Imagine riding your bike with 2 flat tires, not very fun and exhausting. That’s what you are doing if you don’t breathe well while riding. How well you can deliver oxygen to your body is an important capability that defines an amazing ride but it is something that we never discuss. Have you ever paid attention to your breathing when riding? Do you take deep breaths or shallow ones?
How well you breathe, the quality of your respiration, is something that you can work on during your rides. This is one of those things in the Toolbox that you can work on to make your riding better without having to improve your fitness.
The higher the quality of your respiration the more oxygen you can move with each breath. Moving more oxygen with each breath will help control how fast your heart needs to beat to get oxygen to the muscles. In the Sans Chaine system, where we are using both power and heart rate to guide our workouts, if you can lower your heart rate with proper breathing it means that you can push more watts. We all want that!
How to check-on and improve your respiration?
You can use breath counts to start working on your breathing. Endurance and tempo rides are good workouts for this. To check your breathing take 15-seconds on the clock and count your breaths: in and out = a count of one breath.
We know that your respiration rate which is defined by how many breaths you take in a minute, correlates well with your training zones. Notice how the deflections in respiration (the blue line) in this ramp test match up with what were determined to be this rider's training zones.
Respiration targets
At endurance you want to be breathing at roughly 4 breaths for 15-seconds, and at tempo in the range of 6 breaths for 15-seconds. You can actually use these targets as another means of checking in your effort level during training.
Pro Tip: Be sure to exhale
If you find you are taking too many breaths for your effort level check what your exhale is like. The inhale is rather natural but the exhale takes some work. It takes an effort to push the air out with our abs. At the end of a ride working on our respiration it should feel like you have done an ab workout.
Respiration is an integral part of our riding and yet is not part of our "training". Start paying attention to it. You will be surprised how much you can affect your heart rate!
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