One of the first things I tell my athletes is that their breathing is the most important thing. You can live days without food and water but only minutes without air. Your body will protect your ability to breathe beyond anything else. Learning how to breathe more efficiently as well as learning some specific breathing strategies can immensely improve your performance.
The effect that your breathing has on the function of the human body cannot be overstated. There are countless benefits to improving how well you breathe. Breathwork is a big piece of a lot of physical, spiritual, and emotional practices, some of which date back thousands of years. I’ve seen the effects that different breathing patterns and strategies (or lack thereof) have on an athlete’s performance and always try to teach a better way.
As I think about it, I am surprised at how much breathing gets overlooked as a component of physical performance. The biggest thing I see is athletes “chest breathing” instead of “belly breathing.” As an athlete, especially strength athletes, you want to be able to drop your breath from your chest down into your belly, “belly-breathing.” For starters, if your air is in your belly you are going to have a more rigid mid-section. This is what we want when lifting. The “core” is what transfers the force your legs and hips generated up to whatever load you are supporting above your mid-section, so you want to be able to make that very rigid when needed. This is what bracing is or at least what we try to do when bracing. The rigid mid-section keeps the back happy and healthy as it prevents movement of the spine while loaded. A couple other very important things that happen with chest breathing is that firstly it’s a more shallow breath, meaning the amount of air the person gets is less, and secondly chest breathing is going to cue your nervous system to shifts towards survival mode, which is not the ideal performance mode. There is a lot more going on with the bracing and breathing but that’s just a quick high-level view of it. I want to get into some more of the tactical things I use with my athletes that you can away today and start implementing.
What I see a lot of athletes do is a one-two punch of chest breathing and not putting much intent behind the breath. Both of which limit the amount of air the athlete gets so we want to improve these things. The first step is to drop the breath down into your belly. This will take a little time and practice to do so do not get frustrated if you aren’t able to get it on first try. I recommend taking time throughout your day to get 20-30 deep belly breaths. Put your hands on your side and collect ten breaths, feel your stomach and hands move out with each breath. There are countless videos of different breathing drills you can do so I will not go too deep into the specifics here if you start practicing it will start to carry over. That practice will start to address the first part, the belly breathing, the second part of what I see often is that athletes do not put enough intent behind each of their breaths. It is quiet when they take a breath, I want to be able to hear an audible strong breath. That ensures that the athlete is getting the air they need to perform. So, when you breathe in, especially in a moving event, make your breath heard and force air into your lungs.
One last thing to touch on before wrapping up. This is extremely specific to Strongman athletes. When you are performing a moving event or endurance event, I recommend that you “sip air.” That means that you are breathing in and out maybe 50% of your lung capacity. You want to maintain a very rigid brace so letting all your air out would be detrimental, so taking small harsh breaths will help maintain that strong mid-section while still getting fresh air.
This post is a little bit longer, but I have barely touched on some very important concepts here. I would like to go deeper into the topic of breathing overtime but today I wanted to hit a quick overview of some of the more common things I see with it. As you start to incorporate some of these tips watch and see how much better you recover between sets and events. I hope something here helps you out. Keep training hard.
