Lung Training 101: Breathe Better, Perform Better

And they say that the surface area of your lungs is equivalent to that of a tennis court. So if you were to actually unravel all of your alveoli, each one of us, you could actually spread.

that surface area, that alveolar layer, that's how thin it is. You could spread that right over the length of a tennis court.

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. This is the next installment of our series on VO2 max and how we can improve our limiters to increase the capacity of our bodies ability to utilize oxygen. Our first episode was about measuring VO2 max and the accuracy of watches and other devices to calculate our oxygen consumption capacity. But today,

we're talking about how our lungs can be a limiter and how, what we can do to improve the function of our lungs so that we improve our VO2 max. In fact, up to 50 % of elite athletes get something that is called exercise induced arterial hypoxemia or EIH. So Paul, in a training science podcast you did recently, you talked about how the lungs are one of the four limiters of a high VO2 max. Could you talk about how the lungs

can be a limiter and in what situations do the lungs become a significant limiter?

Yes. Well, thanks for that, Paul. And yeah, they absolutely can be, right? So remember, Elias on the Training Science podcast, we were speaking about him on our intro. We're in sort of, you know, pillar number one of the potential limiters of your VO2 max. If we want to, if we think that's important for us. Remember, just as a review with VO2 max, we're talking about taking the air

the oxygen that's in the atmosphere, taking it into our lungs, transferring that into the bloodstream, getting the heart to pump that blood around the circulation, delivering it mostly to the muscles in the case of exercise and for the muscles to taking up that oxygen and using it ⁓ to convert the fuel that we've consumed, fat and carbs, into energy.

where we can transfer that ⁓ chemical energy into mechanical energy. So this is sort of why it's important. Remember also why this is important. This is one of the most important things when we're about longevity. you know, according to Peter Atiyah, outlive, you have a high VO2 max. It's the number one predictor of how ⁓ long you're gonna live, how well you're going to live. So it gives us function. Aerobic clean energy.

you know, just going at it and they're right at VO2 max. You know they're at VO2 max. Well, you take 50 % of those athletes, as Paul said, 50 % of them are hypoxemic. In other words, if we were to put a little saturation monitor on their earlobe or on their finger, just like you might see in, if you happen to visit the hospital, you'll see the medical team put an oximeter on your finger.

Well, you'll see that percentage actually go down. Right now you're sitting listening to this podcast and if you're not exercising and just listening to it, your saturation is sitting at 98%. In other words, all of the red blood cells are just about fully saturated with oxygen, but something happens on the lungs of the limiter in that maximal exercise. Okay, so that's.

EIH or exercise-induced hypoxemia. And that's one of the reasons why you won't get quite as high of VO2 max ⁓ in that context in the elite athlete, but also in disease cases as well. you know, anything like, you know, asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, any of these sorts of issues, though lung can be a limiter. So I'll just sort of start there. That's where it can...

you

Eliminer. ⁓ Paul or Marianna, any comments?

Let's keep asking questions.

My rabbit hole will go in a little too deep on this one.

It did. You already answered my question, so I'm going to swing it. In a case where there's like forest fires or air pollution, does that affect your oxygen saturation?

Not at all. ⁓

Mariana thinks it is. Paul likes it.

⁓ I mean, it could, ⁓ in extreme, in extreme cases, but more, I think it's more almost an irritant at that point in the game, right? Or you've got to think about the, you know, it's good actually to think about the, the lung and, and sort of how it's set up, right? And you know, remember that it's.

it branches out, right? It goes from the bronchioles and down into the aioli. And they say that the surface area of your lungs is equivalent to that of a tennis court. So if you were to actually unravel all of your alveoli, each one of us, you could actually spread.

that surface area, that alveolar layer, that's how thin it is. You could spread that right over the length of a tennis court. So you think about that, right? And you think of particulates coming in from a forest fire, smoking, whatever, you know, all of those. And then there's like, there's little, you know, nervous tissue that's all around that. that's gonna, it causes irritation ultimately. So you don't wanna have that, you know, where I'm at in British Columbia.

inevitably we get forest fires at various times in the summertime and it's very, you know, it's not enjoyable to go out there and exercise. It can get so bad, but you just don't, you want to exercise indoors as opposed to outdoors. Always very unfortunate. ⁓ So yeah, that's something you have to be careful of. It's probably not an in, well, the reason why it's going to cause potentially EIH is it's not going to

you might not ventilate enough because you don't want to almost. So I guess there's certain contexts for sure where that's going to cause for an EIH and exercise induced hypoxemia. So, but what I do want to talk about, I'm going to ask the question for you. I want to talk about the four little areas where ⁓ EIH can actually, I guess, be like why it actually happens in us.

Mm-hmm.

Good, that's

it. ⁓

and why it can lower

our VO2 max, and then what we can do about it. ⁓ And what we can all do about trying to use tools to increase our VO2 max. Because I think that's what everyone wants to know. Can I start in there? Okay. Okay, perfect. Okay, so first of all, there's like, yeah, these are, I'm geeking out a little bit, but basically there's, first of all, there's this, there's, for whatever reason, scientists have discovered that there's this mismatch between the heart

Yes, please do.

Let's go.

And we're going to talk about heart next time. Their hearts beat so fast and with so much blood that it speeds around through that alveoli, that tennis court, that it basically, it's moving so quickly through there that it actually doesn't pick up the blood onto the red blood cell. So pretty incredible there to think that that's a proven mechanism.

And then in some of us for genetic reasons, we have this shunt issue. In other words, like the blood takes a shortcut and it skips the lungs entirely. And this is a very strange thing. We basically just go straight from venous to arterial blood without actually picking up any blood. So that's just a genetic thing. You can't do anything about that one. And then this one is the last one is this alveolar hypoventilation. And that is for some reason,

we just, get lazy with our lungs and we could actually ⁓ move them a lot quicker. We could ventilate a lot quicker. And, ⁓ but for whatever reason, we just get a little bit lazy or we're not training those, the lung muscles. Remember, it's not the lungs per se that are causing this, that we can do anything about this here. It's the respiratory muscles that are attached to your brain, right? That you can actually do something about.

And that's what we'll talk about next, I think. But those are the key ones, the key reasons from a geek out physiology sort of standpoint of why you might not be, why you might be actually getting this, having this issue ultimately with not getting enough oxygen into your bloodstream.

So the saturation is the actual oxygen molecules in your bloodstream? Is that what that means? So when it's 50 % that means there's just less oxygen in the blood or in... Okay.

That's right. That's

right. And if you're at 50%, we're pretty, you you are feeling that. Like, so we're talking, you're probably up at you know, at Everest Base Camp or higher, and you're starting, and you are really, really not moving quickly around. you know, I was, and, you know, I did an altitude project in my physiology ⁓ time and was right across from

Okay.

from Everest Base Camp at Gokyo-ri and moving around there, walking around there is very, very challenging. And indeed our saturation was low. It wasn't as low as 50%, but if I'd kept going higher, I think when they're taking their final steps at the top of Everest, they're sitting around 50%. And that's why you see how slowly, these are incredible athletes that go to the top there, especially if they're going unsupported without supplemental O2.

These guys are, yeah, they're probably sitting around 50. When we're talking about what, the context we are, we're actually talking not as bad. We're actually talking more like 90%, which isn't too, too bad. But that's, that's, that's, you know, you're, you're missing a little bit there in your, in your bloodstream. You're probably the, the, the cutoff is 92%. If you go, you know, we're, we're sitting right now, we're at 98 towards 98 and a hundred percent. That means all four.

of the hemoglobin molecules that are in a red blood cell, they are fully saturated. But, and if we were 50%, then only two of those ⁓ red, those two of those, ⁓ what is it, hemoglobin attachment points for oxygen are saturated. And, and yeah, so, so that's, that's kind of the, that's kind of the setup there. So in your red blood cells, hemoglobin for attachment points, and it's like,

you know, can you actually get them fully saturated 100 % or are you like, are a lot of them sort of sitting around just only three attachment points are set up.

If he's got EIH.

Mm-hmm.

I guess it is. Doesn't matter.

Good point, for sure. ⁓ Well, Tim Noakes would tell you it doesn't really matter. It's just really, all about the, ⁓ you know, it's about the mind and the brain and the central governor. And that's, you know, it'll be what it'll be. ⁓ So that's a really good point you make. Does it matter? You're right. Well, we're talking about a bunch of physiology, but it might just be observations that we're kind of making. But all of these observations actually occur. And it's just, you know, it's such a good

Mm-hmm.

Good point. Like at the end of the day, matters is you moving forward. So, ⁓ you know, we get all ⁓ focused on the nuances of trying to get this big VO2 max, but, you know, maybe it doesn't matter too, too much, but I actually going back to, it does actually matter. So, and I know this because when we start to talk now about some of the tools that we can use to change this number,

Mm-hmm.

they increase not only your VO2 max, but they also increase your performance. So there's always kind of like, it's all related, right? Like it's related to the mind, the mind's gonna feel better. Surely we know that when we throw back to the sauna, right? I know with this open fire sauna, I know that when I open the damper on my sauna and I let more oxygen into the fire that's burning in there, it burns hotter. And it's the same thing for us.

So my thinking is that it doesn't matter because he's only doing three minutes 50 once, but if he were to repeat it with the oxygen deficit, then he would feel it. Like when we're doing VO2 max sessions, we don't want to get hypoxic because we are repeating the efforts.

Totally.

many, many times. But if you know you have a full minute once all out, I don't think it matters at that point. Like you train to withstand that deficit and that's it.

Yeah, you do.

For sure. So yeah, you're training your mind. But the other thing that you also train when you do VO2 max efforts. So when we do your 30 30s, MJ, we don't even really know, we don't even notice it, but we're training, we actually train our respiratory muscles during that. So SoCal is the best example always, right? Because we always hear him breathing hard into his microphone.

But that's his respiratory muscles. He's training those respiratory muscles. There's a couple different ways you can go about actually changing all of these sorts of things. And again, back to the fourth mechanism of EIH that I mentioned, the alveolar hypoventilation. In other words, your ventilation ultimately isn't sufficient to saturate all of those ⁓ hemoglobin elements. So what you want to do, you want to ventilate more.

You want to open the damper in your fire ultimately. And how you can do that is, number one, training at VO2Max. So, VO2Max training. ⁓ And if you feel your lungs and you feel the respiratory lungs, your diaphragm and your intercostals, you feel they're sore a little bit, that's a really good sign. But you can also use these tools that are out there too, right? Like PowerBreathe, Breathe Way Better. ⁓

go to altitude, so all these various different, nice pull, you've got one too. So yeah, and it's like these are other ways you can specifically train the respiratory muscles so that you, remember I mentioned you get lazy for some reason, you turn it off, you don't think about it as much. There's also this thing called a metaporeflex, where there's a reflex inhibition.

Yep. I've got one too.

of the respiratory muscles. for whatever reason, when we get fatigued, it's almost like that's the first thing to go. I don't know why we're wired that way, but for whatever reason, there are these afferents that go into your respiratory muscles and you don't ventilate as well. So you can counter that by specifically training with some of these devices as well.

Now all Ironman athletes are buying PowerBreathe. But that's a funny thing that because when I did my Masters and Bachelor, we were told, no, lungs, you can't ⁓ improve your ventilation. Right?

Hahaha

Yeah.

Yeah, know we were. there's, because there were studies that really sort of showed that, right? So the small studies, small subject numbers, and you know, didn't really show too, too much. But it's where this is, where we get better and better now is we get more down to stealing a note out of your presentation I just watched, MJ, but basically getting down to the individual. So in certain individuals,

will have these deficits, right? So it's all about kind of figuring out, well, what's your situation? Do you not have this alveolar hypoventilation, know, a ventilation profuse and mismatch? Are you ventilating well? Then great, no problem. It's probably not going to do anything for you. But if you feel like your respiratory system could be a limiter, absolutely, this is a place where you... And VO2Max matters to you.

probably does to a lot of us these days. This is where you could gain a couple percentages.

Mm-hmm.

Let's take a step back for just a second to make sure that I understand. You know, because E I H well, let me ask the question. Does lung capacity or lung size have an impact on VO2 max or are we just talking about O2 saturation?

That's a nice question. And again, the the Dargon answer is, ⁓ is it depends. One of the key findings is in the literature of EIH, and this is a whole field, right, that I just happened to stumble upon ⁓ where I did my master's and bachelor's was at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and there are huge ⁓ lung ⁓ researchers in the exercise field.

So I was following all of the guys that are sort of studying this, but, one of the key things they found in general, if we're going to take a group of women and a group of men, the prevalence of EIH in women is on the magnitude of another 50 % higher. And the reason is because of the generally smaller lungs. So their tennis court, remember the surface area of the tennis court? So, you know, they're kind of playing the...

the smaller lines and well, the guys are playing more the double lines. ⁓ So in general, and it's just basically due to the size of the individual. Of course, we can have small men, we can have large women and that will throw it out. So again, coming down to the individual, smaller individuals, ⁓ a lot of women ⁓ have more of a challenge here and then largers, ⁓ again, the...

the lung tends to ⁓ change in terms of its size most correlated with your height. So if you're a tall individual, your lung all of a sudden tends to be tall as well, right? And your surface area kind of increases and conversely for the smaller stature individual. So that's the key correlate, Paul. And then you're gonna have all the individual differences too. Remember,

the weird thing, the shunt as well, which is really, really crazy, right? Like you get these for whatever reason, strange defects where you've got this shunting occurring. In other words, by the shunt, means it like takes a shortcut. You've got these blood vessels ⁓ in your physiology that go for some reason just around, they just bypass the lung altogether.

So that one's a bit of a weird one, but that kind of creates it too. So much individual variation goes on. So it really just depends on you.

So does the lung size affect your VO2 max? So if you are a small person, your VO2 max is going to be less? OK. Can be.

Yeah, can be, it certainly

can be, yeah. And again, you'll find outliers in both cases all the time. But then there's, you'll be, you're a smaller person, you'll have other advantages too, right? Like you're all of a sudden tend to be now better in the heat. You tend to be producing less metabolic.

energy, right? And we know that there's great examples of some of the best marathoners in the world. They're very small individuals. and you know, they're having no issues with their VO2 max there, right? Of course, maybe their threshold's higher, but maybe heat is no longer a factor. So yeah, I mean, it's all just kind of fascinating. But at the end of the day, it comes down to you, the individual listening. It's like, okay, take this info and do I want to...

play around with some of these toys or my training to be able to really focus on the lungs, pillar number one here that we're gonna talk about in all these areas, to enhance my VO2 max and hopefully performance.

okay, so let's talk a little bit about how you might go about training your lungs, right? So I have to give credit to Steve Neal, who we had on the podcast, and you can listen to the Steve Neal's podcast, the Training Science podcast we did with him. But yeah, ultimately, at the end of the day, you treat the training of your lungs the exact sort of same way that you would treat your training of any system in your body.

Okay, so like, you know, you're in terms of your, your cycling, you're, you know, your cycling training, your running training, your swimming training, really the same sort of things that we do in Athletica, except now you would apply these specifically with some of the devices. So in the breathe way better scenario, right? You've got this, got this bag that you, that you breathe into and you can also

get the app that goes with it as well. It has kind of a guidance and a metronome on it that will talk you through a certain frequency of breathing, right? So you work to increasing that frequency with generally large, deep breaths of this so that you are breathing through the full range of motion ultimately ⁓ in your breathing.

and you follow this time course and it winds up being challenging because it's out of sync with what you actually need. So you sort of are challenging the muscular endurance, the strength endurance of the respiratory muscles. So just like you're doing an SC session, strength endurance session in Athletica, you're starting doing the same thing specifically with the lung, ⁓ sorry, not the lung, the respiratory musculature.

you

All right, and you're also linking into the mind as well, right? You're looking at the timing of these things too. And I always notice that after I do a series of training on the Breathe Way better, I can all of a sudden do my VO2 max work so much better because I can actually focus almost, especially towards VO2 max, these are high power outputs when I'm really having to breathe harder.

it's, I almost take like, I don't have that lung fatigue anymore, right? So there's just, there's no fatigue that's in the lung respiration muscles. So that's one. And then of course, just like we progress our training in Athletica, right? And notice how Athletica just makes every week a little bit harder, a little bit harder, a little bit harder, right? It's following the, you know, the algorithm. It's just, you want to do the same thing with a breathe way better bag, right? So you want to increase both the duration

that you're on the breatheway better for, and potentially also the frequency of those breaths. you're working, you're sort of on the slower frequency to begin with, but you'll be working towards faster and faster and faster respirations, right? Yeah, so that's kind of, that's the key thing. And then the other one that you can add in there as well.

It's probably not as effective as the Breathe Way Better. If you had to buy one device, it'd probably be the Breathe Way Better bag or that kind of thing. But if you also wanted to add one as well, you could use the Power Breathe. And the Power Breathe is almost like doing a maximal strength training session ⁓ with your respiratory muscles, right? So you're breathing all out maximally in, maximally in, maximally out. So you're working on both the inspiratory

muscles and the expiratory muscles as well. So you're kind of strengthening both of those so that you can add that one in as well. you kind of, how I've done this before is I've sort of done breathe away better bag on one day and then the next day I'll do the, you know, the power breathe on the next day kind of thing. So I kind of swap it around just like you would do in an endurance training program. So yeah, and you get better and better and better until you get to the place where

you're almost, you're noticing it in training, especially when you're doing key sets like 30, 30s and you're just like, yeah, got it there. And then you can kind of bleed it out a little bit. You've periodized that in and you pull that out. ⁓ And so again, I'll be, I remember if you recall listeners ⁓ that I'm working towards my, to keep my VO2 max above my age. So I'm just about to start a series of, yeah.

breathe way better ⁓ work and I'll let you know how goes.

Ladies and gentlemen, here we go. Prof just spilled the beans how he's taken his VO2 max to another level. I've noticed on the VO2 max essence that ⁓ you're breathing more forcefully and longer than the other

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Yeah, I think it's probably relates to the, you know, almost the, the breathe way better training that I've done. You know, it's like, have no relation with their relationship to the company, just so you know, right. But, yeah, but it's, yeah, you know, it's, yeah, I think it's probably just specifically the training, right? Like I I'm going, ⁓ you know, at the end of the day, we want to ventilate those lungs, right? We want to.

Mm-hmm.

No

Please send a check.

One billion dollars.

Mm-hmm.

increase ⁓ the flow volume loop of our inspiration and we want to increase the flow volume loop of the expiration. So the total ⁓ minute ventilation, you can increase that. That means like how much you're breathing in and out in any given ⁓ loop or cycle. You want to take full advantage of that so that we can ventilate the lungs. We want to push, we want like the, we're trying to get

whatever is here in our atmosphere, here into the lungs, right? So that that tennis court can suck it up into our bloodstream. So to do that, you've got to engage those respiratory muscles to their fullest capacity. And that might be what you're observing, MJ.

So can we do VO2 max training for our lungs?

cycling, running or swimming? Or do we need to use the bags, the devices to build up that capacity?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't think anyone knows the answer exactly, Paul. think again, it kind of comes down to it depends, but you certainly when we're doing any VO2 max training, long intervals or short intervals, and you're breathing hard, you're training those muscles. You have to, right? Because you have to ventilate. So you don't need a tool, but it's like if you're looking for like ⁓ that little bit of an extra edge,

you might get something a little bit more. And again, this is back to the Steve Neal podcast and the experiment that I did with him. ⁓ He showed that I could increase my VIA2 max because we actually measured it, right? It's like, okay, now we're gonna do a month of Breathe Way better training. And sure enough, it went up. just by ventilating and all the other factors as well kind of went up too, right? So this is kind of the beauty of few, you

you can actually, you need to test this as the individual on yourself. You will not know the answer. There's no black and white answer to this question. It does come down to you at the end of the day. How you're built, all that physiology I was geeking out about, you're an individual, you're going to have various degrees of all those various different mechanisms at play. ⁓ But there is some things you can tinker with to work towards enhancing your VO2 max. Enhance your VO2 max.

likely going to improve your performance. ⁓ The more oxygen we can burn at these high exercise intensities, or we can use at these high exercise intensities, the generally the greater performance you're going to have. You're going to beat your competitors, your own personal bests. So yeah.

What about submaximal intensities?

That's a good question. ⁓ You know, in theory, it's kind of, I think, the old adage, just like, well, why would you do strength training, Marianna, if you were just going to be doing submaximal intensities? How can strength training help you with submaximal intensities? What's that? Yeah, efficiency. like, if you're, you just think about like the ceiling that you've actually got, and you're, you know,

Efficiency. Efficiency.

Do you wanna work at that percentage of your ceiling? Or do you wanna work at that percentage of your ceiling, right? Like, I'm showing my fingers down here, like, so it's just like, if you're that strong up here, and you're only working down there sub maximally, you've got so much, so much more of a roof to kinda go, and it just means, yeah, more efficient and everything's easy.

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Marjaana or me check the show the links in the show notes for Marjaana Rakai and dr Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the athletes

that's easy for me to say Thanks for listening and have a great day.