Maximizing Breathing for Exercise Performance: Comprehensive Guide

Breathing and exercise. Are you maximizing your breathing to improve your exercise or your competition performance? We're going to find out today. Today's session is all about not only how do we breathe during exercise, which is also a very updated part of the science. A lot of information out there is quite dated nowadays. There are new models over the last couple of years. You're going to get a little touch of what some of those are. Anyway, before we dive into that, who am I? McPhillamy? 15 years experience in respiratory physiology, exercise physiology, a lot. And now I help breath coaches and psychologists and beyond that, people understand the depths of how we can use the science of breathing, psychology and the mind body connection to improve people's performance, health, wellbeing, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, we're diving straight in. I'm not going to leave any further. If we are thinking about breathing, we're thinking about bringing oxygen in, CO2 out, and being able to sustain energy management during exercise. Now, the first thing you have to consider with athletes is not even when they're actually exercising. Strange that we have to consider pre anticipation. Yes. Athletes will get nervous. People who are going to exercise, even if they don't feel nervous, their physiology will start to ramp up their heart rate, will start to ramp up their respiratory rate, and we'll start to ramp up their blood pressure. Why is that? Because we want to prepare the body to take on oxygen and to be able to get the heart pump in that round so we can actually ensure that we have adequate energy supply. Now, here's the interesting thing. There's studies out there that suggest if we have individuals that know they're going to cycle at moderate intensities, then they have a little bit of anticipation. However, if they are told that they are going to exercise at their maximum, then their heart rate and their respiratory rate and oxygen consumption increases even further, even though they haven't started exercising yet. This poses some problems because we might have sports out there or competitions out there, or athletes out there who get attached to training hard or specific outcomes. Now, that's not too much of a problem until it is, because if we have someone who gets too worked up, then what they're going to do is they're going to blow off potentially too much carbon dioxide. That is going to reduce their ability to actually extract oxygen from the blood cells and therefore the oxygen delivery to the muscle cells to produce energy is impaired. In fact, this person is going to start to accumulate hydrogen ions in their body and also we're going to see more Anaerobic respiration, meaning the person's going to gas out. This is not great for high intensity work or sports that involve shorter rounds, that require both high intensity, but also the ability to stay calm and focused. That is, fighters typically fight BJJ competitors. If they gas out early, it's endgame form. And if they continue to do that because it's a breathing habit, then they're going to have problems. So what does that mean? It means that not only do we need to be ensuring that athletes are aware of that breathing, but they should be aware of how to regulate their nervous system. To have a regulated nervous system. That doesn't necessarily mean because someone's fit, that they have a regulated nervous system, but also to understand themselves and understand them state. So that's where we need to start even before we've started exercise. Now what are we going to do is we're going to go through some graphs and these graphs are going to be some graphs around what it looks like when we do a VO2 max test or a cardiopulmonary exercise test. So this is where we put someone on a treadmill or a bike and we gradually incrementally increase the intensity of work from basically walking all the way up to until they can no longer further increase their capacity. So go to their exercise capacity. Now, interesting enough, when we first look at this first graph here, this is ventilation, ventilation with exercise intensity. And we can see there isn't a linear shift or a linear change here. Heart rate, however, will be linear and then it will plateau. However, we have to break ventilation down into two components. Breathing frequency, how fast we breathe and the depth of our breathing. And initially when we start to exercise, we don't really get too much change in our respiratory rate because respiratory rate is directly related to both our cognitive load and our physically exerted loads are a level of arousal. So initially we can see there's a slight increase with intensity of work that is going to be by changes to our tidal volume that how deep we breathe. We think about that for a moment. If we take a deeper breath, we get more air poured into our alveoli, meaning that we're going to have greater ability to exchange that gas. So initially during exercise, in a moment you're going to see that low intensity to low to moderate intensity exercise. We increase gas exchange efficiency, we become more efficient. However, there is a particular point in the intensity of work that we're working at where our breathing becomes less effective. But that doesn't really matter for that intensity of work because with shifting energy systems. So we can see here there is a point where it says VT what? Ventilatory threshold, one that is known as the anaerobic threshold, where we're going from using fats or carbohydrates to the fuel using oxygen, to then moving into a state where we're going into using carbohydrates in an anaerobic state without oxygen. We're now breaking things down into lactate. Lactate obviously is been deemed as the thing that makes us fatigued. It's not. Lactate is also shuttled and used as a fuel. However, hydrogen ions start to accumulate. Both the accumulation of the hydrogen ions and the increase in CO2 that we produce from the breakdown of energy then starts to trigger increase of more depth, but also send signals to our brain to produce a feeling of air hunger. So not only do we now have increased depth of our breathing, we also starting to feel the exercises more challenging and maybe even notice some air hunger. We get a larger increase in terms of the change of our total ventilation, an upward curve, as you can see. Finally, when we get to the end point and only fit people or athletes will be able to reach this point, we get to what's called the VT2 respiratory compensation point. And this point here is where the intensity of the work feels so high, the actual level of air hunger someone may be experiencing, so their relationship to the sensations increases even further. We get a further increase in arousal and now we get compensation and we start to really ramp up the respiratory rates and we get that final infection that you see there. Moving on to the next graph. The next graph is going to allow us to see what happens with gas exchange. So we know that generally having a slower, deeper breath, you can find that in my mechanical episode, which I will put up here, you'll see that pop up now is greater for gas exchange. It pulls more air into the alveoli and therefore allows for more oxygen to be extracted. However, initially when we start exercising, as I alluded to earlier, we get an increase in our heart rate and an increase in the amount of air that's coming into our alveoli. So therefore, we get an increase in what's called ventilation, perfusion matching blood where air is. So therefore a downward deflection on this graph here will actually mean greater gas exchange. But once we hit that point where we get to the ventilatory threshold1 and ventilation, particularly respiratory rate starts to increase, we become more and more efficient at exchanging gas. But that doesn't really matter too much because now we've clipped over into anaerobic respiration. Finally, I'm just going to show you what this graph is. Here we can see what happens with CO2. As we increase the intensity of work, we're going to produce more and more CO2 so it gradually accumulates in the body. However, when we get to the respiratory compensation point, we get that downward inflection. So if we were to draw a line across there and put a mark on it, we might be able to say this is someone's CO2 tolerance or the level of CO2 they can tolerate until their brain starts to flick on panic alarms and it causes excessive breathing. Now the issue with these graphs is that if we are to be a person who is over anxious or has dysfunctional breathing, these graphs are going to shift to the left and we are shift to the left on the first one, up on the second one and down on the third one. We're going to over breathe to hyperventilate. This is going to have a big impact on exercise performance. So if that has an impact on exercise performance by over breathing, what about if we trained ourself to slightly under breathe or control our breathing during exercise? Does this have a positive benefit? In this study that I have reviewed before by George Dalam, he shows that nasal breathing during exercise after an adaptation phase can actually lead to the same level of intensity of work on a VO2 max test with 25% less breaths, meaning that we have potentially a lower level of arousal, decreased sympathetic nervous activity, and also we maybe even have a greater ability to utilize oxygen. That's very interesting and I'm going to leave this here for today because there is plenty of information for you to take away and we need to start to consider how can we use this information to gain better breath control, to improve people's performance, to reduce things like respiratory muscle fatigue, reduce gassing out? If you want to learn more, check out www.cheathscience.com check out the breath Science certification if you enjoyed this episode. Subscribe, leave a comment the channel is growing and I appreciate you all. Catch you for the next one.