BREATHING INTO COMFORT

April 08, 2018

BREATHING INTO COMFORT

Oxygen is an indispensable chemical element to be captured efficiently and transported seamlessly to your cells.  The only objective is to produce energy.  Correctly regulated breathing is a required physiological adjustment to allow for sustained efforts.  Beginner runners often struggle with breathing when experienced runners seem to have such an adjusted breathing apparatus, they rarely seem “out of breath”.

When you train, your body naturally increases oxygen-rich blood flow to working muscles in several ways:

• More oxygen is transported to the working muscles.
• Blood flow from nonessential organs is diverted to the working muscles.
• Blood flow from your heart is increased.  Higher cardiac output.
• The rate and depth of your breathing increases.
• More oxygen is unloaded faster from hemoglobin cells into your working muscles.

Trained athletes can improve blood flow to working muscles by nearly 500% compare to coach potatoes and the amount of oxygen the muscle utilizes can be increased by almost 15 times.

The better you capture and bring oxygen to your cells, the more energy you produce, the faster or longer you typically go (see Vo2Max).  Pro athletes bring and consume more oxygen per amount of time.  This is one of the few reasons they go faster.  Training triggers billions of physiological adjustments and breathing better is key to improving your overall fitness.  

The good news is that you do not have to run long or hard to see significant improvements.  Most of the most important adjustments are done within the first minutes. 

Going for a 20 minutes run twice a week has gigantic repercussions on your overall wellbeing.  Your body is a machine that is trained to adjust at the slightest trigger.  You have a high-level of unconscious physiological adjustability right at your fingertips, put it to good use!

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