Breathing and Running and You

It’s Mile 6 of your Half Marathon and at this point your race has truly started. You’ve been training for 3 months for this one race. Your goal time is set, burned, into your mind so much so that you’ve considered tattooing it to your wrist next to your Garmin. You look down at your watch and your heart rate is starting to get out of hand, but you’re not letting it worry you. You press on. “It’s race day. Of course it’s going to be higher than usual.” Mile 9 and you’re starting to pick up the pace just a little, but your heart rate has been climbing away from you for the past 3 miles and now you’re getting in your head. “Uh oh. What do I do?” 

Have you been in this scenario before? I’d be lying to you if I said that I’ve never had that exact scenario happen to me. This was me before I learned about what proper breathing can do for me during my training as well as my racing. There, of course, are many other factors that go into a good day on the course, but in this article, I’m going to talk about one that you can always take with you; breathing. Proper breathing while exercising can help in a variety of ways; calmer mind, warmer body, increased stability and efficiency, as well as guiding you on where your physiological training zones lie. So let’s get to it. 

Breathing helps keep a cooler body and a warmer mind. When I talk about breathing, I’m talking about nasal breathing and diaphragmatic breathing, although they both kind of go along with each other. Nasal breathing helps to bring the body out of what’s called a “sympathetic state” which is also known as your “fight or flight”. We don’t want to live here when we’re racing longer distances or events that will take an hour or longer. Bodies that are in the sympathetic state are more tense and less efficient. Nasal breathing helps to release Nitric Oxide which for the millennial powerlifters and bodybuilders out there may recognize the word in some older pre-workouts that usually gave you the tingles. Nitric Oxide is a vasodilator (fancy word for making your blood vessels bigger). When blood vessels are bigger, more blood gets to their target tissues, specifically muscles and lungs, meaning increased amount of blood that goes to the muscles has more oxygen bound to it. This is a very effective formula for increasing your body’s efficiency during aerobic activity like running, biking, rowing, and walking.

Nasal breathing helps the body use the diaphragm to draw the breath in as opposed to other muscles like scalenes, upper traps, the Sternocleidomastoid. Utilizing these other accessory muscles usually leads to a feeling of tightness in the shoulders and neck which detracts from focus during training and leads to excess caloric need = less efficient. Another very useful part of diaphragmatic breathing is stability. When your body feels more stable, it will turn off or turn down the muscles that aren’t needed. This helps free up some range of motion which gives you more room to be able to propulse yourself using your hips for example. 

Understanding when you’re going in and out of your physiological training zones can help you train more efficiently. The fancy watches that we wear are getting better and better at accurately measuring heart rate data, but they still aren’t great. We understand that training in Primarily zone 2 is the best for developing the holy aerobic base and increasing lactate clearance. A good way of measuring when you’re out of zone 2 is thinking about it in gears. Let's say there are 3 gears; 1st is Zone 1 and 2 which should be accomplished by only breathing nasally to where it’s teetering on the edge of uncomfortable. 2nd is Zone 3 and low 4 where a runner can manage pace and effort by breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. 5th gear is high zone 4 and zone 5. Here you’re breathing however you can to maintain these difficult paces. So; 1st gear is the chill conversational pace, 2nd gear is the “push” gear and 3rd is “do whatever I need to do to get the thing done.” Now, back to the race. 

You’re at mile 9, and you remember the nasal breathing that the one chiropractor talked about in an article. In through the nose and out through the mouth. A feeling of Zen comes over you. After a few deep breaths, you begin to reel in your heart rate, you’re gaining control. Mile 11 is coming into view and you're more than ready to start picking up the pace. 

References:

Beard, B. (2021, February 18). Solo Cast - Breathing and Running . YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qihbyFbvwf0&list=PL4qucIlemahuUKUYhDBzI95WdorblzaZv&index=19 

Keller, L. (2018, April 5). Understanding the different breathing options — Dr. Lauren Keller, chiropractor. Dr. Lauren Keller, Chiropractor. https://drlaurenkeller.com/blog/understanding-the-different-breathing-options

Watso, J. C., Cuba, J. N., Boutwell, S. L., Moss, J. E., Bowerfind, A. K., Fernandez, I. M., Cassette, J. M., May, A. M., & Kirk, K. F. (2023). Acute nasal breathing lowers diastolic blood pressure and increases parasympathetic contributions to heart rate variability in young adults. American journal of physiology. Regulatory, integrative and comparative physiology, 325(6), R797–R808. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpregu.00148.2023

Zaccaro A, Piarulli A, Laurino M, Garbella E, Menicucci D, Neri B, Gemignani A. How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing. Front Hum Neurosci. 2018 Sep 7;12:353. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353. PMID: 30245619; PMCID: PMC6137615.