Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I thought I’d write about something a bit different, still about science, but of another kind. When I was sixty-three, I had the curious experience of getting my heart and lungs and all tested to the max by the doctors. They shot my veins full of drugs and made way cool movies of how the blood was pumping around my heart, and other fun pursuits.
They also gave me a full-stress treadmill test. It started out moving slowly, and on the flat. No problem, I kept up. Then they jacked both the angle and the speed up a bit. I kept up. And after a short time, they did the same again, increased both the angle and the speed. Still, I kept up. After a few more rounds of ever-increasing intensity, I was almost running up what seemed like the side of Mount Everest.
But I kept up.
Afterwards, they pulled the tape off of the machine. The nurse and the doctor looked at it, and conferred a bit. Then the nurse came over and asked “What kind of exercise do you do?”
I mimed flexing my bicep, bending my elbow, and lifting a glass to my lips …
“No, seriously”, she said, “do you work out at the gym?”. I admitted that no, I didn’t go to the gym … and I also didn’t run or exercise at all. Why was she asking?
“Your metabolic score on the treadmill”, she said, “we only ever see that high a score on twenty-year-old guys who are firefighters or cops or bodybuilders.”
I could have told her why I was able to get that high a score, but it wasn’t the time, so I just laughed and went on. Anyhow, there’s a curious story behind my ability, and this seems like a good time to tell it.
When I was about twenty-seven, I spent about a year in Hawaii in training as a psychotherapist. Yeah, I know, who would have guessed? And I spent many, many hundreds of hours working with and assisting lots of clients during that time. Anyhow, about a year later I was swimming in the pool at Laney College, in Oakland, California. I was working on my Red Cross Lifesaving Certificate, but I was having trouble with the distance swimming. I could swim fine, but I always ended up panting and out of breath after only a few high-speed laps of the pool.
One day, it all changed. Who should I run into at the pool but an ex-client from Hawaii. Talk about a surprise, we weren’t even in the same state as when we’d known each other, and he wasn’t a student at Laney. I have no idea why he was there. He was never all that coherent, and that day was no exception. He tried to tell me what was going on, but it was hard to follow.
Somehow I got to talking about my difficulty with swimming distances. He watched me swimming for a while, and then he waved me over to the side of the pool. “I know what you’re doing wrong”, he said, and he told me how to fix it.
So I tried what he said, and to my astonishment I found that I could just swim and swim and swim! I was totally blown away, I’d never done anything like that. I thanked him profusely, he walked out the door … and I’ve never seen him again in my life.
I showered and dressed … and then on a whim, I decided to run the two miles back to my home.
To understand what that meant, you need to know that I hated, hated, hated track in high school. They wanted me to run a mile, and after the first of four laps my tongue was hanging out, I was panting to the max, and totally out of breath. I despised running, and I never, ever ran unless I had to. So for me to suddenly decide to run the two miles from Laney back to my place in Oakland, that was a shock to me.
I started out, not knowing what to expect … and I ran the two miles home, and when I got there, I wasn’t even breathing hard.
So … what was it that the half-crazy guy told me about my swimming that made such an instant difference in my stamina.
He said “You’re not breathing out enough.”
He explained that particularly when we’re swimming, but also with any exercise, people usually end up panting, taking very rapid, shallow breaths. We focus on breathing in, on forcing more air into our lungs. He said that the way to break that habit was simple—when you start running short of air, don’t mess with the in-breath, just breathe out for one count longer.
He pointed out that when we swim or run, we usually fall into a pattern. With me, when I swam I breathed out and then took an in-breath with every alternate stroke of my arms. He said when I ran short of air, there was no need to mess with the in-breath—what I had to do was just add one more beat to the out-breath. So for example, if I was running, I was in the habit of breathing in for two steps and out for two steps. When I started running out of breath, I needed to lengthen my out-breath to three steps … and then if that wasn’t enough, lengthen the out-breath to four steps, and so on.
And that was it. There’s no need to make any alteration to the in-breath, we’re all really good at that part. Filling up the lungs isn’t the problem, it’s emptying the lungs.
And from that day to this, I don’t run out of breath. I just breathe out one beat longer, and I keep going. That’s the reason why at the age of sixty-three, I finished my treadmill test breathing deeply, very deeply … but just like some young guy who does pushups and runs laps all day, I wasn’t out of breath at all. I could have kept it up for a while longer.
Will this have the same effect on you? Heck, I don’t know. It was a gift that was bestowed on me by a slightly mad man I’d once cared for and had tried to help, who reappeared in my life for a single afternoon, apparently for that one purpose … all I can do is pass it on in the same spirit of joyous abandon. I only wish someone had been around to tell me about this back when I was in high school … so if you’re interested in catching your own breath, think of it as science, do the experiment, and report back.
My best to everyone,
w.
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Hey WIllis,
So far this technique did work well, at least at first. I was more oxygenized and felt better overall, stronger. Then my breathing got caught in the “out” end of the breath, between forty and 100 per cent exhale. That’s probably from lung scarring and asthma. I’m going to try some more and see if things might balance out over time and the in breath returns stronger. Again, thanks for the thoughtful suggestion. ST Triane
PS, I’ve also said here that I’m not a denier. I’m an agnostic. A science agnostic, actually
My motivation and experience with my “last puff” diaphragm technique was casual cycling, which unfortunately a mild stroke a year ago has interrupted, maybe permanently (balance). It made getting uphill and resuming steady speed on the flat much easier, and more fun. And it greatly accelerates recovery after heavy lifting, etc.
prjindigo says:
September 25, 2013 at 7:26 am
This kept me alive during a 90% asthma attack/blocked lung situation.
Getting oxygen isn’t a problem, dumping the carbon dioxide so you can GET the oxygen is the problem.
We produce our own carbon dioxide to enable efficient oxygen transport and pH balance – around 6% carbon dioxide in each lungful of air, 4% in each exhaled breath. This apparent overproduction is no such thing, it is essential reserves to aid restoring balance, such as from physical exertion.
Hyperventilation, like in asthma or stress, is not the body unable to get enough oxygen, but insufficient carbon dioxide to move oxygen into the blood – it is the body trying to conserve carbon dioxide by stopping it being breathed out, and the remedy is the classic – breathe into a paper bag to get big hits by re-inhaling your own carbon dioxide.
This is used to help asthma patients, breathing out slowly is also slowing down the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled and so helping keep optimum carbon dioxide levels going.
Your post is timely for me Willis – I’ve just taken up gym sessions again after long period of absence…, thank you.
So. There is a fine line between fishing and sitting by the river like an idiot. Same can be said about cycling around the block. I felt it pointedly, from puzzled glances and muted giggles by passers-by who happened to see me more than once as they walked up the same street.
The closest I could get to a controlled experiment, without going far out of my way, was to ride a few identical loops up and down the hill, alternating the breathing technique. This was based on the idea that if the system has memory, alternation should compensate for memory effects, at least to some extent. To minimise the effects of uncontrolled drift, I chose to ride a fairly short path (~0.9 km). Also, intuitively, it is easier to transmit a periodic signal through noise when its phase is known, so I endeavoured to run each lap in about the same time (although that didn’t quite work, the effort was worth it). Here are the results:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1725690/breathing-exercise.pdf
This graph shows the cumulative time series for elevation and heart rate under normal and deep breathing conditions. The data came from gps tracks like this:
http://www.brytonsport.com/mapTrackView/2?id=4418929
The GPS quality was atrocious, so elevation and heart rate were the only variables I could measure somewhat reliably. My tracker combines the data from GPS and from a pressure altimeter, allowing me to average recorded profiles to something that resembles the real topography.
I’ve made six laps in the following sequence:
normal – deep – normal – deep – normal – deep
The same breathing pattern was maintained throughout each lap (even while coasting back to the starting point). I gave myself a few seconds of rest between the laps to reset and relaunch the tracker. What I tried to keep constant throughout the experiment was my perception of effort, and that was maintained by a bilaterally constrained optimisation of sorts. I am not a sports person, so I never seek to do things better than before. Instead, I maximise my sense of comfort. On the other hand, I am impatient, and that sets the lower limit on effort. I typically exert as much effort as I can without feeling uncomfortable. The result is usually on the verge; if I push a little harder, I run out of breath and / or feel muscle fatigue that makes me uncomfortable enough to I slow down or stop. I had a few short moments like that during this experiment, but their effect and duration were, I think, negligible. I was mostly in the comfort zone.
The graphs were plotted by indexing each track by relative time since the start of the lap, then merging and sorting the points from three “normal” and three “deep” laps. The scatterplots were smoothed using LOWESS with f = 1/6.
What do we see here? My earlier intuitive assessment that there was something to it still stands. I don’t see any drastic changes of the kind some people report (as an aside, how much is “drastic”?). I wouldn’t call anything I see in my results “drastic”, but maybe it’s just me. My present assessment based on the data is that there is some signal showing through noise.
In particular, I can make that statement about the heart rate. Even though the ranges of the merged sets overlap, there is a consistent difference between each pair of consecutive laps. It could be robustly detected by a ranking test.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the deep breathing technique encourages faster pumping (intuitively, I expected more oomph for each heartbeat). But that may be the consequence of my comfort-bound optimisation. I do assert that it felt a little more comfortable to be climbing in the deep-breathing mode, and the graphs seem to indicate a slightly higher rate of climb. What I did not expect at all is the higher rate of descent. I didn’t do anything riding downhill besides braking to keep the speed near what I perceived was the safe limit. I didn’t look at any instruments, so speed control, too, was solely based on my perception of comfort. I was not aware of the time either, so the shorter average round-trip time in the deep-breathing mode came as a surprise. Upon reflection, the difference in the round-trip time seems to be proportional to the difference in heart rate (indicating that energy per heartbeat may be constant or near-constant), but does that also affect the perception of speed while coasting?
Don’t quite know what to make of it yet. Maybe those of us who report drastic improvements operate near some sort of a limit? I felt I was riding near a limit, but maybe my limit is less stiff than other people’s?
Ahhhhh.
But – as you point out above! – certain, almost certain, very certain, or “certain of being certain” or merely “very confident of being certain”of your “drastic” (or was that “dramatic”) results? 8<)
Sorry, need to /IPCC Summary for PulseHolders mode 8<)