Does Holding Your Breath Make a Diffrence

I once held my breath for an entire 15 miler. I found it to be quite relaxing, until I woke up in the ditch.

De Olivera (sp?) does something with this. Cruz used to hold his breath the final 50 meters of many 200/440 reps. Maybe someone who has more insight could add to this.

Fred Wilt had Buddy Edelen doing 400's on the track while holding his breath..I think up to 30 seconds at a time.

100m sprinters hold their breath in a race...because the act of breathing requires energy. I suppose one could also do that in training to teach the body to cope with lacic acid.

If it did, somebody would have figured it out and bragged about their great discovery.

People have figured this out. The problem I see is that most people don't want to be liable for the potential consequences of playing with great amounts of energy, such as holding your breath for increasingly longer periods.

An elite sprinters perspective would be nice to hear from, but as far as I've read the elite 100M, 9.79 - 11.20ish, goes by on a single maximum inhalation. So does the elite swimmers 50M, 19.00-22ish. Because it takes less energy? That makes sense. But also, it should be noted that as an air pump, you derive your locomotion from air.

Let your lung capacity be expressed by X. Having X amount of air inside you will result in maximum efficiency for power transfer. If you took two breaths during a 100M race, you would lose because your efficiency was not 100% for the whole time, while your competitions was at 100%, or closer to it is more likely.

The trick with this is to continually work on lowering your resistance to the energy running through you. As you do this you will be able to go farther on each cycle. Based on this, you could theoretically run a marathon on one breath. That's a bit impractical at this state though. It is likely that distance runners will eventually count their breaths during races, it's just another way to manipulate your energy, or ability to receive it however you want to look at it.

It is conceivable that a 100 second race could be executed on 10 breaths. If every 9 seconds you followed a very forcefull exhale with a complete inhalation you would be running at maximum efficiency for approximately 90% of the time. With the remaining 10% at approximately 50% efficiency.

Time will tell, and based on a post above, 1:41 in college certainly ought to tell you something.

I read an article on the new free diving record the other day. I admit to wondering whether some of the breathing training / exercises performed by these people had any transfer over to running. Their number one goal appears to be to achieve relaxation and maximum economy of breathing and heart rate during their efforts.

Often, when running, particularly after a tough hill, the rate of respiration gets too high. The danger is that you are inhaling the CO2 that you have just exhaled and this could lead to hyperventilation as the worst case. So, often when running hard up a steep hill, it is necessary to hold your breath for a few steps simply to get it back under control.

Sprinters do not hold their breath for the entire 100 meters. But they run with their chest expanded as much as possible and the air is sucked in effortlessly. It is interesting that when it is kick time, that it becomes necessary to breathe like a sprinter, with a much lower rate of respiration and sprint rather than simply running harder.