Weekly ish running update... nasal breathing!

I discovered nasal breathing while running this week!

There's a whole art and science around nasal breathing over mouth breathing....

The general idea is that nasal breathing is a more efficient way of getting a better quality of oxygen into your body compared to mouth reading.

It's possible to get more oxygen into yr blood with less air.

However doing this while running feels more constrained when yr not used to it!

But if one persists it can really help improve VO2 max.

I tried this with two runs this week...

Tuesday 5K Intervals

For this run I did the first 2Ks nasal breathing to warm up.

Then I did two 800s and two 400 intervals then 2 200s

I mouth breathed during the pace sessions but then forced myself to do nasal during recovery.

It was very different to usual. I cld really feel the lungs opening up - I really had to breath proper deeply like a real workout for lungs. I guess that's the idea!

Thursday's 9K

I did 5Ks nasal breathing.... and this was easy enough... a nice flat route but a little slower than usual.

I then walked a while and did a couple of fast Ks - at around 4.10 pace which I was quite happy with!

Then a final K nasal breathing.

nose breathing and running final thoughts...

I think this is a keeper! It's gonna be slow going but hopefully I'll see my lung capacity increase over the coming weeks and months!