out through your mouth or vice versa the heating effect of air coming in if you have asthma maybe that helps a little bit but for most of us vast majority of us doesn’t make a performance difference breathe how however you want you can use nasal breathing to control your breathing to slow it down to decrease that sympathetic nervous system increase parasympathetic and relax a little bit there is some data that shows that respiratory muscle training can have a positive impact but most of that is on moderately to well-trained individuals because the Dynamics and the limiting factors have shifted because cardiac output is going out through so fast right we tend to have eah and then also because our breathing our cardiac output and our breathing is at such high volumes and such quick volumes for those who are moderate and well Tred that yes we can get some respiratory muscle fatigue so it makes some sense to train those with strength and endurance again you don’t do that by putting on one of those you know Bane altitude maths there are specific respiratory trainers that Target you know the respiratory muscles so there you go we went on a deep dive on breathing if you want to breathe through your nose to control your easy runs have at it I know some individuals who breathe through their nose so that they don’t go too fast on runs that makes some sense to me it’s a controlling mechanism but if you’re thinking hey I’m going to change my nasal breathing in order to improve performance it’s just not going to happen at high intensities it’s just not so there you go hope that you enjoyed this episode on breathing and going down the rabbit hole in terms of respiratory physiology did it off the top of my head with only a handful of written notes so hopefully I got everything right um thanks for listening thanks for enjoying subscribe follow all of those things check me out at St magnus.com thank you good luck in your endurance training Journey