Matt Roberts (book Get Running) says that we should take as many strides to breathe in as we take to breathe out when we run slowly (3-4 to 3-4), more in than out if we run at a medium pace (3 in and 1-2 out), and same in and out if we run at a fast pace (2 in and 1-2 out).
People who smoke should not do physical exercise, and that is mostly because of their lungs, therefore because of their capability of absorbing air (the lungs filter it).
Smokers perform worse than non-smokers in all physical activities, therefore it is silly considering them able to take part into competitions of physical nature.
They filter less and less air with time (time here regards time of the addiction/habit), so that they need to breathe in more and more air than the normal, what means that they spend an extraordinary amount of energy both to put the air in and to filter it, therefore they are much more tired than anyone else all the time.
As if it did not suffice, they may be stubborn and insist that they can do the same as others, so that they try too hard and may die literally from the effort, that is, the valves (the hearts) that impose the rhythm to their bodies may have to move quicker than they can move, so that they may literally break.
Matt Roberts also tells us that our breathing should come from the diaphragm, so that we should put our hand over it and check on whether we are doing it right or not.
We feel pain in the lungs if we breathe from it.
If we smoke, it is likely to be the case that the air concentrates in our throat and our lungs make noise with time on the trial to digest/filter the air.
That is because our lungs become progressively more rotten when we smoke frequently, like they are slowly destroyed in all their functions.
That must mean that breathing from the diaphragm is the runner's equivalent to taking drugs: We must enter some state of wonder, or of no limits, if we can do this right!
Our best female runner (modern times) of hurdles, Sally Pearson, was almost undeniably intoxicated in her first competition at the Olympic Games, like it is unlikely that a health expert watch the TV images of her win, actually of her post-win, and say that that was not the case.
Drugs that make you over-perform are of a nature that frontally opposes the nature of marijuana, which is known to let our organisms with lethargy (slow movements) instead (the addict believes that they over-perform during the effects of marijuana, like they need recordings and the reports of others to accept that what happens is the opposite).
The point is that we can get a reasonable amount of boost from simply breathing correctly, conditioning our organisms to do it, if what we search is sublimation of our human feelings, therefore also of our human needs.
Drugs usually inhibit our self-criticism, our superego.
There is a real-life story, which originates from real-life scientific experimentation, in which individuals die from heart attack for being blindfolded and being made believe that they were shot whilst a wet piece of cloth hit their necks... .
What kills them is not the bullet, but the thought that the bullet has entered their bodies in the right place.
That means that we always add an extraordinary amount of distress to our organism with our minds, therefore we must look for air before we need it in a frequent manner, and breathing in/out obviously takes an amount of our energy, and this amount could be fully used in the activity of running if we could control our minds... .
Discipline and training in that direction (breathing right) should then pay back in a not so meaningless way... .
As for swimming, what pays is breathing as little as possible, especially in.
If we want to have good speed in swimming, we aim at least three outs and one in in each sub-cycle.
The problem with running is that we do not have the water to support our weight and we cannot afford stop moving.
In the water, we stop making efforts to progress as we breathe in and out, like our body rests a bit whilst we do that.
Because our body needs the air to move, we accumulate deficit each time we stop to breathe in if we do that when we have no air left, so that we must breathe in when we still have enough to move our legs during the breath intake... .
We can still use some of the techniques for diving here, like to prolong the breathing-out process...
