Advanced breathing techniques before and while riding?

[alexeyga]

Have been going through a couple of books about extreme survival and advanced breathing training for athletes - which made me wonder - does, or rather how it might be applied to kiting?

Analyzing my own riding and last couple of crashed/swims, it feels like my breathing is always balancing somewhere around "just enough for right now", but if sh@t hits the fan - I have to put breathing in double overdrive to compensate having had nothing to spare to begin with. Perhaps there's a conscious, better way of going about it?

Anybody care to share their experience / thoughts?

[FLandOBX]

Interesting topic to tee up, alexeyga. I've experimented with breathing patterns in more rhythmic sports like running and cycling where coordination between breathing and foot/leg cadence can be beneficial. But with kiteboarding, I'm not sure I have ever focused on a pattern beyond inhaling just before popping into a trick, and then exhaling either during or just after the move (somewhat like power lifting).

If you want to see (or hear) what other kiteboarders are doing, the Go-Pro videos without music often record really annoying breathing patterns, which most of us quickly mute... (don't you hate those videos?). Especially entertaining sound effects when stuff goes bad.

[Bushflyr]

Kiting really isn't aerobic enough for it to matter much. Just don't forget to exhale when you crash. That will keep you from getting the wind knocked out of you.

[jeromeL]

I usually try steady breathing, don't want to breath in water when it unexpectedly spray in my face, so being slow and steady helps.

I am rarely breathing hard but recently I have been hitting mostly flat water spot. In wave or chop when trying to go fast for boosting I definitely breath harder and have to catch my breath at times. Pattern is more sprint or soccer like were you push your limit while accelerating prior to boosting and recover after doing some trick or wipeout... If I ever feel out of breath I just slow it down to recover...

Overall I feel like tolerance to "pain" is higher while kiting, too focused on kiting to think about how bad I need air or break for my thigh... Usually only early season when my stamina is low.

I hate those mouth mount gopro video, some people seems to be grunting a lot each time they pop or lift their leg up lol.

[plummet]

Kiting really isn't aerobic enough for it to matter much. Just don't forget to exhale when you crash. That will keep you from getting the wind knocked out of you.

This works really well. Particularly out the nose to stop water getting blasted up there.
BUT. Not so good when you are going through the rinse cycle in waves and need that air to stay alive!

[rynhardt]

Kiting really isn't aerobic enough for it to matter much. Just don't forget to exhale when you crash. That will keep you from getting the wind knocked out of you.

This works really well. Particularly out the nose to stop water getting blasted up there.
BUT. Not so good when you are going through the rinse cycle in waves and need that air to stay alive!

The air/CO2 in your lungs will not help you much anyway. Your blood concentration of O2 is built up through regular breathing over several breath cycles.
Unless you practise lung packing (which is a fairly advanced freediving technique, and impractical to do while kiting ), you are unlikely to increase your oxygen reserves.
Your body manages its O2 and CO2 levels pretty optimally without any conscious help needed. In fact, you are more likely to make things worse.
A good example of the unintended consequences of fiddling with your breathing cycle is shallow water blackout, where people unknowingly reset their "urgent need to breathe" trigger by hyperventilating before the dive.

[Bille]

...
A good example of the unintended consequences of fiddling with your breathing cycle is shallow water blackout, where people unknowingly reset their "urgent need to breathe" trigger by hyperventilating before the dive.

Surprised you know that ; where did Ya learn it ?

This article explained it good :
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/08/1 ... ur-breath/

...
Except that’s not what happens when you hyperventilate.

Instead, hyperventilation tricks your body into thinking you have more oxygen than you do by reducing the amount of CO2 in your bloodstream.

When you breathe, the oxygen coming in is converted into CO2. When you hold your breath, this CO2 starts to build up, and when this buildup begins to reach a critical level, you feel that overwhelming urge to take a breath and get some new oxygen into your system. When you hyperventilate, you reduce the amount of CO2 in your blood, but you don’t boost its oxygen. These lower levels of CO2 delay the activation of the body’s “need to breathe” reflex far past the point where it should have been triggered. In short, the reason you can hold your breath longer when you hyperventilate isn’t because of an increase in oxygen, but because of a decrease in CO2.

Besides reducing the amount of CO2 in your system, hyperventilating actually reduces the amount of oxygen available to your muscles and organs. Because your blood has less CO2 due to hyperventilation, the alkalinity levels in your blood increase. This increased alkalinity causes the hemoglobin to bond too strongly with the oxygen molecules in the blood and consequently doesn’t allow those molecules to be released to the muscles and organs.

Hyperventilating thus creates a broken fuel gauge in your body — you think you have a full tank of oxygen because lowered CO2 levels have suppressed your urge to take a breath, but you’re actually running on E.

What all this often leads to is an unexpected loss of consciousness, and in water, this is called “shallow water blackout.” ...

The article also tells how to get more oxygen in your system ; or Breath DEEP.

Bille

[Mossy 757]

Set and setting are crucial to any psychedelic experience, I see no reason why you shouldn't focus on both prior to and following a kiting session. During the session, I'd let your body breath naturally, it knows what to do so well it even does it in your sleep!

[jakemoore]

Our physiologic desire to breathe is driven more by need to eliminate CO2 and acid than oxygen saturation. Respiratory drive will increase at high altitude and the resulting hyperventilation creates the respiratory alkalosis we experience as altitude sickness. Moral of the story is to just relax and let your lizard brain decide how and when to breathe.

[Bushflyr]

This works really well. Particularly out the nose to stop water getting blasted up there.
BUT. Not so good when you are going through the rinse cycle in waves and need that air to stay alive!

That's pretty much irrelevant. You're going to lose the air no matter what. Exhaling, humming, yelling, whatever will keep the windpipe open and keep the diaphragm from getting paralyzed by the hit. Also, you have plenty of O2 stored in your blood to stay alive for a few minutes. Breathing is just a reflex that can be easily overcome with a bit of training.

A good example of the unintended consequences of fiddling with your breathing cycle is shallow water blackout, where people unknowingly reset their "urgent need to breathe" trigger by hyperventilating before the dive.

Actually that's not the case. SWB is caused by the reduced partial pressure of O2 in your lungs actively drawing O2 out of the blood as you surface from a deep dive. Caused by deep dives, not by hyperventilating or resetting the "need to breathe."