How To Increase Your VO2 Max Anytime, Anywhere - Without Actually Exercising.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And you know, I wrote an article over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com a while ago called Underground Training Tactics for Enhancing Endurance. And in that article, I introduced you to the concept of using things like resisted breathing and restricted breathing and hypoxic training to do things like increase your oxygen utilization, your VO2 max, your inspiratory and your expiratory muscle strength, or muscle endurance. And in that article, I actually mentioned something that I use called a powerlung, which is a special portable breathing device that I personally use and have been using when I drive around in my car or I'm stuck in traffic when I'm watching a movie or waiting in line at the airport as a way to squeeze in a quick workout for my lungs and my inspiratory and expiratory muscles. So I keep it in my bag and kind of pull it out whenever I know I have a quick chance to boost my VO2 max. So that means I can exercise my lungs just about anytime, any place. But sometimes it's difficult to understand how exactly these things work, whether they're proven and whether they actually can increase your VO2 max without you having to go out and exercise and really, you know, how these things actually operate. So I decided to get an expert on the call today to talk about how you can actually train your respiratory muscles without actually exercising in a traditional sense of the word, like, say, riding your bicycle up a hill or running on a treadmill. So the guy who's on the call with me today is Greg Wells. And Greg is a PhD. He's the assistant professor of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education and at the University of Toronto. He is also the Associate Scientist of Physiology and Experimental Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children. And today he's gonna share his wealth of knowledge with us on respiratory muscle training, how to do it, what you can get out of it, how it actually works, and everything there is to know about it. So, Greg, thanks for coming on the call today.

My pleasure, Ben. Great to speak to you.

Now, Greg, I noticed that you've actually written a paper called Respiratory Muscle Power before and after training. I'm curious how you got into kind of looking into this in the first place and then as a follow up, what you've looked at and what you found when it comes to respiratory muscle power and what happens when you train with it.

Yeah, I got into this back when I was doing my PhD at the University of Toronto. I was in exercise physiology and I'm a former competitive swimmer and I was coaching swimming at the time. And I was really interested in finding new ways to make athletes faster. And one of the things that I was really interested in, I have always been interested in, is how breathing interacts with movement to help athletes perform. And so I began to explore this idea of respiratory muscle training and decided that that was going to be what I did my PhD thesis on. So we developed a whole bunch of things, one of which was how to actually test the strength and power of the breathing muscles. A really complex system that we built in a lab that measured pressures that you could develop and the speed of breathing and how much ventilation that you can actually create. And then we took a group of athletes through a 12 week training program and found out what happened to them when they trained their breathing muscles. They were actually swimmers at the time, but I also did a group of cyclists in a side project and a lot of other people have done research in the area in rowing and a little bit in running. So it's certainly been an area of great interest over almost 10 years now.

And so when did you actually start to work on this paper, this respiratory muscle power? Before and after training. Is it a paper or is it a study?

That's sort of the paper that I wrote that came out of my PhD research. I published a paper in European Journal of Applied Physiology that was the scientific version of that. The paper that you're referring to is the paper that I wrote for coaches that helped them to understand what's happening, try to make it as simple as possible. And what we talked about with power and increasing ventral breathing power is it's basically the same as watts on a bike, but you're generating watts of breathing, you're creating ventilation, which is liters per minute, how deeply you can breathe times how fast you can breathe, breaths per minute. And so the math comes out to liters per minute. And then if you do that as a factor of time, it's its power of breathing, believe it or not. So we measured critical power of the breathing muscles, which had never been done before. And the critical power of the breathing muscles is sort of the endurance capacity of the breathing muscles. And we saw, we tested that before and after training to see if we could improve the critical power, the endurance capacity of the breathing muscles with just regular swim training or regular swim training plus respiratory muscle training.

Interesting. So explain to me exactly how respiratory muscle training works. Like, can you give me, give me some examples of how someone would do respiratory muscle training?

Sure. So there's really two main ways that people do respiratory muscle training. The first one is to use a device like the powerlung that you refer to. And those are devices that have springs in them. So it's like a tube that you put up to your mouth. You breathe in and out through the tube. The tube's about an inch in diameter. And the inspiration port, the port that takes air in and the expiration port, the part where air flows out, have springs that you have to work against in order to open them up and to be able to breathe in. So it's like a strength training maneuver, just like weight training for your breathing muscles, the other way of doing it.

Now, can I interrupt you real quick when you say breathing muscles, can you clarify?

Yeah, it's amazing, but most people probably aren't aware that 15%, let's say you're exercising at VO2 max. You're cycling along and you're going all out, and you're breathing really hard, and your muscles are, your leg muscles are hammering and you're going all out. About 15% of the total oxygen that your body consumes around VO2 max is spent on your breathing muscles. And your breathing muscles are all of the muscles that are in your rib cage. So if you eat ribs for dinner or whatever, that's actually your ribcage muscles, and those are the muscles that you contract in order to breathe. You also have the diaphragm, which is a huge sheet of muscle that runs right through the middle of your body at the base of your rib cage. But then you also have your abs. A lot of people don't realize that you use your abs to breathe, especially when you're exhaling, especially when we're working really, really hard. And then there's all what's called the accessory muscles, which are the muscles up and around through your neck. So the scalenes and sternocleidomastoid and other muscles up and in through your neck. So there's actually a, a huge part of the body's musculature is devoted to breathing.

Wow. Okay, got it. So you explainedyou explained about these spring loaded resistance training devices, and then you said there was Another way that people can do this a second way.

Exactly. And the other way is endurance training for your muscles called hyperpnea training. So that's basically high ventilations for an extended period of time. You're breathing really hard, as fast as you can, no resistance, just trying to handle the high ventilation rates. And the challenge there is if you do that to sort of sit in your chair and hyperventilate for a little while, you blow off all your carbon dioxide and get really dizzy. Can be actually quite dangerous. So some of the hyperpnea training devices that are out there store some CO2. So you breathe in and out of a bag, for example, keep your CO2 levels high so that you don't pass out and get sick, or pass out and hurt yourself, I should say. So those are the two main different ways of doing it. Either strength training for your breathing muscles or hyperpnea training for your breathing muscles.

And you said hypertenia training. How do you spell that?

Hy. It's like hyper. So that's the term in science we use to say more hyperpnea and then hyper. Excuse me, and then apnea, which is. Or nea is breathing. So hyperp with a P and then N O, E, a. Gotcha.

Now, in addition to your respiratory muscle power before and after training paper, and I'll put a link to that, by the way, in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com for people who want to read that. For the nerds out there, can you tell us what other studies or what other type of research has been done on this resisted muscle training?

I think one of the coolest studies that was done was by a group out of Wisconsin, Jerome Dempsey's group, and what they did was really interesting. They actually did a study that showed that if your breathing muscles become fatigued, they preferentially steal blood away from your arms and your legs. So the harder your breathing muscles work, the less blood flows to your arms and your legs, because the body will protect the heart, the brain, and the lungs before anything else. It doesn't care if your arms and legs get tired. It just cares about making sure that you can keep breathing. So it was a really interesting study that they did that I think is really applicable, because if you think about it and you're out for a ride or you're out for a run and you're at threshold and all of a sudden it asks you a question and you start talking to them and increasing your breathing, that's enough to throw you off and just. And push you over that threshold. And so it was a really fascinating study that speaks to the importance of controlling breathing, especially when you get up to the higher intensities.

Okay, so how would doing something like that hyper apnea training that you talked about, or using like a spring loaded resisted breathing device be any different than doing something like getting a straw and just like breathing in and out of a straw?

Yeah, it's a little bit different. And if you're breathing in and out of a straw, you're breathing through very narrow tubes. So that's creating resistance as well. That's one way of doing it. It's very hard to control. The cool thing that I liked about the powerlung in my research was that we could actually change the resistance. There's dials that you can use to increase or decrease the resistance inside the PowerLung device. It's important probably for me to say at this point in time, I get no money from powerlung. I never have. They donated some units for me in my PhD research. I'm saying this is because I believe in it, not because I'm getting any financial benefit out of it whatsoever. So when you're using this PowerLung device, you can actually change the resistance. So as you get stronger, just like in the weight room, as you get stronger, you have to keep increasing the weights that you're using to continue to stimulate adaptation in the muscles. You can do that on this one. Whereas if you have just a straw, it's not going to. That's probably not enough. I view using the powerlung almost like you would as part of a strength training routine. If you're going into the gym and you know that you're doing some bench press or some back arches or squats, or, you know, single leg lunges, I just throw in a set of power lung on that as well. And it's. I just treat it exactly like it would any other exercise.

Okay, got it. Now, I've seen a lot of other of other devices out there, like resisted breath training devices. And from what I understand, some of them are indeed like breathing in and out of a straw, and some of them are more of these kind of spring loaded devices. Can you explain what exactly the difference is in terms of what some of these devices that are indeed like a straw are doing versus what say a spring loaded device is doing?

So if you're breathing in and out of a straw or out of a device with a very narrow tube, you can breathe regardless of the pressure. So if you just inhale just a tiny Little bit. You will get some flow through that straw. And the faster you try to inhale, the harder it's going to become. Because when you generate flow through a little tiny tube, there's resistance and there's just not enough space for the air to get into your lungs. So it makes it very, very hard. But there's no threshold. Like you can breathe a tiny little bit of effort and you're going to actually inhale. The difference with some of the spring loaded devices is that until you reach a certain threshold pressure, you actually don't get any ventilation, any air at all. It's like a cracking pressure. So you have to sort of, if you put it in your mouth and you start inhaling, you have to generate a certain resistance. Push, push, push. And then I should say suck in the air, you know, hard. And then all of a sudden it'll crack, it'll open up and then you can generate flow and you have to maintain that pressure all the way through the inspiration and then do exactly the same thing on the exhale. So it's a little bit more controlled. You can actually hit target intensities, target thresholds before you're actually generating any resists, any ventilation at all. So I actually find it to be a lot more controllable and a lot more precise. We've ended up using it. I ended up using it quite a while ago with quite a bit of success with a lot of the competitive, national and international level swimmers that I was working with and it worked really well for them.

Yeah, that's actually what I noticed when I started using the powerlung and didn't know what I was doing was I tried to breathe into it and couldn't get any air in and out and, and realized that I actually had it on like the highest resistance possible. And so it just didn't move air at all. And so that's something that folks should know about is you actually, once you have one of these, you know, you want to start at relatively low resistance. That's at least what I found. After a couple months of training, I'm pretty much rocking it at the highest resistance I can dial in. But initially, yeah, you can't even move that resistance. You can't even move air through it unless you just really put your whole body into it. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, it's shocking how hard it is and it's shocking how fast you adapt to it. Another cool application of it actually is the rowing team from the UK was using it, found it was great before warmups so you could actually do it before you go on the water to warm up before you race and actually lowers lactate levels during the race itself. Almost like you can also use it as a warm up for your, for your workouts.

So how is this any different than hypoxic training? You know, like, you know, lowering the partial pressure of oxygen or using like a hypoxico tent or something like that?

Yeah, completely different. So there's hypoxic training which is, you know, going to bed at night and sleeping in a tent and lowering your oxygen levels. That's going to stimulate your body to produce more red blood cells and via the EPO response. There's also hypercapnia training which is when you're doing controlled frequency breathing when you're swimming, for example, like breathing 3, 5, 7, 9 or something like that, that's going to increase your carbon dioxide levels in your body. Doesn't do that much to your oxygen levels. Bit of a misunderstood thing there. And that's changing the levels of gases in your blood, which does all sorts of very positive things for your in terms of triggering adaptation inside your muscles. Respiratory muscle training is a specific targeted training for the muscles of breathing. And so it really targets the diaphragm, it really targets the muscles throughout the ribcage. And we now know that the breathing muscles can adapt, you can adapt your breathing, your breathing can become, you can become fitter, your breathing can become less stressful. When you're working at VO2 max, the fitter your breathing muscles become, the less challenge they're going to pose to your arms and your legs in terms of getting, competing for blood flow. So yeah, it's quite a bit of a different, quite a bit of a different thing. Even though both are quote unquote breathing related. One is the hypoxic and hypercapnic training really have to do with changing oxygen and CO2 levels in your blood. Whereas respiratory muscle training really targets specifically the muscles are breathing themselves.

So you talked about how you would use something like this in the weight room. Can you give me an example of a typical workout that one would do with a resisted breath training device?

One of the things you can do if you want to increase the strength of the breathing muscles is just do three sets of eight to 12. The same way that you would do strength development exercises in the gym. You just do three sets of eight to 12 complete breaths in, complete breaths out on the power lung. Another thing that we've done is 30 breaths at very, very low resistance three times before we do warm ups. You do three sets of 30, very low resistance. Warm up. The breathing muscles, get in, warm up. We've done that with swimming and both cycling. Another really cool thing that we did in swim training actually was using it. Particularly cruel. When I was coaching, we would use it and athletes would have to recover on it in between repeats. So they're going 10, 1/ hundreds freestyle. When you hit the wall, you grab the power line, you breathe on it for 30 seconds, put it back up and start swimming again.

That's a good idea. So I could keep this poolside and just like set it to the pool.

We've done it a lot. A buddy of mine, he's used it on the bike, which you gotta be really careful of because you don't want to get dizzy. But he's a very hardcore cyclist. We'll do sets of it while he's out on the bike, just because it immediately steals blood from your arms and legs and can be really, really challenging. So you might want to not try it out on the road, but certainly on the trainer. It could be a really cool thing to do.

Have you ever used one of those altitude training masks? Not the hypoxic training masks, but just like the. They're called elevation training masks that resist your brain.

I personally haven't. We've taken athletes to altitude camps. I know that there's back and forth debate about whether or not altitude's effective. We obviously live high, training low. Seems to be the consensus.

Well, I don't mean like, like the. The altitude training in terms of hypoxic training. I mean like these devices that you'll find on, like, MMA websites and that are really popular among a lot of, like, crossfitters and gym junkies. They strap these, these masks to their face and they basically restrict oxygen flow. Have you seen?

Yeah, yeah, I haven't. I have not had any experience with that. I had a little bit of experience with the altitude tents and with altitude training camps and stuff like that. But in terms of actually resist, actually increasing, decreasing the amount of oxygen that's consumed during using one of those mats. I haven't seen that.

Yeah. What I've. What I've found and, And I call that more like restricted breathing, because what it does is it's like breathing through a tiny, tiny hole. I found that it feels way different because I've worn it a few times. It feels way different than doing something like restricted breathing with something like a power lung.

Right.

For I think the reasons that you just outlined, you. You have to reach a certain threshold before the power lung even moves at all, versus, like an elevation training mask, you can breathe no matter what. It just restricts the amount of air that comes in and out.

Right. What they might be doing there. And sort of similar to the myth around controlled frequency breathing and swimming, the sort of breathing 3, 5, 7, 9 sets and stuff like that, is that by restricting breathing during exercise, we think of it as hypoxic training. When in fact, what's really happening there, what really makes it uncomfortable, is that you're building up CO2 inside the body so your muscles are working. They're producing carbon dioxide. It's the buildup of carbon dioxide that actually gives you that urge to breathe, that sensation of breathlessness that comes from high CO2, and that causes changes in PH levels. Your blood will become more acidic. The acids, the hydrogen ions will get into your muscles and cause problems with muscle contraction and speed up fatigue. So I can see how that could be really useful for MMA for sure. And if you're doing sprint events or anything that requires greater intensities, then that could be beneficial as well. You just have to be really careful with how you use it.

Interesting. Okay, got it. So as far as this powerlung device, I've seen, if I go over to your website, I've seen that there are different ones. Like there's one called Airstream, or it's not your website, I guess it's the powerlung website, but it's the Airstream, the breath air, the trainer, the sport. I know that you don't work for powerlung, but do you know the difference between these different devices?

Yeah, it's really cool seeing the evolution of all of those different products. When it first came out, there was the powerlung sport. And then of course, as you know, when you as an athlete, you put it in your mouth the first time, like, oh, my God, this is so hard. And then so an easier version came out, a version that's very easy to breathe in and out of for people with respiratory diseases who need to improve their lung function, people with asthma, copd, et cetera. And then there was another version that came out that was only inspiratory in nature, and then another version that came out to help musicians. So it's really interesting to see them expand the number of offerings that they have. So really do, if you are getting into it, take a look, because there's lots of different options for you depending upon what fitness level you're at and where you're starting from.

Yeah, I just use this green I believe it's the sport model, which I think is the one that's kind of designed for athletes and it is tough. So I've been using about twice a week. And honestly all I've been doing is when I'm sitting around, like I mentioned, I do the breath training and I've just been doing 10 sets of three seconds out, three seconds in. And just that alone has made a pretty big difference for me in terms of my respiratory strength. And the main areas that I've noticed it is swimming in the pool and then also just my core strength when I'm doing core sets, it seems to have somehow improved core strength. Is that something that you've noticed is like a direct crossover into things like swinging a tennis racket? Torso strength, are you using a lot of those muscles if you're doing the breath training?

Yeah, the expiratory side for sure. And that's the one difference between powerlung and most of the other devices on the market is that powerlung actually trains both inspiration and expiration. And I found some specific benefits to training the expiratory muscles in my research. And the expiratory muscles are largely your core muscles, all of your abdominals. So if you get those working better, if you work the nervous system and how to activate those muscles, absolutely, it's going to help you. And if you look at the moment of explosiveness in many sports, so like hitting a tennis ball or that moment when you're actually in the power phase of your swimming stroke for the very best swimmers in the world, or starting in track and field, people exhale at those moments because exhalation matched with muscle contraction can be more powerful. So it's not surprising to me that by working on your expiratory muscles and linking that to your sport performance, that you're finding improvements in what you're able to do. Because that's definitely what a lot of the world class athletes across the variety of different sports do.

I think you can do it the wrong way though. I've found like, I've noticed that I can move the dial on the power lung by doing almost like shallow chest breathing. But I'm way stronger and I feel like I get a better workout when I focus on breathing from within my belly. So is it actually possible to use.

These things the wrong way just like every exercise? Yeah, I mean, imagine you're doing bench press, you're doing, you know, 6 inch range of motion movements. It's, it's not nearly as good with a bar, for example, not nearly as good as if you grab some dumbbells and move yourself through an entire full range of motion where you have the muscle fully stretching and then contracting. And it's exactly the same way with Power Lung. You do not want to be doing short, fast, shallow breaths. You want to be doing complete, nice, deep breaths, expanding the lungs, building strength through an entire range of motion. And that's when you get the real benefits.

Okay, got it, Got it. Well, cool. What I'll do over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com in the show notes, for those of you listening in is I'll give you a link to Powerlung, but we've actually got a 25% discount, which is actually really significant. Worked out for the powerlung, and they were kind enough to give that to us until, I believe it goes until the end of 2014. We might be able to get to extend that. But the, the code over@powerlung.com you can use to get a 25% discount on one of these little portable breath training devices is BGF, as in Ben Greenfield Fitness 025. So it's bgf025@powerlung.com and furthermore, we're going to give some donations 10% of the proceeds when you get a resisted breathing device over there@powerlung.com, they're going to go to the Sick Kids Foundation. Greg, can you tell me about the SickKids foundation and what exactly that is?

Yeah. So I'm a scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and we're one of the top research centers for children's health. We deal mostly with really complex diseases. Most of the kids that we see have more than one problem, but more than one disease at a time. Tertiary care, like really complicated cases. And what I've been working on for the last few years at SickKids is actually using exercise to prevent, diagnose and treat chronic diseases in kids like cancer and cystic fibrosis. And we've moved into heart inflammatory diseases due to juvenile arthritis, other things like that. And so we're really trying to promote exercise as a primary treatment for children with chronic diseases. And so we established the Exercise Medicine Fund, and that goes towards funding research into improving children's health using exercise and specifically improving the health of children with a number of different chronic diseases. We just started our first cancer intervention study last week where we're actually using exercise to treat children with cancer. It's wild, it's really, really cool, and we appreciate everyone's support huge because it's brand new and we need all the support we can get.

Okay, cool. So it's a SickKids Foundation. And again, 10% of the proceeds from your purchase of a PowerLung over@powerlung.com if you use the 25% discount code BGF025 are going to go to the SickKids Foundation. So these power lungs are pretty cool. For those of you who are listening in, I'll put a link to some of the studies that have been done on not just power lungs, but respiratory muscle training in general. Really good way. Again, even if you don't aren't stepping foot into a gym just while you're kind of doing other things to become a better athlete, to increase your VO2 max, to help out with stuff like asthma and breathing issues, to help out strengthen your core and your abs. So I'm a big fan. And Greg, thank you for coming on the call today.

Oh, Ben, my pleasure. Thanks so much. And yeah, it's great to be on your show. I'm a fan of your show and so thanks for all the great information.

Awesome. Well, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Greg Wells signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit.

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