The question of whether improved breathing has an effect on exercise performance or everyday life can be examined by considering basic physiological principles and then supported by related research. It is important that the relationship between strength, power and endurance is fully understood before attempting to explain how this affects our breathing.
The strength of the muscle can be defined as the maximum possible output that it can produce while the power of the muscle is a combination of strength and speed defined as the amount of work done in a unit of time. Therefore, a person wanting to increase their power could either lift a heavier weight in the same time or lift the same weight in a faster time.
The endurance of the muscle is illustrated by the number of repetitions it can produce before it fatigues. Equating this to a bench press, the person may be able to lift 100kg once. If they wanted to build up the power of the muscles they would consider working at around 80% of that maximum, i.e. 80kg, trying to contract the muscles as quickly as possible. They would attempt the lift 8 - 12 times. As they move in to endurance they would lift 40 - 60% of their maximum and repeat the motion 20+ times.
These are obviously rough guidelines depending on how much endurance, or number of repetitions the person wants to do, or how fast they want the contractions to be as contraction speed is vitally important in a number of sports.
What is important is that as we move from strength at one end of the spectrum, to endurance on the other, the weight decreases. Therefore, in very crude terms, if we increase the strength of the muscle, still keeping power and endurance work, then the range shifts up. So, the person that is required to work at a certain level will find it easier to work at that level if the muscle is stronger because they are working at a lower percentage of their maximum.
Applying this theory to the fact the respiratory muscles are trainable; so increasing the strength of the respiratory muscles combined with the power and endurance training, would increase their endurance capacity. Boutellier showed in his 1992 papers with both sedentary people and endurance trained athletes that respiratory training improved the endurance of the respiratory muscles by over 300% with the sedentary people, and over 600% with endurance trained athletes.
Neither showed an increase in VO2 max, but both showed a large increase in sub-maximal exercise time, sedentary, 50%; endurance trained, 38%. This would suggest, confirmed by Boutellier himself, that "the respiratory system is an exercise limiting factor in normal, endurance trained subjects", as well as sedentary subjects.
All these studies, which look at respiratory training, can be applied to PowerLung. This is because PowerLung is a respiratory trainer that trains the respiratory muscles. All these studies train the respiratory muscles to prove or disprove their hypotheses. The respiratory muscles are being used to do the work. Taking the example of a bench press, it has been shown that this exercise strengthens, for simplicity's sake, the chest. The weight is just a catalyst for that. It doesn't matter who made the weight just that the weight enables the person to perform the task.
To conclude, employing the PowerLung training system increases respiratory muscle strength leading to performance improvements at any level. PowerLung specifically warms up the respiratory muscles which reduces the feeling of breathlessness and can also reduce the feeling of breathlessness as a result of improved performance, efficinecy and through the body being properly warmed up.
Thanks to Mr. Anthony Scoon for his contributions to this document. The original article is available from www.powerlung.com.