June July 2024 - 38

Therapy Focus
RECOVERY &
REJUVENATION
Breathing drills offer a low-level,
high-impact ritual for resilience
and rejuvenation.
By Cass Barrett, CFSC, CPT, FMS, FRCmS
A
s strength and conditioning
coaches and performance
enhancement specialists,
we have cornered the market on highthreshold
programming. We know full
well how to rev our athletes up. But
amidst all the 1RM testing, vertical
jumps, 40-yard sprints, and other
tests of intensity, have we forgotten
a variable?
That variable can be loosely
referred to as " recovery, " and is
perhaps more appropriately called
" resilience or rejuvenation training. "
Without it, there is no fitness, no
performance, and ultimately, no
reason to train.
The goal of dedicated resilience training is to merge
activities that promote down-throttling of the central
nervous system (CNS) and facilitate long-term habit
development. This means using modalities that are
not too complicated and that don't invoke a negative
emotional response.
A good example of this type of practice is approximately
two to three minutes of foam rolling before (or after) lifting.
Although it is often a point of conjecture, the value of
checking the body for inordinately sore or tight muscles is
hard to argue against. While we understand that the effect
on the physical structure of the tissue is minimal, the other
valuable aspects of foam rolling, such as dampening neural
tone and aiding the flow of blood into the tissue, create
reason enough to devote a few minutes to this practice.
Breathing drills offer another low-level, high-impact
ritual for resilience and rejuvenation. Breath training is
becoming a much more mainstream practice in elite-level
strength and conditioning as more and more coaches are
educated on its impact on performance. Take legendary
NFL strength coach Joe Kenn, for instance. One of the
38 | Training & Conditioning | June/July 2024
first activities on his Block Zero programming itinerary is
breathing drills.
The relevance of this practice is easy to recognize
once we start to consider the impact of a more efficient
oxygen exchange in the lungs. An easy way to move
forward with breath training is to have your athletes
begin with simple nasal inhalation and emphasize the
inflation of the stomach. Of course, the air isn't actually
filling the stomach, but the lower portion of the lungs,
and this is where the alveolar concentration is located.
Additionally, breath work is another route to downthrottle
the CNS so that stiff muscles might be more
compliant, presenting a window of oppor tunity for
mobility and dynamic warm-up exercises to have the
greatest impact. Finally, breathing drills allow for a
moment to declutter the brain before under taking
a very challenging order of work, and it's fair to
assume that all coaches would like just a little more
focus in training.
Quite often, timing is everything when it comes to
performance-based outcomes, and in an ideal world, we
June July 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of June July 2024
