Breathing

Yes, it’s a good idea !

Here is an article from Australian Runner’s World from July 2017 about how to breathe while running. (In case the link disappears, the article is also here.)

It’s a bit wordy but the main takeaways for racewalkers would be :

  • be sure to engage your diaphragm as well as your chest muscles to increase the amount of fresh air reaching your lungs with each breath.
  • For race walkers, breathing with the chest muscles will tend to activate the muscles of the shoulders and upper chest. Breathing with the diaphragm will lead to more relaxed shoulders and a lower and more effective arm action.
  • In both running and race walking, the diaphragm also plays a role in maintaining a strong and stable core, and it probably does this is a different way for each gait. Therefore, the diaphragm needs to be trained to perform both functions well, so improved breathing is needed in both training and racing.
  • When talking, we tend to use the smaller and easier-to-control muscles of the upper chest to manage the air flow that we need to talk. Therefore, a little silence is helpful in learning to train the larger and more rhythmical movements of good diaphragm breathing . . . .
  • Experiment to find steady and rhythmical breathing patterns that allow your diaphragm to do both its jobs. Probably, you will need to find more than one pattern of breathing, so that you can cope with tiredness or changes of pace without reverting to giving all the work to your upper chest muscles.
  • A strong and rhythmical breathing pattern will be synchronised with your cadence, but it may be valuable to synchronise each breath with an odd number of steps rather than an even number – thus spreading the effort around different parts of the diaphragm. This may help to ward off stitch.
  • Choice of breathing pattern can help you control your pace in the early part of a race, knowing that keeping your faster breathing pattern in reserve gives you an ‘extra gear’ for use on the hills, or on the last lap, or in the second half . . . without your shoulders going up and your technique starting to crumble . . .