This is part two answering the question of why coaches are increasingly having clients do breathwork prior to working out. If you have not read part one, it is not necessary for you to understand this next part though there might be some areas of confusion. If you want to check it out, you can find it here

       In the last post I discussed the reasons for breathwork as they related to the physical changes in the body, specifically the position of the body in space, and why correcting for/adapting our movement for natural asymmetries and compensatory mechanisms is so important. This week I want to get into the physiological reasons for this. Additionally, I want to go through an example or two of real world application for this to hopefully demonstrate the importance of having your breathing down. So let’s jump into this.

       The physiological reason for breathwork pre workout is to help bring the balance of gases within the body back to neutral. These gases, specifically the balance between CO2 (Carbon dioxide) and O2 (Oxygen), are prone to falling out of balance during the course of the day/week/month/life. Why? As I alluded to before, stress is the main culprit. A stress response from the body is not just the release of hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc., but it also has a profound effect on blood flow, resting posture (see part 1), and our respiration also gets screwed up. Stress can be anything that knocks you off balance, whether it’s mental, emotional, or physical in nature it does not matter, your body interprets it all equally as stress. 

Imagine stress flowing into the bucket and recovery practices (sleep, nutrition, breathwork, etc) emptying it through the faucet. When the stress starts to overflow is when health issues start to arise. 

 

       The longer we are in a stress response, the more out of balance our system becomes. Sometimes this response can be so prolonged, even in a very mild state, that your body will actually reset its “normal” homeostasis to this stressed state. This is why people who are chronically stressed never think they are, because it feels normal to them, but its not and the body does not function optimally like this. 

       But back to the respiration side of this. During a stress response, our respiration is going to increase; think about exercising. Exercise, a form of physical stress, results in increased heart rate, blood flow, and your breathing increases too to compensate for the higher production of CO2 from the working muscles. But after exercise, the stress is over, the blood flow, heart rate, and respiration rate all fall back down to normal levels, exactly as they should. But what about in the case of chronic moderate stress, where the stress response is prolonged to the point of a change in homeostasis, so things never QUITE go back down to normal? This means that all of these different metrics are going to be SLIGHTLY elevated now, and stay there. Now imagine if there are recurring instances that trigger a stress response in this altered state, and the body continues being pushed into a more severe “moderate” stress state. There will start to be a compound effect to this, where each new stress episode continues to push the chronic elevation higher and higher….* 

       For our purposes, this compounding effect is going to lead to a chronic state of over breathing. When we over breathe, O2 has a hard time getting into the muscles which leads to feelings of fatigue, low energy, and decreased endurance. Why is this the case? If we look at something called the Oxygen Dissociation Curve we can see why.

 

Oxygen Dissociation Curve

 

       On the horizontal y-axis, we see what is essentially the amount of usable O2 in our body. On the vertical axis is the percent saturation or how saturated are our red blood cells with O2. As we breathe quicker and quicker, while not working out or doing moderate strenuous activity, the curve shifts to the left. This shift means that O2 will hold on tighter to red blood cells which means it is harder for the blood cells to drop the O2 off at the muscles and organs where it is needed for energy. 

 

Less energy = less work capacity = anaerobic activity = more acidic environment = more inflammation.

 

       But now let’s say we slow our breathing down. As our breathing slows, the curve begins to come back to the middle, then it begins to move slowly to the right. As it moves to the right, the red blood cells are able to drop off their O2 much easier and provide the muscles with a constant supply.

 

More O2 = aerobic activity = more energy = greater work capacity = more basic environment = closer to neutral

 

       And note, that even as the curve shifts to the left, percent saturation stays high, that means that your body has sufficient oxygen, it is just having a hard time accessing it. That is where CO2 comes into play. We need a level of CO2 equal to 40 mmHg for good gas exchange, less than that and our curve moves left. By slowing our breathing down, we can actually increase the concentration of CO2 in our blood, which will help move the curve back to the right.  

       So as I said in the beginning, the goal from a physiological standpoint for doing breathwork pre workout is to bring CO2 and O2 back into balance. From what we just went through we can see that over time, our respiration will increase due to stresses of life. That increased respiration leads to a shifting of the oxygen dissociation curve to the left. As it moves more and more to the left, the ability for us to do work decreases. To counteract this, we do breathing exercises that are slower, to help increase the concentration of CO2 in the bloodstream, which in turn, moves the oxygen dissociation curve back to the right, increasing our ability to do work. 

 

       Now if you tuned in to Ask the Coach on the 14th, you will know that I mentioned respiratory diseases or issues, specifically apnea and sports induced asthma. I want to get into the sports induced asthma example now and, using what I talked about here, help explain how it happens and how breathwork can correct and eliminate it. 

       For those who don’t know, sports induced asthma, also known as exercise-induced asthma (EIA), is a condition where your airways constrict in the first 5-10 minutes of exercise which is followed by wheezing, coughing, difficulty breathing, etc. This usually goes away on its own and can be triggered by many different things, from allergens to cold air. Another cause, that you won’t see listed on WedMD or any place for medical information, is over breathing. When we over breathe before we are warmed up, the balance between CO2 and O2 in the body is thrown off and we have a difficult time delivering O2 to the cells of the body. We can see this in the Oxygen Dissociation Curve above. Let’s break it down here..

 

  1. When we start exercising, our heart rate increases to get blood flowing to working muscles.
  2. As heart rate increases, our breathing increases in anticipation of the work about to be done. 
  3. As breathing increases, we are offloading higher levels of CO2 (metabolic waste) that’s being exchanged for O2 by cells. 
  4. Here is where it gets interesting! At this point, 5-10 minutes into our warm up, our muscles have yet to really ramp up production of ATP for energy so the metabolic processes are not caught up to the supply of O2 being delivered. 
  5. This means that we have an imbalance of CO2 and O2, where we are dumping more CO2 than we are producing. This pushes our curve to the Left.
  6. Once pushed to the left, the bond between red blood cells and O2 becomes stronger, making it hard for O2 to get passed to cells. 
  7. This leads to blood vessel and airway constriction and, by extension, respiratory difficulty and an asthma attack. 

 

       This is why these attacks happen early in a training session, because the body is not warmed up, cellular metabolic processes are not at full capacity yet, and our increased respiration creates this imbalance in the body. Once the body is warm though and respiration slows down or is constant, the metabolic processes of the cells catch up and correct the O2/CO2 imbalance, leading to the symptoms lessening or disappearing on their own. 

       So if over breathing/excessing breathing early in a workout triggers an EIA attack, slowing the breathing down or controlling it early in a session should limit or eliminate the risk of an attack. The easiest way to do it is to only nasal breathe for your warm up. Depending on what your warm up entails, this might mean for all your mobility work and dynamic warm up just breathing through your nose. If your warm up includes jogging or running, starting off at a slower pace nasal breathing and slowly opening your mouth for mouth breathing as your pace increases might be the way to go. General rule of thumb I use is, if I’m not sweating yet I don’t need to use my mouth to breathe. 

 

I hope this was helpful and informative. Chronic respiratory issues take all kinds of forms, but generally they are rooted in some form or over breathing. If you are someone who suffers from EIA or something similar, please try out the nasal breathing for your warm up and see if it makes a difference. I’d love to hear how it goes for you. Any respiratory issues outside of exercise? Send me an email at [email protected] and I’d be happy to work with you. You can find me and GDH on Instagram and Facebook at @goaldrivenhabits. New post next Sunday, be sure to check it out. 

 

*Some people might also recognize this as a situation where someone is chronically inflamed. This is a little more eastern medicine-y but the idea is that all systems are working overtime to the point where they are breaking down. Imagine if you keep scratching at a constant itch, eventually the skin becomes red and inflamed. This is essentially what is happening within the body in these states of chronic inflammation. Everything is irritated.