You’ve no doubt seen them: those sleek, tight-fitting masks worn by UFC fighters like Diego Sanchez, Tyrone Woodley and Carlos Condit, celebrity actors like Michael Jordan in the recent movie Creed and even extreme workout enthusiasts at your local gym who appear to be the exercising equivalent of the villain Bane from Batman’s “Dark Knight Rises.” Indeed, from the looks of NFL players, Ironman triathletes, BJJ champions, MMA fighters, boxers, Crossfitters and beyond, these masks, which come in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes, seem to be taking the fitness world by storm.
But do training masks really work? In today’s article, you’ll discover the answer, and find out whether these trendy face-gadgets are waste of your money or a breakthrough device that will give you the lungs of a freak mutant.
The Difference Between Hypoxia, Resisted, and Restricted Breathing
Let’s start here: pick up a straw. Now, breathe in and out through the straw. That’s resisted breathing. Consider it to be something lke weight training for your lungs.
Now go for a swim or, if a swimsuit isn’t handy, imagine going for a swim. Experience what happens when you breathe every 5 or 7 strokes instead of every 1 or 2 strokes. That’s restricted breathing, which sends a clear message to your body that oxygen molecules are few and far between.
Finally, let’s say you go climb a mountain or crawl into an altitude tent (a type of tent that basically sucks some of the oxygen out of the air that you’re breathing). That’s hypoxic training, in which the air is truly thinner and you’re actually pulling less oxygen into your body.
Since it neither restricts how often you can breathe nor reduces the partial pressure of oxygen in the air that you actually are breathing, a training mask would only fall into that first category: resisted breathing. And the proposed mechanism of beneficial action for resisted breathing is that it may enhance your endurance or cardiovascular performance by strengthening your inspiratory and expiratory muscles, which would then increase something called your “ventilatory capacity” (basically, your lung size).
But does the research actually back this up? Let’s take a look at the most recent studies.
Resisted Breath Training Research
There has actually been quite a bit of recent research on breath muscle training, which involves inhaling through any type of device that forces inspiratory and expiratory muscles such as your intercostal muscles, serratus muscles, diaphragm, etc. to work harder. Until recentl, the research has been somewhat inconclusive, culminating in a 2013 review entitled “Effects of respiratory muscle training on performance in athletes: a systematic review with meta-analyses.”, which concluded that resisted breath training may indeed boost cardiovascular and endurance performance at sea level, particularly in sports such as swimming during which frequency of breathing is limited. But the boost was small, as were the sample sizes used in the studies reviewed.
However, a different story emerges when we turn to investigating what happens during performance at altitude, a time at which breathing and oxygen utilization become even more crucial due to the lower amounts of oxygen. In this scenario, you tax your breathing muscles far more intensively, and an argument could be made that the more conditioned these breathing muscles are via the use of something like a resisted breathing mask, the less prone to fatigue you and your breathing muscles would be.
Recently, at the Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, this hypothesis was investigated. In the study, entitled “Respiratory Muscle Training and Exercise Endurance at Altitude.” researchers subject participants to 30 minutes of resisted breath training three times a week for four weeks. It’s important to know that they weren’t using a training mask in this study, but rather a special breathing device that allowed for something called “voluntary isocapnic hyperpnea respiratory muscle training (VIHT training). All this means is that the carbon dioxide levels in the blood remained relatively constant so that the study subjects didn’t become dizzy or faint.
Then, the subjects performance at 12000 feet of altitude was tested. It turns out that following the resisted breath training, the participants were able to last a shocking 44% longer in a cycling test to exhaustion, while a control group and a group that did a “sham” (AKA placebo) version of the breath training didn’t improve one bit.
The idea behind the improvement in the resisted breath training group is that their respiratory muscles were able to withstand fatigue for a longer period of time, and thus less blood needed to be shunted to these muscles and more blood was available for hard working body parts such as their legs. Interestingly, the same group of researchers performed a separate study in which they used a similar protocol to test cognitive function at altitude. Cognitive processing speed and working memory can be significantly compromised during exercise in thin air, which makes perfect sense since less oxygen gets to your brain when the air is thinner. After four weeks of resisted breath training, both cognitive processing speed and working memory during exercise at 12,000 feet were improved – possibly due to better tolerance of carbon dioxide buildup and possibly due to more “resilience” to the discomfort brought on by thinner air.
And one final quick point, as highlighted in this study: by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in front of your face (which happen when you wear a training mask), you are actually increasing the carbon dioxide content of the air that you breath back in, which can actually decrease the percentage of oxygen you take in per breath, and thus increase your tolerance to higher amounts of carbon dioxide that tends to accumulate during difficult exercise.
Summary
So ultimately, it appears that if you’re going to be competing or exercising at sea level, the use of a training mask may give you a slight boost in performance. If you’re going to be performing at altitude, it would appear that you get a far more significant positive effect in both cardiovascular and cognitive performance. Sure, the effects aren’t as pronounced as they would be if you had, say, used a hypoxic altitude training device, slept in an altitude tent, or moved to a mountain to train – but considering you can simply slap a mask on your face and head to the gym to get a significant positive training effect, I personally think the use of a training mask is worth the small expense (about 70-90 bucks), and I use mine several times a week for everything from bike rides to kettlebell swings to yoga.
Do you have more questions about whether training masks really work? You can join the conversation at http://ift.tt/1xq4tz1!
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