Your lungs work by contracting a muscle in your rib cage called the diaphragm. This pulls air into the empty chamber of your lungs by creating a negative pressure. In your lungs, the air drawn in is routed to little sacks called alveoli, where carbon dioxide is expelled and oxygen taken onboard. That’s the mechanics - but like any machine, there’s some tweaking you can do to maximize your intake.
November 12, 2021
4 breathing tips that make for better cyclists
Cycling is one of the purest forms of endurance exercise there is - which means the critical factor is simply this - how much oxygen can your body deliver to your muscles and how efficient is it at doing so? Well - it will be no surprise to hear that breathing can make a massive difference - not only to your capacity on the bike, but to reducing your heart rate and reducing your overall energy consumption. Sadly, although you’ve been doing it all your life, people’s breathing techniques can really negatively impact their riding.
1. Engage your diaphragm
Like any muscle, the diaphragm gets stronger with use, and though it’s impossible not to use it, it’s easy to use it less than optimally. Hunching over, sitting down and poor posture can all encourage shallow breathing, which is essentially slacking on the part of your diaphragm.
Rather than fully filling your lungs in one longer breath, shallow breathing only partially fills your lungs, and similar to pedaling, increases the “deadspot” of inefficiency - if you’re taking more breaths, the more time spent between breathing in and out is more time not breathing at all. Fewer deeper breaths will provide the oxygen you require on the bike, reduce the amount of time you’re between breaths, and strengthen your diaphragm and therefore lung capacity.
2. In through the mouth, out through the nose.
It’s simple, bigger aperture, higher volume, increased efficiency. While you may see riders poker facing on the climb, when the going gets hard, they’ll start opening their mouths and breathing out through their noses.
3. Actively breathe out - or zooming
Most people look upon exhaling as being passive. It’s normally the relaxing of the diaphragm rather than the contraction. This is all well and good until you’re halfway up an alpine climb and you need to get more air into your body. Well - one trick that may help is actively trying to expel air through your nose. Accelerating the process of breathing fully, expelling air with force through the nostrils, can increase the amount of time you’re drawing in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide at a faster rate.
4. Be self aware
Okay, okay, not in a negative sense - we don't mean that you should be embarrassed about your breathing - but there’s nothing like listening to your body for picking up on errors and making improvements.
It’s easy to let breathing slip from deep to shallow, even over a short period of time - being aware of your breathing will really have an impact on how you manage it - and often, that’s a major part in sustaining these improvements.
So what are you waiting for?
Try putting those tips into practice on your bike - perhaps try and reduce your breathing on tempo efforts by limiting breaths to pedal strokes - one inhale every three pedal strokes and one exhale every three. We're pretty sure you'll pretty soon start to see some results.