Yahoo Finance Four-Time Fittest Man on Earth, Rich Froning, Swears By 'Optimised Breathing' for Superior Fitness
What does it take to become one of the fittest men in history? Unparalleled strength and years of training? Check. Unwavering motivation and mental resilience? Check. Unearthing new ways to get ahead of your competition? Check, check and check.
For Rich Froning, a four-time CrossFit Games champion — often referred to as one of the 'Fittest in History' — it's important to stay one-step ahead of his competition. Previously, he's chalked his success down to intermittent fasting ("it's increased my testosterone in about six months," he said), but more recently, he's also tapped into an often-overlooked part of exercise: regulated breathing.
More specifically, Froning has been focusing on how best to utilise his breathing during certain exercises and is using regulated breathing as part of his programming ahead of the team division of the CrossFit Games. "Recovery is king in a sport that’s based around a clock," Froning explained to Barbend. "When it matters most, if your heart rate and breathing are out of control, everything else falls apart."
Besides regimented breathing exercises and paying attention to his heart rate, Froning also trains with an AIRWAAV, a 'performance mouthpiece' that's designed to "perfect the most efficient way of opening the airway and optimising performance." There's some smart science behind it, too — a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning found a "significant positive effect of respiratory muscle training (RMT) on sport performance outcomes of time trials [and] exercise endurance time."
During testing, the performance mouthpiece was found to lower respiratory rate, impact lactate levels in muscles and even lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. According to AIRWAAV, the mouthpiece "increases the width of your airway an average of nine percent."
What's more, a Compendium of Continuing Education in Dentistry trial backed this up, proving mouthpieces can provide a "significant difference" for any athlete looking to gain an edge. For Froning, his mouthpiece is "bringing awareness to breathing" and helps him handle the challenges and "curveballs" at the CrossFit Games.
Ryan Atkins, an OCR world champion, also noticed the benefits of using an adaptive mouthpiece, saying "my FTP (functional threshold power) went up by 20 watts, seemingly overnight."
Whether more high-performance athletes will follow Froning and Atkins' lead remains to be seen, but this could become a disruptive force in the world of functional fitness.
And if it does, you heard it here first.
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