For those of you who are not familiar with Patrick McKeown – he is the founder of The Oxygen Advantage program, and author of several books that dive deep into the respiratory system and teaching people how to breathe.
For years he has been working with athletes helping them improve conditioning and stamina by perfecting their breathing technique. Patrick’s Oxygen Advantage Program contains 7 different exercises, each of the exercise having its own benefit and purpose. The goal of the program is to improve sport performance, whether you are an endurance athlete, a sprinter, baseball player, basketball player or weight lifter.
Patrick McKeown also teamed up with expert doctors, physicians and sports professionals to bring the High Performance Breathing Technology (HPBT) protocol to all the athletes around the world. The purpose of HPBT is to maximize oxygen carrying capacity and delivery for aerobic and anaerobic improvement.
Some of the most famous athletes trained by Patrick McKeown include the likes of Patrick Feeney, Jade Barber and Chris Giesting. There’s no doubt that Patrick McKeown is an authority when it comes to breathing technique and breathing exercises and recently he gave his thoughts on the Training Mask.
“Patrick McKeown admits he likes The Training Mask because it conditions the body to cope with the feeling of breathlessness.”
Many of the pro athletes that are engaged in high intensity physical activities often reach a performance plateau, not because of their strength or technical capabilities, but because they have poor control of their breathing.
If you are even remotely into sports, you must know that breathlessness sensation when you can’t seem to get in enough air no matter how hard you try it. Training Mask will put a cap on the amount of oxygen you can inhale based on the settings or valves you will be using. This will make breathing much more difficult for you during a moderate or high intensity physical activity.
By training this way over and over again, athletes will develop a higher tolerance to the breathlessness sensation. It allows you to become much more comfortable with training under severe air resistance conditions and are more likely to perform better during high exertion workouts when there’s no additional breathing resistance.
Ultimately, Training Mask will make your cardio vascular and respiratory systems more efficient. So your body will use less energy to breathe and therefore it will have more energy at its disposal to put into the actual physical activity that you are doing, resulting in better athletic performance.
Our lungs are forced to put in more effort when the air flow is restricted by a device such as the Training mask. By training this way frequently enough, the lungs will start to get used with the external resistance and they will become more efficient at breathing and utilizing the oxygen that it’s available.
In other words, you will improve your lung capacity as well as your aerobic capacity. As per the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research this method of training has been proven to improve athletic performance in a variety of different sports.
The Training Masks features a specially engineered valves system which will allow any user to set the right air resistance setting. So you don’t need to be a pro athlete to start using this device. It will not only develop the efficiency of your respiratory system, but it will also teach you how to pace your breathing. It’s almost like a link connecting you with your physique at a mental level.
So if you are looking for an out of the box way of improving your endurance and overall performance by dialing into your respiratory system, the Training Mask is definitely a device you want to consider.
Add a couple of respiratory training sessions to your workouts each week and see how it feels. My bet it will grow on you instantly. Don’t go full head on first though. Start off slowly and progressively add more and more difficulty as your body becomes accustomed to it.
