I Tested 7 Breathing Methods for Runners (Only 2 Work)

[00:00:00] This is a runner. This is what they’re told to do with their breathing. Box breathing, Wim Hof, 4-7-8, belly breathing, nose only, cyclic sighing. Most of it wasn’t made for running. Some of it isn’t even close. So I tested all seven to see which ones actually help when you’re running, which ones support it from the side, and which ones are straight trash for runners.

[00:00:21] I’m ranking them worst to best so you can stop guessing and actually run easier with less effort. In this episode, you will get the seven breathing methods that runners might try to do, the ones that actually work and which ones are total BS for running, one science-backed pivot at the end that flipped how I think about breathing on a run, and a free breathing and base training plan that puts all of the winners into practice of the best ones so you can go and use them out in the real world.

[00:00:49] And a quick thing before we get into it, go and try each technique while you watch this. So you know, you can pause it, just sit there and do it. Takes five, 10 seconds. Then the top picks that I do or maybe you do on your own, go and try them on a run. That’s how you actually learn this stuff, not just from me talking, but from you doing.

[00:01:06] All right. So I’m Daren D. Lake, certified run coach, lifelong runner, almost 30 years, and I’ve been testing, uh, this breathing stuff and a whole lot of other stuff on myself and runners that I coach and digging through the actual research, talking to experts, et cetera. And the goal is to help you and 100,000 other self-coach runners get 1% better, and one of those things is breathing.

[00:01:26] So which one of these seven actually deserves your attention? Quick framing before we rank. These seven techniques all came from somewhere. Some were built by yoga teachers, some by Navy SEALs, some sleep doctors, scientists, ice bath dudes, and almost none were built for running. So the question I’m using to rank them is simple: Does this technique actually help when you’re running, or does it support your running before or after?

[00:01:49] Or again, is it just trash? Three buckets. During the run, around the run, or skip it entirely. But for real, for real, I kind of want to know why runners are so obsessed with breathing in the first place. I’m confused. I always thought you just did it. You just brea- I’m not thinking about breathing right now.

[00:02:03] But everyone keeps making videos about this on YouTube and content, so let me find out if I’ve been missing something. Let’s start with the worst and climb up to the best. Number seven, the 4-7-8 method. All right, so you want to inhale for four seconds while you’re running, hold for seven seconds, and then exhale for eight.

[00:02:21] That’s 4-7-8. It’s a sleep technique Dr. Andrew Weil made popular for falling asleep faster, and it works pretty well for that. There’s science to back it up. On a run, though- I think it’s useless personally. Try counting to seven while your legs are pumping at 180 strikes a minute. It’s confusing, non-rhythmic, and your stride doesn’t care about math.

[00:02:42] All right, the 4-7-8. Let’s see if I can get this. It’s kinda weird. One, four,

[00:02:52] Okay, that is for recovery only . Try it now if you’re sitting still. Did you feel a bit more chill? Yeah, great for recovery and going to sleep. Not running though. All right, so we’re gonna save this 4-7-8 for bedtime and chilling out, maybe post-run recovery. And speaking of saving things for the right moment, real quick, before we get into number six all the way up to one, things that actually work, you might wanna actually try some of this stuff out ASAP, and I got something for you.

[00:03:18] It’s a free breathing while you run cheat sheet and base training plan. You also get a email course. It’s six lessons, five minutes or less for six days. It’s that mental lifelong tactics to get 1% better each day. Again, plus breathing and base training. I just bundled it all together. All right. You can go and get that for free at the QR code somewhere here or below in the description if you’re listening or watching somewhere else.

[00:03:42] Now, let’s get back into the rankings. Number six is the one that possibly your favorite biohacker won’t stop talking about. Wim Hof power breathes. All right, so 30 fast, deep breaths, then a long hold. Wim Hof built a whole empire on this. It’s legit for cold plunges and breathwork practice. For running though, I’m gonna say no.

[00:04:02] I tried doing this before a workout to prime my lungs, got dizzy, felt a bit nauseous and sick.

[00:04:24] No, no, no, no, no, no. I didn’t even do the 30 seconds. No. I feel like I’m gonna pass out. No. Definitely for recovery. All right. Wim Hof breathing is controlled hyperventilation. That’s the opposite of what you want before exerting effort. Save that for the ice bath. So if Wim Hof gets the boot, what about the one that Navy SEALs swear by?

[00:04:44] Number five, box breathing. Four in, four hold, four out, four hold. So you’re creating a box. Do, do. So 4444. The Navy SEAL one, big in productivity culture, lotsa hype. There’s actually not too much published running performance data around this stuff. It actually earns its keep after your run. Post-workout downregulation breathing or breathwork or whatever.

[00:05:08] Calming the nervous system, falling asleep on maybe even the race day where you got a lotta nerves and you’re like, “I can’t sleep,” or you just need sleep and you’re wired. This is where it actually shines. All right. Try it right now. Four breaths in, nice and gentle. Four breaths hold. Four breaths out, exhale, and then four breaths hold and continue.

[00:05:29] Feel how your body wants to slow down. That’s the parasympathetic system kicking in. Great for after the run. I don’t think it’s a good tool for during. All right, box breathing. Four,

[00:05:53] four, three, five, three, four, three, four, four, three. Definitely for

[00:06:08] recovery. All right, number four is one you probably heard a whole bunch in running books if you read them. So we got rhythmic 3-2 stride breathing. You wanna inhale for three steps and exhale for two. Coach Jack Daniels, he came up with the Vdot calculator and the Vdot formula, which I really love, and I love Jack Daniels whole method.

[00:06:29] It’s really, really good. I apply that actually to a lot of my training, a lot of stuff I talk about. And, uh, coach Bud Coates wrote about this. The idea is that an odd-even pattern spreads the impact stress evenly across both sides of your body and gives you a rhythm to lock into. Does it work?

[00:06:46] Anecdotally, yeah. Hard performance data, not really. There’s no big RCT. That is a randomized controlled trial. It’s the gold standard study where they take a group of people, randomly split them up, give some the technique and some nothing, and measure who does better. None of those exist showing 3-2 makes you faster.

[00:07:03] But as a focus tool when I’m tired, when my form fails apart late in the long run, locking into 3-2 brings me back. It’s a metronome for the lungs. All right, three in, two out. See how we go. Three, one, two. One, one, two. One, one, two. One, two. One, one, two. Three, one, two. One, two. Supposed to do it with the steps. I know this is supposed to work according to Jack Daniels.

[00:07:40] It’s, like, the best running one. I don’t, I don’t know if I like it. That’s a solid mid-tier focus trick. Now we get to the ones with actual receipts. Number three, the physiological sigh, also called cyclic sighing. Uh, it’s a double inhale through the nose, long, slow exhale through the mouth. That’s it. Try it right now.

[00:08:02] One inhale through the nose, and then basically when you get to the top where you feel like you have no more air, then you do another inhale on top of that one. Um, it actually, like, kind of fills, expands the lungs up, and then a slow exhale out through the mouth. Do that three times in the beginning, ’cause you might get a bit dizzy But, uh, you should feel a bit more relaxed ’cause it’s your nervous system shifting gears, the easy gears.

[00:08:26] This one, it has legit receipts. A 2023 Stanford study by Dr. Andrew Huberman. Yes, Huberman Labs, whether you love him or hate him. I actually like him. I don’t understand the hate. He’s giving out free information. Dude is smart, talks about a lot of stuff, has experts on, science-backed. Anyway, and, uh, Daniel Spiegel tested it against meditation and two other breathing techniques.

[00:08:44] Five minutes a day for a month, cyclic sighing won better mood, lower respiratory rate, more positive feelings than meditation, and it was published in Cell Reports Medicine. So for running, it’s the best post-run tool I’ve found. Hard workout, nervous system spike, can’t fall asleep at night. Three minutes of cyclic sighing before bed and the lights go out.

[00:09:03] Here’s me out in the field. Cyclic sighing.

[00:09:19] That’s top three for

[00:09:34] a reason. You don’t expect it to make you faster mid-run. Again, it’s a recovery tool. Are you seeing a pattern here? The recovery tools are actually where the magic is. All right, before we get to number two, comment what kind of breathing do you do? Nose, mouth, diaphragmatic, uh, 17 breaths in, 144 out, hold.

[00:09:54] Let me know. I wanna know ’cause again, I’m still trying to figure out why this is so complex for runners, and I went in and was like, “Let me see receipts.” I’m obviously doing this whole episode for you, and I wanna know what you guys are doing. So yeah, hit me up in the comments or email me darren@onebetterun.

[00:10:10] And if you wanna help the algorithm, show this to other runners that are figuring out breathing. Just watch this to the end. Just put it on 2X, mute it, go scroll Strava or something. You can like it, subscribe if you don’t already. Really appreciate it. Share the link out. You can do all those things.

[00:10:25] That’ll help the algorithm. Okay, so if cyclic sighing is the recovery king, what’s the foundation everything else gets built on? Number two, diaphragmatic or diaphragmatic belly breathing. So you breathe into your gut, so the top of your stomach and not your chest. I know this sounds really weird. If you have your hand on your belly, the top part here, and your hand on your chest, only the belly hand should move on the inhale.

[00:10:49] So Very, very weird. Try it. Hand on your stomach, breathe in slow, and then the hand should push out. If your chest is rising and your belly isn’t, you’re doing it wrong, and most people are, and I am too. Why is this number two? Because every other technique on this list fails without it. Nose breathing, cyclic sighing, three, two rhythm, all them assume you’re breathing from your diaphragm.

[00:11:11] If you’re a chest breather, you might be sipping air through a tiny straw and wondering why you’re not catching your breath. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports tested 69 elite endurance athletes. We got runners, swimmers, cyclists, triathletes, and the ones who breathe from the diaphragm had significantly better lung function across the board.

[00:11:29] Vital capacity, lung volume, gas diffusion, it was all better. And almost half the athletes they tested, they were pretty much doing it wrong. Even the pros messed this up. And again, I’ll be honest, I started doing this on purpose and it was weird, the hand on the stomach trying to push it out while running or at least, you know, having that kind of feel there so you know that it’s pushing out from your stomach.

[00:11:48] It feels unnatural at first, but then something started clicking and my easy runs felt a touch smoother. It’s hard to know if it was placebo or real yet, but I’m sticking with it. All right. That’s a foundation. We got something there. So what do you think might beat that? Number one, and this one might make you smile and even chuckle.

[00:12:07] The best breathing method for runners is breathing normally. Look at that. Nose breathing for easy runs, mouth breathing when the work gets hard. Both together in the right place, sometimes a little bit of… You get it. And here’s where the science actually backs it up. A 2018 study by Dr. George Dallam at Colorado State found that runners who trained with nose-only breathing for at least six months moved 22% less air for the same effort.

[00:12:32] Same pace, way less air, no drop in performance. It’s like basically a 22%, like turbo boost. That’s huge. 5%’s a lot. 22%’s crazy. But the gain happens at easy and moderate paces. If you push above 85% of your max heart rate effort, et cetera, and the nose physically can’t move enough air into your body, into your lungs, your airway, it’s just too small, the nose area.

[00:12:55] Even Dallam’s adapted nose breathers, the ones that actually nose breathed all the time, they figured out how to do that. They adapted themselves and learned and taught. They had to switch to mouth breathing at higher intensities. That’s not failure. That’s physiology. If you run hard, you gotta breathe through the mouth.

[00:13:11] I know some of y’all out there, you go, “Ah, I can breathe through my nose when I’m doing the hardest efforts ever.” And other of you are like, “I have to breathe through my mouth all the time.” I get it. I get it. I get it. I actually talk more in depth about nose and mouth breathing. You can get it at the episode right up here and also at the end.

[00:13:24] But breathing videos on YouTube, they make you pick a side. It’s like Kendrick versus Drake. But I’m a J. Cole stan, and I like both. No, I’m a hardcore J. Cole fan for real. He’s like the most consistent rapper in the game. I think The Fall Off was a masterpiece end to his career. I digress. Back to breathing.

[00:13:40] The truth is your body already knows what to do. You’ve just been fighting it on easy runs by gasping when you don’t need to. Easy pace. Just shut your mouth if you can. Close it. Breathe through your nose. Build that aerobic engine on the cheap because nose breathing forces you to slow down. That’s the point of nose breathing.

[00:13:57] It’s not that it’s more efficient. It forces you to slow down. And if you start going hard, you’re doing intervals, race pace, hills, just open your mouth. Get air in. It’s absolutely fine if you naturally do that. I naturally do that. Most people naturally do that. Your brain wants the most amount of oxygen.

[00:14:12] All right, now we got the nose breathing for easy runs and mouth breathing for hard runs.

[00:14:24] I think, I think that’s my favorite. I think that’s my favorite. And then if I was going hard, I was doing sprints, tempo runs, VO2 max, I’d be breathing out through my mouth. That’s the winner. Nose, mouth. Look at that. The irony is that breathing normally the way your body wants to is the highest leverage move on this whole list.

[00:14:42] So notice anything about the top two. They’re boring. Diaphragmatic or diaphragmatic breathing, nose breathing on easy runs, no fancy patterns, no 30-breath rituals, no Navy SEALs, David Goggins anything. The runners I’ve coached who actually adapt to nose breathing, it takes them six months, sometimes longer.

[00:14:58] There’s no shortcut. The CO2 tolerance has to slowly come up. Your aerobic system has to get used to the slightly higher feel of having all that air in your lungs. That’s not sexy. It doesn’t make a great Instagram reel but it is the move. I’m writing a book right now called The 1% Better Runner. I have a whole section with four chapters dedicated to patience, possibly more, and why it’s the last piece to the puzzle to getting 1% better each day.

[00:15:22] And if you want first dibs when the book drops, just click the link up here, uh, or the QR code right here, or there’s a link below, and you’ll get signed up and I’ll let you know as the book progresses. You can even, uh, maybe even get an early copy of it, and you can yell at me and tell me what you think is good about it, what you hate about it, et cetera.

[00:15:37] Again, it’s all about patience because if you want fast results from breathing, you might quit in three weeks. You gotta be in it for the long game. And if you wanna actually breathe easier, here’s another free… There’s so much free stuff. Again, go get that QR code. Go click it or whatever. Scan it and get it, and you’ll get the breathing, uh, base training guide and bundle and cheat sheet and, uh, email.

[00:15:58] So much stuff. It’ll take you probably 25 seconds to sign up, maybe even actually it’ll take you 13 seconds, seven seconds. But back to the number one pick that I had, nose and mouth breathing. It has actually a lot more to it, like when to switch, how to train your nose to handle more pace, how to know if you have adapted yet, et cetera.

[00:16:14] You can go and get that full deep dive right here if you’re on YouTube. Just click that video below or there’s a whole bunch of links in the show notes or video description, uh, podcast, wherever you’re listening or watching. Happy breathings. Peace.