Patrick McKeown explains how resting breathing patterns affect running performance. Poor mechanics like mouth breathing and upper-chest breathing cause premature breathlessness and fatigue. He recommends recreational athletes train with their mouth closed to build respiratory strength, while elite athletes should split training 50/50 between closed and open mouth work.
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Would you apply this, this same approach of nasal breathing to all athletes across the board? Would you say some advanced athletes might want to do this only on some of their runs, or, or when they're doing like higher intensity training, like it's going to be much harder to, to integrate this, I assume?
Sure. Uh, how you breathe during running is, is going to— is not influenced by how you normally breathe during running. It's your everyday breathing, which influences your breathing during running. If I have an athlete coming into me, I look at their breathing during rest. I look at their breathing, is it functional? I measured their breath hold time. I measured their maximum breathlessness test. I have them nose breathe during sleep. I don't care. It's not just about the athlete, how are they breathing when they're with me? It's more so with the athlete, how are they breathing when they leave me? When they're outside. So I want to improve their breathing efficiency by having a higher BOLT score. So by bringing this into their training, because this ultimately is part of the training, I seen athletes come in, Florence, I've seen Olympic athletes with a BOLT score of 15 seconds. They are breathing fast and upper chest. And if I see any athlete breathing fast and upper chest, I'm gonna say to them, Listen, how you are breathing, you are going to have disproportionate breathlessness, you're going to have muscle fatigue, and you're going to gas out too soon. And you can train all of the hours under the sun. But physical training doesn't improve your respiratory fitness because the breathing muscles lag behind. And that's something why we have to address breathing. And we have to address it. Yeah, you could use something like We have, you know, the masks that we use. But that's, that's looking at your breathing during your training. It's also your breathing outside of your training. So say, if it's a recreational athlete, I would say to them, do your best to sustain all of your physical exercise with your mouth closed. It just makes a whole lot of sense. And yes, the recreational athlete, their performance could dip a little bit initially. But they will get so many benefits out of it. And in a few weeks, they'll have the same performance. Now, if it's an elite athlete, I will say to them, do about 50% of your training with your mouth closed. It's going to be tougher, it's going to add an extra load. And it's because of this toughness and the extra load that yes, your ability to maintain that intensity is going to drop a little bit. But spend 50% then with your mouth open, so that you're at least able to achieve your max rate intensity.
