Photo by judhi.
Today I tried out a technique I learnt from Ravi Raman of sethigherstandards.com, applied to running: breathing through your nose.
Sounds weird, right? After all, when running our natural tendency is to breathe through the mouth — whether in through the nose and out through the mouth, as in swimming, or both in and out through the mouth. After all, the mouth is bigger than the nose, and should thus result in a greater supply of oxygen to the lungs… right?
Not according to Raman. Here’s what he has to say about it:
Breathing through your nose allows a smaller and more highly directed stream of air to flow deep into the lungs. As a result, according to Dr. Konstantine Buteyko (creator of the The Buteyko Breathing Technique), the carbon dioxide levels of your blood are able to stay at a more moderate and even level, and the oxygen is able to be efficiently absorbed into the bloodstream.
So I gave it a shot today, during a short, comfortable warmup run before a weight-training workout: ten minutes on the treadmill at 13.0 km/h, breathing exclusively through my nose.
It was rather uncomfortable! I actually found myself having to consciously keep my mouth shut in the later stages of the run, clamping on my lips in an effort to keep them closed.
But surprisingly enough I DID find a real improvement in overall energy levels during the run, and a measurably improved recovery time after. I think my heart rate returned to normal within about a minute, perhaps a minute and a half! That’s plenty impressive, at least for me.
Ten minutes at 13.0, of course, really isn’t very fast or far at all. I’ll try a few longer/faster runs using the same technique, and keep you guys posted.
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