How to Improve Exercise Performance: The Importance of Nasal Breathing

From increased fat burning to the production of alpha brain waves, nasal breathing achieves it all.

Nasal breathing during exercise may be the best performance hack there is. There are what seems like almost endless benefits to simply changing how you breathe while you’re working out — lower perceived exertion, greater fat loss, and quicker recovery just to name a few.

Nasal breathing has many benefits for life in general, which are all beyond the scope of this article. However, here I will outline the benefits specific to exercise and how to implement this method of breathing into your exercise.

Nasal breathing

Nasal breathing is what it sounds like: breathing through the nose. So often when we exercise, we take in big gulps of air through the mouth, and we can’t imagine how we would be able to breathe with our mouths closed. This is just how we have always done it. But it appears that our ancestors rarely breathed through their mouths; they breathed through their noses even during strenuous activity.

Research has shown that we can perform just as well when we are nasal breathing compared to breathing through our mouths, even during anaerobic efforts. Furthermore, the amount of oxygen we need actually reduces when breathing through our nose. This is known as physiological economy.

So nasal breathing is possible during exercise, even during intense workouts. We just need to practice.

Benefits of nasal breathing

Increased efficiency of oxygen uptake

Breathing through your nose drives oxygen into the lower lobes of the lungs, whereas mouth breathing only drives oxygen into the upper lobes. This means that all 5 of the lobes are utilized rather than just the top 2, and that the air stays in the lungs for longer, increasing the efficiency of oxygen uptake. These lower lobes also stimulate the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system whereas the upper lobes stimulate the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system. More on this later.

More carbon dioxide expelled

Breathing through your nose draws air into the lower lobes of the lungs where there is more blood, meaning that carbon dioxide is taken out of the blood more effectively. It was found that nasal breathing significantly increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the expelled air of runners compared with mouth breathing, highlighting this effect.

Dr. John Douillard explains,

“The reason we huff and puff during exercise is because we are not removing the CO2 as efficiently as we could be. Nasal breathing maximizes this action.”

The diaphragm becomes stronger

Breathing through our noses during exercise usually means we are breathing through our noses harder than we normally would during the day. This has the effect of strengthening the diaphragm, which means that we will become better at deep breathing away from exercise as well, as deep breathing requires a lot of action from the diaphragm.

The lymph system flows more effectively

Nasal breathing leads to full activation of the ribcage. This full activation will help with lymph flow, which is important as unlike the cardiovascular system, the lymph system doesn’t have its own pump. This system relies on the action of our muscles in order to pump lymph around the body. Nasal breathing pulls lymph fluid up from the lower portion of the body into the chest, to help with this circulation.

Nitric oxide is produced

You may have heard of athletes using beet juice to improve athletic performance. This is through the action of the high amount of nitrates found in the beets which the body can convert to nitric oxide.

Nasal breathing has a similar effect. The body produces more nitric oxide which has the effect of increasing blood vessel dilation and increasing blood flow, therefore contributing to the efficiency of oxygen and carbon dioxide transport in the body, thereby improving athletic performance.

Decreased breathing and heart rate

Nasal breathing leads to a reduction in the number of breaths taken as well as a decrease in heart rate, as we are breathing more deeply and more slowly than we would if we breathed through our mouths.

A decreased breathing rate also means that there is more time for oxygen to diffuse into the bloodstream compared with mouth breathing, as mentioned above.

Increased alpha brain waves

Breathing through the nose has the effect of increasing alpha brain waves. These are the brain waves that lead to increased concentration and focus, which may therefore help improve athletic performance.

Shortened recovery time

Nasal breathing during exercise can shorten the time taken to recover from the exercise. As previously discussed, nasal breathing is more efficient and therefore less taxing on the body, meaning that it is easier for your body to recover.

Increased endurance capacity

A study has shown that nasal breathing during exercise can actually increase endurance capacity. As we can more efficiently take up oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, we are able to push harder for longer than if we were mouth breathing.

Reduction in sympathetic nervous system activation

This is arguably the biggest effect of nasal breathing during exercise as it has many run-on effects.

It was found that when breathing through the nose rather than the mouth during exercise, the galvanic skin response (think lie detector test — the method used to detect stress) showed a significantly reduced stress response.

Breathing through the nose lessens the activation of the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system, keeping the body in a state of relaxation. The body does not become stressed out, which can contribute to lower perceived exertion, quicker recovery, and increased endurance capacity.

Lower perceived exertion

Breathing through the nose during exercise makes the exercise feel easier through the mechanism of increased oxygen uptake efficiency as well as the decreased activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

Carbon dioxide tolerance is also increased when breathing nasally, which means you won’t feel fatigued as quickly as you would with mouth breathing.

Gives you an extra “gear”

The cool thing with being able to nasal breathe during exercise is that when you need to kick it up a notch, you’ve got a whole other gear to tap into. When you need that extra power output, you can start breathing through your mouth in order to increase your intensity.

More fat burned

Nasal breathing during exercise increases fat burning compared with breathing through the mouth. Turning fat into energy requires oxygen, and because nasal breathing increases the efficiency of oxygen uptake, we are able to burn more fat.

Implementation

You need to start slow, and only work with what you can handle. It might take weeks to build up a tolerance, but it will be worth it.

I started trying to nasal breathe while walking up the 200 steps near my house. Initially, I could only take about 4 or 5 steps before I was gasping for air. This isn’t the ideal way to learn to nasal breathe. But now I can do the entire thing twice through without opening my mouth once. It took a few months of practice to get to this stage.

Exercise at a pace that allows you to keep breathing through your nose. If you feel yourself wanting to take a breath through your mouth, slow down until you’re comfortable again. You can slowly increase your pace each week until you can nasal breathe at the full pace of whatever exercise it is you’re doing.

Conclusion

Nasal breathing has so many benefits for exercise performance. From increasing fat burning to producing alpha brain waves and nitric oxide, almost every aspect of exercise performance is benefited. Start slow and build your way up to doing all of your exercise while breathing only through your nose. The benefits will be endless.

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