You may not think much about how your breathing affects your riding except when you’re huffing and puffing as you climb a steep hill, but how you breathe has a huge impact on every part of your ride.
How you breathe dictates things like:
⚡️ how fast you can go
💥 your likelihood of crashing
❤️🩹 how quickly your body can recover after an effort
These elements and more contribute to how well you perform overall and how much fun you have on the trail.
Learn from Certified Breathing Behaviour Analyst, Deborah Eraut, as she offers practical tips on how you can manage those pre-race nerves, rebound quicker from a big effort, help your body recover post-ride and more through simple practices.
Access Deborah’s slide presentation with the exercises she mentions here.
If you have questions or you’re interested in working with Deborah you can connect with her at https://breathoptimization.com/.
Below is an AI transcript of the call. Please excuse any errors.
Thanks everybody for joining us today. I am very excited to have, now, Deb Eraut. She is an expert in breath and and she’s going to be speaking to you today about how you can prepare yourself to manage your breath really well during the race so that you can optimize your performance, which, whether it doesn’t matter where on the race course you are you’re probably going to be huffing and puffing.
So the we all need this no matter whether you’re coming in first or last or anywhere in between. So I’m going to let Deb take it over and introduce herself, tell you why she, you should listen to her. And she’s going to have some exercises, some practical tips that you can walk away with and use right away.
So Deb, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. So I’m just going to share my screen. And we will get on with this. All right, let’s go here and let’s go present mode. And here we go. All right. I first want to thank everyone for being on the call today. And as well, I want to thank Carmel for inviting me here to present something that I’m so passionate about.
The science behind the breath and how we can retrain our breathing to truly optimize our health and our performance in everything that we do. Today we’re going to be speaking about how we can perform in while you’re on the trail.
And I’m I’m gonna just jump right in. My name is Deborah Rowe, as Carmel has already said. I’m a breathing behavior analyst. I have studied under Dr. Peter Litchfield and Sandra Raymer at the Professional School of Behavioral Health Sciences. Pardon me? What’s going on, buddy?
Am I to continue or somebody need to get muted? All right, I’ll just continue. And I still mentor with a faculty member, Lisa Cush, who has her own breathing practice in Saskatchewan. I could go on about. Why I’m here, what I love about the breath, but because we’re only here for 30, 30 minutes, I really want to give you the information that you logged on to to have.
So I’m going to just jump right in there and I’m just wondering of raise a hands if anybody’s been huffing and puffing as they’re doing a climb. Yeah. So how about loss of focus when you’re on a descent? Raise your hand. Okay. So today we’re going to give some insight on how we can actually change those breathing patterns.
So we’ll just start with an agenda of what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be talking and getting some definitions. Three elements that actually affect our breathing. Why breathing matters on the trail and some common issues. That might mountain bikers will have we’re going to talk about biofeedback equipment that I use in training and some takeaway drills.
We’re going to do four drills that you can practice in your training, and then we’re going to open it up for question and answers. And I’m probably going to go a little quicker through all of this. And so that we have more time for questions and answers at the end. All right. So first definition, what is optimal breathing?
So optimal breathing is a breathing pattern that can stabilize a respiratory chemical axis. This simply means that there’s a balance, an optimal balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our blood. Okay. And so this is very crucial for gas exchange. cellular function, and to regulate our nervous system.
Let’s go a little deeper into the um, stabilization. So we need this to ensure that our pH in our blood is balanced, which manages our metabolism, thus the food turning into energy. Proper oxygenation into our tissues. We actually need CO2 in the blood so that oxygen can be released from the hemoglobin and saturate the body to where it needs to be.
For bikers, you’re using your legs and your muscles need to have that oxygen into your brain. You’re making split decisions on those treacherous downhills, right? And to really help with the recovery. CO2 levels can help transfer you from into a parasympathetic state for a recovery that allows lactic acid to be released so we don’t have that soreness.
Alright, so we learned about what dysfunctional breathing is. or optimal breathing. So let’s look at dysfunctional breathing. So it’d probably be the opposite, right? So it’s a breathing pattern that when persistent enough will cause symptoms without any organic issues. And by organic issues, Perhaps you’ve been into an accident where maybe some ribs have been broken, and the way they healed, you don’t have that flexibility in the ribs to expand when we breathe, or perhaps a broken nose, and there’s a blockage in the airway.
The breathing patterns Disfunctional breathing patterns can cause certain symptoms with which I’ve listed here. There’s five categories. So emotional, cognitive, personality, performance, and physical changes, emotional. I’ve just put a couple of these in brackets behind anxiety, right? Attention and learning, cognitive challenges, self confidence.
That mindset that you have, competitive racing, public speaking. This can be very all of these can create anxiety and fear. Okay, so we have our optimal breathing, dysfunctional breathing, and here’s three elements that actually affect our breathing. The chemistry I already spoke about, that gas exchange.
within the blood system and the respiratory chemical center or respiratory center. Physiology, the mechanics of how we breathe. So we breathe in our nose, out through our mouth, we diaphragmatic breathe, we chest breathe, there’s fast, there’s slow. There’s a combination of mechanics that can be used for breathing.
Now psychological, this can affect the way we breathe. Our thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and reinforcement.
And some of these are the five biggest psychological issues I have found for mountain bikers. So one is, so you’re encountering your weak points when you’re on the trail. Yeah, that’s pretty obvious that’s my fallback, right? I need strength in that negative mindset. Oh, can I do this?
I don’t know. I have a performance anxiety. Fear of the unknown, especially when you’re on a new trail, you don’t know what’s coming up and we tend to push our boundaries a little too fast, a little more rocky or roots or whatever that we’re used to and there’s always a potential for crashes and dealing with injuries and all of these right can create that fear anxiety as well.
So breathing in certain patterns can help alleviate this. All right. So this is why breathing matters so much on the trail. And I’ve alluded to a few of them. So that oxygenation again, every muscle that we use needs to have that fuel and you can’t have that fuel without CO2 and everyone has a CO2 tolerance.
So that window of how each individual for whatever reason that has happened in our past, maybe there was an accident that you got. Ribs broken, right? You learn to breathe a certain way, and then because you found it stressful, it reduced the pain. So then the next time you had pain, you breathe like that again, and it’s more of a hyperventilation breath.
We call that over breathing. And so you do it again, and you do it again, until it becomes a habit. And we can habituate to lower levels of CO2 that are not optimal. for our performance and so we’re going to go through some how to train and increase our tolerance and this breath control with while you’re in the race and in just in general can improve stamina bike handling and your sharpness in your decision making
so common issues for mountain bikers the position the riding position you’re bent forward Extending out the arms a little bit, this can put compression on the diaphragm and sometimes in the chest. So when we climb, we can tend to chest breathe, which causes, which can cause over breathing, not always, but can, which leads to lowering CO2.
And when you’re sprinting, uncoupling your breath with your movement. This can also lower CO2s, which then can bring on early fatigue. On a descent, over breathing. You’ve just climbed up a hill and now you’re going down. And you still have that same breath pattern, the heavy breathing that you needed to get up the hill, on your descent.
This can lead to over breathing again and low CO2’s and that can cause stiffness in the body and slow reaction when you need to make that decision. So what’s the solution? The solution is train your breathing. Like you train your physical body. Every time you train your breathing. And when I work with someone, when we’re in training, I use biofeedback equipment and the semantics within a person so they learn what it’s like, how their body is moving when they’re seeing the data of their CO2 wave on the computer.
Okay. So we link those two together. And then when you change. Your mechanics of breathing, you’ll see maybe your CO2 level goes up. So you can pair that, right? Alright. So let’s go on with the biofeedback equipment that I use. This is a capnometer. This one here is called a Capnotrainer GOAT. And it’s by Better Physiology.
This measures CO2. And for a moment, I’m just going to show you the size of it. It fits in the palm of your hand. or in a pouch and you wear a sampling line in through the nose and just around the ears. So it’s a small hum when it is turned on, but it’s so small, which makes it a perfect wearable while you’re on the trail.
So I mentioned it measures CO2. Now, capnometers are used in hospital rooms that monitor all vital stats. This one in particular is a training model and only measures CO2. It can identify over breathing and help you retrain for optimal breath. which then gives you respiratory, better respiratory function.
It is truly a mirror for your breathing habits and patterns. We can see your patterns on the screen in real time. So it’s immediate, relevant, and actual data. And when you link that with your somatics, That is the optimal way to transform your habits and as I mentioned, it’s wearable. Okay, this is a wave graph of a CO2 levels.
The optimal level is 35 to 45 millimeters per mercury. Millimeters per mercury is because we’re measuring air pressure. 35 millimeters per mercury. is this dotted line. 35 to 40 is up here. This is where we want to be. So this is good breathing. It could be better, but it’s great, right? So I’m going to show you the next slides are from a novice mountain biker.
She did a 64 minute ride. She did climbs, downhill, cross country loop, another small climb, and then downhill. This, on this picture, this red dotted line is the 35 millimeters per mercury. So you can see that she’s below. She is actually in what we call hypocapnia. Her CO2 levels have dropped so low. When she is in this state, And before I go there, I’ll just show you the downhill.
You can see it decreases. This grey bar graph down here gives you your CO2 levels in a medium. And so it then, you can see here, this is where she had her downhill, her CO2 levels dropped dramatically. Here’s the other downhill. CO2 levels drop again. And what she experiences is her vision starts to go and she wants to pass out.
Passing out. is the body’s fail safe mechanism to keep you alive. Because when you pass out, the body can take over the breath again. And it will bring up your CO2 levels. The blue bar graph down here shows you breaths per minute, and she has really high breaths per minute. Not to say that’s wrong or right, it’s when we have fast breaths, we need to bring in smaller volumes of air.
Okay, then she did a recovery. After this ride, she did a 30 minute recovery where she is just sitting. And look at this, how low this is. She is at slightly over 20 millimeters per mercury.
This is her norm, and she doesn’t even sense any symptoms come on, and I’ll talk about symptoms in a while. You can see she is still breathing really fast, which again, is not right or wrong, but for her, the fast breathing is not working, because we can see she has dysfunctional breathing patterns.
All right, let’s carry on. So not everyone has a capnometer. So these are these four drills I’m going to go through with you to help you in your training of your breath. So the first one is the CO2 tolerance drill, and we’re just going to do breath holds. to help increase your tolerance. And so I invite everyone to just inhale through the nose and exhale out normally.
And hold your breath. You can even pinch your nose. Don’t let any air in. And you would time yourself to see how long that lasts. Until you get that first urge to breathe. And then just continue to repeat that and repeat that until that time span increases. That is a way you can detect if your CO2, you can, your CO2 window is increasing with the capnometer.
It’s very easy to see. We can monitor in real time. All right. This should be done. Not on the trail while you’re off the bike and you are training and. To increase your CO2 levels, it can delay fatigue. Okay. So the next drill is diaphragmatic breathing. And this is where I get into that aerodynamic position that bikers get into.
And I invite you here to just Lean forward slightly as if you were biking and place your hands on your ribs. And when you breathe in through the nose and breathe into those ribs and allow them to expand and into the back. Because that leaning forward, as I had mentioned before, can compress the belly so we don’t have full access to the diaphragm in the front.
So this is a really good practice to allow you to breathe in other areas than into the chest, into the upper chest. You can do this before a ride, during training, and if you have time in between really effortful parts of the course. Okay, the third one. Climbing. And I do want to thank the people that actually completed the survey.
It was very informative that a lot of people have climbing and descent issues. So this one here. Is sinking your pedals with your strokes so it stops you over breathing and it can improve endurance. And when do you do this is when you’re climbing or actually in steady effort. And if you can sit back and just pretend that your pedaling right and breathe in through the nose for five pedals and exhale for three pedals.
strokes and then just keep this rhythm. And why this is an an odd number is that when we do the shift from exhale to inhale to exhale, we can tend to push harder on that leg before we shift. And so that leg will then become stronger and we want to have that balance. So you would constantly be shifting and using both legs here.
Now on the descent. On the climb, let’s just say you’re going to start to breathe heavy. You’re metabolizing more, right? Your CO2s will increase and there’s more of an effort for breathing. So on the descent, once you summit and you’re starting to descend, That higher breathing rate, faster rate, more volume can continue and this will lower your CO2.
So this technique will help you to avoid that over breathing and the stiffness that can come when your CO2s are lower.
I invite you to get in that slouch forward position again. And when we’re doing this training, I encourage you to go into the position that you would normally be on when you’re on the bike. So you can transfer the training that you do off of the bike onto the bike in the race. So just sitting in that slouched forward position.
And I encourage you to put your hands on your ribs again because when you do inhale, You are going to be expanding that rib cage, but you’re going to be bringing in less volume of air. Very important. You’re going uphill previously to the downhill. You’re bringing in a lot more volume of air. And at that point you need it.
But when you’re starting to descend. You don’t need that much volume and if you can remember that wave graph that I showed you of that novelist mountain biker, she kept continuing to do that heavy breathing as she was descending, right? So when you are doing this exercise, breathing in through the nose, bringing in less volume and sigh out through the mouth.
Ah, this will help release tension. And when you’re doing this, maybe it’s just, you know what, when you’re at the peak or intermittently throughout the descent. We don’t want to do it too much because it can lower our heart rate and you don’t know what’s coming after you’re down at the bottom. There could be another climb where you need to have your heart rate up again, right?
So to practice this, but don’t overdo it on the decline. Now, let’s bring this all together. So breathe through your nose as much as possible, right? The CO2 tolerance training is We do it off the bike, and this can also aid when you’re in a sprint.
You can just go for longer periods of time. You have more endurance and more stamina. Pre ride warm up, and you do this in your training as well, right? So it’s a diaphragmatic, but breathing laterally and into the back. During the climb, you’re syncing your breath with your pedal strokes. Making it an odd number and on the descent, you’re reducing the air volume on the inhale and sighing on the exhale.
So those are some takeaways for you. That you, I would Really suggest that you bring this into your training. It will help you perform. I’ll just put a little slide in here I’m working with me. These are different ways that you can connect with me I had spoken to Carmel and I am offering to work with two athletes for two months prior to the race So that would be May and June because the race is at the end of June.
Carmel will will work with us afterwards to figure out how that those two people will be picked. If someone wants to work with me, capnometers can be rented if you’re in the States. I have affiliates in the States that can rent monitor CO2 capnometers, so those are a variety of different ways, and then we can work over Zoom, and then you can take the capnometer on your ride, and then we together over Zoom can look at your performance and how we can change it.
And now I’m just open for some questions and answers. If anyone has any awesome. Thank you so much, Deb. And yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna pick a couple of racers for this year lucky to lucky folks who will win. The chance to win a cup, two months worth of working with Deb. That’s very exciting and incredibly generous of her.
Very excited about that. We’ll announce that in a newsletter and we’ll be sending out the record. I made sure we’re recording this. . We’ll be sending that with the recording and I’m hoping, Deb, will you share your slides ’cause the outline of the exercises that they can do on their own.
I thought that was really helpful and I’d love to be able to share that with everybody. Yes, I will back that out there, you. So we will, we’ll we’ll make sure that everybody can access those so that you have it. You don’t have to go back to the recording or anything to remember what those exercises were.
So we’ll open it up for questions. I know we did have one very short technical not really technical question, but the it was right, right at the beginning. Lars Berg Swedish. Was that
Jonathan just mentioned that. I’m not sure how important that was.
Yes, that’s correct.
Do you hear me? Yep. Yep. Yep. Oh, okay. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t realize that Jonathan was tagging Mars. Great. Brian. Yes, go ahead. So my question is I didn’t quite catch if you could talk about the CO2 levels, and why that 35 to 45 was the magic number and what it meant that the athlete that you were showing had lower than that.
Is that the body is not. It’s not producing enough, or it’s not expelling enough CO2. I’m not sure I followed that. Okay, thank you for that question. The CO2 level, the optimal range, that 35 to 45 millimeters per mercury, there have been thousands of studies, thousands of white papers written, medical studies done.
So you can find that. On just searching it, what that optimal range is and when we’re lower than that optimal range, we don’t have full performance. So in the biker situation, she learned a breathing pattern in, for whatever reason, it came from her past, whether it was a traumatic experience, car accident, hard life, whatever that case may be.
She learned a certain breathing pattern that reduces her CO2. The example that I used is if someone is in a lot of pain. When our CO2 is reduced, it can eliminate feelings, reduce feelings in our body. So you wouldn’t feel that pain as much. And then when you’re feeling pain later on in the day, you take on this certain type of breathing pattern, which I’d mentioned is mostly over breathing, breathing in too much volume of air.
It could go the opposite direction. You’re where you actually increase your CO2. So it’s We don’t want them too high and we don’t want them too low. It’s just the pH balance in your system, right? In your blood. You only want it to be in a certain level or it can be detrimental. So in her case, she learned a different dysfunctional breathing pattern and her CO2 tolerance.
is low. So when you actually increase your CO2, it can not, it can feel uncomfortable. And an example I can give is if you’re right handed and you brush your teeth with your right hand, and it’s normal, you don’t even think about it. If you switch to your left hand, and you try to brush your teeth, it is It doesn’t feel right?
And so that’s the same with CO2. Even though the body performs better at a certain level, if we’ve learned through different patterns to reduce that for whatever reason, It’s going to take time to build up that tolerance again. Does that answer your question?
Great. Awesome. Thank you. And we have a question from Yasuko in the chat. She said she started using a BreatheRight device in nasals. I feel like it’s helping. Is it my imagination?
It, the BreatheRight, they can open up your passages. And just to share, I use, when I sleep, I use a mute, so it’s actually inserted into the nose and it pushes out your nasal passages because I do get clogged up. So it can open up your passages. That being said, if you have a breathing pattern that’s dysfunctional, it’s not going to change that breathing pattern.
Is that helpful? Hey, I think that answered the question. Sukho, maybe give us a thumbs up. In the meantime, we’ve got Clayton. Clayton, do you want to unmute? And yeah, so in the past, I’ve been taught that you want to take a longer inhale than your exhale. You want to inhale more slowly than your exhale.
And it sounds like you’re telling us. the opposite, five stroke on the climbs, a five stroke inhale and a three stroke exhale. So is that old advice that I have been living by? No, that’s not all advice, but we’re training for sports here, and it’s different. It’s a different breathing. If you’re just sitting and relaxing, watching TV, go for that other breath pattern, but this is sports and it’s different, and you can really see it when you’re on the capnometer.
Got it. So it’s really a longer inhale and a quicker exhale. Yes. For sports. For this particular event. Okay, cool. Thank you. Great. Great. And we’ve got a question from Israel. Do you want to unmute? Yeah. Some time ago, I talked with a sports psychologist and we were chatting about how breathing can improve you or hurt your your downhill runs.
And he was asking me To record myself with a GoPro so he can see how stressed I was about the features and how my breathing was working, but we never came to measure it. Do you have a clue about how he was doing that just by watching? You know what I mean? I don’t think you can truly tell what’s going on in the body when you’re the cam is focused on the trail.
If perhaps he is listening to how you’re breathing, yeah, it was to see like when I was approaching the future, he was listening. Yeah. Oh my. Okay. So that I can see. So if I hear someone how they’re breathing. And if they’re really, you’re at the top of the hill, you’re like, yeah, I made it. And then you’re going to the descent, that breathing will not change immediately, right?
You’re still going to be breathing like that. So what I’m suggesting here is the change be immediate. So to actually train when you are on it on a stationary bike, let’s say, and you’ve got it going uphill. And so at that point, train your breathing to bring in less volume of air. It’s not even the rate we’re playing with here.
It’s just not doing that. It’s just. Bringing it in slowly. Is that helpful? Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot. And just to go back to that other question, everyone is an individual. It’s that longer exhale than inhale type of thing. Everyone is an individual and they’re going to breathe differently and an optimal breath for one person.
is not going to be an optimal breath for the other person, okay? That sounds like there’s a little bit of room for playing around and seeing what works for you. Now, how do you reconcile that with the, how do you know when the discomfort is just you getting used to a new breathing pattern, and when it’s oh, but this just doesn’t work for me?
I would say the only true way you could know that if you have to be on a capnometer, you have to see your data. Immediately what’s happening in your body to truly know. Okay, that makes sense. Now I saw Eva had her hand up. Did your question get answered or did you still want to ask? I do have a question, but it’s not quite to this topic and I wasn’t sure if we wanted to get rid, ask all the other ones specifically on this first or can I just ask?
Is it? It’s about breathing, but off the bike. That’s fine. Yep, go ahead. Okay. I found that I’m a fairly new writer, and last year I found as the week went on, obviously fatigue, overwhelm stress built up at least in me for the week, and I found I think after stage six, I was actually, I couldn’t sleep.
And so I was in my tent, couldn’t sleep, and the more I tried to sleep, the harder it was to sleep. And would you have a technique, or is that then like this? Yes. Is there a shorter breath in longer breath out in that case, then would it be the opposite of what we’re doing when we’re on the bike, or is there a technique you could offer to calm oneself down when you are actually in the country?
Do you know what I’m, getting at? I do Eva, thank you for that question. It would be to bring in less air, slow down your breathing. You can take in that smaller inhales, longer exhales, doing the sigh as you release. The recovery is so important. Especially when you’re doing multiple day runs like you guys will be doing, right?
That’s seven days to be able to recover faster. So you’re not as fatigued the next day for you. You really found it, on the sixth day. And that recovery slide that I did show you of that novelist mountain biker, she didn’t recover. She was breathing too fast, too much volume. So for you to be able to keep your That range that 35 to 45 millimeters per mercury in your recovery will help you in the sore muscles in the anxiety that you’re having all of that.
It will help. Absolutely. But again, everybody is an individual. I can’t say do box breathing and that’s going to help everyone right is to find out what works for you. And there was one question on the, the survey how long does it take you to recover or how long does it take you to feel that the muscle soreness?
So many people said it takes about two days and it takes about three days to feel recovered. So if you can optimize that CO2 level and that means changing your breathing. On the trail, off the trail to get that optimal recovery.
Hey, awesome. I don’t see any other questions in the chat. Does anyone else, you can just throw your digital or real hand up and let us know if you have anything else. Um. Yeah, otherwise we’ll probably open up to if there’s any other kinds of questions. Um, Evan asks, do you have any advice for the pre race nerves?
okay. So working with me, we’d find out what really optimizes your CO2 levels, right? And it’s to take that moment before the race. And do that pre warm up that I suggested because when you breathe and expand the rib cage and expand the back, it keeps your CO2 levels raised. Optimal CO2 levels reduces anxiety, performance anxiety.
That will help.
Yay! That helpful, Evan? Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Any other questions?
Hey thank you, Deb. Super really appreciate you sharing your expertise with us today. I was really excited about this Presentation because I know we talk a lot about tech, what bike you’re going to have, what tires you’re going to have, what, and the traditional training stuff.
And this was something just a little bit different that often doesn’t really get paid attention to among at least amateur athletes. I’m sure the pros spend time on this stuff. But so this has been a wonderful opportunity. Thank you, Deb for coming in and sharing this with us. You all have some practical, like I said, we’ll send out an email with the slides so that you can see you’ve got written out the exercise recommendations that Deb had.
And we’ll be letting everybody know who the two lucky racers who are going to be working with Deb for May and June. To prepare for the race and that I’m super keen to hear about how they are how they find that experience. Yeah. Thank you so much. If you have any lingering questions, feel free to stay on and ask them.
And if not, we’ll we’ll see you next time. everyone.