Improve Your Endurance With Breathing Exercises For Athletes
Breathing effectively and efficiently can have tremendous positive impacts on improving your endurance for any cardiovascular sport. Endurance is the ability or strength to continue or last despite fatigue. When you strengthen your respiratory muscles and learn how to breathe more efficiently you will successfully improve/increase your endurance and stamina- which will improve your athletic abilities.
To improve performance every athlete has the need to breathe easily throughout the duration of their game or event. To improve stamina and endurance we should learn how to breathe while practicing our sport of choice, practice breathing exercises that will strengthen your respiratory muscles, determine your ideal endurance pace, and learn how to measure endurance so you can track your progress.
During any cardiovascular sport (i.e. basketball) it is important to maintain ease of breathe. To do so you should start with good posture inhale deeply through your nose and mouth, then exhale gently through your nose and mouth while drawing your stomach in, breathe in again filling your stomach with air on the inhale and continue to repeat. In other words you should try to breathe naturally and steadily while practicing your endurance based cardiovascular sport.
Practicing breathing exercises is another great way to improve stamina and reduce shortness of breath. Training with a breathing resistance trainer like Expand-A-Lung will strengthen your diaphragm and your intercostal muscles which allows you to inhale a greater volume of oxygen and exhale a greater volume of carbon dioxide-this will improve your endurance. The training is simple and detailed instructions can be found at https://expand-a-lung.com/exercise-instructions/ . As the device is small and only requires you to inhale and exhale you can practice almost anywhere and it should take no more than 10 minutes a day. For maximum benefits try to train with the device at least three times a week.
Determining your ideal endurance pace is also a great way to control your breathing while practicing sports. All you need to do is determine if you can carry a light conversation. If you are able to do so without experiencing extreme shortness of breath then you have found the right pace. If you are practicing above your intensity level you may want to dial back the intensity until you are able to improve your endurance. This will avoid burn out and fatigue.
To measure your endurance you will need to consider two variables VO2 max, and MAS (maximum aerobic speed). Your VO2 max is a measurement of your maximum oxygen consumption and it reveals your respiratory capacity. Your VO@ max is represantive of the amount of oxygen your lungs are able to absorb during an extreme workout. Exact results would need to be calculated in a lab. However, you can get a pretty fair estimate by entering your age and your resting heart calculated by number of heart beats in 20 seconds into this calculator http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/vo2max-calculator.shtml . The MAS corresponds to your max speeds that can be attained based on your respiratory abilities. As you continue to focus on breathing more efficiently during your practice, as well as training with breathing exercises in your off time start to keep track of your VO2 max so you can track your progress and impress yourself with your improvement over time.
Take the time to connect to your breath as it can give you great improvements in your performance, stamina, and endurance.
