Exercise and breathing – the key to Mo Farah’s Olympic gold success?

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Mo Farrah, and the Olympic 10km silver medalist America’s Galen Rupp, have been undertaking a focussed training regime by their coach and mentor Alberto Salazar. Alberto best known for his performances in the New York City Marathons in the early 1980s and his American track records of 13:11.93 for 5,000 m (July 6, 1982 – Stockholm) and 27:25.61 for 10,000 m – (June 26, 1982 – Oslo), has become a legend in the middle- and long-distance disciplines. Training elite athletes at the Nike Oregon Project, Alberto is known for complete focus, detail and novel-training techniques. One of those was to improve the breathing efficiency, through the intercostal muscles, of his athletes using RespiBelt.

RespiBelt is a specially constructed compression belt which allows you to train your breathing and chest muscles during exercise by providing an adjustable load. We are all very familar with training our biceps, legs, abs, by doing exercises such as bicep curls, squats and crunches, but what we don’t have, until now, is a way of training the inspiratory breathing muscles during exercise. Training our inspiratory muscles can improve our breathing efficiency, running economy, help with asthma, and make us use less energy. But please don’t look at the product and think you can use any old elastic belt. The team at Progressive Sports Technologies have spent years developing the right tension in the elastic. If the tension is too high it can overload the muscles, too low and you don’t get any benefit. If you get it just right, like in the RespiBelt, then you can achieve much better performance like the British Triathletes (wording from RespiBelt website):

“The first trial of early prototypes was performed with the support of British Triathlon and four of their TASS athletes over an 11 week period. The results of the training intervention proved very interesting. The participants significantly enhanced running economy measures, along with reduced sub-maximal oxygen utilisation and minute ventilation which was considered by British Triathlon scientists as being atypical of results expected due to habitual training adaptations. This prompted further investigation into the RespiBelt using a larger sample size with the addition of a control group. The second trial was performed with 12 competitive athletes over only a 4 week period. Additional measures were taken in addition to the measures previously investigated. All the measures showed positive changes compared to the control group who undertook the same training regime. Breathing endurance improved as did, sub-maximal oxygen consumption, % VO₂max, sub-maximal minute ventilation and heart rate. Further improvements in running economy, respiratory frequency and minute ventilation were also present.“

RespiBelt comes in 6 sizes that are derived by measuring your chest: X-Small – chest sizes 75 to 80cm; Small – chest sizes 81 to 88cm; Medium – chest sizes 89 to 96cm; L arge – chest sizes 97 to 106cm; and X-Large – chest sizes 107 to 118cm.

If you would like to purchase the best accessory for training breathing muscles then please click on this link to buy the RespiBelt.

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