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As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Do you ever find that your breathing locks into sync with your stride when you’re out running? Or with your pedal cadence when you’re cycling? (No points if it happens when you’re swimming.) It happens to most people, but it comes and goes, so there’s been decades of debate about whether it’s a “good” thing, and whether we should try to synchronize breathing with stride. I go into this topic (plug alert) in my new book (pp. 83-85, for the record), but I just noticed a new study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology which adds some interesting insight. It’s a little bit involved, but it’s pretty interesting — so bear with me!

First things first: this was a study (by researchers at UMass-Amherst) of walking, not running — but it’s likely that the same basic processes are at work. Essentially, there are two cyclic systems at work: the “locomotory” system (your legs) and the respiratory system (your lungs). Both are fulfilling separate goals (to keep you moving as efficiently as possible, and to keep your muscles supplied with oxygen), but they also interact with each other — e.g. changing stride can drive greater demand for oxygen. So you’ve got what physicists call a “coupled oscillators” system. The question is: when the two systems are in sync, do they function more efficiently? Do you burn less oxygen at a given pace if your breathing matches your pace?

Here’s what the study did: it had volunteers walk at a natural pace at whatever stride frequency felt natural. Then, keeping the same pace, it had them increase or decrease stride frequency by 10% and 20%, while doing sophisticated monitoring of how closely the breathing rate matched the stride rate, and also monitoring oxygen consumption (a measure of efficiency).

First finding: forcing stride frequency away from its preferred “natural” value made the walkers less efficient. They consumed more oxygen when they either increased or decreased their stride. This is exactly as expected, and has been observed in many previous experiments.

Second finding: changing stride frequency had no effect on how often breathing rates locked in with stride rates — it stayed pretty much the same. Since efficiency changed and synchronization didn’t, this suggests that synchronization doesn’t help (or hurt) your efficiency. Previous studies have found conflicting results for this question, so this is an interesting observation.

But here’s the key finding. The number of different synchronization patterns was greatest at the naturally chosen stride rate. At the lower and higher frequencies, subjects were more likely to lock into their favourite pattern, which was two strides per breath. At the preferred stride frequency — where they were most efficient — they spent a greater proportion of time jumping to different patterns, like 3:1, 4:1, 2.5:1, 4.5:1 and even 7:1. Here’s the data:

So what does this mean?

This would indicate that the greatest variation in the dominant coupling strategy used allowed the participant to explore coupling strategies with the goal of minimizing oxygen consumption.

In other words, we’re efficient at our “natural” stride frequency not because we can breathe in sync with our strides, but (in part) because we don’t let ourselves get locked into one breathing pattern. Instead, we’re unconsciously trying different breathing patterns constantly, finding the one that’s most efficient at that moment and then re-optimizing a moment later. The moral: don’t try to consciously lock your breathing into a prescribed pattern.

(This doesn’t mean you should never pay any attention to your breathing. It may be, for example, that in stressful race situations you have a habit of breathing shallowly because of nerves. Trying to look out for this and correct it is different from, say, trying to exhale on every second left footstrike.)