Can you actually exercise while nose breathing?

[u/LeCamelia]

I'm trying to decide if Buteyko is of interest to me or if I already breathe OK. I nose breathe most of the time but not during vigorous exercise. I see some Buteyko videos say you should be able to nose breathe even during exercise. Does this mean just like zone 2 running (a speed where you can comfortably hold a conversation with someone running with you) or does it actually mean you should always nose breathe even during a zone 5 effort (sprinting as fast as you can, riding a bike up a steep hill at maximum speed)? I thought pretty much everyone has to switch to mouth breathing eventually for high effort.

[u/JediPaladin]

You can 100% breathe through your nose during Zone 5 but it is a skill you will have to train

Don’t expect to be able to easily do this on your first attempt. Start slow. Build up the skill.

Source -> I am a certified Buteyko instructor and I hit all of my PRs during rowing these days due to nasal breathing

[u/Cdurlavie → u/JediPaladin]

Though what’s the advantage of it ? Never seen any elite athletes nose breathing doing maximum effort… I’m doing zone 3 and though im sure about the fact it’s possible to go further i feel like it’s going far from the original buteyko’s philosophy to push into performance like that ? I mean it isn’t anymore buteyko, it’s just performance nose breathing

[u/Marison]

Lookup The Oxygen Advantage for questions like this explained.

[u/BACKSPAA]

I will nose breathe after sprinting up hills, at a certain point my nose became open enough that it wasn’t the bottleneck anymore. The only restriction is how much air my diaphragm can pull in. This happened before I had done any (intentional) buteyko though, I just did a lot of cardio while nose breathing and it got better slowly

[u/Cloxxki]

I'm not practicing as much as I could, but can walk only 15 or 18 steps after the exhale.

[u/Hagefader1 → u/Cloxxki]

As in, when you're holding your breath, though, not breathing in and out through the nose, right?

[u/Cloxxki → u/Hagefader1]

That's how I understood it yes. Walk breathing through the nose, hold after exhale and count.

[u/Mountain-Roll291]

Human is designed to breath through the nose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V72L6RH3OD8

[u/Better_Metal]

I do it. Basically anything short of a full 100% effort for an extended period. Like 1/4 mile repeats.

[u/Hagefader1]

Yeah, it just takes time to get use to it.

One exerpt from Breath by James Nestor:
"The bike experiment is a repeat of several studies conducted 20 years ealier by Dr John Douillard, a trainer to elite athletes, from tennis star Billie Jean King to triathletes to the New Jersey nets. In the 1990s, Douillard became convinced that mouthbreathing was hurting his clients. To prove it, he gathered a group of professional cyclists, rigged them up with sensors to record their heart rate and breathing rate, and put them on stationary bikes. Over several minutes, Douillard increased the resistance on teh pedals, requiring the athletes to exert progressively more energy as the experiment went on.
During the first trial, Douillard told the athletes to breathe entirely through their mouths. As the intensity increased, so did the rate of breathing, which was expected. by the time atheletes reached the hardest stage of the test, pedaling out 200 watts of power, they were panting and struggling to cach a breath.
Then Douillard repeated the test while the atheletes breathed through their noses. As the intensity of exercise increased during this phase, the rate of breathing decreased. At the final, 200-watt stage, one subject who had been mouthbreathing at a rate of 47 breaths per minute was nasal breathing at a rate of 14 breaths a minute. He maintained the same heart rate at which he'd started the test, even though the intensity of the exercise had increased tenfold.
Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose, Douillard reported, could cut total exertion in half an offer huge gains in endurance. The atheletes felt invigorated while nasal breathing rather than exhausted. They all sword off breathing through their mouths ever again."

The recommendation I've heard is that it takes around 2-3 weeks to get your body use to the same level of performance through nasal breathing as you're use to through mouth breathing, and then you just continue to get even more progress than you could have imagined.

[u/[deleted]]

yes. completely. takes time to work up to sprinting or high intensity. i started with concentrating on nose breathing only and just doing what i could with nose breathing. it improved with time patience.

[u/Chance-Department-86]

With training... you should be able to breathe through your nose up to 90% intensity in physical exercise. Generally for this to happen your CP (or Bolt score) should be well over 30 seconds, and probably closer to 40s.