Breathing Strategies For Elite Triathletes
Do you want to improve your triathlon performance through your breathing?
Believe it or not, you can be an elite triathlete, and still have poor breathing habits. Athletes have an incredible way of ‘pushing through’ despite breathing challenges. The impact of optimising breathing habits though is well worth the exploration.
What baffles me, is if cyclists have shaved their legs for such incremental gains, why have the 20,000 (ish) breaths taken per day been overlooked?
I’ll answer that one for you…
Our entire society has had a lack of optimal breathing habit education.
The human breather before the triathlete
If you’re here looking for breathing strategies for solely during a triathlon, then this is exactly what you need to know.
In order to improve your breathing during swimming, cycling or running, you need to improve your breathing habits when you are merely being a human.
That means for example when you are walking to your car, walking up the stairs, sitting down, or sleeping.
How you breathe all day, and all night, is what is going to impact your peak performance breathing during a triathlon.
This seems to be the best kept secret in the sporting world, which is strange really, as so many other areas of optimal health and recovery for sports people are focused on in detail.
Typical poor breathing habits for triathletes
There are 3 key issues with breathing habits of triathletes:
Over-breathing
Restriction
Perception
Over-breathing
It is not uncommon for triathletes, along with the rest of the population, to be ‘over-breathers’. An over-breather is someone who breathes too much (too big, too fast, too loud) for the scenario.
Let’s start with the obvious, mouth breathing. Whilst we do need to ‘breathe more’ during exercise, how we do it matters. Many triathletes will switch to mouth breathing during exercise, trying to get more oxygen.
The point that is missed here though is that the oxygen they are getting is not necessarily being delivered optimally to their muscles and other cells.
There can be reduced oxygen delivery to muscles due to the excessive ‘dumping’ of carbon dioxide, not to mention missing out on the incredible benefits of nitric oxide accessed via nose breathing.
“Ah-ha”, you might think, “Just breathe through your nose.”
And you’d be right. Nose breathing for triathletes is key, but this is where the challenge comes. Not everyone feels they can do this. Certainly not straight away. It can be hugely frustrating when your triathlon performance is the equivalent of having your fitness at 5k, but your nose is still on the couch.
Restriction
Firstly, unrecognised restriction can cause inefficiencies in how the breath is drawn into the lungs, meaning we use more energy to get the oxygen in the first place. Secondly, there can be restriction of the airway. This can be permanent or temporary. Understanding what you can and can’t change when it comes to restriction is a game changer.
If efficient oxygen uptake is what you are after, unintentional restriction is definitely not the way forward.
Perception
Breathing perception for anyone, including triathletes, can be an absolute mine field. The reality is that our breathing education has often been delivered stealthily. Cartoons, films, colleagues, friends, trainers, parents and certain yoga teachers, all showing us breathing that we have copied. The issue here though is that due to a lack of optimal breathing education, most of the sources are unhelpful reference points. The likelihood is, you wouldn’t even know what I mean, until I show you.
We can also have a disconnect between what we can see and what we can feel. Unless you recognise this, it may mean you know what you should be doing, but still cannot manage to improve it.
Perception can be as deep as what the simple word ‘breath’ means to you and therefore how your body naturally responds. For those struggling with pre-performance anxiety and breathlessness, going beyond the simple physical approach is key.
Retraining breathing habits for triathletes
In order to retrain your breathing habits to improve your triathlon performance, we need to go right back to basics as a human being.
If you want help with pre-race nerves, breathlessness or fatigue during your triathlon, improving your personal best or improving endurance and recovery, reach out. You don’t know what you don’t know.
I’m not a triathlete.
You’re not a breathing retrainer.
Together, however we can make incredible changes, even some you might not expect.
or reach out via email to jane@canidoitmyself.com for queries and in person appointments. I am based in Bicester, Oxfordshire and happily work in person too.
My name is Jane Tarrant.
I am a leading educator on healthy breathing habits & breathing retraining.
I work with a wide range of clients, from asthmatic retirees to high performing athletes, from stressed CEOs to lawyers experiencing panic attacks and burnout, from breathless perimenopausal women to families who want to positively benefit the development of their child’s airway through how they breathe. The future triathletes of this world, some might say.