Brian Mackenzie is the founder of Crossfit Endurance and a world class strength and conditioning expert who constantly innovates the endurance, strength and conditioning paradigm. His workout programs are based around altitude and hypoxic training – which he studied for more than 10 years.
Brain is working with many athletes in various sports and has a ton of experience, which makes him the perfect person to share his overview of what Training Mask can do for a wider range of sports.
In this video review Brian shares with us his unique way of adding in the Training Mask to increase recovery times in the athletes that he trains.
“Hypoxic training is not just about altitude. It is about the ability of your body to handle the stress of not being able to breath as fast as you can or as much as you can.”
Training Mask works a little bit like altitude training from one point of view – it will limit the amount of air you can take in based on the presets you will be using, and it will make it more difficult for you to breath as rapidly as you may want to, after a high intensity activity.
By doing this, athletes are more likely to become much more comfortable with working out under air resistance conditions which will increase their tolerance to that breathless felling you have during a high exertion workout.
“A larger deal of it is mental, but it’s also physical – your diaphragm is actually a muscle, your intercostal are actually muscle as well, and these muscles play a significant role in your lungs development.”
Your breathing capacity will be determined to a great extent by how powerful your diaphragm and your respiratory muscles are. A strong diaphragm will be able to contract more efficiently, making more room for your lungs to expand and fill with air.
This will mean you will be able to take deeper, more controlled breaths.
“Getting the athletes to learn how to deal with the hypoxic aspect of training and to control their breathing, control their pacing via this hypoxic deal has become a big part of what I play with.”
This is something that Brian Mackenzie experienced while training athletes in various sports from crossfit to football, MMA, surfing, soccer and so on. Training Mask will give you added benefits regardless of the sport you are in.
This is why Brian is using Training Mask on so many of the athletes he is working with.
“Getting 100% out of the athlete during training is the optimal goal, so that we create an adaptation out of that and know when to catch that super compensation wave. But when we add the Training Mask to the recovery, that is when we start to see some radical changes starting to happen, because people’s recovery times are not that fast at that point.”
What is cool about Brain’s approach is that is so much different from what anyone else is doing right now and he also has the results speaking from themselves.
So instead of having the athletes wearing the Training Mask during the actual activity they are performing, they are using it while they are resting in between sessions. By doing this they are not limiting the training necessarily, but limit the recovery protocol.
As a result of this type of training, Brain claims they started noticing much faster recovery in all athletes after just two weeks after they started using the Training Mask. And of course, the recovery period will be even faster when working out in a normal environment, where you don’t have any air resistance.
