I make no secret of the fact that I am a horribly slow swimmer, despite working on it for years. One of the things that I struggled with for the first couple seasons was getting rhythmic breathing. I have learned to exhale completely underwater, and I alternate sides, but I still have to breathe twice as often as most other swimmers I see.
In addition, every time I have ever had a physical, they have commented on my lousy lung capacity. It is consistently below average, and one time they even asked if I had ever been on oxygen. Everything else is completely normal. Also, I do not have asthma and chest x-rays are clear, and I have never smoked or lived with smokers. I even have no problem running or cycling at high altitude, despite living at about 1000’.
So I am starting to suspect that the slow swimming and the craptastic lung capacity are related, which leads to my question. Does anyone know of specific drills, exercises, whatever that can be used to improve lung capacity? What can I do to train my body to suck in more air?
I was in band for 7 years. Maybe take up playing a musical instrument that requires the musician to generate the air movement. I always thought that it helped train breath control.
Lung capacity normally scales with height and torso length. I don’t know physiologically what would limit how deep you can take a breath. Maybe some malformation of the diaphragm. Usually he heart and lungs adapt proportional to metabolic output. You can’t actually train your heart and lungs. You train muscles to generate more output and the heart, lungs and related systems to supply energy to fuel the muscles, adapt adapt accordingly. You heart and diaphragm are always the most well conditioned muscle in your body and always exceed the fitness of all other muscles. Can you imagine you heart or diaphram muscle cramping, or getting fatigued? You’d die. Yes, it can happen, but usually only with other underlying issues or complications.
I don’t think you’re actually asking for how to increase capacity, but rather, how to improve efficiency of the cardio-vascular system. That’s what you do when you spend time on higher altitude, you become more efficient using the oxygen, not increasing the volume you inhale.
I have slightly lower than average lung capacity (measured about 20 years ago). However, I normally breathe every 1.5 seconds while swimming (do the math yourself: figure out your time for a length of the pool, subtract a couple of seconds for the turn and break-out, count your number of strokes per length, and divide the former by the latter). I’m guessing you don’t breathe anywhere near that frequently.
“What can I do to train my body to suck in more air?”
Breathing is like cardiac output: if your stroke volume is small, then you increase your stroke rate. Don’t get enough air per breath? Breathe more often. That means breathing every stroke on one side, and increasing your turnover.
I suspect your lower lung capacity and your slow swimming conspire to make your swimming even worse. Raise your turnover, and you’ll likely go faster, and get more breaths per minute in, to boot.
Ken (“klehner”) has already hit on all the main points so i’ll just add on that most top distance swimmers, and actually most swimmers in any race of 100 yd or longer, breath every cycle of their arms. A few swimmers with very high turnover rate, e.g. 90 str/min or more, will skip a breath or alternate breath every 3rd stroke, but even they don’t usually do this all the time, but rather maybe just once per length. I think it’s your alternate breathing that is causing your problems but, if you want to practice breathing on both sides, just breath on one side down and then the opp side on way back. Breath every cycle of your arms and this will in essence give you 50% more air each length, e.g., let’s assume you’re taking 18 str/length, this implies 6 breaths/length if you alt breath, but 9 breaths per length if you breath every 2 strokes. Also, as Ken said, increasing your turnover rate will give you more air and prob help you swim faster.
After the Vo2 max thread I wanted to ask how many swimmers can sprint a 25M 15 sc +/- with no breath, even on repeat with suitable rest. I think that is a good test of functional capacity in the pool at least.
In order to build the lungs or diaphragm you have to tax the system. Seems to be best done after 30-60min of priming up - hill repeats running, or hold the clock swimming (50M repeats), tackle hills on the bike.
By far the best for me was competition, hockey shifts are all-out repeats. Mind blowing stuff. Only sport where I ever pushed it to dry heaves. Some nights we’d be short staffed and have to play the minimum, 7 skaters. Whoa.
I’ve started to build the lungs back up a bit and I have to say, besides the running, diet has been a major part of that effort.
I think something that beign left out is that the sensation of being out of breath, is the drop in blood PH from increase blood CO2 concentrations. You respond by increasing breath rate. With swimming however, breathing rate is limited. So you have 2 options. You need to either increase your breathing rate by breathing every stroke (2 strokes), and/or by increasing your fitness so your body processes CO2 more effeceintly.
Consider that very fit pro cyclist can sustain 400W for a long period of time. An average athlete the same size might only be able to sustain 200W over that same period. Is that cyclist breathing 2x as fast? No. Is their lung capacity double? Not likely. Is their blood flow rate 2x? not quite, but its’ a lot higher stroke volume. Their cardiovascular system has adapted to process oxygen and CO2 more effectively by increasing red blood cell concentrations, blood volume, density of blood vessels among other things to increase capacity.
So again, your looking to adapt, not just draw in a larger volume of air. You won’t gain this by holding your breath, you’ll gain some by going to high altitude, but the adaptations are somewhat short lived. You need to train more,. make your cardio system more effective.
So you can say your building lung capacity, but in most cases your are not. You might gain a little more functional capacity, but your lungs don;t actually increase in size. Instead the whole system adapts, and it adapts passively to you metabolic output… not the other way around.
I think something that beign left out is that the sensation of being out of breath, is the drop in blood PH from increase blood CO2 concentrations. You respond by increasing breath rate. With swimming however, breathing rate is limited. So you have 2 options. You need to either increase your breathing rate by breathing every stroke (2 strokes), and/or by increasing your fitness so your body processes CO2 more effeceintly.
Consider that very fit pro cyclist can sustain 400W for a long period of time. An average athlete the same size might only be able to sustain 200W over that same period. Is that cyclist breathing 2x as fast? No. Is their lung capacity double? Not likely. Is their blood flow rate 2x? not quite, but its’ a lot higher stroke volume. Their cardiovascular system has adapted to process oxygen and CO2 more effectively by increasing red blood cell concentrations, blood volume, density of blood vessels among other things to increase capacity.
So again, your looking to adapt, not just draw in a larger volume of air. You won’t gain this by holding your breath, you’ll gain some by going to high altitude, but the adaptations are somewhat short lived. You need to train more,. make your cardio system more effective.
So you can say your building lung capacity, but in most cases your are not. You might gain a little more functional capacity, but your lungs don;t actually increase in size. Instead the whole system adapts, and it adapts passively to you metabolic output… not the other way around.
I think something that begin left out is that the sensation of being out of breath, is the drop in blood PH from increase blood CO2 concentrations. You respond by increasing breath rate. With swimming however, breathing rate is limited. So you have 2 options. You need to either increase your breathing rate by breathing every stroke (2 strokes), and/or by increasing your fitness so your body processes CO2 more efficiently.
Gawd dang, I hate that out of breath feeling, I really do. I am sure anyone who learned to swim as recent history can relate. It happens a lot! I found the best way to “open the pipes” & a lot like blowing carbon out of a V-12 Ferrari engine, is to:
Warm up, I call it priming. Minimum prime is 20 minutes, preferable longer to an hour
Then hammer the system into lung buster mode
Recover, then repeat as long as you can handle it
I noticed a difference after every race I did, which was pretty cool. Again no science here, but this is where I felt I’ve made the most gains aerobically, now in conjunction with the dietary. Diet part is pretty basic, specifically paying attention to mineral balance (+potassium, + magnesium, no sodium, no caffeine). All that stuff goes directly into your blood!
25M sprint no breath @ 15s +/- is just a benchmark test. We know some of the world class sprinters can do 50M no breath ~25 Secs.
I remember back in day, before I could swim a stroke, doing underwater BS for 25M, hitting the wall and turning it around for another 1/2 length.
I make no secret of the fact that I am a horribly slow swimmer, despite working on it for years. One of the things that I struggled with for the first couple seasons was getting rhythmic breathing. I have learned to exhale completely underwater, and I alternate sides, but I still have to breathe twice as often as most other swimmers I see.
In addition, every time I have ever had a physical, they have commented on my lousy lung capacity. It is consistently below average, and one time they even asked if I had ever been on oxygen. Everything else is completely normal. Also, I do not have asthma and chest x-rays are clear, and I have never smoked or lived with smokers. I even have no problem running or cycling at high altitude, despite living at about 1000’.
So I am starting to suspect that the slow swimming and the craptastic lung capacity are related, which leads to my question. Does anyone know of specific drills, exercises, whatever that can be used to improve lung capacity? What can I do to train my body to suck in more air?
Not going to totally agree or disagree with anyone here, but want to add that you are referring to 2 things. Lung capacity and ventilatory strength. The lung muscles have shown to be stronger and have more endurance in swimmers (yes those muscles fatigue too) for a variety of reasons. 1 of which is the fact that your breathing against a resistance which is unique to swimming. Otherwise fit people struggle to breathe against the pressure the water places on the lung cavity. That takes strength and conditioning, and likely your issue. That conditioning in turn increases the capacity itself (more robust and inflated lungs) while at the same time the fitness makes each breath more effective in terms of oxygen transfer.
I never ever would have bought one, but was give a Training Mask as a gift for the guy who likes to experiment with training techniques. I had seen the promotions. From my experience as an MD I questioned the concept of making lungs stronger or emulating altitude training. Lungs don’t get stronger and there is nothing about the device that would alter oxygen concentration.
To show some enthusiasm for what I thought was a useless device I wore the mask for short periods of time walking around the house and when reading. What I found was the resistance in the system would stimulate inspiratory effort proportional to the number of open vents in the inspiratory valves. With few valve open this was no small effort, engaging intercostal and diaphragmatic muscles to the level of hitting the wall while racing. I was now experiencing inspiratory muscle training, a component of pulmonary rehabilitation, that I had prescribed for patients.
I started using the mask for 30-45 minutes while reading, reducing vent opening from wide open of 8, to two. Within a week I had improved the compliance of my chest wall. After 3 months of use I now read with 1 opening taped 50% closed, sort of like inhaling through a single highly congested nostril. I routinely use the mask on the bike trainer for 60-90 minutes with 3 openings, and run 2-3 miles with 4 openings.
The results have been interesting. My ability to increase the volume of a breath that is fixed into a time constraint while swimming has improved with the ability to increase inspiratory pressure. When running or biking my tidal volume goes beyond the old stop point reflecting an improved tidal volume. I wish I had measured a before and after, but I would estimate a 10% improvement.
It has been interesting to selectively train inspiratory function and see functional improvement under standard conditions
I have nothing to do with the company, and if wasn’t a gift I would not have one.
My problem is definitely not the cardio that other people are implying. If it were, it would affect other activities, but it doesn’t. My swim is so disproportional that I went from last place to first place female between T1 and T2 of an oly race a couple years ago. So what would you recommend to improve the ability to breathe against the resistance that is unique to swimming? More intervals? Is there some type of core exercise? The respiratory mask that Sametime talks about? It seems like there should be something that I can do.
My problem is definitely not the cardio that other people are implying. If it were, it would affect other activities, but it doesn’t. My swim is so disproportional that I went from last place to first place female between T1 and T2 of an oly race a couple years ago. So what would you recommend to improve the ability to breathe against the resistance that is unique to swimming? More intervals? Is there some type of core exercise? The respiratory mask that Sametime talks about? It seems like there should be something that I can do.
There’s lots of options out there if you look around. The easy answer is to copy what swimmers do. Breath control. Swim some sets breathing every 3, 5, 7. Do a little high intensity, not for the arms, but to get you to breathe heavy during a set. People (ok, not people, triathletes) often mistake breath control sets as an attempt at altitude training or something. It’s not. It will increase lung volume/capacity and strengthen the diaphram and rib muscles, but it’s not going to force more hemoglobin in your blood.
The other piece of this puzzle is to learn not to panic just b/c you can’t breathe freely. flip turns are great for this. A hard set with flip turns forces you to control your breathing as you push off under water. Learn to relax and control yourself for that second or two and understand that a slight burn for a second underwater doesn’t mean your drowning. Flip that switch in your head and you will notice big changes quickly.
there isn’t anything that can increase lung capacity unfortunately. My lung function has decreased steadily for the last decade, so I have investigated this in some depth…
The respiratory muscle training devices like the one sametime mentioned, can be helpful though.
If you don’t have any oxygen supply problems running, then it is very unlikely to be a lung function problem with swimming. As the swimmers say, breathe every cycle, try increasing turnover, and get some good coaching/technique analysis…