Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [21]
But athletes are more concerned with how they perform in competition than in the lab, and several more recent studies have demonstrated small but significant benefits in sports like swimming, cycling, and rowing. For example, a 2010 study at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand put 16 competitive swimmers through a six-week Powerbreathe training program; half of them did the real thing, while the other half used the same device but were given a training program that didn’t actually strengthen their inspiratory muscles. The experimental group improved by 1.7 percent in the 100-meter freestyle and 1.5 percent in the 200 meters compared to the sham training group, but didn’t show significant improvement in the 400 meters.
Swimmers are good candidates for this type of training for several reasons: they have to control their breathing rate to match their stroke, and they have to overcome water pressure to expand their chests when they inhale. Rowers also face the challenge of synchronizing their breathing to their stroke rate. But even cyclists, who don’t face the same constraints, have shown improvements of 2.7 to 4.6 percent in time trials ranging from 20 to 40 kilometers after inspiratory muscle training. And a 2010 study by researchers in Hong Kong saw improvement in a series of repeated 20-meter shuttle sprints when the subjects did twice-daily inspiratory muscle training. The runners also warmed up before workouts and testing sessions with a slightly easier breathing routine.
There are several plausible theories of why this form of training should work, the simplest being that stronger breathing muscles allow you to pump in more oxygen when you’re tired. Even if breathing rate isn’t a limiting factor, it may be that stronger breathing muscles require less oxygen-rich blood to fuel them, allowing it to be diverted to arm and leg muscles. A more subtle possibility is that the primary benefit is how you feel—which would explain the initial failure to find improvements in laboratory studies. If theories about fatigue originating in the brain are correct (see Chapter 3), then feeling less out of breath could allow you to keep pushing for longer, even if there’s no actual difference in the functioning of your lungs or other parts of your body.
The downside of the “it’s how you feel” theory is that the performance-enhancing effects may then fade away as you become accustomed to inspiratory muscle training. Clearly, much more research will be needed before we really understand if and how this technique works. Until then, unless you’re an elite athlete searching for an extra hundredth of a second, you’re probably better off focusing your time and energy on a more traditional form of breathing training with proven results: swimming or running or biking until you’re out of breath.
CHEAT SHEET: FITNESS GEAR
• Your stride on the treadmill is the same as it is outside, but you may need time to readjust to harder outdoor surfaces, so do a few outdoor runs before any races. Set the treadmill incline at 0.5 to 1 percent to compensate for the lack of wind resistance.
• Elliptical machines offer a low-impact aerobic workout that is equivalent to running or biking, but they don’t develop “functional” muscle patterns. You can prolong the workout by using the arm levers.
• Athletic shoes are optimized for the different movement patterns and playing surfaces in different sports. This boosts performance, but the evidence that the right shoes reduce injuries remains weak.
• Running in bare