POWERbreathe: What the experts say

Inspiratory muscle training as an ergogenic aid: credible at last?

Professor Alison McConnell is Professor of Applied Physiology at Brunel University's Centre for Sports Medicine & Human Performance. She holds degrees from the Universities of London and Birmingham, is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, and has published extensively on the subject of breathing and exercise.

More than 15 years ago, Professor McConnell recognised that breathing not only presents a limitation to exercise tolerance in patients with respiratory illness, it also limits healthy people, including athletes. The pioneering research undertaken by her group has moved research on breathing and exercise into the mainstream of sport science. Here's Professor McConnell's take on the important role that breathing plays in exercise performance.

'For many years I accepted this received wisdom held by all sport scientists that breathing doesn't limit exercise performance. But it always troubled me, and I began to wonder why phrases like 'I stopped to catch my breath', or 'I'm taking a breather' came into being if they don't indicate that breathing limits us? As a former competitive rower I also knew, all too well, how the suffocating sensation of 'lung burn' can overwhelm all other sensations of effort to the point where you simply have to back off. Then I began to think 'outside the box'; I considered breathing 'mechanically', as process brought about by muscles, not as one that simply supplied oxygen at no cost to the rest of the body. Once I did this, I quickly came to a very simple conclusion - of course breathing presents a limitation to our ability to exercise, and it does so for each and every one of us.

The demands placed upon the breathing muscles to pump air in and out of our lungs can be enormous; so strenuous in fact that we have measured fatigue of the inspiratory muscles after simulated competitions ranging in duration from 3 to 60 minutes (Lomax and McConnell, 2003; Volianitis et al, 2001; Romer et al, 2002). Inspiratory muscle fatigue has both sensory and metabolic repercussions, both of which impair performance.

The good news is that the inspiratory muscles respond to training in the same way as other muscles - if you subject them to an appropriate training stimulus, they will adapt, increasing their strength, power and endurance (Romer & McConnell, 2003). Whilst the underlying physiological mechanisms may differ, the exercise-related benefits of this training appear to be universal, applying to world-class athletes as much as they do frail elderly patients with severe emphysema.'

'For me, the most striking outcome of our research on exercise performance has been the universal reduction in whole body effort sensation that results from just 4 weeks of POWERbreathe training. People simply don't feel that they are exercising as hard. You can look at this two ways, either you can enjoy the experience of lower effort during workouts, or you can push yourself a bit harder and increase your training intensity. Either way, you can't lose'.

'We have conducted very carefully controlled laboratory experiments on highly trained athletes, and published the data in the best scientific journals. The results stand-up to scientific scrutiny - training with POWERbreathe Sports Performance improves exercise performance at all levels of competition; even in Olympians. There is nothing else that an athlete can add to their training that takes so little time and guarantees such an improvement'.

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