You leave me breathless

AMAA Journal,  Winter, 2005  by Edward H. Nessel

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    This article will attempt to illuminate principles of breath
  control that I have derived from many years of experience with the
  sport of distance swimming. For those unfamiliar with movement
  through water, almost everything is at least four times more
  resistive than on land. For example, a 400-meter run is pretty close
  in time to a 100-meter freestyle swim. In the water, the more
  movement is forced, the more the liquid medium resists. For anyone
  who pushes the body out of its comfort zone both on land and in the
  water, knowing how to control breathing is the answer to having a
  good race. While most of what follows is related to swimming, you may
  easily adapt these breath control concepts to any sport. I feel they
  are of particular relevance to triathletes, who--through their
  movement in water, with the mechanical advantage of a bike, and
  finally on land--run the gamut of vigorous exercise.
    Breath control is key to putting the body through prolonged
  vigorous activity and having it not desert you. What constitutes
  "prolonged" is reflective of body physiology and relative to choice
  of endeavor. Sprinters need to control their breathing to prevent
  fading quickly toward the end of relatively brief but intense
  muscular movement. For them, "endurance" can mean one to two minutes,
  and sometimes less. Middle distance and distance people have the
  physiologic ability (along with proper training) to transfer oxygen
  to meet demand for much longer. But in each case breath control is
  what needs to be practiced, trained, and remembered come race time,
  no matter what the sport.

Overview

Rapid vigorous movement, whether sudden or prepared, is expected to bring about the body's compensating mechanisms. These include the most visible and obvious: increased depth and rapidity of breathing. There have been many scientific experiments whereby normal athletes at sea level were given pure oxygen to inhale before and after intense exercise in assumption of either delaying oxygen debt or enhancing recovery. Neither the arterial blood content of oxygen was increased nor the recovery time diminished. Since this proves that the body cannot store or accumulate oxygen to any great extent, the superficial interpretation of this intense breathing response would be that it is simply the body's way of bringing back its supply of usable oxygen. But this is only partially correct.

I submit that rather than simply developing an oxygen deficit as a consequence of intense body movement, the build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) from increased metabolism is the main cause of the sometimes nearly paralyzing symptoms of breathlessness.

Even a benign situation like being tired (or bored) can cause the body to work at compensation by causing a yawning sequence. This happens more to cause the blow off (forced exhalation) of increased CO2 than it does to cause the inhalation of more oxygen.

One gets drowsy and begins to yawn in a car with several passengers because of the build-up of CO2 in the air rather than any measured decrease in oxygen content. And this manifestation would be even more apparent and occur more quickly in aerobically conditioned athletes because of their ability to extract more oxygen from the ambient air per unit time and leave more CO2 to build-up.

I have also noticed on many occasions that exposure to cold can bring on the yawning reflex; here, due to the increased metabolism (shivering, etc.) necessary to raise body temperature, more CO2 gets produced which is then needed to blow off forcefully.

Unlike plants and trees, which nature has adapted to utilize CO2 in a productive way (the manufacture of oxygen), human physiology has had to come up with metabolic pathways to neutralize or "detoxify" CO2 since its production to excess has deleterious effects.

What happens to the body when it is asked to endure the vigorous activity of swimming fast? Depending upon the duration, intensity, and specific type of movement through water--and, of course, the physical condition and aptitude of the athlete--breathlessness is the endpoint for which to train. This is not an easy thing to ask of an athlete, especially on a constant basis. It is one thing to become short of breath during vigorous land-based exercise; the body usually responds in its natural way of rapid respiration, in-and-out, without much thought given to controlling this process in any way other than the desire to recover as quickly as possible. But do the same in water, and we see a very different picture. No matter how athletic the participant, if one cannot control the breathing part of swimming for as long as the race lasts, the whole technical aspect of the stroke usually breaks down, and movement through water becomes at first less efficient, then downright counterproductive. This negativity is magnified because as one moves faster through the water, the liquid medium holds the swimmer back with resistance that is either squared (under the surface) or cubed (at the surface).