Nasal Breathing Rest Intervals

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Counting seconds for measuring a rest interval is the convenient and most common, but it is also external and not necessarily related to what is actually happening inside your body. It would be better to connect your rest time to some bio-feedback from inside your body to make a decision about exactly how much time you should give yourself for rest.

And some days, though you are indeed increasing in ‘fitness’ your body may simply require more or less rest on this particular day, in order for you to remain in the zone of optimal health and continuous improvement. To ‘push’ yourself outside this zone in a misguided sense of grit, is not beneficial to your body and progress although it may feed your pride for a few hours.

So, a swimmer needs to learn to read information coming from his own body and make better decisions on how to cooperate with the wise signals of the body rather than suspect it of laziness.

Since we can’t easily use a heart rate monitor in the pool (Finis does make one that speaks the HR number in your ear, but it can be distracting).

One very interesting way to build some body-awareness is to practice nose-only (nasal) breathing while resting at the wall.

This is how you do it:

When you arrive at the wall at the finish of a repeat, keep your body as relaxed as possible (floating or crouched down until weightless), and face as close to the surface of the water. Keep the mouth below the surface if you can. Inhale and exhale only through the nose. If your heart rate is very high it will be very difficult to do this – so as soon as possible, switch from mouth to nose-breathing.

At first, when the heart rate is still high and the body feels more desperate to get rid of carbon dioxide, the exhale will be emphasized. Depending on the intensity of the heart rate and the fitness of the swimmer, it may be a few or more exhale-emphasized breaths from the nose before there is a shift, and the body now wants to emphasize the inhale. It is this shift moment, that the heart rate (in Coach Mat’s personal experience) is ready to go again – it is back in ‘aerobic idle’ mode as I describe it.

But also beware of waiting too long after this point. Again, from experience, it seems as if there is some momentum in the heart and vascular system, and you don’t want to wait too long and let that drop further or it will actually be harder to get going again. So, you want to give your heart just enough time to recover, but not too much. Therefore, noting this moment of the ‘shift’ in emphasis from exhale to inhale is one useful indicator.

Count the number of breaths and also you may want to note how many seconds it took to reach the shift, and then compare that number of seconds to the recovery time your body actually needs when swimming at different intensity levels and on different days.

By this method you can let your body tell you exactly when it is ready to go, under the conditions of that particular day. And, in theory, as fitness improves from your continual training, your body will recover quicker and that nasal breathing rest interval will shorten as a result.

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