To understand how breathing can optimize your physical and mental performance you first need to understand the basic physiology behind breathing, so let’s dig in: Breathing is not something we often think about as it occurs spontaneously. Our respiratory system is designed to trigger a breath when the body’s chemoreceptors detect increased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. CO2 is a metabolic stress messenger. This means that straining your body during exercise or emotional stress will change your breathing. Increased CO2 will increase your breathing rate and heart rate. If your body can tolerate higher levels of CO2, it will be able to maintain a lower breathing rate and heart rate even though the body is being exerted due to physical or mental stressors. It is therefore important to train how to regulate your breathing to train your stress tolerance during exercise and in life.

Improved muscle efficiency. During exercise blood flow increases to your muscles to deliver oxygen (O2). The O2 needs to be offloaded into the muscle and CO2 is needed to facilitate the process. Indicating that the muscles’ ability to use O2 is dependent on CO2.
Improved recovery and less fatigue after exercise. The key to eliminating metabolic acidosis and repairing muscle damage after exercise is CO2. CO2 is an antioxidant and prevents oxidative stress.
Improves performance and endurance. Muscle efficiency is fueled by glucose and oxygen. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as breathing in more O2 to help muscles perform better as we have already seen that O2 uptake in the muscles is facilitated by CO2. When you run, your heart rate and breathing rate increases as a normal response to the body moving faster. Using nasal breathing during exercise improves the body’s CO2 tolerance and leads to greater Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and quicker recovery time. This shows that your fitness is largely defined by your ability to tolerate CO2 levels to use oxygen efficiently. The aim is not to nose breathe yourself through your marathon, but incorporating nose breathing during training can improve your body’s CO2 tolerance.
It boosts metabolism. Increased CO2 levels have fat burning benefits and improves metabolic conditions. Fat is converted to CO2 and water. When you are burning fat, it is removed from the body via the air you exhale, sweat and urine.
CO2 tolerance relates to overall physical health. Improved CO2 is shown to be a predictor of a good physiology as it is a marker of stress on the system. Let’s take sleep apnea as an example. Sleep apnea leads to loss of O2 while sleeping as breathing is interrupted. Then add mouth breathing to the mix, when mouth breathing is used too much CO2 is blown off and unfiltered air is inhaled. If nasal breathing is used it improves HRV, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, brain health, and inflammatory markers.
CO2 tolerance affects mental health. CO2 Tolerance has been highly studied in the field of Psychology and is found to be an indicator of stress tolerance and self- regulatory capacity. An example of high emotional reactivity would be panic attacks with fast shallow breathing and rapid heart rate. CO2 builds up quickly with rapid shallow breathing (hyperventilating). Deep breaths can help calm someone, but it is the body’s ability to tolerate the carbon dioxide that makes the biggest difference.

Scored below 15 sec: Start with triangle breathing. Inhale, hold and exhale as for the “three sides of the triangle”. Start with 3 sec and work your way up to 5 sec.

Scored above 15 sec: Start with 5 sec “per side of the rectangle”. Inhale for 5 sec, hold 5 sec. exhale 5 sec, hold 5 sec.

Continue this cadence continuously for 10 minutes a day without having to breathe the way you normally would in between. Once you have mastered it, challenge yourself to 7 or 8 seconds. There are multiple benefits to increased CO2 tolerance, practice it and feel the difference.

Breathing: To improve physical and mental performance

06.09.23

Benefits of increased CO2 tolerance:

How well can your body tolerate CO2?

How to interpret your results:

How to improve your BOLT score

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