Breathe Your Way To Faster Fitness

Breathlessness is a common feature of exercise and although aerobic activity does provide training benefits to your breathing muscles, it’s not sufficient to elicit their full potential.

Your breathing muscles never really get trained enough to cope with the ‘heavy breathing’ that results from high-intensity exercise, and for this reason, it will always present an uncomfortable challenge during exercise and fitness training.

When you experience high-intensity fitness training that is above your lactate threshold, your breathing moves out of its comfort zone and increases steeply. And when your breathing muscles are weakened or fatigued, your breathing feels harder still. A useful analogy is to think about how much heavier a barbell feels on the 12th repetition than it did on the first.

Inspiratory muscle training with POWERbreathe IMT has been scientifically proven to strengthen your breathing muscles to help them cope with the demands of breathing at this high intensity. It is often dubbed, “dumbbells for your diaphragm”, because your main breathing muscle which it trains to become stronger, is your diaphragm.

Research and trials suggest that during heavy exercise, blood flow (and hence oxygen delivery) to your exercising muscles is restricted because your breathing muscles fatigue, impairing performance. This process is called a metaboreflex and is a ‘survival’ instinct. Basically, your body is choosing the need to breathe over the need to ‘perform’. But, with a well-trained and strong diaphragm, greater blood flow to your limbs can be maintained and performance improved.

Expiratory muscle fatigue also impairs exercise performance, especially during heavy, whole-body exercise when you’re breathing heavily and panting. Just as you would use weights to improve limb strength, using a POWERbreathe Expiratory Muscle Training (EMT) device with its variable resistance will improve your expiratory muscle strength and stamina, thereby improving your exercise performance.

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POWERbreathe IMT and EMT subject your breathing muscles to an appropriate training resistance to increase breathing strength, power and stamina. Research into inspiratory muscle training and exercise performance revealed the universal reduction in whole body effort sensation. This means that after 4-weeks of POWERbreathe IMT, people didn’t feel they were exercising as hard and were therefore able to push themselves that bit further, increasing their training intensity and getting fitter faster.

Using POWERbreathe IMT will help you warm-up more effectively, as well as, cool-down and recover more quickly. Research from Brazil found that breathing against a small inspiratory load straight after exercise reduces lactate by 16%. In fact, just 5-mins after using an inspiratory load, lactate concentration was equivalent to 15-mins passive recovery.

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