Breathwork for Athletes

In October 2019, Eliud Kipchoge ran 26.2 miles in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds — the first human to break the two-hour marathon barrier. Video of the attempt captured something that most viewers didn't notice at first: while his pacers were visibly mouth-breathing within minutes of the start, Kipchoge, moving faster than all of them, was breathing through his nose. ^[7]

At sub-four-minute-mile pace.

It raises an obvious question: is that a physical gift, or is it trained? And if it's trained — if the way the greatest endurance athlete alive manages his breath is a skill he developed, not anatomy he was born with — then what exactly is he training? And does any of it apply to the rest of us?

The answers, it turns out, are: both, yes, and more than you'd think.

The Pressure Question

Novak Djokovic has won more Grand Slam singles titles than any tennis player in history — 24 at the time of writing, across all four major tournaments. He is also among the most open athletes in professional sport about the role breathwork plays in his game. Not general fitness — not conditioning or training load — but the specific, deliberate act of controlling his breath in the moments that matter most.

The No. 1 thing is to learn how to consciously breath. [...] Conscious breathing, really learning how to master that skill, [...] helps with better sleep, better recovery, more presence in the moment.

What Djokovic is describing is a skill most athletes leave undeveloped. Not lung capacity. Not cardiovascular fitness. The ability to use breath as an active tool — a way to modulate the nervous system response in real time, during the highest-pressure moments of competition. He has spoken extensively about using deliberate breathing between points, in tiebreaks, and mid-match to reset his emotional state and return to focus. ^[1] He has collaborated with Wim Hof — the Dutch extreme athlete who systematized what is now widely known as power breathing: repeated rounds of forceful, rhythmic breathing followed by a breath retention. ^[2] But Djokovic's day-to-day application is simpler than the full method: in moments of tension, conscious breathing is a reset switch.

Serena Williams — 23-time Grand Slam champion and the most dominant women's tennis player of her era — built the same skill through a different path. Her daily meditation practice, which uses breath as its anchor, is documented across multiple interviews. What stands out in her high-pressure match moments — most visibly in tight sets against the best players in the world — is her visible deliberateness: a breath taken, a reset made, attention returned to the court. It doesn't look extraordinary. That's exactly the point. The reset has become automatic.

LeBron James — four-time NBA champion and widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time — meditates for 20 to 25 minutes before games, a practice confirmed by a teammate and documented in multiple sources. ^[5] He described it plainly: "Meditating helps a lot for me personally with taking a lot of deep breaths, closing my eyes and just centering myself." Tom Brady, the NFL quarterback who won seven Super Bowl championships across two decades, described the same mechanism differently. His mental fitness coach Greg Harden put it into plain language: "The whole movement for mindfulness still goes back to slowing your breathing down — teaching people how to inhale, hold, and then anticipate releasing, relaxing and letting go." ^[6]

Four athletes. Across different sports. Decades between their careers. And they all independently arrived at the same tool.

The research explains why. When you slow your breathing to approximately five to six breath cycles per minute, something measurable happens in the body: your heart rate begins to oscillate in synchrony with your respiratory rhythm, producing a state called baroreflex resonance. ^[15] Heart rate variability — the variation between heartbeats, which is one of the most reliable markers of nervous system health and athletic readiness — reaches its peak amplitude. In plain terms: your body shifts from a state of stress-readiness toward a state of composed alertness. Not calm in the sedated sense. Clear in the focused sense.

What Djokovic has built — the ability to consciously activate this state before a tiebreak — is exactly what the research shows is trainable. He didn't stumble into it. He practiced it until it became available on demand.

Coherence breathing is where that training begins. Five to six breath cycles per minute, equal inhale and exhale. It feels almost too simple — which is why most athletes skip it. The same pattern, practiced consistently, is what shifts the nervous system from reactive to composed.

The Efficiency Question

The question Kipchoge's Vienna footage raises is a different one from Djokovic's. It's not about composure — it's about mechanics. Every breath you take during intense exercise costs something: momentum, position, energy, drag. The athletes who reach the highest levels of performance are often the ones who have found a way to minimize that cost.

In swimming, the tradeoff is visible and precise. Michael Phelps — the most decorated Olympian in history, with 23 gold medals across four Games — built a breathing pattern that most coaches would call unconventional: in butterfly, he breathes every stroke rather than every other stroke, because — as his coach Bob Bowman explained — "he just has a better rhythm when he breathes every stroke." ^[8] The pattern was calibrated to him specifically, but the principle is universal: the right breathing pattern is the one that costs the least and delivers the most. In sprint freestyle events, Phelps would hold his breath for the final 25 meters — prioritizing position and stroke mechanics over oxygen in the moments when fractions of seconds decided everything.

Katie Ledecky — nine-time Olympic medalist and the most dominant distance swimmer in the history of women's sport — takes a different kind of precision to her breathing. She breathes every two strokes and positions her head so that often only one goggle clears the surface. She breathes inside her own bow wave — the pocket of lower-pressure water that forms ahead of her as she moves — which means her head barely moves, her hips stay level, and almost no energy is lost to rotation. ^[9] It is a refined technique built over years of deliberate attention to something most swimmers barely think about.

Caeleb Dressel — the American sprint swimmer who won five gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics — carries it to its logical limit. In the 50m and 100m sprints, he doesn't breathe in the final 25 yards at all. ^[10] A fully controlled breath hold, in competition, at peak exertion. The technique is legal, intentional, and the product of knowing exactly how his body responds to oxygen debt — because he has trained that response extensively.

Which brings us back to Kipchoge's nose.

Nasal breathing at marathon pace is possible because the nose is not a liability — it's an underused asset. The nasal passages produce nitric oxide, which dilates the airways and improves how efficiently oxygen transfers into the bloodstream. ^[23] Nasal breathing also demands higher CO₂ tolerance: because airflow is more restricted than through the mouth, CO₂ builds slightly faster, and the body must learn to stay calm under that pressure without triggering the panic response. ^[24] Over time, that adaptation changes how efficiently you breathe at any intensity.

This is the efficiency frontier of breath training. It's accessible, but it's a long road — measured in weeks and months of consistent work, not sessions. What Kipchoge breathes on race day is the output of years of altitude training at 2,400 meters in Iten, Kenya, combined with deliberate respiratory practice. The system responds, but slowly.

Before training this system, it's worth knowing where you stand. CO₂ tolerance varies significantly between individuals — and most people have no idea how high or low theirs is. A simple breath-hold test gives you a baseline: how long can you comfortably hold after a normal exhale before the urge to breathe becomes irresistible? That urge is triggered by rising CO₂, not falling oxygen — and how early it arrives tells you a great deal about your current respiratory efficiency. Athletes with high CO₂ tolerance breathe less frequently, recover faster, and stay calmer under load. It's the metric that connects everything in this section.

Recovery as a Skill

Laird Hamilton is widely regarded as the greatest big-wave surfer of his generation — the person most responsible for pushing the sport into waves that were previously considered unrideable. He has spent his career on swells that can hold a person underwater for thirty seconds or more. In big-wave surfing, a wipeout isn't painful — it's potentially fatal. The question of breath, for Hamilton, has never been abstract. It began as survival.

What he built from that survival question, over decades, became XPT — Extreme Performance Training — a structured system built around breath-hold work, cold exposure, and underwater movement. ^[3] Hamilton practices nasal breathing as a baseline habit and incorporates breath training into every cycle of his preparation. The discipline came from necessity, but the benefits extend far beyond the water: the same practices that prepare him for a hold-down are the practices that accelerate his recovery after one.

Stephanie Gilmore, eight-time world surfing champion, approached it differently. She worked with breathing coach Nam Baldwin — co-developer of Breath Enhancement Training — and built a daily practice that she describes in practical, unromantic terms: focusing on where the oxygen is going, even if only for five minutes. ^[4] The point isn't the duration. It's the consistency. She incorporates breath awareness as a structured daily habit the same way she incorporates strength and mobility work.

The recovery dimension of breath training is where the research is clearest — and where most athletes are leaving the most on the table. After exhaustive exercise, the body needs to shift from sympathetic dominance (the stress-response state that enables intense performance) to parasympathetic dominance (the recovery state that enables adaptation and repair). That shift happens naturally, but it can be significantly accelerated by deliberate slow breathing.

For athletes managing back-to-back competition days, high training loads, or poor sleep quality, this is not a marginal gain. The ability to deliberately accelerate the shift from effort to recovery — to make your nervous system come down on command — is a trainable skill that compounds over a season. What Hamilton and Gilmore built for big-wave survival, every athlete can build for the recovery window after hard training.

Slow, diaphragmatic breathing after intense effort is where to start: four to six breath cycles per minute, focused on a full belly exhale, for ten minutes. That's what the research actually tested.

The Activation Question

Every technique in this article so far is about bringing something down — heart rate, cortisol, arousal, the urge to breathe. But there is a category of athlete for whom that's not the problem. Their problem is the opposite: how to arrive at the moment of highest demand already fully switched on. How to walk into a fight, or a wave, or a training block, and be ready before the first bell.

Alistair Overeem has held world titles in both MMA and kickboxing — a rare combination that required him to compete, across two decades of professional fighting, at the highest level in the most demanding combat sports on earth. In an interview on the official Wim Hof channel, he described how he incorporated power breathing into his fight preparation: rounds of rhythmic, forceful breathing followed by a breath hold, repeated before training and before competition. ^[25] His explanation was direct — it gets him into a state he can't reach any other way. Not calmer. Sharper.

Georges St-Pierre — two-time UFC welterweight champion and widely considered the greatest mixed martial artist of his generation — took a more systematic approach. His published training program, The Path, treats respiratory training as a structured pillar of conditioning, not an add-on. St-Pierre has spoken about the mental dimension explicitly: what separates fighters at the elite level isn't always physical — it's who can maintain composure and aggression simultaneously, who arrives in the cage already inhabiting the right state. Breath training, for St-Pierre, is part of how that state gets built.

And then there is Djokovic — who appears earlier in this article for the slow, deliberate breath control he uses mid-match — also using power breathing as a separate practice, trained directly with Wim Hof. ^[2] That might seem contradictory. It isn't. These are different tools for different moments. Slow breathing brings him down in a tiebreak. Power breathing builds the physiological resilience he draws on to get there in the first place.

What all three are accessing is the same mechanism: a voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system, triggered entirely by breath. The physiology of this was documented in a landmark 2014 study at Radboud University, in which trained practitioners were injected with bacterial endotoxin — a substance that normally triggers a strong, automatic inflammatory immune response. The power breathing group showed dramatically reduced symptoms and measurably suppressed immune activation compared to controls. ^[26] They had used breath to influence a system that science had, until that point, considered entirely outside conscious control.

The reason fighters and extreme athletes cluster around this technique more than other athletes isn't incidental. Their sports place them repeatedly at the edge of what the nervous system can tolerate — and what they need is not just preparation but a specific quality of readiness that passive warm-up doesn't produce. Power breathing gives them a controllable on-ramp into that state. A way to arrive already there.

Power breathing is built into Auralize as a guided session — metered rounds, cued holds, structured progression. It's the same practice Overeem, St-Pierre, and Djokovic have built into their preparation, guided so you can find your footing without guesswork.

Start With the Baseline

The through-line across every athlete in this article is the same: none of them were born breathing better than you. Kipchoge's nasal efficiency at marathon pace, Djokovic's mid-tiebreak reset, Overeem's pre-fight activation, Gilmore's daily five minutes of breath awareness — these are practiced, developed, deliberately built capacities. The breath is the raw material. Training is what makes it useful.

That's exactly what Auralize is built around. You begin with a CO₂ tolerance test, then use that baseline to choose the right kind of breath training: composure work before pressure, recovery work after effort, or activation work when you need to arrive switched on. Progress becomes visible because the starting point was measured.