Podcast 229 // Breathing for Performance & Recovery | School of Calisthenics

now if you've ever been speed dating before you're gonna be comfortable with this one because we're gonna come thick and fast sometimes podcasts go on for flipping hours these days because people want to talk about too much stuff in one go we're going to keep this really really really short we're aiming for 15 minutes jack is going to drop some knowledge about how you can use some breath work to combine recovery during higher intensity efforts but before we do that we're very quickly going to thank our sponsors um spartan race and jacob's going to tell you how you can get a free place at a spartan race of your choice in less than 30 seconds yes now so there's 50 free spaces available from the lovely sponsors spartan it um they've started to go so there is not many left so you need to jump on quick all you have to do though is prove that you're training for this bathroom so you're going to come to it by taking a picture or video posting on your instagram and then tagging three things taggings at spartan that's them tagging spartanbrace and then importantly tag us at scorecardsenic so that we see it and then the final thing is send that to us in a direct message so we can verify that you've passed all of those criteria and then we will send you the code to join it can be any spartan race at all but we would love you to join us on the 16th of july at 16th of july at the midlands one to take part with the team scorecast linux on the morning on that saturday morning so uh it's worth about some of those spartan races are like i mean they start from like 5k all the way up to 21k but the the they're close to 100 quid so it's a it's a fantastic offer from the podcast sponsor which we are grateful for and thank them very very much and we thank all of you that have already signed up and look forward to seeing the rest of you there well done right let's get into this one this week a little bit of just some real practical takeaways as how you can maximize performance in a conditioning session by utilizing some breathing techniques jacko send us off roll that jingle listen players you're listening to the movement strength and play podcast by the school of calisthenics here are your hosts tim and jacob [Music] so timbo a lot of people will be have come across some of the like nasal breathing benefits for like low level aerobic work and how it's more efficient and everything and you may even try to do run to the end of your road and be like hold on i can't even run like 50 meters through breathing through my nose that's what i was like about three years ago and then you also might be taking part in some higher intensity stuff so i worked a lot of rugby players for example or you might be doing crossfit like tim's been doing or you might do some high-intensity work in your in your conditioning in your body weight training whatever it may be and and and you might be a little bit more aware and realize that holy crap when i do handstands i hold my breath or and when i come down i'm like completely like or when i'm doing like some hints and stuff like i'm just completely losing my breath and i'm aware of like that's not necessarily good but then when i think about trying to nasal breathe doing that i'm like well this is just impossible and this is actually helping this is actually worse um we're gonna talk about how when we understand the physiology of respiration of breathing so like how your body responds to breathing and what's going on uh on the inside to help us understand what can we do to allow ourselves to fatigue less quickly recover faster between bouts and not lose control of our breath which is a really important element to any conditioning work that you're going to do it's going to let you basically do better work and then recover better from that work so you can come back and do a little bit more uh afterwards now i'm going to make this real world for you to begin with because i know what people will do because people are like me and i know that because i've trained a lot of people what you're not most most people listening is what you're not going to do is going to go and do loads of steady state low intensity nasal breathing to build up your nasal breathing capacity and respiratory fitness let's call it that way what you're probably going to do is listen to this go to the gym go like balls to the wall and just go absolutely kind of gas and all of a sudden go yeah i'm supposed to do some nasal breathing what should i do so this is going to be like a shortcut to some strategies you're going to find when you are kind of like blowing out of your backside probably considering that most people won't have done the base level which would actually kind of like lead you to help so this might the start of your journey so if you're thinking about how you're going to go and improve efficiency then yes whenever you go out for your steady state runs or you're doing the longer sessions on a bike or whatever then yes you can go and learn from jacob about how to kind of optimize efficiency through nasal bleeding at a relatively low to moderate intensity now what we want to talk about today is there are always going to be those cases in training where we find ourselves redlining we're in that zone five we are like properly giving it a noise the body is absolutely craving whatever we can give it from an oxygen perspective because we are working super hard so what do we do in that situation jacko because there's one thing that you find is there comes a point where like nasal breathing becomes impractical right you adjust your body is in a state of stress let's say where you just cannot give it what it needs and continue to perform so if you're doing something like a crossfit workout or an interval based workout you might have got a 30 second break before you've got to go again or you get these windows where the intensity drops a little bit because it's in a slight kind of like you got on a room which is slightly less hard work than a full-out sprint on an erg or something like that so just talk a little bit about that context yeah how can people kind of like play around with different techniques and options within that yeah so um like to you've set the scene beautifully there and there is i just i do want to say like to be nasal breathing during the day when you're not exercising like helps you form that base so everyone can do that um and then yeah if you if you do some lower level aerobic work for five years and your days when you improve the efficiency of that it's going to help you do stuff but like you say um people aren't going to necessarily put in the work early doors to be able to do that but there are still loads of stuff we can do from understanding and it isn't all about just breathing nasally the caviar is if you are willing to do the work it has been shown that you can do your maximal intensity stuff nasally and have the benefits from that in that there was a study done um in 2018 by george daley who's like an olympic triathlon coach so context of is like top level people and some of them have been training the nasal breathing for six years or more i think but they did vo2 max testing and uh compared them nasal breathing created mouth breathing and they had no reduction in power output when they were nasal breathing but their respiratory rate was 22 percent less so they were 22 more efficient with their breathing less energy spent on the act of breathing and therefore more energy to be able to do the thing that they're they're doing but then you're going to have to do a lot of put a lot of work in to get that so the short like not the shortcuts all the like i think we don't like magic bullets and things like that but there's just like some very very simple principles that we can understand we like principles don't we principles we can understand and i'm going to share with you one that like changed got that hooked me into it about say four years ago where i tried nasal breathing for about six weeks on some of my easy runs and it was like pretty must burns pretty crap at it and i couldn't even run to the end of my road at first i then did a 5k um a park run a parking i'd never done before so i didn't know the course when i finished it i wasn't really happy with how i'd ran so i didn't even look at my watch to see how fast i'd gone after about 10 minutes i did and i'd knocked a minute off my 5k time my training at this point was all calisthenics i didn't do any running training other than do a park run on a saturday so my training for park room was doing a park run i ran once a week and nothing changed in my training other than i tried to do some nasally but importantly during the actual run the principle i was trying to use was larger slower breaths are more efficient at delivering oxygen to your working muscles so i said again larger but slower breasts and we'll explain very simply why but larger slow breaths so it was like i tried to start nasal breathing during this 5k but i couldn't maintain nasal building so i was like in and out for the nose but after not long it was like in through the nose and out through the mouth and then eventually it was in through the mouth and out through the mouth but i was always trying to take a larger deeper breath from like low down the diaphragm um and slow and trying to slow it down and that's because um the the best thing that you can understand about your training and we know this intuitively what's the worst type of breathing when someone is like fast mouth panting it feels rubbish it looks rubbish everyone actually knows me sees someone breathing like that that if you're doing a crossfit session with your pal or just in a group and you see someone do it the first person to start breathing like that you're like well they're the least fit out of everyone and if i stay away from that panting i feel in control of my breath and i actually feel a hell of a lot better and that's because physiologically there's there's oxygen is being delivered better to your system um the the reason being every breath you take there's about 150 milliliters of air lost in dead space so the more breaths you take in a minute the more air you're wasting your dead space that's a space in your lungs and your airways that just cannot be occupied so a principle of being able to slow down my breath allows me to get more oxygen in per minute to the lungs that can then get transferred into the blood and into the tissues that has to though slower breath needs to also then be a bigger breath otherwise you're reducing the total volume of air going through so we want to be able to take a larger breath but slower the other thing that's then going to help is breathing from deeper lower down from from activating from your breath coming from the diaphragm those mouth panting breaths they're very shallow heights like your upper chest you're lifting the upper part of the rib cage where you're then not sending air in the breath you take down to the lower portion of the lungs it's important to send air to the lower portion of the lungs because that's where the most amount of blood sits because of gravity gravity only works in one direction and as you're doing handstands all of the blood is going to sit more lower down and um there's a greatest density of alveolar the bottom portion of the lungs and that would be by for me it's like by design you can argue wise to why but by design or for whatever it's there's greatest portion a density of the bottom part of the lungs because that's where the blood sits so if i'm breathing shallow upper chest i'm wasting a loads of air in dead space and i'm not sending air into the lower portion of the lungs where oxygen can be transferred into the blood so it's not even so that's really inefficient i'm not getting oxygen to the tissues where they need to be and therefore i stay feeling out of breath and i stay with that fast panting and i never actually recover my breathing until i completely stop the exercise or completely reduce it down to very low level before i'm going to get my breath back so if i rather than i can take a larger breath and even if it's through the mouth and i'm trying to make it come from lower down so that it's breathing into not people with use that might be used the term like belly breathing but we i don't go into the detail of whether some people get their knickers in the twist about that but breathe from lower down in more towards the belly region than your upper chest make them bigger and make them slower and the little tip is starting to use a phrase is to use your mouth a bit more like a nose so the nose those holes are very small it provides resistance that helps slow your breath down it gives a diaphragm something to pull against you can make your mouth be that as well that stops you from getting to that point of like and losing your breath losing your mind losing everything and that for me dropped my 5k time down from 20 minutes 15 to 90 minutes 17 in six weeks of like no training just deeper larger slower breaths during the actual exercise that can be during the exercise as well as during your recovery periods is going to help with that you know i think it's been like a really interesting because i've experimented with this um more so recently as my training changed towards including more high intensity elements and the biggest thing for me that i experienced and then also seeing others and it is is the biggest thing for me jacob i think is awareness of people just being aware of what they're doing because i think there's because a lot of times as you said before people aren't taught this stuff you kind of find yourself in your 20s or 30s kind of just doing what you've always done and we would never talk breathing when we were playing rugby or anything like that really so you end up kind of going into a trading environment and you just kind of go right it's an all out high intensity session so your default is to go and just kind of like try and get through and people do end up just panting like dogs whereas if you're aware of it you start to kind of like think about moderating the breathing and it's just it's for some people it might be just that they it's not a massive additional load to think about because a lot of times people think like can i physically get through this am i strong enough am i fit enough so that the breathing just kind of like is part of the parcel of just that's just kind of what happens whereas if you can be more intentional about it then you start to kind of just it's i'm not going to say give yourself more capacity but the awareness just gives you more control and therefore you might have to moderate your intensity of what you're doing for a period of time but if we are training for the purposes of health and performance and you can buckle i can kind of partner both those two things together because i don't think it makes any difference having an awareness of the entire system is far better than just relying on whether you are strong enough or in technically like fit enough to complete a session but think about how do you complete the session so i talk to people all the time now around the shoulder stuff of like don't just move away from a to b think about how you're moving from a to b because it's important so how you're completing a high intensity session with regards to your breathing is important and yes you might go a little bit slower to start off with but you are training creating a stimulus and therefore building an adaptation which will reap rewards as jack has explained in the long term and i just want to get your point on your thoughts on this one jacob so something like a real quick fix that i've tried to do is be more mindful for one like throughout the whole workout when it gets hard if i'm doing an intensity session i'm going to switch nose in mouth out if i'm properly kind of like gas in i'm going like yes i'm trying to take those bigger breasts from the mouth but the other thing if it's kind of like if it's a weightlifting type crossfit sort of session where you've got these gaps when it's like an emom or something where you might have got 20 seconds recovery in between rounds just taking that time to go like three or four long kind of like nasal inhales exhales seem to bring the system down a little bit just gets you control back over the breathing before you then go again and then the other thing is that after the workout is finished everyone just kind of often collapses on the floor as i tend to get up walk around nasal breathe just to try and bring the system back down and there's a really easy way to do that just put some water in your mouth right it's an old school trick that everyone talks about but it really does work just hold some water your mouth and just get that system down regulated through some controlled breathing have a little wax lyrical on that jacket before we wrap it up yeah yeah no just the the the down regulation so your training is a stimulus there's a stress on the body we recover when we are not in a state of stress so we have to bring ourselves out of that stress state bring ourselves out of that fight or flight state and your breath is the direct sort of link into or remote control of your nervous system so as tim says when you your nasal breathing is going to slow your breathing down so post training when you can like get to take some larger breasts start to slow it down and if you can we want to be extending our exhalations because it's the exhalations that help with that down regulation it helps activate the parasympathetic nervous side of the nervous system so that relaxation response um whether you do that with water in your mouth or not is totally up to you and i don't have you know some people like take their mouths clothes and all this i don't advocate for that in um in actual training circumstances i like to choose to have my mouth closed and then open it if i want to be able to but yeah so the slower extending your exhalations will help with that down regulation to help kick start that recovery process and get you shifted from a state of stress fight or flight into a state of relaxation which is the uh parasympathetic activation glorious now we're still going to keep it short so i reckon there's some stuff to go away and play with there guys so i'm gonna have a play with it start to build that awareness you've got a real kind of simple thing to start thinking about the takeaways that jacko has explained um very eloquently for us so yeah let us know how you get on we're interested to see this is just an evolution of getting a better understanding of how your body is working how to optimize it listen to what your body is telling you these are new tricks that i say new crikey these are tricks that maybe haven't been part of your training up until this point or weren't in your initial kind of training they weren't in hours like years ago jaco said he didn't really become aware this before until four years ago so just go and start thinking about how you can influence some of this stuff and play a long game don't look for like a quick win just invest some time in it and it will improve but it needs to become more habitual rather than like i'm guessing what i'm supposed to do is trying to help my breathing it should become a little bit sort of um your your basic and default response [Music] yeah and if you have any other questions on it at all just reach out and and ask and um if you want to take a bit of a deeper dive into some of it then there's the pro breathwick app to check out where there's a there's a whole sports performance course was a free foundation score so you can have a look at and learn a little bit more and follow along with some of the uh recordings and exercises um within that so i'll put a link into the show notes for that as well glorious all right until next time keep exploring your physical potential with movement strength and play class dismissed [Music] you