In the quick guide to breathing ebook and first three supporting articles you learned the importance of mobilising your rib cage, putting your focus on the deliberate practice of both muscular activation and the breathing process itself, and you discovered just how important your brain is in the seemingly simple act of breathing.
In this article you are going to find out a bit more about some of the chemistry involved in breathing, why it’s important for your breathing in general, but specifically how it can help you improve your running.
You may already know that when you breathe in you inhale oxygen (O2) and when you breathe out you exhale carbon dioxide (CO2). But how does this relate to efficient and functional breathing?
Well, the basic process is that when you inhale oxygen it eventually ends up in the small air sacs deep in the lungs called alveoli. The alveoli actually share a membrane with your capillaries, allowing the oxygen to diffuse across into the blood. From there it is pumped around the body to all of the tissues where it is used to help each cell survive and thrive. In terms of your running, the more oxygen that can be supplied to your working muscles and other tissues, the easier your running will be; also faster and longer. But that’s not the whole story as you’ll discover very soon, but first let’s briefly look at the exhalation process.
As the blood comes back around to the alveoli from being pumped around your body by your heart, it contains carbon dioxide that has been generated by your cells as part of their normal function of metabolism and put out into your blood. As the blood passes through those capillaries next to the alveoli, the carbon dioxide is diffused back across from the blood to the lungs. You then breathe it out as you exhale.
Energy Systems
When you run, irrespective of the intensity that you are running at, you are utilising three primary energy systems:
- Your aerobic system.
- Your lactate system, also known as your anaerobic system.
- Your alactic system, sometimes known as your phosphocreatine system.
Your aerobic system uses oxygen and both glucose and fat to help your body’s muscles and other tissues keep you running. It becomes the dominant energy system when you are on your easy runs and the intensity is below your lactate threshold 1 level. The other two systems are still active, but much less so.
As your intensity increases, you begin to transition across your energy systems and your lactate system becomes more active. This system still uses glucose as fuel, but doesn’t use oxygen and doesn’t really use fat (it can but it’s so minor that common teaching is that it doesn’t). This transition zone that includes some upper aerobic system activity and some lactate system activity is where you are usually operating in when you are running a hard 5k and 10k, and in certain places during longer distances as the intensity increases at times. The skill with this transition zone, between lactate threshold 1 and lactate threshold 2 is balancing your effort so that you almost ‘surf the wave’ by keeping enough oxygen and fuel being supplied to your working muscles and the waste products of the cells from energy creation (lactate, CO2 etc) being removed and cleared (or reused in the case of lactate), with pushing hard enough to get the performance you want. This is a zone I like to refer to as the speed endurance zone.
The harder you push, the closer you get to lactate threshold 2 and the less oxygen is available for your working muscles. The waste products from the cells also can’t be cleared efficiently because your blood cannot move around your body fast enough. This basically puts you on a timer before your cells are unable to function as needed. For well trained runners, this timer is around 3 to 5 minutes. For the rest of us it can be a lot less.
For completeness, the energy system that is dominant when you are at your highest level of intensity (think of a 10 second all out, max intensity sprint) is your alactic system. This doesn’t need oxygen, glucose or fat, instead relying on an internal energy source. However, this internal energy source is like a flashbang in that it burns very brightly, but only for a few seconds. Typically, your alactic system can only function well for between 5 to 10 seconds depending on how well trained you are. If you are ever at a running track and watch sprinters training high intensity short sprints, you’ll notice that they take very long recoveries (sometimes 5+ minutes) between each rep. This is to allow that alactic system to fully recharge, otherwise the sprint will be done in the lactate system or even in the threshold or aerobic systems if the recovery is very short. While you will use your alactic system in your normal running (think of finish line sprints, overtaking etc), and you do need to train it, you won’t need to put as much emphasis on it as the other two systems.
So how does all of this relate to breathing? Let’s find out…
Running, O2 and CO2
As you’ve just learned, the higher the intensity of your running, the less efficient your system becomes at both getting oxygen to your body’s cells, and at removing the waste products such as carbon dioxide from your cells. In both cases, this will force you to slow down at the very least.
But for many runners this leads to panic and breathing difficulties. As you discovered in article 3, carbon dioxide is the chemical trigger for you to take a breath in. Because carbon dioxide builds up as your intensity increases, the trigger to breathe can get very strong very quickly. This can cause that feeling of panic and you start to gasp. Unfortunately, this more often than not will result in either hyperventilation or paradoxical breathing (where your breathing muscles are doing the opposite of what they should be). Neither situation is good and can result in your predictive brain learning that running hard is unsafe.
Now, you may think that taking in larger breaths, particularly through your mouth, will lead to more oxygen getting into your blood and out to your cells. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work like that. We’ll look at this more in the next article which is on nose breathing, but for now you just need to know that due to things like respiratory rate, dead space and a simple formula, more air and quicker breaths don’t equal more oxygen. For that, you need to learn to breathe more efficiently to get more oxygen exchanged, and to not react when you get those triggers to breathe in the way that you are currently doing.
One of the first steps of doing that is to increase your tolerance, or reduce your sensitivity, to the build up of carbon dioxide as the intensity of your running increases. In turn, this reduces the panic response, and while you may still have to slow down a bit, it is more controlled and you’ll be able to hold a higher intensity for longer. This is the hypercapnia training that I mentioned in article 3, and is all about training your system to tolerate lower levels of oxygen (hypoxia) and higher levels of carbon dioxide. To begin with this, let’s start with a simple exercise (this is the one from the ebook):
- Take a slow breath in through your nose for a 4-count.
- Exhale slowly for a 4-count and hold for a 4-count.
- You may start to feel a small amount of air hunger near the end of the breath hold, but don’t worry if not.
- Progress to holding that out-breath for a count of 5 then 6 then 7 to start to experience the feeling of air hunger. You may find it induces panic, in which case just dial it back.
There are many ways of progressing this exercise, and also several variations that I often use with my clients. The first one I start with is to do rounds of these breath holds like this:
- Take a normal breath in through your nose and then a normal breath out through your nose and hold your nose.
- Count to 5 and then take a normal breath in through your nose, trying not to gasp the air in, and then out through your nose.
- Take another normal breath in through your nose and then a normal breath out through your nose and hold your nose.
- Again, count to 5 and then take a normal breath in through your nose, trying not to gasp the air in, and then out through your nose.
- Repeat this for a total of 5 breath holds.
- Continue breathing through your nose for another 30 seconds to 1 minute depending on how much recovery you feel you need.
- Complete three sets of the above.
- Aim to do this several times a day for the next week until it becomes easy to do. Then reduce the two breaths between breath holds to just one breath.
With continued practice of all the exercises you’ve learned on the ebook and articles, you will be well on your way to reaping the rewards of more efficient and functional breathing.
In the next article you’ll learn about nose breathing and why it’s important in your life in general, but also why it’s vital to start building it into some of your running.
