Concept2 Forum

Hello - I'm a new owner of Model D. I have a question about the proper breathing techique:

I have a tendency to breath through my mouth while rowing but I found this actually causes a condition called 'Exercise Induced Asthma'. Google it - its true. What happens is the air coming through your mouth being colder and not warmed by the nasal passages causes a constriction of the bronchial tubes and you get short of breath... not immediately, but after about 1/2 hour after rowing.

So I am trying to train myself to breath through my nose and it has helped!

So what is your breathing technique?

Thanks - Marvin

Pilates teaches to breathe in and out through the nose not the mouth. My Pilates teacher stresses this over and over each class. I used to get the asthmatic condition after a heavy workout because I tended to breathe through the mouth. I'd literally roll off the erg after a 2K and lay down gasping for air and go around in coughing fits for hours afterwards. Now

I'll erg most workouts focusing on breathing through the nose. I inhale on the pull portion of the stroke and exhale on the recovery. When I do intervals, I will exhale thorugh the mouth as I think I'm getting more air out of my lungs...at least it sounds like it. The last 2K race I did 3 weeks ago, I finished breathing heavily but not asthmatic.

I have asthma, but not too severe. I never used to be able to exercise very hard for very long because I would be so out of breath.

My technique is to focus on exhaling - exhale to push the air out of my lungs and let them fill on their own. I read about doing this somewhere, as a way that asthmatics can breathe more effectively during exercise. I believe that this has helped.

Oh. I think I usually breath through my mouth.

bw

There are a couple threads on breathing on these forums. Basically, I just let my body control how it breathes. One of the other people on these forums described it as: Do gazelles think about how they breathe when they run from lions (something like that). I do all my breathing through my mouth, and I'm sure that is bad because my mouth is bone dry by about 1000m to go in a 2k.

jbell wrote:There are a couple threads on breathing on these forums. Basically, I just let my body control how it breathes. One of the other people on these forums described it as: Do gazelles think about how they breathe when they run from lions (something like that). I do all my breathing through my mouth, and I'm sure that is bad because my mouth is bone dry by about 1000m to go in a 2k.

If the lion keeps up the chase and gazelle lives long enough for their mouth to go dry they probably do...

The tip on making sure to perform a very good exhale si quite good, after all, it's the waste that we don't want to build up, there's more than enough O2 in the air we breathe, even on a small breath, but letting the CO2 remain deep in the lungs does us no good at all, jsut reduces the useful capacity of the lungs.

If you can workout hard with nose breathing, I'm pretty impressed. Maybe a lot of other people can, but I can't.

As Paul said, increased breathing during exercise has less to do with needing more oxygen and much more to do with getting rid of CO2. Get rid of the CO2 and blood pH improves (becomes less acidotic), your cells are happier, and you can keep going longer and/or harder. You will need to deliver more O2 to the muscles to make sure you undergo aerobic and not anaerboic metabolism, but that will laregly be taken care of by increasing cardiac output, not breathing.

In other words, most of the time our blood is 99-100% saturated with oxygen, and I'm willing to bet if you put an oximeter on a rower who is working hard, it probably hasn't changed much (have you ever seen a rower turn blue?), but if you checked a blood gas, the CO2 and pH would be out of whack.

The amount of CO2 a person gets rid of is directly proportional to the volume of each breath times the breathing rate (the minute ventilation). The amount of air you can exhale in a second is proportional to the pressure you create with your rib cage/diaphragm and the resistance of the airways. Resistance is related to radius to the 4th power, so if you narrow an airway in half, the resistance increases 16-fold. Once you try to move a lot of air through a small tube, you also get turbulent flow, instead of laminar, and that makes things even worse.

In short, for me, at the rate I am working (creating CO2), it is impossible to move enough air every minute through the small nasal passages instead of a large open mouth.

I would agree on doing whatever works for your physiology. Have you talked to your doctor about using an inhaler before exercise (or at least having one around in case of an emergency)? It may be possible that you will reach a point where you can no longer breathe exclusively through your nose.

tbartman wrote:If you can workout hard with nose breathing, I'm pretty impressed. Maybe a lot of other people can, but I can't.

I don't know of anyone who can purely nose breathe at anything other than very moderate work levels (perhaps the "conversation level" that is often discussed, and by definition is NOT "hard work".). I've got quite a large nose and it's insufficient to provide adequate flow beyond a fast walk.

Heck, there is a huge market for "Breathe Right" nasal dialators apparently. I've never tried them, but it might well make a big difference, especially considering genetic gifts.

When undergoing VO2Max testing they actually plugged my nose and made me breathe exclusively through my mouth (and associated tubing). I do remember thinking that there was a bit of labor involved, which was likely due to smaller external tubing than my internal tubing. Oh yeah, big mouth too. (At least my ears are normal, otherwise I may have been nicknamed Jumbo.) That brings up an interesting question, do elephants breathe through their mouths when stampeding?

"Hard Work" is rather subjective, but your explanation of supply and demand brings it into perspective quite nicely. Some won't like to hear this, but if you can supply your breathing needs through your nose, you simply are not working very hard. When you are working hard, thoughts will be geard more toward if it might be possible to convert the ear canals to useful airways.

hello, recently i went to the doctor and i was diagnosticated with adenoids in the left nostril and deviant partition in the right. I had always breathed by the nose while rowing and always feel the lack of oxygen when i do the 2k. Would breathing throuegh the mouth will help me improving my times or just the same or worst.

I will apreciate an answer please. Thanks

plus dont forget that you only breathe through one nostril at a time (the nasal cycle; the nostril you're breathing through switches every few hours)

MotleyCrew wrote:plus dont forget that you only breathe through one nostril at a time (the nasal cycle; the nostril you're breathing through switches every few hours)

Really? I'd never heard that.

bw1099 wrote:

MotleyCrew wrote:plus dont forget that you only breathe through one nostril at a time (the nasal cycle; the nostril you're breathing through switches every few hours)

Really? I'd never heard that.

Me neither. And I've walked outside in -40°F temps and had BOTH nostrils freeze shut on a single inhalation, so I'm skeptical.