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Breathing is at its highest after sprinting, inducing breathlessness and oxygen debt. Continuing to play effectively your breathing must recover fast.
On average football players are likely to cover around 6.2 – 7.5 miles during the course of a match, at an average intensity of 75-80% of your maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max.). Throughout the 90 minutes of the game you’ll be cruising for 30-90 seconds and sprinting for 3-5 seconds.
Although most activity during your match will be sub-maximal, your intermittent sprints are supra-maximal. This pattern of exertion places extreme demands upon your breathing because these activities are anaerobic and generate high levels of lactate. CO2 levels stimulate your breathing to increase which in turn restricts blood flow and oxygen delivery to your legs, impairing performance.
When your breathing muscles fatigue, blood flow will always be diverted away from your working arms and legs as breathing is essential and will always win out. This is a process called metaboreflex.
However, with well-trained and strong inspiratory and expiratory muscles, your breathing muscles won’t need to ‘steal’ blood flow from your limbs, so you can delay the onset of fatigue and keep going.
Strong breathing muscles are also essential while playing football for the twisting and flexing movements of your trunk and contribute to stabilising and turning your body during kicking. They also assist with flexing your upper body during heading. Fatigue of a footballer’s breathing muscles can affect more than running ability during play.
Developed by sports scientists at leading universities, POWERbreathe Inspiratory Muscle Training (IMT) is scientifically proven to improve breathing strength and stamina, reducing breathing fatigue. This is particularly beneficial if you are one of the 3 out of 10 elite footballers may have undetected lung and airway problems, such as EIA (exercise-induced asthma).
POWERbreathe IMT is also ideal for non-impact rehabilitation during recovery from injury, as it helps to maintain fitness levels when physical activity is prevented.
In research, IMT is shown to improve aerobic capacity in amateur indoor football players. And in other research, POWERbreathe IMT demonstrated enhanced inspiratory muscle strength in professional soccer players. Also, an increase in inspiratory muscle efficiency led to a decrease in sprint time and improved exercise tolerance.
Research also shows that your expiratory muscles fatigue the same as your inspiratory muscles, impairing exercise performance as previously reported for inspiratory muscle fatigue. The good news is that you can train your expiratory muscles to become stronger and improve expiratory endurance with a POWERbreathe EX1 EMT device.
Finally, POWERbreathe IMT is also proven to help you warm-up more effectively when called onto the pitch as a substitute, as well as, cool-down and recover more quickly. In fact, research from Brazil found that breathing against a small inspiratory load straight after exercise reduces lactate by 16%.
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