Efficiency vs. Performance: Stuck in Second Gear
With myself, my clients, and athletes, I tend to focus on nasal breathing — specifically down-regulating. Paradoxically, we can then develop a cognitive bias for efficiency and lose sight of the objective of performance.
The TLDR is that we have a transmission (gear shifter, diaphragm) for a reason. Typically most people are “tired but wired” and the general campaign is that we need practice to re-establish a less stimulated state of being. However, it can certainly be the case that in pursuit of developing efficiency (endurance) we dull or at least limit our performance (capacity).
I categorize myself as tending too much towards “harder” and ignoring the “longer” foundation that would actually pay great dividends towards “hardening.” If you’re reading between the lines, that means that fighters want to fight, lifters want to lift, and sprinters want to sprint.
The obvious limitation here is that having ignored endurance work because it’s not “functional” for your sport ignores a more fundamental premise that that endurance would allow you to get in more reps, rounds, sets, etc. before fatigue sets in and also allow you to recover faster between training sessions.
Even if we put differences in muscle tissues aside, what’s the look on a marathoner’s face when you line them up on blocks for a 40-yard dash? More realistically, how much do they sell themselves short if they remain stuck in a “marathon-state-of-mind” and thereby a “marathon pace” when a given race may only be 5K?
In the above Instagram post I mapped some different Assault Bike paces (RPM and Calories per Minute) on to breath cadences — of course dependent on my current fitness and physiology.
The “range finding” that took place in that training session is important to note in this discussion as well; because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. If a given event / session is going to require me to “go until I have to stop to pee (i.e. fluids need replaced)” then the pacing is greatly different than “give-er-hell for 15 minutes”, which is different still from a 30-minute grind.
Note: In this article I’m using my own metrics for reference points. Please note these differ greatly based on individual fitness and even on states of arousal / stress / recovery / etc.
The point is to (1) know what you’re capable of and (2) know what the task that lies ahead will require. Sometimes we get this wrong. We fail, and as a consequence learn quite a bit about ourselves.
As an illustrative guide to this mismatch, let me tell you how stupid I am. On multiple occasions I’ve been so determined to maintain an arbitrary breath cadence that I’ve induced tears to my soft palate. Typically such an injury is only caused by drinking scalding hot liquids, or children running around with straws in their mouth — and inevitably jabbing their palate.
This brings us to an important discussion about when to “shift gears.” As Brain reminds us in the video above, mouth-breathing is inherently up-regulatory / pro-stimulating / sympathetic (SNS) engaging. It also helps cools us down. All of that is important when we’re operating at a high intensity; say 30-60 breaths per minute (Gears 4 and 5).
“Gears” 1 and 2 are sustainable for very long efforts — as noted in my Instagram post. Gear 3 can be misguiding because it “feels” difficult, but we lose a lot by always “training medium.” We neither achieve the output desired by higher gears, nor the volume / duration desired by utilizing lower gears.
What this says to me is that if you notice yourself in Gear 3 — nose-mouth or mouth-nose breathing — then you’re at the edge of a transition. You either need to downshift in order to sustain or upshift to a more efficient gear for the current output.
In other words, why run the redline in Zone / Gear 2 when you have another gear that wouldn’t be as costly in terms of either fuel or wear-and-tear?
What we’re effectively talking about is training vs. testing, or practice vs. performance. When I want to “practice” my endurance a 1-hour training session may see an average heart rate of around 130-140 BPM. By contrast, when “testing” endurance for the same 1-hour session my average heart rate is probably 150+ and 170+ at the end.
In other words, if I’m trying to “test” myself, I’m inherently beholden to an outcome (speed, time, calories, watts, etc.). There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s important to note is that achieving a more favorable outcome will require a different investment than what’s required for “training.”
Analogously, there’s no true estimate for a 1-rep-max. Though, admittedly I favor a 2 or 3-rep-max, but even then the “true max” is only an estimate. The further we get from the truth, the less accurate our estimate becomes. Who cares what your max set of 8 is, much less a max set of 20? However, that’s not to say that those implements can’t or shouldn’t be used in training, they’re just not accurate tests of “maximum strength.”
In conclusion, if we’re testing or otherwise emphasizing performance, we need to know how and when to optimize our physiology and all the “gears” we’re capable of. In almost all other cases the opposite is true. Efficiency is of the upmost importance in order to conserve energy, stress, and stimulation for the performance instances when it’s truly needed.
Getting chased by a tiger? Redline!
Sitting on the couch watching TV? Idle motor.
It’s also worth noting that trying to “perform” maximally all the time is a fools errand. It inevitably leads to things breaking. When you’re trying to make every session a time trial or 1RM or roll like it’s the finals of ADCC; you’re missing the point that constantly sharpening things makes them brittle.
On the transverse, no matter how much hardening one endures (e.g. endurance training), no one wants to stay dull forever.
“People get attached to methods… If you’re using a tool to change how you feel, you’re never doing the work to understand what you feel.”
~ Brian McKenzie