Nasal Breathing – Secret Weapon
by Lisa Engles -track coach Silicon Valley Triathlon Club
I encourage everyone to use this month to begin the practice of
nasal breathing. You can think of nasal breathing as the `secret
weapon’ in your bag of training tools. Over the past five years,
I’ve used this technique both personally and with my athletes to
create incredible performance breakthroughs.
There’s one hook to nasal breathing: you have to be willing to set
aside your ego and allow your body to adapt to this technique. Which
means, for a short period of time it will seem as if you are getting
worse, instead of better with your running. This is precisely why I
introduce this technique during the off season. If you commit to
regular use of nasal breathing during every run that you do between
now and January, you will reap the rewards of this secret training
weapon.
So what is nasal breathing and why is it so good for you? Nasal
breathing, just as the name implies, means to breathe only through
your nose during endurance activity (running and even cycling).
We’re all born into this world as nasal breathers which means that
we don’t possess the voluntary ability to breath through our mouth.
Mouth breathing is a learned response that is triggered by an
emergency stress. If an infant’s nose becomes obstructed, it begins
to suffocate and starts to cry. The crying forces air into the
mouth and through the lungs. Mouth breathing becomes a way to get
large quantities of air into the lungs quickly in order to deal with
survival. Once the emergency is over, the infant returns to
breathing through its nose.
We LEARN to breathe through our mouth as infants, and become
conditioned so that under the first signs of stress, including
exercise stress later in life we shift to our emergency mode of
breathing— through the mouth.
There are several important reasons WHY nasal breathing is so
beneficial to you and your overall performance in triathlon. They
are: 1. Our nose is made to breathe with 2. Nasal breathing
disarms the bodies stress response 3. There’s a direct correlation
between nasal breathing and heart rate (exertion levels). I’ll
discuss each briefly below.
Our Nose Is Made To Breath With
While this may sound like an obvious statement, the more important
implication is that our Mouth Is NOT made to breathe with! To give
you a quick anatomy lesson, the nose, with it’s intricate design,
allows for optimal respiration during rest and exercise. The inner
nose is made up of small ridges called turbinates which act as
turbines to swirl air into a refined stream that is suitable for
oxygen exchange. The entire passageway of the nose is lined with a
protective mucus membrane that keeps it moist and wards off
infection. The mucous membrane in combination with small hair like
cilia act to clean and filter incoming air. The air is warmed,
cooled, or moistened depending on the conditions, by our nasal
passage.
The mouth on the other hand, is a more direct emergency route. It
bypasses all preliminary phases, and the cold, dry, unfiltered air
is allowed to enter directly into the lungs.
The Nervous System Response to Nasal Breathing
When we breathe air directly from the mouth into the lungs, a
survival response is triggered in the nervous system. As a result,
a fight-or-flight reaction is activated causing the release of
adreneline and cortisol which are both degenerative hormones. They
contain waste products called free radicals, which are believed to
be the leading cause of aging, cancer, disease and death. In
addition, the body responds to this stress by Storing Fat and
burning sugar. So if we can train our body to handle more stress
without responding to it as an emergency (via nasal breathing),
we’ll have taken a huge step in the fight against fat, aging and
disease.
Breathing through the nose stimulates the parasympathetic nervous
system which calms the mind and rejuvenates the body.
The Correlation Between Breath Rate and Heart Rate
Probably the most frustrating and difficult aspect of nasal
breathing for beginners is that initially, it feels like you’re
breathing through two, tiny cocktail straws . The passage way from
the nose to the lungs is much smaller than from the mouth to the
lungs, so until you’ve developed a strong diaphragm that is able to
effectively pull air into the lower lobes of the lungs, you will
feel like you’re not getting enough air.
I see this as a blessing in disguise. By this point in the season,
most of us are over trained and NEED to slow down. Nasal breathing
will force you to slow down in the beginning, giving your body the
appropriate rest that it needs and deserves after months of hard
work. As with any muscle, the more you use it the stronger it
becomes. Through nasal breathing, the diaphragm will become a
stronger, more efficient muscle, making nasal breathing considerably
easier with time and practice.
Due to the need for longer, deeper breaths, one of the inherent
results of nasal breathing is a slower breath rate. There is a
direct correlation between breath rate and heart rate so that a
slower breath rate will entrain a slower heart rate. The average
athlete who consistently uses mouth breathing will have a breath
rate of anywhere between 30-40 breaths per minute during exercise.
During nasal breathing this number is generally cut in half! This
has an incredible amount of significance when you realize that
simply though nasal breathing, you can lower your breath rate which
will in turn, lower your heart rate at any given intensity. The end
result being that during a race, you’d have more in your energy
reserves to out-run your competitors!
So now that you understand why I’m such a proponent of nasal
breathing and how it will ultimately benefit you, I invite you to
spend this coming month playing with this technique.
Bart's Journal: Reminiscings of an avid runner, former speed skater, and a few tidbits I picked up along the way...
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Bart's Readers Digest Version of Skating Career
I began skating when I was 13 years old at the Pasadena
Winter Gardens in CA. About half the
Olympic team in 1960 and 1964, came out of Southern California so it was an
ideal time for a youth to come up through the ranks. In January 1963 I headed north to Edmonton,
Alberta and spent two seasons there skating on the 400m track. The second season I did very well breaking
the North American records for 3,000 and 5,000m. Based on those performances I received an
invitation to join coach Johs. Tenman in
Hamar, Norway to train with his team, Hamar Skoyteklub under Hamar Idrettslag. I jumped at the opportunity and arrived in
Hamar on September 15, 1964. Seems like
last week. It was a brutal transition
from Clarke Stadium in Edmonton to racing in front of the big crowds in Norway
but when you are young, insane and full of testosterone anything is
doable. Almost 16 years later I my
closed my business, sold the house and came back to the US for good.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Doctrine and Covenants, Section 101, verses 77 through 80
“According to the laws and constitution of the people,
which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights
and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles;
That
everyman may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to
the moral agency which I have given unto him, that everyman may be accountable
for his own sins in the day of judgment.
Therefore,
it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.
And
for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands
of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by
the shedding of blood.”
Doctrine and Covenants, Section 101,
verses 77 through 80
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The story of Emil Zatopek is quite interesting, be sure to read this one. "Horrible Extremities of Pain"
Rock
Running Editor's Note: The story of Emil Zatopek is quite interesting, be sure
to read this one.
"Horrible Extremities of Pain"
Emil Zatopek was simply the most remarkable athlete in the history of long distance running. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, a country with little running history, he was a self-made man who conquered the world. In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Zatopek won the magic distance triple-the 5000 meters, the 10,000 meters and the marathon, setting Olympic records in all three. The marathon was his first, and his time of 2:23:04 was a world best for an out-and-back course. As the second finisher came into the stadium 2 1/2 minutes behind him, Zatopek was happily chatting with his wife Dana (gold medalist in the javelin) and munching on an apple, while the air reverberated with the cheer "Za-to-pek! Za-to-pek!"
Zatopek's method was the interval system, though he apparently knew nothing of Gerschler and Reindell when he adopted it. His own common sense led him to intervals; he eventually proved that they worked for marathoners as well as for the 400-/800-meter runners that Harbig represented. Zatopek says he began running repeated, fast 100-meter sprints when he realized long, steady training runs could not instill the speed that competition requires. At first, people thought he was crazy. "You can't train for 5000 meters by running the 100," they argued quite logically. "True," Zatopek acknowledged, "unless I run 100 meters 50 times," which he proceeded to do while the other Czech distance runners looked on in amazement.
So revolutionary was Zatopek's training, so astonishing its intensity, and so phenomenal his racing results, that word of his daily regimen quickly outstripped its actuality. It was widely rumored that he was doing 60x400 meters in 60 seconds, a workout that almost surely surpasses man's ability, as more than one world-class runner discovered in trying to duplicate it. Yet when people saw him racing, they were willing to believe almost anything. The sight of Zatopek on the track was positively riveting. No one has given freer vent to racing's agony. He tilted his head, furrowed his brow, wagged his tongue out of his mouth, rolled his shoulders, twisted his arms across his body, and appeared on the brink of an epileptic seizure. Red Smith wrote that spectators "still wake up screaming in the dark when Emil the Terrible goes writhing through their dreams, clawing at his abdomen in horrible extremities of pain." Few noticed that his running form was perfect from the waist down.
Even today, much contradictory information persists about Zatopek's training. We know for certain that he trained prodigiously and largely on the track, but without a stopwatch and certainly not at anything approaching a 60-second pace. In fact, by the standards of today's track training, much of his running would be considered quite slow.
It was the quantity of Zatopek's interval training that produced results. His training for the 1948 London Olympic Games, in which he won the 10,000 meters, consisted of daily workouts of 5 x 200 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x200 meters. Immediately prior to the London Games, Zatopek reportedly ran 60 x 400 meters for 10 days in a row. Four years later, feeling that he needed even more training to ensure a triple victory in Helsinki, Zatopek began running 5 x 100 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x 100 meters twice a day.
If the training sounds repetitious and boring, Zatopek's approach was anything but. Interval training appealed to him because he found it infinitely variable. He tried hundreds of different combinations of repeats, distances and speeds before he settled on the ones that best suited him. He was willing to experiment with all manner of training. He would run through knee-deep snow in his army boots, he would sprint from telephone pole to telephone pole holding his breath, he would run with Dana on his shoulders (which resulted in his suffering a hernia condition). He was a human dynamo off the track and on. Gordon Pirie, who idolized him, once visited Emil and Dana at their home. "These two used to romp like children or like beautiful young animals in their perfect fitness of body," he wrote. "Once, in fun, he threw her into a stream. Unfortunately, her foot hit a rock and she broke an ankle. I have seen him and his wife hurling a javelin full-tilt toward each other. The trick was to catch it in the air above their heads and return it as fast as possible. A dangerous game, and they Loved it.
"One secret of his success was that he never let himself get bored. He would jog for hours on the same spot, reading a book or listening to the radio. Everything was fun to him. On wash days at home he piled all the dirty clothes in the bath and then ran on them for hours. His mind was always as active as his body."
Ultimately, the specifics of Zatopek's training are less important than his spirit and determination. He won because he was unwilling to acknowledge boundaries. He pushed training for distance running light-years beyond anyone before him, saw it not as drudgery but as a daily experiment, and raised it to the level of art. Typically, Zatopek found nothing unusual about his abilities or his training. His philosophy was as matter-of-fact as it was Promethean. "When a person trains once, nothing happens," he said. "When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly has developed in ways more than physical. Is it raining? That doesn't matter. Am I tired? That doesn't matter, either. Then willpower becomes no longer a problem."
Since the day Emil Zatopek toed the 10,000-meter starting line at the 1948 Olympics, distance running has not been the same. Such a sweeping statement can be made of no other man.
Zatopek's amazing 100 x 400m reps
In spite of the great success of Kolehmainen, Nurmi, and Hagg, interval training didn't really take off until after World War II, and it was not a Finn but a notable Czechoslovakian athlete, Emil Zatopek, who perhaps did the best job of convincing the athletic world at large that intervals represented an unparalleled training technique. Zatopek used a somewhat unusual interval combination: he ran relatively short repeats, often no more than 400m in length, but instead of blazing through these relatively short interval distances at high speeds, he ran them at close to his lactate-threshold velocity, ie well below both 10k and 5k race speeds (3).
The hard-working Czech was known to rattle off 100(!) of these 400m reps per day, alternated with 200m recoveries. Scientists later reckoned (op cit) that Zatopek reached lactate-threshold speed at about 85% of his vVO2max (ie at a pace of about 72 seconds per 400m), which meant that on a 100-work-interval day he was completing about 40k of work intervals in just 120 minutes or so. (Before you become completely incredulous, don't forget that there were 99 'recoveries' injected into such running to make the 100 x 400 scheme more palatable.) Zatopek's pattern of churning out high volumes of moderate-quality (below 90% VO2max) training was echoed, albeit on a less grandiose scale, by the American runner Jim Ryun in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Interval training made its way into a scientific journal for the first time in 1959, when German exercise scientist H Reindell and colleagues described specific interval training carried out by top athletes and formulated some basic rules for interval work (4,5). Sigfried Hermann, an athlete described in Reindell's book, specialised neither in Zatopek's 'large bag' of slow intervals or Nurmi's 'short stack' of scalding reps; he engaged in what could be called 'variable-pace' interval training. A 3:40 1500m runner, Hermann would - within a single workout - run four sets of 6 x 200m, with rests of 50-60 seconds between the 200m work intervals and eight minutes between sets. Sigfried completed the first set at a tempo of 30 seconds per 200 (or 98% of 1500m speed), the next two sets at almost-exact 1500m race velocity, and most of the final set at 28 seconds per 200 (about 105% of 1500m race tempo). The German whizzed through the very last interval of the last set in 25 seconds, which was 118% of his race velocity over 1500m.
This variable-pace interval training, performed above and below actual race velocity, was mirrored in the early 1980s by famed British coach Frank Horwill, the founder of the British Milers' Club and mentor of two-time World Cross Country silver medallist Tim Hutchings. Horwill, however, liked to use the different paces on separate days of training, a scheme he called 'multi-paced training'. Peter Coe later based Seb Coe's overall training on Horwill's multi-speed foundation. Variably-paced intervals were also employed with great success in the 1980s by Said Aouita of Morocco, who held world records for both the 1500 and 5000m and ran at speeds ranging from lactate-threshold velocity all the way up to 1500m competition speed within the same session, with interval distances ranging from 200-3000m.
"Horrible Extremities of Pain"
Emil Zatopek was simply the most remarkable athlete in the history of long distance running. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, a country with little running history, he was a self-made man who conquered the world. In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Zatopek won the magic distance triple-the 5000 meters, the 10,000 meters and the marathon, setting Olympic records in all three. The marathon was his first, and his time of 2:23:04 was a world best for an out-and-back course. As the second finisher came into the stadium 2 1/2 minutes behind him, Zatopek was happily chatting with his wife Dana (gold medalist in the javelin) and munching on an apple, while the air reverberated with the cheer "Za-to-pek! Za-to-pek!"
Zatopek's method was the interval system, though he apparently knew nothing of Gerschler and Reindell when he adopted it. His own common sense led him to intervals; he eventually proved that they worked for marathoners as well as for the 400-/800-meter runners that Harbig represented. Zatopek says he began running repeated, fast 100-meter sprints when he realized long, steady training runs could not instill the speed that competition requires. At first, people thought he was crazy. "You can't train for 5000 meters by running the 100," they argued quite logically. "True," Zatopek acknowledged, "unless I run 100 meters 50 times," which he proceeded to do while the other Czech distance runners looked on in amazement.
So revolutionary was Zatopek's training, so astonishing its intensity, and so phenomenal his racing results, that word of his daily regimen quickly outstripped its actuality. It was widely rumored that he was doing 60x400 meters in 60 seconds, a workout that almost surely surpasses man's ability, as more than one world-class runner discovered in trying to duplicate it. Yet when people saw him racing, they were willing to believe almost anything. The sight of Zatopek on the track was positively riveting. No one has given freer vent to racing's agony. He tilted his head, furrowed his brow, wagged his tongue out of his mouth, rolled his shoulders, twisted his arms across his body, and appeared on the brink of an epileptic seizure. Red Smith wrote that spectators "still wake up screaming in the dark when Emil the Terrible goes writhing through their dreams, clawing at his abdomen in horrible extremities of pain." Few noticed that his running form was perfect from the waist down.
Even today, much contradictory information persists about Zatopek's training. We know for certain that he trained prodigiously and largely on the track, but without a stopwatch and certainly not at anything approaching a 60-second pace. In fact, by the standards of today's track training, much of his running would be considered quite slow.
It was the quantity of Zatopek's interval training that produced results. His training for the 1948 London Olympic Games, in which he won the 10,000 meters, consisted of daily workouts of 5 x 200 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x200 meters. Immediately prior to the London Games, Zatopek reportedly ran 60 x 400 meters for 10 days in a row. Four years later, feeling that he needed even more training to ensure a triple victory in Helsinki, Zatopek began running 5 x 100 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x 100 meters twice a day.
If the training sounds repetitious and boring, Zatopek's approach was anything but. Interval training appealed to him because he found it infinitely variable. He tried hundreds of different combinations of repeats, distances and speeds before he settled on the ones that best suited him. He was willing to experiment with all manner of training. He would run through knee-deep snow in his army boots, he would sprint from telephone pole to telephone pole holding his breath, he would run with Dana on his shoulders (which resulted in his suffering a hernia condition). He was a human dynamo off the track and on. Gordon Pirie, who idolized him, once visited Emil and Dana at their home. "These two used to romp like children or like beautiful young animals in their perfect fitness of body," he wrote. "Once, in fun, he threw her into a stream. Unfortunately, her foot hit a rock and she broke an ankle. I have seen him and his wife hurling a javelin full-tilt toward each other. The trick was to catch it in the air above their heads and return it as fast as possible. A dangerous game, and they Loved it.
"One secret of his success was that he never let himself get bored. He would jog for hours on the same spot, reading a book or listening to the radio. Everything was fun to him. On wash days at home he piled all the dirty clothes in the bath and then ran on them for hours. His mind was always as active as his body."
Ultimately, the specifics of Zatopek's training are less important than his spirit and determination. He won because he was unwilling to acknowledge boundaries. He pushed training for distance running light-years beyond anyone before him, saw it not as drudgery but as a daily experiment, and raised it to the level of art. Typically, Zatopek found nothing unusual about his abilities or his training. His philosophy was as matter-of-fact as it was Promethean. "When a person trains once, nothing happens," he said. "When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly has developed in ways more than physical. Is it raining? That doesn't matter. Am I tired? That doesn't matter, either. Then willpower becomes no longer a problem."
Since the day Emil Zatopek toed the 10,000-meter starting line at the 1948 Olympics, distance running has not been the same. Such a sweeping statement can be made of no other man.
Zatopek's amazing 100 x 400m reps
In spite of the great success of Kolehmainen, Nurmi, and Hagg, interval training didn't really take off until after World War II, and it was not a Finn but a notable Czechoslovakian athlete, Emil Zatopek, who perhaps did the best job of convincing the athletic world at large that intervals represented an unparalleled training technique. Zatopek used a somewhat unusual interval combination: he ran relatively short repeats, often no more than 400m in length, but instead of blazing through these relatively short interval distances at high speeds, he ran them at close to his lactate-threshold velocity, ie well below both 10k and 5k race speeds (3).
The hard-working Czech was known to rattle off 100(!) of these 400m reps per day, alternated with 200m recoveries. Scientists later reckoned (op cit) that Zatopek reached lactate-threshold speed at about 85% of his vVO2max (ie at a pace of about 72 seconds per 400m), which meant that on a 100-work-interval day he was completing about 40k of work intervals in just 120 minutes or so. (Before you become completely incredulous, don't forget that there were 99 'recoveries' injected into such running to make the 100 x 400 scheme more palatable.) Zatopek's pattern of churning out high volumes of moderate-quality (below 90% VO2max) training was echoed, albeit on a less grandiose scale, by the American runner Jim Ryun in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Interval training made its way into a scientific journal for the first time in 1959, when German exercise scientist H Reindell and colleagues described specific interval training carried out by top athletes and formulated some basic rules for interval work (4,5). Sigfried Hermann, an athlete described in Reindell's book, specialised neither in Zatopek's 'large bag' of slow intervals or Nurmi's 'short stack' of scalding reps; he engaged in what could be called 'variable-pace' interval training. A 3:40 1500m runner, Hermann would - within a single workout - run four sets of 6 x 200m, with rests of 50-60 seconds between the 200m work intervals and eight minutes between sets. Sigfried completed the first set at a tempo of 30 seconds per 200 (or 98% of 1500m speed), the next two sets at almost-exact 1500m race velocity, and most of the final set at 28 seconds per 200 (about 105% of 1500m race tempo). The German whizzed through the very last interval of the last set in 25 seconds, which was 118% of his race velocity over 1500m.
This variable-pace interval training, performed above and below actual race velocity, was mirrored in the early 1980s by famed British coach Frank Horwill, the founder of the British Milers' Club and mentor of two-time World Cross Country silver medallist Tim Hutchings. Horwill, however, liked to use the different paces on separate days of training, a scheme he called 'multi-paced training'. Peter Coe later based Seb Coe's overall training on Horwill's multi-speed foundation. Variably-paced intervals were also employed with great success in the 1980s by Said Aouita of Morocco, who held world records for both the 1500 and 5000m and ran at speeds ranging from lactate-threshold velocity all the way up to 1500m competition speed within the same session, with interval distances ranging from 200-3000m.
Friday, January 15, 2010
January Poem
Winter
Damn
It’s cold
Isn’t that beautiful? I thought it sums everything up; short, sweet, and to the point!
Damn
It’s cold
Isn’t that beautiful? I thought it sums everything up; short, sweet, and to the point!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Poem: Antigonish
Poem of the Month : “Antigonish”
William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) was an American educator and poet. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, Mearns was a Professor at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy from 1905-1920. Mearns is remembered now as the author of the poem “Antigonish” a well known rhyme, composed in 1899 as a song for a play he had written called The Psyco-ed. The play was performed in 1910 and the poem was first published as “Antigonish” in 1922. The poem also appeared in the movie Identity.
Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
“Antigonish” (1899)
William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) was an American educator and poet. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, Mearns was a Professor at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy from 1905-1920. Mearns is remembered now as the author of the poem “Antigonish” a well known rhyme, composed in 1899 as a song for a play he had written called The Psyco-ed. The play was performed in 1910 and the poem was first published as “Antigonish” in 1922. The poem also appeared in the movie Identity.
Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
“Antigonish” (1899)
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
What is the best Fartlek?
When I lived in Norway I was taught that fartlek was
totally intuitive or instinctive. There was no set schedule other than
starting off easier and picking up the pace with shorter quicker distances as
you went. The determining factors were how you felt at the time along with
the terrain and footing. The way I was coached you would determine the
success of a particular fartlek training session by how you felt at the
completion. You should feel invigorated and not exhausted. Obviously this is
not something you learn overnight and I believe some people never learn how
to take full advantage of what fartlek has to offer.
As a sidebar, I believe there is something lost in the English translation. In Norway and Sweden there was as much emphasis on "lek" or play, as there was on "fart", speed or motion. In Norwegian or Swedish, fart is a word used to describe motion, and it can be either slow, fast or any velocity in between. The word for "speed" in Norwegian is "hurtig" or "hurtighet". So to be correctly translated, from a running perspective, the English term should actually be "motion" or "velocity variation" play. Hope this helps you discover a very enjoyable and beneficial way to train. All the best. - Bartman |
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