How many serious athletes follow tight training regimes to keep a competitive edge? And how many have stopped to think about how they can improve one of the fundamental aspects of fitness - their breathing?

Exercising and strengthening the muscles we use to breathe in - the inspiratory muscles - can help boost performance.
New research has shown that training these muscles can improve all-round fitness and even maximise the effectiveness of other muscles used in sport.

Using the laboratory-proven POWERbreathe training system of 30 breaths twice a day, an athlete's strength and endurance will increase rapidly.

POWERbreathe - an easy-to-use, drug-free, hand held device, has a controllable load for progressive training and is appropriate for athletes in all types of sports.

Research has shown that the inspiratory muscles have such a huge task to perform that they can 'steal' blood from our exercising limbs to supplement their work (Harms et al., 1998). The effect of this is to limit the performance of those limb muscles - making exercise feel harder and impairing performance. New research has now shown that specific inspiratory muscle training (IMT) improves the efficiency of the inspiratory muscles (Sharpe & McConnell, 1998), with the consequence that performance in laboratory controlled trials is improved by almost 30% (Caine & McConnell, 1998).

Studies have shown that time trial performance improves in elite rowers (Voliantis et al., 2001a) and cyclists (Romer et al., 2001a) by as much as 4.6%. That slashes almost 3 minutes off a 40km cycling time trial, and gives a winning margin of more than 60m in a 2000m rowing race!