#420 : The Real Reason You Are Out Of Breathe with Brenton Ford

Brenton Ford· Host0:00

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here's your host, Brenton Ford.

Speaker 20:09

[upbeat music] If you've been swimming for six months or more but you still run out of breath after 50 meters, this video is for you. I was recently running a clinic where we had a swimmer who'd been swimming for nine months, and she was running out of breath before she got to 50 meters. She'd have to stop halfway down the lap, get her breath back, and go again. And it's not because she was unfit. It's not because technically she was doing things really, really poorly. It was actually down to one thing that she got taught but didn't quite understand the nuance of it. So when I was asking the swimmer about what she does with her breathing and what she had been taught in the past, she had learned that it was important to hum when you exhale in the water. So straightaway, once you take your breath, bring your face back in the water, and start to hum and exhale immediately. Now, this is not necessarily bad advice for a lot of swimmers, especially if they are beginners. Except what was happening was she would take her breath, bring her face back in the water, and start exhaling straightaway and exhaling a lot. So by the time it came to get her next breath, she was already out of air, and so that meant two things. The first thing was that she was exhaling and not able to use the air that was in her lungs, so she was kinda deprived of oxygen,