Power Breathing And Strength

Kettlebell training and the other methods advocated by Pavel Tsatsouline in his many books will undoubtedly be familiar to anyone interested in strength training. However, as a respiratory physiologist, the one method that piqued my interest was power breathing, to which Pavel refers, identifying Professor Zatsiorsky as the inventor.

So I decided to do a bit of searching about to see what scientific basis this method had, and found only 1 paper with evidence to support the claims made (as a side note I have actually tried the power breath method and found it to be very effective).

The results demonstrate that the breathing maneuvers employed led to an increase in growth hormone by up to 5-fold and an increase in cortisol by up to 2-fold. They attribute this hormonal response to a generalized stress response caused by extreme breathing maneuvers. Imagine choking and the stress you feel, well this response is similar to that and wouldn't be recommended for people with cardiovascular disease or blood pressure problems.

More recently, early evidence suggests that using a vibrated breathing training device can provide the same results (you breathe, Exoscience, UK). The hormonal response was comparable to that stated above after 10 forceful breaths with a you breathe device, except cortisol was dramatically reduced (which is a very good thing as cortisol is a stress hormone and too much cortisol can lead to health problems). In the tiny number of participants studied, there were also increases in strength after you breathed.

This may appear weird at first because there appears to be no connection between the breathing muscles and the other skeletal muscles, but Turner and colleagues proved that activating the breathing muscles using a breathing resistance can change the activation of leg and arm muscles. Communication between the respiratory nerves and the skeletal nerves in the spinal cord appears to be the mechanism behind this activity.

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