Breathing and sport: less quickly out of breath, faster recovery

Why you get out of breath so quickly

That rushed, gasping feeling during exercise feels like a lack of oxygen, but it almost never is. In healthy athletes, the oxygen level in your blood stays almost normal during exertion, even when you are panting. The urge to breathe harder comes from something else: carbon dioxide. As soon as the carbon dioxide level in your blood rises, your brain sounds the alarm and you want to breathe. The more sensitive you are to that stimulus, the sooner you feel short of breath, long before your muscles are really at their limit.

Many people also breathe too fast and too high all day, from the chest instead of the belly. Take that pattern into your training and you effectively start with a handicap: you breathe yourself up before the effort even calls for it. Getting out of breath is then not a fitness problem, but a breathing problem. And the good news about a breathing problem is that you can train it, just like your legs.

Your out-breath is the dial you can turn

The in-breath happens by itself; you do not need to do anything for it. The gain lies in the out-breath. Your heart slows down during every out-breath; that is a normal, well-measured reflex. By lengthening your out-breath you naturally arrive at a slow breathing pace, and that slow pace is what the research is most consistent about: at around six breaths a minute your heart rate drops and your heart rhythm becomes calmer. So the long out-breath is mainly a handy route to that pace, not a separate switch that flips your nervous system.

On easy long runs you can practise this directly by linking your breath to your steps and breathing through your nose. Nasal breathing slows you down: you measurably breathe slower and less. To be fair: for the first few weeks it feels too slow and you will have to give up some pace. That is part of it. And do not expect faster times from it. In research, nasal breathing does not improve performance, and at high intensity it is even limiting. See it not as a performance trick, but as a way to keep your easy sessions truly easy. That is exactly where many runners go wrong: too hard on the easy days. For intervals and race pace, your mouth can simply join in again.

Recovery: where the real gain is

Anyone can train harder. Recovering is the art, because that is where your body gets stronger. Growth does not happen during the effort but after it, and only if your nervous system switches back from action to recovery in time. If your system stays stuck in top gear after training, your heart rate stays high, your digestion is slow to start and recovery begins later than necessary.

With your breathing, that switch is in your own hands. Five minutes of calm breathing with a long out-breath right after your training lets your heart rate drop faster and starts recovery sooner. If you train in the evening, this is doubly worthwhile: a body that is still switched on is the classic reason athletes sleep badly after an evening session. How breathing and sleep are further connected is explained in sleep better with breathing.

Nerves before the start

Then there is that other moment every athlete knows: just before the race, when your heart rate is already climbing while you have not done anything yet. A little tension sharpens you; too much eats energy you will need later. Here too, your breathing is the tool. A few rounds of calm, even breathing bring your heart rate back without taking away your edge. The best-known technique for this is box breathing, four equal counts in, hold, out and hold, which comes from the world of soldiers and emergency workers for good reason: getting calm without getting drowsy.

Training in the practice room

Want to get started today? The online practice room has a complete Sport theme ready for you: from Pre-sport Activation and CO2 Tolerance Training to Recovery Breathing and Race Reset. Seven exercises covering the whole cycle of preparing, performing and recovering, each with guidance. Free to use, nothing to download. Good to know: the practice room is in Dutch for now, like Ada, and will be in English soon.

And if the foundation is not there yet, start there: if you breathe high all day, you take that pattern into your training. With practising belly breathing you lay the foundation that everything above builds on.

From trick to training

Breathing out calmly once after a training is pleasant. Real change comes, as with all your other training, from repetition. If you take your breathing seriously for a few weeks, a few minutes a day is enough, you notice it first on the easy runs, then in recovery, and eventually in the night of sleep afterwards. You do not need to free up an extra hour of training. You breathe all day anyway; the only thing that changes is how.