Today I want you to take a good hard think about your breathing. Correct breathing is essential. The process of breathing or respiration [technical name] allows your body to use oxygen in the air to convert sugars and fats into energy that your muscles need to work. If your muscles don’t receive the oxygen they need to cope with the demands of fast paced long distance running then you simply won’t be able to keep up.

As a general rule of thumb, your running pace needs to be that which allows you to almost talk whilst you are running and your breathing should be slow and deep apposed to short and fast, the slower and deeper you breath the better. As your fitness increases your body will adapt to become more efficient so better utilising the oxygen that you breathe in. However to begin with you need to give it all the oxygen you can.

This is actually a lot harder than it sounds. I found it very difficult to change my breathing pattern when I learned this technique, I could do it for a few minutes and then I would fall back into bad habits.

What I realised is that I was making a big mistake, I was breathing deeper but also trying to run faster straight away. BIG NO NO. Start off a little slower than your usual running pace and see how breathing deeper feels and then slowly and I do mean slowly build up to speed.

I think you’ll find that your breathing slows down but you feel better, you will feel more comfortable running, your muscles won’t feel so tired because they will have access to more oxygen allowing them to convert more sugar and fat into energy to efficiently deal with your running pace. What this technique should do over time is allow you to run at your old normal pace very easily which gives you the opportunity to push yourself to a new higher and faster running pace, simply because you muscles can now deal with it.

IT’S THAT SIMPLE.

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