Breathing in The Sprint Hurdles
I recently received an email from a coach asking me about breathing in the 110/100 meter hurdles. Her athlete was having trouble with late-race breakdowns after getting out ahead of the field early on. The coach was wondering if her athlete’s breathing (or lack thereof) may have had something to do with why she was losing speed and falling apart technically. I answered her that yes, I agreed with her assessment, as I too had coached a hurdler with an identical problem.
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In the case of my girl, she usually ran in the 15-low range, maybe 15-high on a bad day, yet there would be the occasional race where she would lose her 3-step late in the race and end up sloppily 4-stepping the last couple hurdle. I didn’t understand it. How could she have 15-low speed and yet have trouble 3-stepping at any point in the race? Then I happened to notice in practice one day that she ran with her cheeks puffed out. Not quite Dizzy Gillespie style, but it didn’t look normal. And this athlete was generally a very competitive, self-critical person who put a lot of pressure on herself.
I had her going over the first five hurdles that day, out of the blocks. When I noticed the puffed cheeks, I asked her between reps, “Are you breathing?”
It was an odd question to ask, and I wanted it to sound odd. I knew she was expecting feedback about her start or her speed or her technique. The look on her face was a puzzled one, like she wanted to say “Of course I’m breathing.” But she had to think about it. After a long pause she finally said, “I don’t know Coach. I don’t think so.”
So I had her focus just on her breathing, going over just the first hurdle. That’s when I noticed she wasn’t even exhaling out of the blocks. So I gave her commands (mark set go) and told her to inhale into set, and exhale on the go. She did so, and had her best start of the practice. We were both surprised at how much of a difference that made. From my end, I had always thought that breathing in the hurdles was something that happened naturally, just as it happens naturally in everyday life. It had never occurred to me that breathing would need to be something an athlete would need to consciously train herself to do.
In researching this topic on the internet, I found basically next to nothing other than a few forum posts. But nothing from experts. I was able to find a little bit of useful information in regards to breathing in the 100 meter dash. So I’ll use that as the basis of my discussion. The consensus seems to be that, in the dash, the fewer breaths the better, and that the exhales should be big in order to serve the purpose of giving the athlete a big push down the track. While one article pointed that that Linford Christie didn’t seem to breathe at all in his 100 gold medal race in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, I don’t think that not breathing at all is the norm; nor is that the best strategy.
The most common strategy seems to be to exhale with the push out of the blocks, to exhale again at 30-35 meters, then to exhale one more time at 60-70 meters. These exhales are big and forceful. A 100 sprinter who takes a lot of breaths (let’s say 10 or more exhales) is breathing too shallowly, doing too much work, and is therefore prone to late-race fatigue. Meanwhile, the sprinter who doesn’t breathe at all is also prone to late-race fatigue because of the tension created and built up, and because such an athlete gains no boost from the all-important exhales.
In a February 2014 article on the livestrong.com website, personal fitness trainer Gabrielle Furlong points out that the number of breaths the sprinter takes is not the only factor to consider, but also the region of the body where the breaths are coming from.
“The ability to deliver oxygen to your cells quicker helps you to run even faster,” she writes. “This is best achieved by breathing using your belly, rather than using just your lungs to breathe while running. With belly breathing, you will use your stomach muscles to help your lungs push the air out, causing your stomach muscles to expand. When you exhale, you tighten your stomach muscles, drawing your stomach in towards your spine, flattening it again. Your stomach should rise and fall, as opposed to your chest rising and falling…. [B]elly breathing allows you to inhale more oxygen, while expelling more carbon dioxide, which is crucial for sprinting so that you can run faster and not tire as quickly.”
Breathing from the belly allows for a deeper inhale, which allows for a longer exhale, and thus less exertion and less fatigue. Furlong also mentions that breathing with the mouth slightly open is better than breathing with the mouth closed. With the mouth closed, you must breathe solely through your nose, allowing less oxygen into the cells.
“With your mouth open just slightly,” she says, “you will be getting an adequate amount of oxygen into your body for your sprints.”
Obviously, not all that applies to the 100 meter dash applies to the 110/100m hurdles, since there are no hurdles in a sprinter’s way. The rhythm of a hurdle race differs dramatically from the rhythm of a sprint race. So it would seem to me that the rhythm of a hurdler’s breathing should differ accordingly.
To me, a sprint hurdle race is more similar to doing reps in the weight room than it is to a 100 meter dash, at least in regards to the rhythm of the breathing. In the weight room, the basic rule is to exhale forcefully on the effort portion of a rep, then inhale slowly on the recovery portion. This would seem to serve as a better model for the sprint hurdler, and I would also argue that it more closely fits what hurdlers do naturally.
When experimenting with this question myself, I did a few reps over low hurdles at slow speeds, just so I could observe my own breathing patterns. What I found surprised me slightly. I thought that I would naturally exhale during take-off, but instead there was a moment of holding my breath during take-off, and then a forceful exhale while touching down. But when I thought about it, it made sense. When lifting weights – let’s say bench press for example, there’s a deep inhale on the recovery phase of the lift, then a clenching of the muscles and a moment of holding the breath before letting out the forceful exhale. I think, ideally, however, that in the hurdles, the holding of the breath would be something to try to avoid. Instead, continue to inhale more deeply during take-off, then, once on top of the hurdle, transition into the forceful exhale on the way down. I could feel in my own little experiment that the holding of the breath on top causes a pausing of the limbs, interrupting the fluidity of the hurdling action.
I readily acknowledge that questions remain that I don’t have answers to right now. The obvious one has to do with the fact that, if a hurdler exhales during touchdown over every hurdle, in addition to exhaling out of the blocks, that’s eleven breaths, which is a whole lot more than the recommended amount for a sprinter. So a hurdler would therefore seem to be much more prone to late-race fatigue than a sprinter would. I think that female hurdlers would have more ability to mimic a sprinter’s breathing pattern, since the hurdles are so low that the race is more of a sprint race anyway. But for males, the weight room analogy would seem to fit perfectly. Each hurdle, in that sense, is a “rep,” and the rhythm of the breathing matches the breathing of the hurdling.
As for hurdlers who are so tense that they forget to breathe, like the athletes I discussed in the beginning of this article, I would suggest such athletes do breathing exercises away from the track to help them recognize their feelings of stress so that they can teach themselves to be more calm and confident heading into races.
Link to livestrong.com article: http://www.livestrong.com/article/180907-proper-sprint-breathing/
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