While most people come into mountain biking worried about their fitness and cardio, it doesn’t take long to realize that your technical skills play a big role in your performance. Better skills mean you can ride faster and waste less energy, as well as helping keep you safe.

Over the last several years skills training has become extremely popular, with countless videos showing you how to improve your skills and a lot of skills camps popping up. In fact, if you’re reading this then I’d bet money that at some point you have done something to help improve your technical skills.

And while videos and camps can help a lot, there is one thing that most riders don’t think about that can make or break your ability to actually apply those skills to the trail – your breathing. Your breathing habits can affect your technical skills in two main ways.

First, bad breathing habits will directly impact your movement skills. When you don’t use your diaphragm and instead use your chest to breathe then you restrict your movement in two ways.

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The first is that the muscles you are using to breathe can’t be used for movement. You can practice your cornering skills all you want but if you are chest breathing on the trail then you won’t be able to execute those movements as efficiently. 

The second way is through proper breathing mechanics helping to reinforce the core. Diaphragmatic breathing drives pressure into the core, which allows you to brace properly so that you can absorb trail impacts and have a better platform to move from.

Chest breathing adds pressure to the neck and upper torso, which also restricts your movement. As one study that looked at it concluded, until you normalize your breathing patterns you can’t normalize your movement patterns. This means that you are forced into less than optimal movement patterns and you don’t have the best core strength to work with.

The second way that breathing habits impact your trail skills is through how breathing impacts your autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that influences your fight or flight response to situations and your heart rate, both of which impact your ability to execute fine motor skills.

Rapid chest breathing triggers the fight or flight response, which floods the body with adrenaline and other hormones that help you run from a bear or fight off bad guys. However, this isn’t what you want on the trail.

Diaphragmatic breathing triggers the rest and relax response, which helps you stay calm and in control. A big part of this response is tied to your heart rate, which has been shown to directly impact fine motor skills.

When your heart rate climbs above 150 bpm your ability to execute fine motor skills starts to decline. The higher your heart rate is the more this is impacted, and while you can’t always keep your heart rate low on the trail you don’t want to add to the stress your body is under by triggering a more rapid heart rate than is necessary.

On a side note, this is also why a good training program can impact your trail skills. The fitter you are the harder you can go at lower heart rates, making it easier to maintain optimal heart rates for executing technical skills. The use of Isometrics and Anti-Glycolytic Training are two tools that are especially helpful for the 40+ year old rider who is looking to keep up with the youngsters and maybe show them a thing or two.

Your breathing is a bridge to the autonomic nervous system, which is normally something that you can’t consciously influence. Good breathing habits and specific breathing patterns allow you to tap into this part of your nervous system and allow you to influence it in the direction you want it to go.

This is why people who are panicking are told to slow their breathing since rapid chest breathing just creates a doom loop that just increases the feelings causing the panic attack. And while you may not be in the midst of a panic attack – although I’ve seen some riders on the edge of it when faced with a challenging situation on the trail – you can still use this knowledge to help you maintain the best mindset possible.

Besides breathing with the diaphragm instead of chest breathing you can focus on slowing down your exhales to help calm down and slow your mind and heart rate. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use “Darth Vader Breathing”.

This is when you slightly close your throat to restrict the airflow as you exhale. This creates a sound similar to the exhales Darth Vader would make in the Star Wars movies, but the sound isn’t the goal as much as the restricted airway slowing down your exhale.

To super charge this method use nasal breathing. Your initial inhales can be through the mouth but preferably you use your nose as soon as you can because nasal breathing helps with diaphragmatic breathing and it also slows down your inhale, which can also help with the calming process.

So a deep inhale through the nose coupled with a restricted exhale through the mouth or nose will help to calm you down and trigger the rest and relax response in the body. This will help lower your heart rate and calm your mind, both of which are crucial to executing technical skills, especially in high stress situations.

The best way to work on these breathing skills is through your training program. When doing your cardio training be sure to focus on diaphragmatic breathing. A big mistake a lot of riders make is using their cardio training to just reinforce bad breathing habits because they are too focused on performance metrics instead of how they are achieving those metrics.

You can also practice your calming breathing tactics during recovery periods. This one you can use during cardio and strength training and helps you get a lot more out of your training since your recovery time is now contributing to your performance on the trail as well.

Better breathing can impact your performance and health in a lot of ways. While some of them are obvious, once you understand all of the ways how you breath impacts the body you realize that optimizing your breathing isn’t optional if you want to get the most out of yourself on the trail.

This is especially true if you are in the 40+ crowd. Breathing mechanics and smart use of specific breathing patterns isn’t something that declines with age and it allows you to maximize what you still have. While younger riders can use the physical advantages of youth to get away with a lot of bad habits we can’t do that and still perform at a high level on the trail.

So stop letting your breathing hold back your skills on the trail and start to incorporate these tips into your training and riding. And if you want even more info on optimizing your breathing check out my Guide To Better Breathing For MTB, where I show you how to assess your breathing and share even more ways to optimize your performance and health.

Until next time…

Ride Strong,

James Wilson