Why the Odd Numbers?
Why the Odd/Even (or Even/Odd) Breathing Patterns?
This is a concept developed by Ian Jackson, in his seminal book The BreathPlay Approach to Whole Life Fitness (published in 1986). The basic concept centers around body balance. When Ian, a runner and amateur jazz ballet dancer, began to pay attention to his breathing patterns while running, he realized that his exhales were always on the same side. He felt “lopsided.” Coincidentally, he remembered that the string of running injuries he’d had were also all on that same side. So he started to breath in an odd-even pattern when running, and sure enough, he recounts in his book, “all those niggling injuries just went away.”
Scientists have found that focusing on one’s breathing while running can help to balance the autonomic nervous system and improve heart rate variability. But how do even/odd breathing patterns while running help prevent injuries?
When the exhale begins, it is because the diaphragm “releases”; it stops contracting and relaxes back to its neutral position. But herein is an important point: the diaphragm muscle has no directly opposing (reciprocal) muscle. Pretty much every other skeletal muscle in our body has an opposite. This is how we move our limbs. When one contracts, the opposing muscle relaxes, and vice versa. The diaphragm — an upside-down bowl shaped muscle that divides the thorax (upper body) from the abdomen (lower body) — when contracted, ONLY pulls downward. And it’s able to do this because it is anchored along the bottom of the ribcage and wrapped around the spinal column. When it pulls down, it creates a vacuum in the thorax. Since nature abhors a vacuum, air rushes in to fill the space, that space of course containing the lungs.
Illustration by Brian Fallon. Copyright © Breath Runner 2024
When the diaphragm relaxes, it rises back up to its “resting” position, and air gets pushed out. So here’s a key point: because of the way the diaphragm is linked to the ribcage and spine, when it relaxes, so do many other deep stabilizer muscles around the spine and pelvis. Not all, of course, but with enough of these deep stabilizer muscles relaxing all at the same time, as the foot is coming down, it puts stress on the skeletal system and many of the leg’s tendons and ligaments.
Consider: when we run, every time our foot lands, we land with two to three times the force of gravity , depending on how smooth versus bouncy the running style . So for example, if a person weighing 155 pounds (70 kilograms) has a running gait which puts them at the 3G (three times the force of gravity) level, then every time their foot lands, their foot, their ankle, their knee, and their hip all have to suddenly “single leg press” 465 pounds (210 kgs).
Now, think about where the leg bone (femur) joins into the hip: off-centered near the bottom of the pelvic bone. The other leg is airborne. So that 3Gs of force upon the upper body is traveling downward, with the fulcrum, or pivot point, off to one side!
Illustration by Brian Fallon. Copyright © Breath Runner 2024
Now consider what is happening at this very moment, when these tremendous forces are hitting, if we are beginning our exhalation, and our deep stabilizer muscles surrounding our spine and pelvis are simultaneously relaxing. What’s holding us up?
Granted, these things happen over the course of milliseconds. But let’s do the math: if on average, a runner’s foot spends 0.2 secs per step on the ground, for a cadence of 90 (counting one leg only), that’s 18 cumulative seconds of these forces reverberating through the body every minute. Run for an hour, and that’s 1,080 seconds, or approximately 3 minutes 20 seconds spent carrying those forces. If this fictional runner averages a weekly load of 12 hours of running, then that’s 40 minutes.
Across a 24 week training cycle, that’s 16 HOURS spent carrying three times the force of gravity off-centered on one leg. If this runner uses an “even/even” step pattern , then that equates to some 2 hours of not just carrying these lopsided forces, but carrying them when the deep, core stabilizer muscles are taking a break, leaving the skeletal system, tendons and ligaments to handle the load, all on one side of the body.
THAT, in large part, is the reason the Breath Runner program uses an odd-even (or even-odd) breathing pattern. It distributes these forces more evenly across the body.
