Physical Performance
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
The human body’s potential to perform seemingly knows no bounds. It is a marvel of form and function, capable of feats of speed, endurance, strength, fluid grace, beauty, and poetic expression. Fueled by an indomitable will and unquenchable desire, the fully equipped body aspires to greatness, pushing boundaries and executing well beyond what the mind can even imagine.
Human beings are blessed with a magnificent machine, from the ingenious architecture of the skeleton, through complex and multifarious muscular, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems, and its ability to constantly rejuvenate and rebuild. The harmony and coordination required to ignite billions of cells, fire the synapses and millions of nerves and muscle fibers, and continuously pump an adequate supply of blood and energy throughout is simply enormous. When your system is in accord, you hold the inherent ability to efficiently and effectively motivate and focus your body toward profound goals and remarkable achievement.
At the core of that harmony and coordination is the breath. It’s your main touch point with all those functions. By developing an awareness of it, by focusing on it and developing its potential, you can take greater command of your body’s abilities. By taking control of the breath, you can take control of your body, mind, and emotions. It is human nature to pursue the limits of our physical selves. That performance drive is manifest in a variety of ways—athletics, art, adventure, exploration—anything that propels us to test our abilities in the physical world. Understanding and developing the power of the breath is critical in our pursuit of perfect performance.
We’ve gathered stories of ambition and achievement in the quest for human physical performance, from world-class athletes, performing artists, astronauts, mountain climbers, fighter pilots, and many others. Each has come to understand that harnessing the breath is critical to mastering their individual pursuits, and each lives the words of philosopher Norman O. Brown, who said, “The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.”
And the cycle continues, as we exhale each exhausted breath and draw in a fresh one, full of potential, promise, and fuel for the next adventure.
Efficient Breathing
Marathon running provides a prime example of how harnessing the breath can produce tremendous physical results. There is a moment in a marathon, somewhere between miles fifteen and twenty of the hellish twenty-six-mile endurance race, that many runners hit what is called the wall. Abject fatigue, severe dehydration, even hallucinations land like an elephant on the shoulders, making each stride feel like lead weight and searing fire. Many succumb and never finish. Others question the wisdom of even contemplating such an ordeal in the first place.
Alberto Salazar hit his share of walls on his way to becoming one of America’s top distance runners. He set one world and six U.S. distance records during his career, breaking the then twelve-year-old record at the New York Marathon in 1981, eclipsing the Boston Marathon record in 1982, and ultimately winning three straight New York Marathons (1980-82). An asthma sufferer as well, Salazar has probed the depths of respiration in harnessing his lungs’ ability to propel him toward his world records in running’s elite races.
For him it’s about more than just breathing. It’s breathing efficiently. The goal for all endurance training is to build an extensive cardiovascular system or network. The lung muscles and diaphragm will only achieve a certain strength, but, says Salazar, “What you’re doing is creating a capillary-blood network to service the muscles so that whatever amount of air that you can get in, you can keep as much of that oxygen as possible. The less oxygen you have for whatever reason, the more you have to rely on stored blood sugars, and eventually you run out of that. The better you breathe, the more oxygen you can get in, the less you have to use your glycogen stores. When you get to that point, you are able to go a little faster and a little harder.”
Runners and other athletes rely on the primary fuel sources of carbohydrates and fatty acids in the bloodstream. Efficient burning of these requires plentiful oxygen and a hard-working heart to pump more oxygen-carrying blood to the muscles. For runners it may be difficult or impossible to maintain a sufficient pace, especially if they’ve lost enough water through sweat to become even slightly dehydrated. Lack of water causes the blood to become thicker and therefore harder to pump.
Come race day, many runners make the mistake of starting out at a pace that’s too fast, making it difficult for the heart to pump enough blood to ensure a steady supply of oxygen to the muscles. When this occurs, their muscles have no option but to burn blood sugar in the absence of oxygen. This causes lactic acid and hydrogen ions to build up in the blood and tissue, causing muscles feel as if they are on fire, and inactivating the enzymes that govern glucose metabolism. For many, walking up a long flight of stairs causes the same lactic acid buildup and the burning sensation in fatigued muscles.
Additionally, when you’re exercising hard or you’re under distress with a cramp, muscle pain, or a stitch (called an exercise-related transient abdominal pain or ETAP, which researchers believe is caused by stretching the ligaments that extend from the diaphragm to the internal organs, particularly the liver), breathing can become haphazard. In the course of his running career, Salazar found himself in races in which “I’d hit a really hard hill or I’d sped up or somebody surged,” he says, “and I’d find my breathing really out of sync. You have to relax and get it back to a level where it is natural, where you don’t have to think about it again. It’s something of an oxymoron: You’ve got to concentrate on relaxing. It’s hard, but that’s what athletics is.”
Normally, you focus on trying to take natural, deep breaths, both through your nose and through your mouth concurrently, and exhaling at the appropriate time. If it becomes forceful, where you’re straining to blow everything out, he says, “People feel like they’re losing control of their breathing and they sort of panic and start gasping.” He suggests finding a natural rhythm that perhaps correlates with a cadence, and this can work with most kinds of exercise. “It could be, like in swimming, with a certain amount of strokes, every stroke or every other stroke,” he says. “In running, it could be every other stride. You have to find that natural cadence that you have, and stay relaxed within that cadence.”
(For more information on achieving Perfect Breathing during exercise, see the Performance Breathing exercise at the end of this chapter.)
To the Top
Climber Ed Viesturs doesn’t compete with anybody but himself and nature, but his reliance on knowing his own breath is tantamount. Viesturs has climbed all fourteen of the world’s eight-thousand-meter peaks, recently adding the notoriously dangerous peak of Annapurna to his list.
Viesturs is also gifted. He climbs these intimidating spires without supplemental oxygen, an impossible feat for most climbers. Over the years many have summited one or some of these peaks, including Nepal’s oft-climbed Mt. Everest. Even in the best of conditions these are treacherous undertakings requiring extraordinary willpower and stamina. At those supreme altitudes, air is scarce. The deprivation can cause hypoxia, insufficient oxygen in the blood with a severe loss of mental ability. Well before the summit, the human body is, bluntly, beginning to die. For Viesturs, the required willpower and stamina to climb such peaks come from knowing his own breath.
“When I first set out to climb the big mountains, my rule was I wouldn’t use supplemental oxygen,” says Viesturs, whose exploits were chronicled in the breathtaking IMAX film Everest. “For me it was more of a challenge and more pure to see if I could train myself to get to the top of one of these peaks without it. I was never going to use supplemental oxygen just to climb a mountain.”
Viesturs started his climbing career in the Cascade Mountains near his home in Seattle, Washington. As he began ascending higher and higher on mountains like North America’s Mt. McKinley and the peaks of South America, he realized that he was suffering much less than most other climbers, recovering faster, and staying stronger through the whole trip. He began to wonder if there was something helping him be a stronger better climber at high altitudes.
There was. Physiology plays a significant role. Testing showed that Viesturs was blessed with an unusually large lung capacity. Where the lung capacity of average persons like us might hold five liters of air, his holds seven. More important is his cardiovascular system. The attributes that control the blood’s ability to absorb and utilize oxygen are extremely efficient in his blood system.
But it’s more than simply capacity. Even if you find out in the lab that you’ve got that going for you, it doesn’t mean you are going to be a good climber. You need climbing experience and the knowledge of how to climb efficiently. There is a lot of mental willpower necessary when you are climbing those peaks in order to keep pushing yourself up the mountain.
Again, Viesturs’s exploits are outside the realm of possibility for most of us. But what’s key is his preparation and knowledge. Training is what builds his endurance in order for him to have the strength and ability to keep going up so arduous a journey. To train, he typically runs seven miles six or seven days a week and focuses on building his aerobic capacity. He prefers long endurance runs, running hills, and forcing himself to keep pushing once he has crested the hill even though he might be short of breath or struggling.
Taking advantage of aerobic capacity means breathing correctly. For Viesturs, different breathing techniques are dictated by different climbing situations. On mountains such as Rainier in the state of Washington, Viesturs teaches Pressure Breathing. “With pressure breathing, you are forcefully blowing out during your exhale to get as much breath out as you can,” he says, “and at the same time pressurizing the air in your lungs helps you to absorb more of the oxygen. This also helps to compensate for the lower pressure at high altitudes.”
As you climb higher fast breathing is required, and the effort needed to pressure breathe becomes excruciating. At this point, Veisturs uses a fast, deep panting, but still continues to count the breaths between each step. “This prevents you from standing there breathing for ten minutes and forgetting to climb,” he says.
The breath serves another important purpose: It helps develop a rhythm between walking pace and breath, helping focus on the climb and achieving “the Zone,” a concept we’ll talk more about shortly. For example, Viesturs counsels, “You breathe twice and take a step, breathe twice and take a step, exclusively focusing on your breath and your step. The next thing you know you are an hour up the climb.
“It gets so hard at those altitudes,” he continues, “and you have to say, ‘After ten breaths I will take a step, then after another ten breaths I have to take another step.’ That’s what keeps you going. You have these little goals that you are setting for yourself, because when you look at the summit that’s twelve hours away, it’s too large of a goal. You have to break it down into short segments, like climbing to the next rock, which is twenty minutes away, and then take a break. But to get to that rock you’ve got to focus on just moving and keeping some sort of rhythm. It’s like a meditation. And that’s what you focus on as you as you are climbing, and that way you nibble away at the big picture.”
Attaining a rhythm is critical. If you get out of step or if you are moving too quickly, you easily run out of breath and have to sit down to recover. Viesturs adds, “It’s almost like becoming very claustrophobic. Here you are gasping for air and you are not recovering like you do at sea level. Normally, you run up a hill, stand there and breathe and breathe, and in a few minutes you have recovered. But up there, you gasp and gasp, and nothing is happening.”
A climber has to find a speed that he or she can maintain long enough to get to the destination, but not so fast that it requires stopping and recovering every few steps. “You slowly keep moving at a pace just below the level of hypoxia,” he says, “but as soon as you increase your pace you lose it, start gasping for air, and have to sit down to rest. It’s trying to find that pace that is kind of fun.”
Recovery
Especially in athletics, recovery—both physical and mental—becomes critical. International squash champion Gulmast Khan is a warrior descended from a clan of warriors that included the mighty Genghis Khan. Gulmast, however, carries a racquet instead of a sword, has exchanged the horse for court shoes, and wears a sweatband instead of battle armor. Three generations of Khans have dominated international squash competition. Although Gulmast is usually soft spoken and smiling, once on the court one is reminded of his fierce warrior heritage.
The fierce Khan tradition began with Gulmast’s father, who never had any formal training, says Gulmast. “He just picked up a racquet and played. His body told him when he was ready. He took on all comers, any size.” His father was short and had a tremendous barrel chest, giving him inordinate oxygen capacity. He had the racquet skill to run his opponent back and forth across the court and it became a game of attrition, of who could last the longest on the court. “This is what my father and my uncles focused on, being able to last the longest on the court. We had to last longer.”
This is where oxygen becomes the deciding factor in court success. The more efficiently that you can operate and the quicker you can replenish the body, Gulmast surmises, the more you are able to concentrate and become focused. The timing on the breath is split-second. “After your shot you must take in as much air as you possibly can and be ready to expel it with the shot. Bigger players carry more weight and require more oxygen. They quickly find themselves taking faster shorter breaths and are unable to restore their reserves and their timing. The more depleted the body becomes, the more the mind begins to wander and prevents you from focusing on the one thing that you must focus on, which in my case is the ball.”
Khan counsels that one must be able to play through the “runner’s high,” and play through “the wall.” Once you break through the barrier, the rest is easy. “If your mind becomes focused on the goal to the point that nothing else matters, you will be able to ignore the pain in your arms and legs.”
The body communicates when it is hurting, but it is the mind that determines whether you will continue or not. “The mind controls the breathing and all of the functions of the body,” says Khan. “Your oxygen capacity may be great but once you convince yourself that you are tired, you are finished. You have to overcome that thought, and it is overcome through focus. When you start to wear down you have to focus on your breathing. You must become efficient. You must have the lung capacity. Running and lungeing will deplete your capacity. You must be able to recover quickly and stabilize your breathing. That way when your shot comes, all of your energy and force can be transmitted to the ball.”
A New Level of Performance
Is there a way to improve the strength of your breathing and reducing that recovery time? A significant study was done recently under physiology researcher Ralph F. Fregosi at the University of Arizona that lends credence to the fact that athletes can improve performance by developing their respiratory muscles to a higher degree. Engaging in deep breathing, and using a metronome to pace their breaths, competitive cyclists who comprised the study group gradually increased their speed and depth of their breaths during monitoring sessions. The endurance training group posted a 12 percent improvement in the endurance capacity of their breathing muscles during the study, which monitored carbon dioxide levels in their lungs.
Several studies have also been conducted to determine the effect of conscious breathing techniques on the performance of competitive athletes. The research used a couple of different approaches: The first study was conducted with rowers and used resistance bands around the chest to strengthen the respiratory muscles. The other studies were done with cyclists and runners and in those cases, the athletes used simple deep-breathing techniques synchronized with their running or cycling. In all cases, they found that the athletes were able to improve their breathing efficiency in the neighborhood of 10 percent (meaning at a constant level of exertion, they were consuming 10 percent less oxygen—meaning they were getting more out of each breath).
That may not sound significant, but if you are a runner in a sixty-minute race, that will cut anywhere from three to ten minutes off of your time simply by changing the way that you are breathing. If competitive athletes, who more than likely have well-developed respiratory systems, are able to improve their breathing efficiency by 10 percent, imagine how much potential those of us who are not competitive athletes have for improvement.
You Still Have to Fly the Plane
Breathing mechanics are not strictly for athletic performance. An extreme example that demonstrates how knowledge of the breath extends the range of human performance is found in those who pilot some of the world’s fastest military aircraft. Lt. Col. Jack Shanahan has logged more than 2,600 hours in USAF F-15 Strike Eagles and F-4 Phantoms—some of the hottest rides in the world. Piloting is an exhilarating experience, but one that strains the human body to its absolute limits. In the typically understated words of a pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Shanahan says, “It’s not for the faint of heart.”
The human body was not designed to tear through the skies at over a thousand miles per hour. It cannot easily withstand the crushing forces of high-speed flight. When pushed to the limits, it responds by shutting down and the pilot often loses vision and consciousness. The problem is G force. Remember your last roller coaster ride and the heavy feeling of being pressed back into your seat? Those are G forces—G, as in gravity. “Sitting at my desk,” Shanahan explains, “I am experiencing one G force. It is the weight of my body due to gravity. Two Gs means twice the force of gravity, so you feel twice the weight of your body, three Gs, three times your weight, and so on.”
He continues, “Without a G suit or special training—you, me, it doesn’t matter—we are good to about three Gs. After that, you will start losing consciousness in about thirty seconds. As it starts to come on, you will start getting tunnel vision. It is just like putting on blinders. Your vision starts getting more and more restricted, like looking into a tunnel. The three dimensions keep closing in until finally it’s like looking into a soda straw. Unless you back off on the Gs, you will end up passing out.”
These debilitating forces would have kept the modern age of aviation on the runway if methods had not been developed to fend off the crushing effects. Wearing a G-suit (also known as “speed jeans”) is akin to wearing a blood pressure sleeve on the entire lower half of your body. As the Gs build up, it inflates to prevent the blood in the head from escaping to the legs, and that will buy you three more Gs. Breathing and muscle tension techniques are used in tandem with G-suits and can add another three Gs to a person’s tolerance. A trained pilot in a fighter jet can typically pull up to nine Gs, which feels like you have nine times the weight of your body piled on top of you.
The special breathing techniques that pilots use combine rapid exhales and inhales with several seconds of grunting, straining, and muscle tension to keep the blood pressure in the head from falling. According to Shanahan, “If you were to listen to a tape, it would almost sound funny. You hear these short intakes or gasps of breath about three seconds apart. Right as the Gs are coming on, you tense up and try to not let the air out, because with the Gs pressing against your chest, you will never get it back. Once the Gs come on, if you get behind in your breathing you will never catch up. You will become exhausted and unconscious. It’s like lying underneath a pile of bricks.”
Few people realize how hard it is to fly, how much strength, endurance, and concentration are required. If you are flying every day, are in great physical condition, and know how to breathe, you become adept at pulling Gs. Even so, if you pull six Gs for two minutes you will be completely exhausted. That is with a G-suit, with the training, with the breathing. And don’t forget, in addition to everything else, you still have to fly the plane.
Grace and Beauty
Ballet might not appear to be about strength and stamina, but that’s its grace. In the artistry of ballet, dancers defy gravity. There is a graceful aesthetic, a beauty, a poetry in their ability to seemingly float, hanging interminably in midair, striking lithe poses that the eye cannot believe. It is, says choreographer James Canfield, creating the illusion of being lighter than air.
But it’s no mere deception. It involves the rigors of a technique called “muscling,” and derives its strength from the very air we breathe. “You have to teach breathing as part of movement,” says Canfield, an acclaimed dancer with the American Ballet Theater, a renowned artistic director, and a skilled choreographer. “You’re breathing in and breathing out as part of the movement to create these illusions.” The very first movement taught in dance class, he says, is how to breathe air in, to fill up the lungs, and then to exhale, allowing the body to fully stretch. “Arms have to look like they’re breathing; legs have to look like they’re breathing.”
In fact, they are.
Canfield learned the hard way. Early in his career, even though well trained, he was worried about the pas de deux, or partnering. “I would lift the woman over my head and I would hold my breath until I had to let her down,” he says with a laugh. “Everything was like shock. I was shocked that she was up there and held my breath. When it was time for her to come down I’d lower her and realize, ‘Oh my God, I have no strength in my arms!’ They were like spaghetti. It was because in the middle of that movement I stopped my breath for however many eight-counts or series of counts. I was just holding, with no breathing going on in by body. I was ten times as tired when I finally let her down. What it was doing was just wearing me down in the very first parts of the choreography. I had so much more to go that I had to learn how to breathe while sustaining movements that appear still. A still movement still had to be kept alive by breathing or else the muscles fatigue dramatically, which I found out very early on.”
The Oregon choreographer likens it to weightlifting. “There’s a definite reason why you inhale when you do and why you exhale when you do, because it’s, again, to get the fullest capacity and use of muscle groups and your own strength. The breath can help strengthen you.” His explorations into breath and dance led him to his early association with a premier New York ballet instructor and Zen Buddhist Finis Jhung. “All he ever talked about was the breath,” Canfield says. “It was hypnotic and meditative listening to him. He would talk about breathing into the muscles and exhaling. It became involuntary, a part of your training of the breathing and how breath was so important to the movement that you didn’t think about it. I realized I had to teach breath as a part of our training, which made movement and everything we were talking about make much more sense.”
And there’s another aspect, one we’ll explore in more detail in later chapters, but that’s the effect of nerves. In that same vein, performers of any kind experience an anxious nervousness before stepping onstage, part of a human’s natural flight-or-fight response. To counter that rush of adrenaline, the shortness of breath, the nerves and the unfocused mind, Canfield counsels the use of conscious breathing. “Nerves create tension,” he says. “You have to learn to breathe. Dancers are like sprint runners. They go out onstage and use oxygen quickly. They spill it all out for a twenty-minute piece, let’s say, and then they get to stop. You know what’s going to happen to you physically, so pre-performance, it’s easy to psychologically freak yourself out, because physically you know what it’s going to do to you.”
When preparing for a performance, Canfield says, it’s easy to pretend you’re taking deep relaxing breaths, when in fact you can still be holding tension. He tells his dancers to access another part of the body—doing arm swings, working the legs, stretching the hips. “When you incorporate your arms, holding your arms up, for example, you’re psychologically holding onto something else in order for breathing to penetrate in there. There’s a lot going on in your mind psychologically. It helps to close your eyes, see your breath, and pay attention to yourself. Like any sort of meditation, you start becoming aware of your breath. Doing that allows you to relax. At the same time you can’t do too much of that because you don’t want to get too relaxed. You need a little bit to break the tension. You have to find that happy medium between the two.”
Canfield, and most performers, thrive on the excitement and the energy and draw on its energy, but he warns that it can also cause tremendous fatigue. For him, breathing is a great balancer. “Breath is fascinating when you’ve got adrenaline working with you,” he says. “When you have that adrenaline going, you have to learn how to use breath accordingly. All of a sudden in the first five minutes of the ballet, you’ve never felt so tired. You just have no energy left. Part of that is an adrenaline rush with not having the knowledge as to how to breathe correctly with that new sort of level of energy. There is always that going on before, during, and after performances. You have to contend with it.”
Beyond Limitations
We may not all be blessed with extraordinary lung capacities or lithe bodies, but what we’ve learned is that to keep our mighty machine operating at its peak efficiency, we need breathing to help regulate and continually fuel the machine, and to keep pace with physical demands. Obviously, we need to keep our bodies—especially our respiratory systems—in good working order. Anything that robs us of lung capacity, like smoking, should be avoided, and we need to take steps to keep our heart, lungs, and muscles in working order.
Beyond that, we can push what we might have thought were limitations by knowing how to control the breath. It is one area of life where you have ultimate control. Even if you’re not a marathon runner, mountain-climbing adventurer, fighter pilot, or professional dancer, these teachings and deeper understandings can help you improve any aspect of your physical performance. Apply what you’ve learned here to your next workout, and you’ll begin to see immediate results.
Try this exercise and its techniques to improve your performance.
Exercise: Performance Breathing
Here is an exercise that is well suited for any type of sport or exercise that requires repetitive motion, such as walking, running, hiking, biking, swimming, rowing, etc. The focused breathing helps to maximize your energy intake, while keeping the mind “in the body” and clear of distracting, self-limiting thoughts. Studies with athletes utilizing conscious breathing techniques have shown that performance and efficiency can improve on the order of 10 percent or more. Once you become familiar with this method, it requires little or no concentration, allowing your workout to become more meditative.
Note: A complete full breath is a critical foundation of this technique (see Foundation Breath in chapter 7). Make sure you are comfortable with this breathing technique before continuing.
How it works
For this exercise the breathing cycle is divided into three parts, with each part getting a set number of counts:
Try this breathing method a few times to become familiar with it.
Now, let’s look at how we can use this technique while walking, for example. In this case each count corresponds to one step:
To adapt to cycling, each pedal stroke gets one count. For swimming, each stroke gets one count, and so on.
Suggestions for Continued Performance Improvement
Exercise: Preventing a Side Stitch
For anyone who’s ever run even a moderate distance, side stitches are no stranger. To prevent a side stitch, take even deep breaths while running. Shallow breathing tends to increase the risk of cramping because the diaphragm is always slightly raised and never lowers far enough to allow the ligaments to relax. When this happens the diaphragm becomes stressed and a spasm or “stitch” is more likely.
Other methods to alleviate the pain of a side stitch:
Exercise: Stopping a Side Stitch
To stop a side stitch when running, stop running and place your hand into the right side of your belly and push up, lifting the liver slightly. Inhale and exhale evenly as you push up.