Fitness
To get fit fast or faster you need to improve your breathing. Stronger breathing muscles make exercise feel easier.
Breathe Your Way To Faster Fitness
Breathlessness is a common feature of exercise and although aerobic activity does provide training benefits to your breathing muscles, it’s not sufficient to elicit their full potential.
Your breathing muscles never really get trained enough to cope with the ‘heavy breathing’ that results from high-intensity exercise, and for this reason, it will always present an uncomfortable challenge during exercise and fitness training.
When you experience high-intensity fitness training that is above your lactate threshold, your breathing moves out of its comfort zone and increases steeply. And when your breathing muscles are weakened or fatigued, your breathing feels harder still. A useful analogy is to think about how much heavier a barbell feels on the 12th repetition than it did on the first.
IMT to Improve Fitness and Performance
Inspiratory muscle training with POWERbreathe IMT has been scientifically proven to strengthen your breathing muscles to help them cope with the demands of breathing at this high intensity. It is often dubbed, “dumbbells for your diaphragm”, because your main breathing muscle which it trains to become stronger, is your diaphragm.
Research and trials suggest that during heavy exercise, blood flow (and hence oxygen delivery) to your exercising muscles is restricted because your breathing muscles fatigue, impairing performance. This process is called a metaboreflex and is a ‘survival’ instinct. Basically, your body is choosing the need to breathe over the need to ‘perform’. But, with a well-trained and strong diaphragm, greater blood flow to your limbs can be maintained and performance improved.
Expiratory muscle fatigue also impairs exercise performance, especially during heavy, whole-body exercise when you’re breathing heavily and panting. Just as you would use weights to improve limb strength, using a POWERbreathe Expiratory Muscle Training (EMT) device with its variable resistance will improve your expiratory muscle strength and stamina, thereby improving your exercise performance.
How To Get Fit Fast
POWERbreathe IMT and EMT subject your breathing muscles to an appropriate training resistance to increase breathing strength, power and stamina. Research into inspiratory muscle training and exercise performance revealed the universal reduction in whole body effort sensation. This means that after 4-weeks of POWERbreathe IMT, people didn’t feel they were exercising as hard and were therefore able to push themselves that bit further, increasing their training intensity and getting fitter faster.
Using POWERbreathe IMT will help you warm-up more effectively, as well as, cool-down and recover more quickly. Research from Brazil found that breathing against a small inspiratory load straight after exercise reduces lactate by 16%. In fact, just 5-mins after using an inspiratory load, lactate concentration was equivalent to 15-mins passive recovery.
Select An Activity
Rowing
Breathing During Rowing As a rower, your breathing muscles are not only used for breathing but also for maintaining your posture and for transmitting force during the ‘drive’ phase. This is because your breathing muscles, including your diaphragm, engage in helping to strengthen your trunk and protect your spine. Both breathing and postural control is […]
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Swim, Bike, Run
Breathing Effort In Swimming Competitive swimming is one of the ultimate challenges for breathing, as you have to inhale as much as possible in the shortest time possible, so that you can return your body to the optimal position for generating propulsive force. This creates an enormous strain on your inspiratory muscles and it is […]
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Football
Breathing Effort In Football On average football players are likely to cover around 6.2 – 7.5 miles during the course of a match, at an average intensity of 75-80% of your maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max.). Throughout the 90 minutes of the game you’ll be cruising for 30-90 seconds and sprinting for 3-5 seconds. Although […]
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Altitude
Breathing Effort At High Altitude At high altitude, the partial pressure is less than at sea-level, meaning oxygen molecules are further away from each other. The higher you go, the more difficult breathing at high altitude becomes. In order to compensate, your lungs work much harder. At sea level, exercise is limited only by the […]
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Wheelchair Sports
Breathing in Wheelchair Sports As a wheelchair user you may experience difficulties with your respiratory system because if your abdominal and chest muscles, including your diaphragm, are affected by injury you’ll find it more difficult to breathe. Your neurological level of injury will determine to what extent your breathing poses to be a problem. If […]
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Rugby
Breathing Effort In Rugby The physical demands of rugby are highly specific to each player’s positional role. Nevertheless, all players require high levels of aerobic fitness, lactate tolerance, strength and power. Although most activity in rugby is sub-maximal, the intermittent sprints, tackling, scrums, rucks and mauls are supra-maximal, taking you above 100% of your maximum […]
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Racket Sports
During the intense bouts of running that characterise tennis, badminton and squash, such as sprinting to reach a ball, breathing is driven to its highest levels, inducing extreme breathlessness. Being debilitated by your breathing is very frustrating and can hinder your performance. You cannot afford for your breathing to hold you back as it provides […]
Read MoreRelevant Articles
Breathing Exercises for Athletes Using POWERbreathe IMT & EMT
Improving breathing strength and stamina can really make a difference in athletic performance, especially in sports like those seen at the Olympics. And using drug-free POWERbreathe Inspiratory Muscle Training (IMT) and Expiratory Muscle Training (EMT) devices helps athletes get the most from their respiratory muscles. This is because breathing muscle training also reduces breathing fatigue, […]
Why Train Your Breathing: The Key to Unlocking Athletic Performance
Re-worked from the original article, written by Duncan Kerr, 2017 Breathing. It’s automatic, fundamental, and often overlooked. But why should we train our breathing? In the realm of sports performance, where every muscle group is meticulously trained, the respiratory system is frequently neglected. Yet, it holds the key to unlocking your full athletic potential. The […]
POWERbreathe IMT – How To Use The Classic And Plus
When training with your POWERbreathe Inspiratory Muscle Training (IMT) Classic or Plus device, you will notice that you have to work harder to breathe in. This is the effect of resistance training acting on the muscles you use to inhale – primarily the diaphragm and rib cage muscles. However, when breathing out, there is no […]
Inspiratory muscle training as an ergogenic aid: credible at last?
POWERbreathe is a useful device to stimulate sports performance and increase pulmonary function in various sporting fields
5 weeks of POWERbreathe K3 IMT attenuates the respiratory metaboreflex
Expiratory muscle fatigue impaired subsequent exercise tolerance primarily through increased severity of limb locomotor muscle fatigue and a heightened perception of leg discomfort
Effects of expiratory muscle work on muscle sympathetic nerve activity
EMT increases expiratory muscle strength and reduces the sensation of respiratory effort during exercise
