Nasal breathing and The Oxygen Advantage techniques

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Nasal breathing and The Oxygen Advantage techniques
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flag provin1327
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Posted: Jul 15, 2020 at 19:22 Quote
I'm curious if anyone on here has experimented with nasal only breathing or is familiar with Patrick McKeown's The Oxygen Advantage breathing techniques.

The gist of it is that breathing in and out through the nose only is a better way to breathe with benefits like increasing nitric oxide levels, increasing tolerance to CO2 which leads to better oxygen absorption, strengthening your breathing muscles and breathing in a less labored way. Most of the science is laid out here https://oxygenadvantage.com/nasal-breathing-running/

And the breath hold exercises are posted here http://oxygenadvantage.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Oxygen-Advantage-Script-of-Exercises.pdf

Anyone have any long term experience with this in mountain biking? Seems like you have to commit to only nasal breathing and doing the exercises for a few months before seeing any improvements.
flag HaroldGibbons
O+
Posted: Jul 17, 2020 at 4:44 Quote
provin1327 wrote:
I'm curious if anyone on here has experimented with nasal only breathing or is familiar with Patrick McKeown's The Oxygen Advantage breathing techniques.

The gist of it is that breathing in and out through the nose only is a better way to breathe with benefits like increasing nitric oxide levels, increasing tolerance to CO2 which leads to better oxygen absorption, strengthening your breathing muscles and breathing in a less labored way. Most of the science is laid out here https://oxygenadvantage.com/nasal-breathing-running/

And the breath hold exercises are posted here http://oxygenadvantage.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Oxygen-Advantage-Script-of-Exercises.pdf

Anyone have any long term experience with this in mountain biking? Seems like you have to commit to only nasal breathing and doing the exercises for a few months before seeing any improvements.

Hey, YES - I'm a huge fan of Patrick McKeown and nasal only breathing!

I'm a fitness coach in NYC and have been applying principles from The Oxygen Advantage in my riding and coaching for ~4-5 years now, and have learned that it feels incredibly beneficial to practice and implement but will kick the crap out of you if you're not used to it!

Probably for the first 6 months I was doing it, I could really only apply it to slowly walking down the street and really easy road rides or commuting to the pumptrack/dirt jumps in NYC.

After I was able to control the breathing on the easier road rides, I started using it fire road climbs on my trail rides, when I didn't have to think about breathing *and* navigating technical sections of trails.

Now I'm more able to do it for the full duration of my slower, smoother XC-style riding, but have to be really conscious about what happens on the short punchy climbs around here.

If I can relate it to another part of exercise science, using the strategies from the Oxygen Advantage and dedicating time to practicing nasal breathing while riding definitely slowed me down enough to do proper low-intensity work, rather than moderate/high intensity work without any dedicated aerobic training.

https://www.uphillathlete.com/aerobic-deficiency-syndrome/

I can nerd out about this stuff all day if you're ever interested in chatting more!

 


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