You can improve your endurance while sitting on your couch. I’m going going to show you how. Most people think that endurance is really driven by your lungs, your legs, whatever. The fact is that when we look at respiratory physiology in endurance athletes, the muscle that fatigues often most quickly is your diaphragm. When your diaphragm fatigues, what it does is it creates a neural reflex called a metabolite reflex. Because breathing is more important than running, your brain will start to shunt blood away from the working muscles to keep your diaphragm functioning.
There has been a great deal of research on this over the last probably 20 years looking at what is called respiratory muscle strength training. In other words, can we train the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles, et cetera, like we would train our biceps or our quadriceps? The answer is yes. It’s very time efficient. Here’s what it has shown.
Number one, about 70 minutes per week of respiratory training, particularly inspiratory muscle strength training is comparable to almost 120 minutes of high intensity intervals per week, which is insane because like I said, you can do this sitting on your couch. We see that it improves posture. It improves asthma symptoms in many asthma sufferers. It improves overall functional capacity in older people. For tactical athletes, you want to call it that, SWAT teams and firefighters, et cetera, that had to carry load. It also improves their ability to carry load while still maintaining a good oxygen capacity. It improves VO2 max, does a lot of crazy stuff.
Again, we want to show you a very simple protocol today utilizing an inspiratory muscle strength trainer. The research on this, they’ve used the same protocol for almost 20 years now. It’s easy to understand, it’s easy to remember, and it’s pretty easy to do because like I said, you don’t have to change your clothes, get super sweaty to actually improve your stamina and your endurance. The way that we’re going to tell you to do this is first you have to acquire, I think it’s better to acquire some type of respiratory muscle training device.
This one is from a company and it’s just called The Breather, which I really like because it’s very easy to understand. One other thing I like about this one is it has these little dials that allow you to create resistance both to inhalation and to exhalation. We have a dial for inhale and a dial for exhale. What we’re going to cover today is the inhalation part because most of the research is still focused on beneficial effects from inspiratory muscle strength training because that’s really going to target your diaphragm.
The way that you’re going to do this is once you have the device, you’re going to figure out what is between 50 and 70% of what is called your maximal inspiratory pressure. Now, we can do this in a very detailed way medically, but for you, with a device, it becomes really simple. You start on the one and then you take a deep breath in and it needs to be fast. You go, okay, that was not too hard. So then you’re going to go to a two and it should be getting a little bit harder. So you’re going to work through your inhalation numbers until you find the sweet spot where it feels like you’re working really hard, but not maximally hard. Most of the research on this says that between 50 and 70% is a sweet spot. So you will have to dial that in for yourself and it will change as you get stronger. In most cases, you’re going to be doing the following exercises for six weeks. All right, so let me explain.
Once you have your inhalation number set, I’m going to set mine on a three right now. What you’re going to do is you’re going to place a mouthpiece in your mouth and you’re going to exhale and then you’re going to inhale. The idea is to take in as much air as fast as possible. So if you do it like this, you’re not really accomplishing anything. We actually want this to be a hard, fast inhale, typically under two seconds, preferably around one to one and a half seconds where you’re trying to feel your lungs maximally. And then you exhale. Now you’ve got to be a little careful when you first start doing this because most people aren’t used to this level of intensity with inhalation. So if you have compromised breathing, you have rib issues, you have spinal issues, you have to go slow in the beginning, but ultimately you try to get to this fast inhale, slow exhale, fast inhale, slow exhale. You’re going to do that 30 times, twice a day. Do it in the morning, do it in the evening. When you’re able to do all the reps, it will take you somewhere around maybe four minutes to six minutes to get through. So we’re talking about eight to 12 minutes per day total. And again, you’re sitting on your couch or you’re standing, watch TV and you’re getting stronger. You’re developing better endurance. You’re improving your stamina. And again, it is comparable to between 90 and 120 minutes of high intensity interval, at least in some research.
This is one of my favorite tools to give to basically everyone. I also use it if you haven’t watched some of our other videos to improve blood pressure. Whenever we look at blood pressure research, actually inspiratory muscle strength training pretty much outperforms isometrics and all these other kinds of cool things that we do to lower blood pressure naturally. So if you want to build better endurance, you want to build your stamina. You want to do all that in the comfort of your living room, on your couch or in front of your TV, get an inspiratory muscle strength trainer and go through the protocol. Remember it’s 30 breaths, two times a day. You want to work at 50 to 70% of your maximal inspiratory pressure. Basically, you’re going to have to figure that out by feel. You’re going to do it for six weeks. Benefits tend to show up in the research between weeks two and three. So get started, do it six to seven days a week. And I think you will be really, really excited about the end result.
Now, if you are a movement professional, you’re interested in blending cutting edge neuroscience into what you already do, we would love to talk to you. You can click the link below that will allow you to set up a call with us because what we found is a lot of movement professionals, they see this stuff, they go, oh, that’s interesting, but I need to know more. And we are real humans. We’ve done this for real in practice for over 30 years. We have 16,000 students. So if you want to book a call with us, we’d love to chat with you.
