Holding your breath / Marathon training.

I don't think anyone could even run a mile while holding their breath. Forget about completing a marathon.

I didn't mean that, i meant just encorporate holding yoru breath each morning or a few times a day into training, that way your heart becomes more efficient with oxygen. These guys who do these contest are remarkably efficient.

One must note that the world record is done in water and after breathing pure oxygen. No one can just decide to not breath for 15 minute at any time. It takes a lot of preparation, I think half an hour of pure oxygen breathing.

I Read about this too. The theory of training is indeed quite interesting from a physiological point of view.

I'm a runner myself (34:00 10k) and trained for a few months for breathholding, which brought me to 4:30 min.

There's also a discipline called "walking apnea", where you basically just walk while holding your breath. The best guys get up to 400 metres.

I'd really be interested if anybody can provide additional information on this.

For me, I found that it didn't help my running at all, but I'm also not sure if I trained properly.

I also remember a paper that mentioned better static apnea performance for smokers, I believe the reason for that was something like the process of oxygen transport was dilated due to worse blood flowing capabilities.

(sorry for my bad grammer, I'm from europe)

Greetz

11:35 WITHOUT oxygen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_Apnea

I think I read Zatopek used to hold his breath and see how far he could run. Sometimes he would pass out doing this and wake up on the ground. I do not think he ran very far.

I used to live and run at 10000' elevation and found occasionally holding my breath while running at sea level simulated feeling of being at altitude.

Training to hold your breath for long periods seems like training your body to enter a torpid state. Basically shutting everything down, with as little muscle activity as possible, incl. heart rate, given a fixed amount of oxygen. That is sort of the opposite of running where you want to develop high muscle activity as possible given a fixed amount of oxygen. Running also involves training to improve breathing to provide more oxygen to the body, whereas breath holding does not train breathing.

AS stated above i'm not suggesting doing this while running ever. I'm just saying to actually train to hold your breath a long time just to simply train your heart to be more efficient with oxygen. I mean it seems like this wouldn't hurt? If some random can get his heart rate to a resting 30 without exercise imagine mixing this WITH marathon training, you would be insanely efficient.