{"id":17175,"date":"2012-07-09T11:12:08","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T15:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/?p=17175"},"modified":"2020-02-27T16:40:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T21:40:53","slug":"breathing-when-running","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/breathing-when-running\/","title":{"rendered":"How Should You Breathe When You Run? A Remarkably Effective Approach to Easier Breathing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The mental image is of a hurricane: immensely powerful winds moving at tremendously high speeds, but at the center of it all — in the eye — peace and stillness.<\/p>\n

It’s an appealing ideal for how you should run — the winds, of course, being your limbs; the eye, your lungs and heart.<\/p>\n

And it’s for real. Since I’ve started running this way, breathing this way, I’ve gotten my share of funny looks from the people out for a stroll in the opposite direction whom I pass. I’m moving along at a decent pace — okay, maybe more like a breeze than a hurricane — but the visible and audible signs of stress are none.<\/p>\n

No huffing and puffing, no familiar “runner’s mask,” where the mouth hangs slightly open to help the nose take in air. Instead, a calm, closed-mouth smile and an unlabored “Hi there.”<\/p>\n

Whereas I used to take a full 30 breaths per minute (in for three steps, out for three steps, at 180 steps per minute<\/a>), I’ve slashed that number in half, often dipping down to only 12 breaths each minute (five seconds per) on flat or downhill stretches. And with these longer, deeper breaths comes a drastically slower heart rate — hovering around 125, when at a similar pace in the past, the slightest hill, headwind, or even an upbeat song on the iPod<\/a> would push me over my target rate of 140.<\/p>\n

Changing my breathing has changed how I run. The biggest key: training myself to breathe entirely through my nose, instead of my mouth.<\/p>\n

In search of the Zone<\/h3>\n

I became interested in breathing technique when I read Scott Jurek’s book, Eat & Run<\/a><\/em>. There, he writes just enough about breathing through your nose and breathing abdominally to pique one’s interest, and notes that he learned to breathe this way from a relatively obscure book called Body, Mind, and Sport<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As soon as I was done with Eat & Run<\/em>, I ordered my copy of Body, Mind, and Sport<\/em><\/a>. (Paperback, since no ebook exists.)<\/p>\n

It’s a unique and interesting book. The explicit goal of author John Douillard’s methods is to maximize the amount of time during each workout that you spend in “the Zone”– that often talked-about, Zen-like state where everything just flows, where athletes perform at the very top of their game, without conscious effort or exertion.<\/p>\n

And although that distinguishes the book from so many others whose goal is simply improved performance, Douillard believes that finding the Zone in training eventually begets optimal performance in competition.<\/p>\n

Note: Before you go and buy Body, Mind, and Sport<\/em>, make sure it’s for you. The first two-thirds of the book are about determining which of three Ayurvedic types you are, then using that information to tweak everything from your nutrition to what time of day to exercise, to which sports to do in which season. It’s 150 pages before you get to the breathing part.<\/p>\n

What other running coaches say about breathing<\/h3>\n

For as integral to running (and almost all sports) as breathing is, the topic is oddly ignored among runners. Ask a runner, even a good one, how he or she breathes, and you’ll likely get a shrug, or maybe, “I don’t really think about it; I just do what comes naturally.”<\/p>\n

For fun, I checked out some of the running books on my shelf to see what they said about breathing — which, if anything, must have been so briefly mentioned that I had forgotten it. Here’s what I found:<\/p>\n