Breathe To Win: 4 Ways to Squeeze the Most Benefit From Your Training without Changing Your Workout

“Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

A good game plan, months of training, and talent can get you far in the world of sports. That can come to a screeching halt if you’re too tired to go the distance.

In my early years as an amateur kickboxer, I ran 5 miles a day, trained 2-3 hours on top of that, and yet somehow just about every fight I lost was due to fatigue.

Well, when you start the round throwing 10 punches at full tilt in the span of 2 breaths, you can expect to literally gas out! ... Oops!

Had I known more about conserving energy expenditure through breath, I could have avoided some painful lessons and embarrassing losses.

Thankfully, I figured out how to control my breath, things started to fall into place and I started winning.

Breath is such a powerful tool, yet none of my coaches explained how to use it to my advantage. Lucky for you, you can learn from my experience!

Modulating Breathing Techniques

Think about it: A car transmission needs to shift gears through hilly terrain. Just because you’re used to driving in first and second gear doesn’t mean it will get you through the course. Flooring it in first gear will figuratively and literally burn our your engine!

In terms of what we do in the training space, you don’t breathe to meditate in a quiet setting the same as when you are trying to lift 2x your bodyweight off the ground or throwing explosive kick/punch combinations. There are specific ways to breathe based on the task at hand.

As my students, clients, and team all know: everything starts with proper breath. No matter what the activity, there is always a specific breath pattern to match it. (Think back to those gears shifting in your car.)

Interestingly, your breath also works as a means of monitoring your exertion, nervous system state and overall energy expenditure. The more excited, nervous or heightened your mental state becomes, the heavier and faster you breathe. The more relaxed you are, the slower and deeper you breathe.

Using Breath To Tap Into Power

In SUPER simple terms, your energy expenditure can be thought of as having 2 main phases: Aerobic, which relies on oxygen intake to produce energy and Anaerobic, which relies on stored glycogen.

To be clear, you can never truly isolate one type of energy pathway from the other, but our activities can determine the point where one type crosses over into the next. This point is called the anaerobic threshold.

At this point, your short term (10-30 second) glycogen reserves are close to depletion, and you literally start to weaken; i.e. strength tapers off. During this phase, the amount of oxygen you breath in doesn't make a huge difference, but simply coordinating your breathing pattern with your stride can help you extend that sprint interval closer to 30 seconds.

Imagine a high-intensity 10-15 second sprint on the straight portion of a running track, slowing down at the curve, and decelerating to a low-intensity slow walk to complete one lap. Technically you could virtually walk endlessly at the same pace as long as you're breathing enough oxygen and expelling enough carbon dioxide.

After some recovery time, you would be able to sprint again, but each successive interval of sprints would show significant decrease in speed.

While breathing optimally won't significantly improve your performance beyond your conditioning or genetics, it will indeed push you towards full physical potential. This doesn't seem significant, but none of us are walking anywhere close to full potential!

What Does Optimal Breathing Look Like?

Think about your exercise in terms of scale of intensity (ranging from meditation to one rep max). So what does this actually look like in practice? Here’s a short list…

1. Meditation and Recovery:

Breathing techniques like square breathing (inhale → hold → exhale → hold) and diaphragmatic breathing help slow the heart rate and maintain a relaxed state. Activating the parasympathetic nervous system aids recovery and builds focus.

2. Steady-State Exercise:

For low-intensity activities like technical, repetitive movements, steady inhalations and exhalations are essential. Sustaining energy for extended periods (30 minutes to 2 hours) requires shallow, controlled breathing and slow exhales. You should be able to hold an extended conversation at this rate of exertion.

3. Moderate Strength Training:

At moderate intensity (50% of 1-rep max), breathing provides structural support. Big inhales followed by restricted, slow exhales create intra-abdominal pressure, enhancing stability. This approach suits mid-to-high volume training (50-200 reps). At this intensity, you should start to feel your mouth going dry even though you are breathing in and out with your nose. This is starting to tap into your sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight mode).

4. Heavy Lifts and Explosive Power:

High-intensity activities (80-200% of 1-rep max) demand breath control for peak power. Big inhales and breath holds stabilize the core, while tapping into the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) unleashes adrenaline-driven strength. Low-volume efforts (15-25 reps) benefit most from this technique.

When you get past the external aspects (i.e. muscular tension, stabilization, coordination, etc,) of exercise, and start delving into variables like different rates of breath, nasal vs mouth breathing, diaphragmatic vs chest breathing, breath holds vs continuous breath, then your fitness journey starts to become a longevity practice. This is when fitness meets health.

Beyond Strength

Unfortunately modern life is filled with external distractions, leaving us unable to monitor our own state of awareness. It's easy to miss the clues that our bodies tell us through the breath, and we forget that we have the ability control our physiology by simply breathing properly.

The skill of breath isn’t limited to the training space; you can (and should) practice it anywhere at any time.

Even if you aren’t an expert, you can learn a lot by periodically stopping for a few seconds to pay attention to your breaths.

Are you breathing shallowly or deeply?
Is your breath occupying your chest or your belly?
Are you breathing with one nostril or both?

Try it out for a few breaths while you check in with your own body every now and then.

Think about your own training…

Do you focus on your breathing during workouts or daily tasks?
Which type of breathing do you find yourself using the most?
How can breath control improve your performance both inside and outside the training space?