So that deficit from when the body’s after that blood flow to when it arrives, the body has to pay that system back and we call that an oxygen deficit. And that’s what would increase the shortness of breath during that early phase warm-up. 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.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This is episode number 110. It’s called Uncovering the Breath Training Secrets Used by Olympic Swimmers with James Fletcher. On today’s podcast I chat with James Fletcher, who has a background in physio and exercise physiology, but is someone who’s more recently moved into breath training for athletes. And he’s worked with elite level swimmers such as Cam McAvoy and James Roberts, who have both been on the Australian Olympic team. He’s worked with Big Wave Surfer Ryan Hipwood, who surfs waves 30, 40 foot plus on a regular basis. And it doesn’t matter if you would consider yourself a weekend warrior, you can still get a lot of benefit from the breath training that James talks about on today’s podcast. Now, what James I guess specializes in is a very scientific and measured approach to enhancing your ability to breathe. And as you’ll see on the podcast, we talk about

a number of different ways to go about it and how it can help you in your racing. And he has very specific ways to apply this stuff, depending on what types of events that you’re training for. If it’s a 50 freestyle, it’s going to be very different than someone who’s training for a 10 kilometer swim, as you’ll find out. So let’s get into the podcast. This is James Fletcher of FletcherTechnics.com and he’s talking about how he got started, how he got introduced to breath training and the importance of it, and why there’s a big movement now for high level sports moving into this field and wanting to find out more about it and use it to give them an edge over their competitors. So here’s James talking about his background in physio. My background is in physio. So I started working with my first essential job as a physio was a swimming physio with Tim Brown at Mermaid Beach Sports Clinic. So that was looking after Gian Rooney and Grant Hackett and that was when Miami

pool under Dennis was essentially in hitting its straps. So I got exposed really early to swimming as a junior physio and that was purely from physio, just treating them shoulders. He was traveling around with the clinics and I did that for three years and then took off to join Cirque Soleil as a physio. So

then I traveled around the world with those guys for three. Breathing interventions started taking place with them. They were getting old, they’re 50 plus and they were having trouble keeping up with the demands of their sports and they’re running across the wide. Their shortness of breath levels were starting to impede their ability to make a start of looking at the research as a physio to help improve the

similar to the techniques that I use today to him.

And when was that? Yeah, it was the Cirque Soleil guys.

Well at the same time we were dealing with aftershocks from the Fukushima earthquake. So that was 2012 happened and so these guys were getting older. So we had three weeks off and then three performance. So managing that three performance anxiety levels also got me thinking okay well what can we do to… So basically you’re looking for a way to help the older athletes keep up with the younger athletes and what made you turn to breath training? What was it that actually turned you on to that could be something that might be able to help these guys? At the time my mother was diagnosed with a lung condition so

she lives in a house of commissioned flight at Yankeespoof and was struggling getting up a flight of stairs. What’s available for one year per day so don’t avoid activity.

And then came the athletic performance field where in spiritual muscle training can do a similar thing, can reduce shortness of breath levels, can improve performance. So there’s I mean obviously there’s different demands from different sports so you know comparing an endurance, let’s say an endurance swimmer, somebody who’s doing a 10k plus swim compared to a 50 and 100 meter swimmer. What sort of differences would you see in what’s required in terms of their breathing or I guess capacity and technique and then the differences in how you would go about training those different those differences? Yeah so you’re saying between a 50 or 100 like let’s say a 50 meter sprinter compared to a 10k swimmer? Much greater difference. My first consultation usually involves sitting down with the athlete and discussing what they’re trying to achieve with their coach. People might be sitting down with with James Roberts to improve your performance.

What are you guys trying to work on in the call of the moment?

The common for a sprinter is to increase their ability and training their ability to take by increasing their volume so how much air they measure. They put them on a testing device which measures how much air they’re actually taking a breath. Dealing with that the body is really important in exit levels under their certain conditions so that they never have to think about their breath or that they’re never in a rush to get up to take that breath to ensure that they are fully focused on their kick and their underwater capacity. So that might be something that I work on in a sprinting environment but if we care McEvoy and we’re working on something complete each athlete is different and presents with different.

And as in the power of their diaphragm how’s that how’s that tested?

Yeah so it’s tested by thinking think about trying to breathe they can get air in and that is something that might be a little bit more distance swim mode and we know that that has a direct work of breathing we want to work on as well so a lot of finalists get exposure to their stroke. What I want them to do a little bit as well is release that tummy a little bit so when they take a breath in they’re accessing a part of their respiratory system which has such a reduced work of breathing. If you think about taking a big breath in now and just using your chest you’ve got to move pec muscles you’ve got to move rib cage you’ve got to move heart leads in order to create that pressure differential and if you think about just using your tummy there’s nothing in the road of that tummy so if you can release the tummy and get a quality if our work of breathing is the blood flow delivery so that’s that’s the foundation

of what I try and do is whether it is through a fan breathing I take every breathing every swimmer’s breathing muscles training the breathing muscles the longer distance if I reduce the work of breathing energy delivery to the exercising muscles increases so it would be more about increasing the swimmer’s efficiency by increasing their in-spiratory muscle so by uh in-spiratory muscle function is that essentially increased diaphragm strength is that the the same thing that you’re talking about or is that different a little bit different so um but there are that we work along we should we do that however with him was him lying down on his back with a small weight on his tummy and I see on you on the front page yeah yeah it does and like I see on the front page of your website that you’ve got a number of those guys James Roberts um Ryan Hipwood a few of those guys who you’ve you’ve got their testing results

after I need to check when it is but they’re initial results and then um what they’ve achieved after a number of weeks and so on so how how long does it take you to see let’s say that first stage of improvement how long does that take and then kind of I guess the next stage of improvement how long does that take yeah if you’re a therapist by trade but I’m also an exercise what what I’ve done is what we see you can liken it to any strength program so in the first few weeks you get that neural adaptation so you start getting changes where you know the muscle is definitely not increasing in size yet technique change and we’re starting to get that neural connection so quite quickly commonly in the swimming environment you’ll get the patient started to know at first notice I mean that’s a great question and is it an increase in volume so am I allowing it during the breath that they’re allowed to take is it more efficiency so by getting

that neural connection are we making the breathing system more efficient so that during those hypothesis from the research and teaching someone how to take a bigger breath in the of the diaphragm production and shortness of breath and what sort of um sorry so please cut me no no no keep going this is pretty wild um so yeah in the first two weeks we start to see it because of the um impeding on the athletes and the larger breath and shifting their performance in that manner so it is individual but um so you that’s you basically answered the question I was going to ask anyway which was how essentially how time consuming is it to to do these exercises because obviously they’ve still got their primary sport they’ve got to train for and um it’s like it’s like the stuff that we recommend when we’re doing clinics and and when we go away with camps is you know you’ve got to be able to fit in any additional stuff you know into quite a busy

life so um yeah we look at all right how how time consuming is it now what those training programs that you often give to people is it is it once a day is it two times a week or twice a day how’s it normally look what what do you normally recommend yep you know um it does shift um as the program goes through so initially it’s 30 breaths twice a day so that’s under eight minutes um if you do the we do recommend in the early phases that we that we start really light so remember it’s a sanction for the for the athlete we say based on your testing results this is where I want you to work at I want you to do 30 breaths add add a certain intensity strength and that’s where all of my foundation’s light is first of all building a strength and then becoming really specific so less than eight minutes a day at its maximum start to get a little bit more specific so for a sprinter for example wants to do some co2 tolerance or breath hold tolerance training

that training takes a little while longer and I would usually do that in a practical situation so the pool start really easily then we would do a couple of objective owning sets and that usually takes 20 minutes that’ll roughly be about 20 minutes cool and uh there’s I mean there’s a number of different breath training I guess systems or ways to go about it out there you’ve got the Wim Hof method which is probably one of the most widely known ones I guess and yeah I mean obviously there’s a lot of different ways to apply breath holding some of them might even contradict each other and I mean I went to a a kind of a surfing uh breath holding training course with Nam Baldwin I don’t know if you know Nam but um yeah so yeah I went to that and that was that was excellent and that was basically surf specific and um so what’s the difference between what you’re teaching compared to let’s say the Wim Hof method or maybe what Nam teaches to the surf guys so

how how does it differentiate yeah um I mean there’s three vastly different programs if you’re looking at them the Nam’s program and what I do um my foundation is in science I’m a physiologist and a physiotherapist and I want to measure Wim Hof for example so his breathing technique the way I approach it is more about a meditative space to enhance your feelings now we know the breath has a really potent wouldn’t recommend the Wim Hof method for Wim Hof method essentially hyperventilating the system trying to increase the pH of the blood now great maybe for chronic long-term condition treatments but really in a performance environment if you’re exposed in the body to higher pH levels your oxygen affinity increases so wrong space to use and some training a fantastic program um you know really surf specific uh and from my understanding you know he doesn’t put uh let’s measure your volume the largest inhaler

so from my understanding uh that’s how my program would differ um to his program um I’m not I wouldn’t put himself and um Wim Hof in the same category um I although Wim Hof’s graded exposing um many different people to an alternative lifestyle and exercise and the importance of leaves so that he’s never worrying about double training system I want a technique training system I want a strength training system achieving the correct objective measures and I need to change we’ve done a drop set with his so let’s fatigue it and then ask him to hit certain measures as well so we are really potently stimulating anyone in this breath systems and different ways to approach the system and be conscious of it tingly and numb and to my system and maybe if I’m uh a person who’s unhealthy and making the wrong decisions in life and really need to focus on my health then it might enable me to get my mind into a space where it’s becoming much more easy to tap into a positive health plan and looking to warm up

or if I’m looking to improve to improve my performance I think it’s taking each athlete and each sport on its merit and uh applying what you need and and I always talk to the coach I always talk to the swimmer and say look what do you ask that you know want to achieve from my program and then I give those tools to the athlete and to the coach to say if he wants to take less breath I can help him achieve that if he wants to take a faster breath in because he’s uh he’s take his turning his head too long if that’s a technique thing you want to work on I can give the athlete those tools to do that yeah that’s the that makes sense yeah absolutely I mean we do the same thing it’s the same thing with swim coaching there’s so many different approaches to it and you know it depends what which athlete you have in front of you someone who might just be swimming for purely for for fitness and they just want to make it as as easy as enjoyable as possible then you know obviously I can help

them with that but we probably slightly give more towards people who are looking to to increase their speed and and race better so people who are often competing we still work with people who are training purely for fitness but a lot of it is people who are looking to improve their racing and obviously the same thing goes for you know for breath training and is there is there a routine that you will give your athletes to you to go through before competition is there any sort of warm-up that you’d have them go through to want the inspiratory muscles certainly um so we use a pressure threshold device so that that way I can set a load for that patient and you know coming from a science background I know their objective measures I know where they need to be training at to get an improvement or get a shift or illicit sympathy in their system so during a warm-up phase there’s clear research just so if we do inspiratory muscle training

prior to performance we improve repeated sprints so that that’s where the research lies

so I’ve worked with the Brisbane Broncos and they came to me with a problem um my athletes running off the bench um during middle during the game uh really suffering in those first two or three minutes with sureness of breath essentially going from zero to hero you know they’re on the bike they’re certainly warming up their um their quadriceps their glutes their arms when they’re on the side but they’re not warming up their inspiratory muscles and what we see is we see an oxygen deficit so running out uh onto the field the breathing muscles start to require oxygen so they’re starting demanding more blood flow and they’re already at working at 100 because they’ve sprinted out there so that deficit from when the body’s after that blood flow to when it arrives the body has to pay that system back and we call that an oxygen deficit and that’s what would increase the shortness of breath during that early phase warm-up

so we started introducing an inspiratory muscle training respiratory warm-up on the sidelines which looks to improve the blood flow delivery to their diaphragm and to the inspiratory muscles before they warm out to reduce that oxygen deficit yeah fantastic so yeah yeah that makes that makes sense and it was that something that was difficult to get the athletes to to to take on or what did that that look like when you went to work with them was it a group training that you did did you come for several sessions yeah a group yeah a group training um session and each athlete got a device so it’s a pressure threshold device like i said um David Morgan’s a classic example so he’s a really vigilant um trainer and really scientific in in the way he wants to improve himself and his swimming um so i’ve worked with him quite closely um and still working with him quite closely in the lead up to Commonwealth Games Trials and he’s developed

his own inspiratory muscle warm-up based on our conversations the research and what he’s good at so he uses it right before he jumps in the pool for his race and for that same um that same research so let’s put blood flow into the exercising muscle before it’s about to race so that we don’t increase that oxygen debt so that he’s shortness of breath levels reduced and and being butterfly and being pretty good underwater David that’s he he wants to work on his strength and also his weaknesses so he’s saying this is what i want to achieve and this is how i’m going to do it and um in our emails sort of back and forth before we we set this up one of the things you mentioned in there was the um i hope i pronounced right but the the meta bow reflex do you want to talk a little bit about that so uh i mentioned before the um the ways that inspiratory muscle training improves performance so the first one is reducing shortness of breath levels and that’s centered around the neurophysiology of breath

lessness so what drives shortness of breath levels now that’s a really complex field but what you’ve mentioned here is the metaba reflex which it’s pretty simply explained by if we increase the strength of the diaphragm we reduce its fatigue ability we know the diaphragm gets fatigue we know during fatigue process that the diaphragm and the inspiratory muscles are after blood flow they want exercise they want oxygen they want blood flow to satisfy their energetic demands so if we reduce its fatigue ability those demands reduce and we increase blood flow to the exercising muscles because a really great study where they got guys on a on a psychologometer and they made it easy to breathe by forcing air down their throat so by reducing the work of breathing which is my foundation techniques i want to reduce the work of breathing and they also made breathing harder by breathing through a resistance so what they saw when they put ephemeral catheter in so that was measuring

blood flow to the quadriceps during a psychologometer test when you make breathing easier we increase blood delivery to the quadriceps muscles when we make breathing harder we reduce the blood flow delivery to the quadriceps muscles so by reducing that blood flow to the quadriceps muscles exercise becomes harder and that’s one of the great things that we see through the research within spiritual muscle training is not only shortness of breath levels reduced but exercise is made easier so we can train harder and we can perform at high levels so for that sounds like for an endurance athlete that would be one of the key things that you’re really looking to to work on yeah that efficiency is something in a longer endurance athlete that that is really creating that metabolic efficiency is something that you know a one percent can make such a difference over a marathon or over a long distance swim um and that’s where we want to focus is on making breathing as easy as possible so it

doesn’t hinder their performance we don’t see a fatigability of the inspiratory muscles and we deliver the blood flow where it’s needed into the exercising muscles

and um what i mean what does your what how do you normally work with athletes is it one on one is it group settings how’s that normally normally work for you and where you’re based as well for the people who are who are listening who’d um who’d like to get in contact and maybe look into this some of this stuff we’re about to hear your based yeah i’m based on the Gold Coast um obviously that’s a great spot for swimming um but i’m i’m working on some things so that i can train people um around the world um it’s a little bit challenging at the moment to to train people via skype or via video conferencing link because i don’t get the feedback that i need and i can’t see the objective measures that i need to but i’ve got a solution for that that’ll be coming out in a couple of weeks actually um i am based on the Gold Coast and i work with a number of physios around the Gold Coast from their clinic um and work with athletes from

master’s athletes to to your high level Olympians improving that inspiratory muscle function across a number of different sports so from swimming kayaking um you know i don’t think i’m limited in i’m not just a breath hole guy that is a component to what i can deliver if that athlete requires it not really necessary for a runner you know that that’s a technique that you’d probably be spending your time elsewhere if you’re a professional athlete rather than holding your breath underwater you know um so people can get in touch um online or on my website fletcher techniques um happy to you know this space is really i’ve grabbed the research and i’ve taken it to the next level and there’s no one else doing the types of techniques and measurements um of the inspiratory muscles that i’m doing uh and i feel like that i can achieve a one to five percent improvement in someone’s performance purely just by strength training

the muscles and that’s from the research and like i said i’ve taken that to the next level and someone like ryan hipwood who’s done um you know done nam’s cause he loves wim hoff method he does lots of breath training he still finds the time to do some of my training because he feels like it adds on top of what he’s already got so um i feel like i’m in the right space and i’m continuing in the r and d space to say okay well last week i got you know i was in an altitude chamber and went to twice the height of uh of everest and um with my breath training techniques i was able to perform some push ups and okay so what’s the body’s response to that and what sort of hormone levels increase after we come down from such a rapid um ascent and can we achieve more physiologically if we you know hack the body and push hormone levels through the roof during an intervention like that so you know i’m continually pushing the

boundaries of research and like i said the way is to improve sports performance and um hopefully i can deliver that to your readers whether it’s through a blog post or whether it’s through a phone call email or if they want to see me in a consultation um here on the goalcoast that’s great i’d uh it’d be good to get you back on down the track once you’ve uh once you’ve had the chance to go through some more you know go through more research and all that sort of stuff and um get the latest on what you what you’ve learned from it and it’s quite a i guess it’s probably a newly popular sort of field probably you know mostly started from from wim Hof with that and now it’s really sort of picked up and it’s it’s interesting that obviously it applies to nearly every sport out there just in terms of the importance of breathing but it’s something that’s only really now just started to to take off and um going through nam’s course i found that just so so beneficial

and and interesting interesting and i can’t even say that right interesting and something that um you know it’s something that i hadn’t really sort of looked at much before so i appreciate your time and for sharing um what you’ve what you’ve learned so far and your experience is working with some very high level athletes and um all the best in the future thanks very much and i appreciate it thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com