This month’s Bullshit Report concerns nose breathing and running performance. But before we dive in, we’d like to issue an apology to any overscrupulous trainspotters already salivating at the thought of writing in to tell us what we got wrong. Sadly for you, we’re not going to call bullshit on nose breathing, we’re just going to lift an eyebrow and go, ‘Hmmmm.’
Nose breathing. Is it a fad or is it real? According to James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, the benefits of nasal breathing are very real and can—with the addition of other ‘forgotten’ breathing techniques— ‘jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines,’ which sounds like, to quote redditor pearlneckbrace_69, ‘a load of broscience wank.’ But if the 21,975 five-star reviews on Amazon are to be believed, making Nestor's recommended adjustments to your breathing might be life-changing. But can breathing through the nose make you a better runner?
Let’s look at you for a second. Notice now whether your mouth is open. Is it? It shouldn’t be. Not because breathing through your mouth is bad, but because you look stupid. The only time it’s ok to mouth-breathe is when your nose is blocked or you’ve been cast as ‘Lennie’ in a stage production of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, otherwise, keep your mouth closed and let air travel in and out of your nose. But what about when you’re running? Doesn’t it make sense to pull oxygen in through the larger airway of your mouth instead of your puny little nostrils? You’d think so. You’d also think it would make sense to leave the automatic process of breathing to its own devices; after all, you’ve been doing it without thinking since you exited the womb—why try to ‘fix’ it? Let’s check the science.
Ask any dork with a Bunsen burner and they’ll tell you the nose was designed for breathing and smelling—the mouth for eating, drinking, and telling jokes. The nose filters air before it reaches the lungs—the mouth draws in pollutants and bugs and stray pubic hairs that happen to be riding the breeze. We already know that. But what we didn’t know, you and I, is that the nose warms and moistens the air, which greatly improves the passage of oxygen to the bloodstream, whereas unregulated air drawn in by the mouth slows down oxygen uptake like a bastard. And because our nose holes are smaller than our mouth hole, they impose roughly 50% more resistance to the airstream, resulting in 10 to 20% more oxygen uptake. Huh? I know. It doesn’t make sense.
Here’s something really crazy about nose breathing: Air passing through your nose is slowed down by these tiny little shelves in your head called turbinates. The turbinates allow the air to mingle with nitric oxide—a gas produced in the nasal sinuses. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator and bronchodilator that expedites and augments oxygen transport throughout the body. Isn’t that nuts? It’s proof positive that you should always be breathing through your nose. But how can anyone be expected to breathe through their nose while running? That just sounds like yet another paragraph ending with a question.
Besides facilitating the correct action of the diagram—which is obviously going to help you run—some runners claim that nasal breathing is an excellent strategy for maintaining a slower pace on longer runs, the thinking being that if you need to breathe with your mouth, you’re going too fast. It’s recommended that most of your runs are low-intensity, Zone 2 efforts, and if you suck air through your nose, you just can’t go very fast. Unless you’ve got a beak like my mother used to have before she got rhinoplasty. Don’t worry, she never reads my shit. My mother had a massive bugger of a nose until about 1988. She looked like a toucan wearing a Joan Collins wig. She’d kiss your cheek and give you a black eye. I mean to tell you the woman had a schnoz like a prize-winning tromboncino zucchini. Wow, what a conk! Anyway, she got it fixed because she felt self-conscious. I don’t know why.
But I digress. We were talking about nose breathing and whether it makes you run better. I don’t know. There seems to be an equal amount of for and against on this one. For argument’s sake—and because I’ve tried it and almost passed out—I wanna say bullshit. So... I guess bullshit after all.
Are you a nose-breathing evangelist? Get at me here.
