Nasal breathing & imroved performance

There are a lot of claims out there about the benefits of nasal breathing, all the way from 'it might make you more relaxed' to 'it will help you win friends and defeat your enemies'.  Many of these claims are based on totally bogus arguments.  My favorite is that infants naturally breathe through the nose, and only later learn to breath through the mouth.  (This would perhaps be slightly more convincing if infants were also very fast runners...)

I do think it is likely that nasal breathing helps one to relax, although simply being conscious of tension (and then taking steps to reduce it) while running is probably more effective.

There are a few studies out there that suggest that training with nasal breathing helps improve performance in amateur athletes.  However, nothing in these studies rules out the (to my mind, very strong) possibility that the benefits occur because the nasal breathing forces the runners to slow down.  Most amateur runners train too fast (I'm guilty of it from time to time), so anything that forces them to slow down is probably to their benefit.  I've forced myself to breathe nasally for the first half of a few marathons in order to prevent going out to fast.  It works.  I'm very skeptical that there is anything more to it than that, but somebody please prove me wrong.

Oh, and I challenge anyone to do it on the swim. 

Remember he's selling a book. The breath control people are describing can also be attributed to diaphram excersizes that singers do. Oh, did I mention that deep relaxed breathing, lung capacity and posture are important in singing, yet no one sings through their nose...hmmm.

The same results have also been documented using those lung resistence trainers which make your diaphram work harder, but doesn't invlove the nose.

I'm also not clear how the nose alters your VO2 max. Maybe your nose hairs tease the air into processing more efficiently?

 Bump.

Learning to breathe and pace is what helps, not a magical nose cure for panting. Selling a premise in a book that could be explained in a paragraph seems a bit like a con.

I don't think that's the point.

Hey, if breathing through your nose gets you to slow down, then great.

But the point is not the nasal breathing.  This is no more magical a method than HR training, or RPE, or whatever else gets you to train properly.

Breathing through your nose is not going to work for everyone, first of all.  Second of all, it's the the nasal breathing that causes the performance improvement; it's the improved training.  The same thing can be achieved through other means. 

Well, in my view (as I said above) it is because it slows you down and it relaxes some people.  I found it helpful to force good pacing for the first half of a marathon.  I think it is generally a very effective way to force slower pace.  As for relaxing, I think it probably works, but I'm less keen on using it for that, because you want to be relaxed also when you are going all out, and if you rely on nasal breathing to get that relaxation, you are out of luck during an all-out effort.  So I think that teaching yourself to run relaxed under all conditions is better.

As others have said, nasal breathing can be the cause of better training techniques, which can also, and perhaps better, be learned as well by other means.  It is very unlikely to be a direct cause of better running. 

I'm not sure what 'strong' breathing means.  Nor do I know who these 'many coaches' are, but I'd be highly disinclined to trust them if they issue blanket statements like that.  People vary a LOT in their ability to suck air through their nose, because peoople vary a LOT in the physiology of their nasal passages.  Some people can draw a large volume quickly through their noses, others are 'blessed' with smaller nasal passages, sinus problems, etc., and have a harder time getting air through there.  Any blanket statement about the relationship between nasal breathing and training zones is silly, IMO.

But if it helps you, go for it.  I've got nothing against it.