How do you breath: nose or mouth👃🏽👄? | TTT Aug22
Fitness loss after a break, my current training updates and what's better breathing; mouth or nose?
🏃🏽♂️Skim time (5k pace): 25 seconds
🚶🏽♀️Read time (long run pace): 2 min 57sec
Welcome to Three Thing Thu (TTT). The internet's most exciting running newsletter that helps you do dope 💩. And if you know of a more exciting one, please email me the link so I can collab with them! #DontHateCollaborate
💁🏽♂️ WTF is TTT all about?
Each month (ish) you can expect a fun and informative email where I’ll highlight three interesting/important running ideas that I have been using either in my training, racing, or life.
All of this will be in a “summed up and dumbed down” format because the world should all be TLDR.
👋🏽 Whatup to the new folks and hi hi hi to the ones that been riding with me from the jump.
Let's get into this month's edition and talk about;
Feeling this? Share this link with a friend - dlakecreates.substack.com
Thing 1: Where’s my training at now
A quick explanation of the above;
I realised that you probably don't know where I am in my training cycle, and I love data, charts, frames and models. So why not combine them all and give you a "snapshot" each month of where I currently am.
It's two parts to keep myself accountable in this whole "staying consistent to perform better as I age" thing and one part a bit of a glimpse "under the hood" of someone who's trying to talk the walk of habits, mindfulness, etc.
I think most people don't talk enough about the difference between fitness and health and confuse both to mean the same thing. You can be super healthy and be average fit. You can be super fit and be very unhealthy. The perfect balance is what I seek as that allows me to show up day after day, fresh and ready to crush my next challenge for life, training, work, family, etc.
Follow me here on Strava for daily updates and training motivations.
Thing 2: Should you breathe through your nose or your mouth?
Too many runners train in the grey zone: too fast for an easy run but too slow for a hard run. Nose breathing is a natural way to ensure your easy runs are easy because you can not supply enough oxygen to the muscles if you run too fast.
A 2018 study published in the International Journal of Exercise Science showed breathing through your nose makes your heart rate higher than breathing through your mouth, at the same pace.
So which is best? Depends!
For fast/hard runs: mouth. For slow/easy runs: nose. I personally do both most of the time and breath in through the nose and out through the mouth. 🤷🏽♂️
Find out more here.
Thing 3: The detraining/deloading effect for runners
We all know about the build-ups in training blocks to gain fitness and run a fast race, right? But have you thought about the breaks between races and the positive benefits to your health and fitness? This is called detraining/deloading and is ironically necessary to get more fit.
But with that, you can lose too much fitness. And naturally, I had a million questions on how to do it right. With questions like;
How long of a break can you take without losing gains?
How short of a break can you take without burning yourself out?
What's the middle ground?
And the answer to all of those is that it depends on a bunch of variables. Some of the variables are;
How long was your block?
How hard or easy did you go?
What kind of race was it?
How long have you been running for your life?
Watch all them sweet deets here.
Notable Quotable
And…
…for August.
🏈 I appreciate you catching all these facts that I tossed at you like a quarterback in the NFL pre-season.
Again, if you're liking this stuff please share a link with cool folks like you.
If you want me to talk about something or even give you a shoutout for reaching your goals - hit me up - talk@dlakecreates.com
For real-world documentation of my training/races follow me on Instagram.
PS - Ever wondered how Norwegian endurance athletes are so damn fast? Check out this super deep dive behind the scenes of Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s advisors and an earlier adopter of the Norwegian lactate training mode here.
Train smart: race easy,
Daren DLake