Guest blog by Breathing Expert and Advanced Oxygen Advantage Instructor Thomas Hague, The Breath Coach.

There are many reasons why developing youth soccer players and athletes should be looking more closely at how they breathe to gain an advantage over their competitors. We all know that we breathe all day and all night without giving it a second thought, but have you considered how functional your breathing is and how you can optimize it to train and compete at your very best?

If you haven't considered it then you are missing out. Breathing for optimized sports performance is now considered as important as exercise and diet and if you can utilize the untapped power of your breath the possibilities are endless.

I am currently coaching an English League Two youth soccer player and I’ve developed a program for him that his coaches include in his daily training. Each player is different and requires a program specific to them, however, the fundamentals of programming are all the same. The following pointers will briefly explain what you should be concentrating on if you truly want to take your game to the next level.

1. Functional Breathing Pattern Training & its Benefits

Feel and take a second to monitor your breathing. Where are you breathing from, the diaphragm (belly) or the upper chest?

How many breaths are you taking in a minute during rest, are you breathing lightly, slowly, and deeply (LSD) or taking short and sharp breaths? What movement can you see in your body as you breathe?

Simply being aware of how you are breathing can go a long way toward giving you feedback on your breathing and more importantly how your breathing is affecting your sports performance.

Functional breathing helps to improve a number of physiological and psychological aspects of your performance. It's imperative as a soccer player that you have optimal focus, concentration, posture, and sleep and that you have good posture and spinal stabilization to improve movement and reduce injuries. It can also reduce stress and anxiety associated with performance and take the hard work out of breathing.

According to Chapman et al., 2016. In athletes participating in physical activity, the presence of an abnormal breathing pattern can manifest as premature breathlessness or muscle fatigue, which inevitably results in sub-optimal performance.

Below are the advantages associated with functional breathing for the athlete.

Improves blood circulation and oxygen delivery to cells
Dilates the upper airways (nose) and lower airways (lungs)
Reduces the onset of breathlessness and improves endurance
Significantly reduces exercise-induced bronchoconstriction
Reduces energy costs associated with breathing
Maximises vagal tone
Maintains parasympathetic-sympathetic balance
Increases heart rate variation. (HRV)
Improves sleep, recovery, focus, concentration, and calm
Improves posture and spinal stabilization
Improves functional movement and reduces the risk of injury

Dysfunctional Breathing Traits

Breathing through the mouth
Upper chest, neck, and shoulder movement
Hearing breathing during rest
Frequent sighing and yawning

Feel your breathing. Functional breathing and awareness hits the top spot as without them, how can you make the changes required to improve?

2. Breathing, Core Stability & Balance

Breathing plays an essential role in spinal stability and core strength and the diaphragm is the foundation of a strong and stable core which increases balance. Balance is of course fundamental to the art of soccer playing and without it, our movement becomes ‘stiff’ and disjointed and without ‘flow’. So how can you strengthen your core through breathing?

The diaphragm is situated at the base of our lower ribs and is connected to our spine. Its movement during inspiration (breathing in) and expiration (breathing out) is part of our breathing mechanics along with the intercostal muscles located between the ribs. Intra-abdominal pressure (IPA) happens from our diaphragm. During inhalation, the diaphragm moves downward, which contributes to postural control and stability (IPA). As it moves downward, a positive pressure is generated in the abdomen area. Think of it as an inflated balloon inside your stomach that provides support for the spine and pelvis.

Take a second to think about how you breathe during game time and training. Are you taking advantage of increased physical movement whilst reducing the occurrence of injury through functional breathing and a strong and activated diaphragm?

3. Improve Respiratory Muscle strength & Decrease Blood Stealing

Soccer players and athletes train in order to improve sports performance, and while regular aerobic training improves cardiovascular and skeletal muscle function, it does not improve the functioning of the breathing muscles (Pedersen & Saltin, 2015). We also know that training does not increase lung volume, improve lung function or enhance the ability of the lungs to transfer oxygen to the blood and working cells.

It has also been found that ‘blood stealing’ occurs when the respiratory muscles work too hard. If they haven't been trained and strengthened through specific breathing exercises we can experience blood stealing.

This is when blood from the legs is diverted to the fatigued breathing muscles. With less blood flow to the legs and working muscles, players have to slow down or cease exercise altogether. Studies show that by incorporating breathing exercises into a training schedule and reducing the effort of inhalation, bloody flow to the legs increases by up to 7%.

So how can we improve respiratory muscle strength to avoid blood stealing and fatigue?

We can use breath-holding exercises to target the diaphragm which is the most important breathing muscle and one that unlike the lungs can be trained and strengthened. We can add an extra load to the muscles in a low-stress and controlled environment. As inspiration requires the most amount of work we should concentrate on working on this area with the use of a sports mask and breath holds incorporated into training.

Pre-training and pre-game we can warm up our respiratory muscles just like we warm up our bodies. Simply learning to warm up these muscles can have an impact on our performance and avoid blood stealing when it really counts during game time.

4. Training Smart with Breath-Holds (intermittent hypercapnic, hypoxic training)

As we examine how the diaphragm can help reduce injury we can also look at how training smarter can also keep you away from the dreaded physio's table.

In soccer and many team sports such as rugby, basketball, or ice hockey, repeated sprint ability (RSA) is a key performance indicator. It shows an athlete's ability to repeatedly engage in repeated intervals of high-intensity, maximum-effort exercises along with brief recovery periods. There have been a number of scientific studies showing positive results based on repeated sprint ability in sports whilst in a hypercapnic (high carbon dioxide), hypoxic (low oxygen) state.

Woorons et al., 2018 found that a study of 21 professional, Rugby Union players during a competitive season were highly responsive to RSA drills. This type of hypercapnic/hypoxic (high carbon dioxide and low oxygen) training technique has been applied in sports since the 1970s.

The use of this training exposes the body to increased acidosis, which causes adaptations to be made in the long term, reducing the acidity of the blood and delaying the onset of fatigue which is beneficial for a soccer player or athlete.

Ostrowski et al., 2012 found that holding the breath results in lower blood acidity, improved tolerance to low oxygen, decelerated metabolism, an increase in Hct (red blood cells) value, Hb (hemoglobin) the oxygen-carrying protein and EPO (erythropoietin) concentration, as well as an increase in the mass and volume of the lungs.

Lance Armstong cheated in cycling by doping and increasing his EPO levels to increase performance. He could have achieved similar effects by incorporating breathing into his training and wouldn't have faced the downfall in his reputation.

We can train smarter. Instead of training and pushing our bodies to their physical limit continuously week in, and week out we can train smarter by including breath-holding in our training.

Whilst maximum physical training is important in maintaining muscle and skeletal strength, it’s not always the smart way to train if we want to conserve energy, improve recovery and reduce injury.

As a coach, can you implement some breathing training into your schedule to avoid burnout and injuries?

5. The Function of Carbon Dioxide to Release Oxygen into The Cells - The Bohr Effect

Christian Bohr, a Danish biochemist discovered over a century ago that “the lower the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in arterial blood, the greater affinity of hemoglobin the oxygen it carries”.

To simplify this, the lower the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in arterial blood, the less oxygen is released to working cells for the production of energy. This is a big deal when we want to optimize performance.

Energy is of course crucial in sports performance and recovery. By being aware of how we breathe and implementing functional breathing practices into your training sessions you can increase the amount of oxygen cells receive. This obviously has a positive effect on our training and performance.

When you are training or playing during a soccer game you should be breathing through your nose 50% of the time.

Whenever there is a downtime in a game you should return your breathing back to nasal breathing using the 3 gears- 1- nose to nose, 2- nose to mouth. 3- mouth to mouth and back down 3, 2, 1. You can go up and down the gears according to the effort exerted both aerobically (with oxygen) and anaerobically (without oxygen).

Nasal breathing increases CO2 levels and therefore according to the scientifically tried and tested Bohr Effect, you will be distributing oxygen more efficiently to the fatigued tissues.

How are you breathing and is it part of your training to improve sports performance?

A winning sports mentality relies on the participant being aware of the small margins required to be the best. My tip to any developing youth soccer player or athlete would be to train your breathing if you want to be a winner.

If you’d like to know how you can optimize your sports performance through breathwork visit www.thebreathcoach.co.uk where you can book 1:1 or group sessions in person or online.

Breathe | Feel | Move | Perform | Recover

References:

Ostrowski et al., (2012) The Role of Training in the Development of Adaptive Mechanisms in Freedivers. Journal of Human Kinetics.

Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage.

Pedersen, B. and Saltin, B. (2015) Exercise as medicine - evidence for prescribing exercise as therapy in 26 different chronic diseases. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.

Woorons et al., 2018 Repeated-sprint training in hypoxia induced by voluntary hyperventilation improves running repeated-sprint ability in rugby players. European Journal Sports Science.