Rugby

Breathing Effort in Rugby  

The physical demands of rugby are highly specific to the player’s positional role. Nevertheless all players require high levels of aerobic fitness, lactate tolerance, strength and power. 

Although most activity during a game is sub-maximal, the intermittent sprints, tackling, scrums, rucks and mauls that are integral to the game, are supra-maximal. This pattern of exertion places extreme demands upon your breathing because these activities are anaerobic and generate high levels of lactic acid. Lactic acid stimulates your breathing to increase as part of a compensatory strategy to overt fatigue of other muscles. A unique feature of rugby is the involvement of high intensity upper body activity. This can induce conflicting demands upon your breathing muscles, which as well as bringing about breathing, are also essential in activities that involve the upper body.

Inspiratory Muscle Training:

• Accelerated recovery during repeated sprints by up to 7% 
• Improved inspiratory muscle strength by 31.2% 
• Improved inspiratory muscle endurance by 27.8% 
• Reduced whole body effort during exercise 
• Improved performance within 4-weeks (following tried & tested training regimen

• Breathing Training

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  • Following an intense bout of activity such as a sprint, your breathing is driven to its highest levels, inducing extreme breathlessness. If you are to continue to make an active and effective contribution to the game, your breathing must recover quickly. 

    Your breathing muscles are also essential for the fixing, twisting and flexing movements of your trunk and contribute to stabilising and turning the trunk during a scrum, ruck and maul along with kicking and passing, so fatigue of the breathing muscles can affect more than just your running ability. 

    POWERbreathe training specifically targets the breathing muscles, strengthening them by around 30-50%, significantly improving your performance and helping to eliminate breathing fatigue. And in studies, POWERbreathe training enabled rugby players to recover and sprint maximally again more quickly.

• Warm-up with POWERbreathe for Rugby

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    A POWERbreathe warm-up boosts your inspiratory muscle performance. 

    POWERbreathe inspiratory muscle training can be used as part of a pre-match and pre-substitution warm-up. By warming-up your breathing muscles the sense of increased breathing effort and breathlessness experienced during the first few minutes of a game can be avoided. 

    Research has shown that a standard pre-exercise warm-up routine fails to prepare the inspiratory muscles (breathing muscles) for the rigours of exercise¹, and an inspiratory warm-up was shown to improve performance (in rowers)².  

    ¹ Specific respiratory warm-up improves rowing performance and exertional dyspnoea.

    ² Inspiratory muscle training improves rowing performance.

    More about POWERbreathe for warm-up can be found in our sports Training section.

• Cool-down & recover with POWERbreathe for Rugby

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    A POWERbreathe ‘cool-down’ can help to speed lactate clearance even more effectively than traditional active recovery strategies, helping you recover more rapidly and avoid breathing muscle fatigue.  

    Researchers at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil have found that breathing against a small inspiratory load immediately after exercise reduces lactate by 16%.¹ What’s more, unlike a normal active recovery, which takes around five minutes to speed-up lactate clearance, inspiratory loading reduces lactate as soon as exercise stops. Furthermore, when using the inspiratory load, lactate concentration after just 5 minutes was equivalent to that achieved in 15 minutes during passive recovery. 

    ¹ Blood lactate during recovery from intense exercise: impact of inspiratory loading.

    More about POWERbreathe for cool-down can be found in our sports Training section.

• Interval Training with POWERbreathe for Rugby

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    Integrating POWERbreathe into your interval training will improve your respiratory endurance and hasten recovery. 

    More about POWERbreathe interval training can be found in our sports Training section.

• Resources

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  • How Training the Inspiratory Muscles can Improve Performance for Rugby Players 

    Rugby Union: POWERbreathe Training Protocols 

• Research

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    Inspiratory Muscle Training

    • Entraînement de la force des muscles inspiratoires chez le sujet sportif amateur (Inspiratory muscles strength training in recreational athletes)
    • Inspiratory muscle warm-up and inspiratory muscle training: Separate and combined effects on intermittent running to exhaustion
    • Inspiratory muscle training enhances pulmonary O2 uptake kinetics and high-intensity exercise tolerance in humans
    • The effect of inspiratory muscle training on high-intensity, intermittent running performance to exhaustion.
    • The influence of respiratory muscle training upon intermittent exercise performance.
    • Effects of inspiratory muscle training upon recovery time during high intensity, repetitive sprint activity.
    • The effect of inspiratory muscle training on high-intensity, intermittent running performance to exhaustion. 

    Warm-up and Cool-down

    • Inspiratory resistive loading after all-out exercise improves subsequent performance.
    • Effect of specific inspiratory muscle warm-up on intense intermittent run to exhaustion.
    • Blood lactate during recovery from intense exercise: impact of inspiratory loading.
    • Inspiratory muscle training reduces blood lactate concentration during volitional hyperpnoea.

    Exercise-induced Inspiratory Muscle Fatigue

    • Influence of environmental temperature on exercise-induced inspiratory muscle fatigue.
    • Aerobic fitness effects on exercise-induced low-frequency diaphragm fatigue.
    • Exercise-induced diaphragmatic fatigue in healthy humans.
    • The effect of exercise modality on respiratory muscle performance in triathletes.
    • A comparison of inspiratory muscle fatigue following maximal exercise in moderately trained males and females.
    • Inspiratory muscles experience fatigue faster than the calf muscles during treadmill marching.

    Miscellaneous

    • Development of respiratory muscle contractile fatigue in the course of hyperpnoea.
    • Inspiratory muscle training attenuates the human respiratory muscle metaboreflex.
    • Development and evaluation of a pressure threshold inspiratory muscle trainer for use in the context of sports performance.
    • Specificity and reversibility of inspiratory muscle training.
    • Inspiratory muscle training: a simple cost-effective treatment for inspiratory stridor.

    Review Articles

    • Effects of respiratory muscle training on performance in athletes: a systematic review with meta-analyses
    • Effect of respiratory muscle training on exercise performance in healthy individuals: a systematic review and meta-analysis
    • Inspiratory muscle training and endurance: a central metabolic control perspective.
    • Does training of respiratory muscles affect exercise performance in healthy subjects?
    • Respiratory muscle energetics during exercise in healthy subjects and patients with COPD.
    • Respiratory muscle training in healthy humans: resolving the controversy.