How to Work Safely on Breath Control

You might remember doing breath-holding exercises as a competitive swimmer when you were young, with the prevailing-at-the-time theory being that you could get better at swimming by practicing “lung-buster” sets and restricted breathing sets. This became especially popular when underwaters and streamlined dolphin kicking became a bigger part of fast swimming. 

When you hold your breath underwater, however, you’re at risk for shallow water blackout, which can cause you to inhale water and die. The risk of shallow water blackout has led many coaches to change their approach to breath holding and breath control. All swimmers and coaches need to be very cautious when working on breath holding and breath control and never work on it unsupervised.

Breath Holding vs. Breath Control

To keep it simple, consider that breath holding is when you inflate your lungs fully and don’t exhale for a length of time. Breath control is restricting the number of breaths you take over time and slowly exhaling or limiting breath holding to short periods of time.

Working on breath control can help you improve your underwaters and reduce your chances of suffering shallow water blackout. Further, exhaling slowly allows for more rhythmic breathing when you do breathe rather than gulping for air after a forceful exhalation.

Here's how to increase your ability to streamline longer and sprint better. This progression requires a small amount of breath holding as part of the exercise, so make sure you never do this unsupervised.

• Start slow and basic—Push off the wall in an underwater streamline, with no kicking, stroking, or exhaling, and note how far you go from the wall. Repeat this a few times with a lot of rest. Next, try the same thing, except slowly exhale while you’re gliding. Again, note how far you go. To control your exhale, hum while exhaling slowly through your nose. It will take a few repeats to get the hang of it. This will help you relax parts of your body that aren’t helping you move through the water and make small adjustments to your body position. 
• Add some kicking—Now add kicking. Chances are you’re going to find it more comfortable to exhale slowly rather than hold your breath. Stop and come up when you need it, again noting how far you went with each push-off. Make sure you’re fully rested before each effort.  
• Breakout and a sprint—Now it’s time to go all the way down the pool. First try it with holding your breath during the streamline, and then try it with slowly exhaling. Finish each with a sprint to the end of the pool, breathing as often as you need. Make a note of your times with each sprint.
• Experiment—Different swimmers will get different results and learn different things. Change the number of breaths you take for each 25, down to zero if you can make it, but remember to breathe when you need to. As you repeat the exercise, you’ll find yourself making small adjustments to what you’re doing and when, where, and how you breathe. 

Patience

The more you work at it, the more you’ll become aware of how far and how fast you can go underwater and still be able to race a given distance. Length of streamline underwater and timing between breaths will vary with distance and effort of each swim, so play around with both speed and distance relative to your breathing patterns.

Success in longer races makes the mechanics of breathing and knowing when and how much to breathe critical. The ability to maximize your underwater and top-of-water speed by controlling your breathing takes time. The physiological adaptations don’t happen overnight, so it’s best to work on this a little at a time. Try once a week, charting your progress. There isn’t one magic number for all athletes in terms of distance or time underwater, and both will change as you change as an athlete.