The two most famous training quotes in cycling come from the sport's two greatest proponents. “Ride a bike, ride a bike, ride a bike” was Fausto Coppi’s advice, while Eddy Merckx urged would-be pros to “ride as much or as little, or as long or as short and you feel. But ride.” What if you told the Campionissimo and the Cannibal that they could improve their time trial performance by 4.6% if, instead of yet more riding – OK, as well as yet more riding – they performed twice-daily sessions of sucking in air through a small machine?
Modern pros will go to extraordinary lengths to win an extra one per cent of performance, so can simply strengthening your lungs – or inspiratory muscle training (IMT) – really supply more than four times that? If so, why haven’t we heard more about it and why don’t more pros do it? Or do they, but we just don't know about it?
The figure of 4.6% comes from a 2002 study in the Journal of Sports Sciences by Lee Romer, Alison McConnell and David Jones, who evaluated the effects of specific inspiratory muscle training on simulated time-trial performance in trained cyclists with VO2maxes of 64 ± 2. Using a double-blind, placebo-controlled design, the cyclists were assigned at random to either an experimental (pressure-threshold inspiratory muscle training) or sham-training control (placebo) group. The researchers found that after the intervention, the inspiratory muscle training group experienced a reduction in the perception of respiratory and peripheral effort compared with placebo and completed the simulated 20 and 40km time trials faster than the placebo group. Their conclusion was: “These results support evidence that specific inspiratory muscle training attenuates the perceptual response to maximal incremental exercise. Furthermore, they provide evidence of performance enhancements in competitive cyclists after inspiratory muscle training.”
The leader in the field of inspiratory muscle training equipment is PowerBreathe. The technology was developed at Loughborough University in the 1990s and the founder of PowerBreathe, Harry Brar, bought the rights to sell it commercially. It was originally a sports science product, but early on it was recognised that it had a medical role too – in helping people with respiratory weakness caused by conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure, and to help combat breathlessness in older adults. PowerBreathe’s product specialist and training manager Duncan Kerr explained that the latest electronic devices can connect to a tracheostomy to train patients to breathe through a stoma, or hole, in the neck. “There are quite a few hospitals using them now,” he confirms. A key component of Kerr’s job is training patients and athletes to use PowerBreathe products, he has a detailed knowledge of each product and, having worked for the company for 12 years, has seen everyone from Paralympians to Premier League footballers use it.
First of all, how does it work and why? “The most important muscle for getting air into the lungs is the diaphragm,” he explains. “It sits like a parachute below your heart and lungs and it flattens, changes the pressure balance and sucks air in. At the same time you can expand your rib cage to its maximum capacity using your intercostal muscles. You might have five-litre lungs but you’re only using four litres because you’re not using the maximum ventilation.”
And as for the work done by the muscles: “Sitting down you might be taking 12 breaths per minute, but if you’re exercising hard the respiratory muscles are having to make a big change in effort. Eventually, at the point where you’re struggling to breathe, your brain starts to reduce bloodflow into your legs and arms and redirect the blood into your breathing muscles – the metaboreflex that Alison McConnell coined [one of the sports scientists who conducted the 2002 experiment]. So you start to slow down because you’re not getting the exhaust gases out fast enough and the brain is slowing down the glycogen-burning process. So if you can train that system, that bellows system, to be as smooth and efficient as possible, without recruiting the shoulders and neck, you’re a more efficient machine. It’s making your mechanical efficiency better and telling your brain that it can keep the effort level up for longer without slowing down. It’s as simple as that.” Kerr is talking about the “reduction in the perception of respiratory and peripheral effort compared with placebo” described in the 2002 study.
Can everyone benefit from PowerBreathe, even pros whose VO2maxes are generally higher than those of the trained cyclists in the study and who are already used to working at inhuman intensities? “For someone in ICU it might give them a 200% improvement, but for someone like Tom Pidcock, obviously a lot less. But that’s added onto everything else – all the other marginal gains. Everyone can improve. Even the elite are trying to beat their last PowerBreathe score.”
The “score” – or a measurement of breathing performance and strength that the user can check with every PowerBreathe session – is something that has only been available since the devices went electric. I was sent a demo PowerBreathe IMT Plus device with the ‘Smart Adaptor’ that connects it to the ActiBreathe app via Bluetooth. You do the initial strength test, which involves breathing in as hard and fast as possible through the smart adaptor with a specific strength test plug to raise resistance to determine maximum inspiratory pressure (MIP). You have five attempts to produce three breaths with similar scores. Once done, the app prescribes a programme to follow based on your result. The device has adjustable resistance via a spring-controlled valve, so once you’ve performed the strength test, you simply set it to the number recommended for your personalised programme and do the sessions on your plan. My initial plan told me to perform 30 breaths through the device twice a day for seven days. Then you do another strength test to track your progress and start another programme that might involve more resistance and/or more breaths per session. After each session the app will give you a breakdown of your performance – precision score, successful inhalations, average inhalation time, average time to lift the valve and the ‘P-Index’, which is the measure of the total effort achieved by your breathing muscles in the session. There are so many stats that it’s in danger of turning into Strava for the lungs, and Kerr agrees that for athletes PowerBreathe can become a competitive sport all of its own – even though lung capacities differ and there’s little value in comparing one athlete’s strength test with another’s. However, as a rough guideline, he says, the average person gets about 65, the person who commutes to work, swims a bit and maybe sings too might get 100, but very few get above 100. Good athletes would be above 140. I was extremely proud to get a score of 195, but Kerr told me the highest strength test score he’d seen was well into the 200s by a Welsh doctor.
It’s backed up by science and real-life results, it’s been available for almost 30 years – though admittedly not with the smart connectivity that it has now – so why don’t we hear about more pro cyclists using PowerBreathe? “It’s a secret weapon,” says Kerr. “Our Dutch distributor will rattle off names of pros using PowerBreathe but who won’t tell anyone about it. I went to the Appeldoorn velodrome with the Liv team a while back and every one of them was using PowerBreathe – we were setting up the devices at the right level for them at the same time that the new bikes were being set up. I went to Leuven to the Bakala altitude training centre there, where athletes can live with 15-16% oxygen and then go and ride at 21% oxygen. They were also using PowerBreathe. Oleksandr Usyk, the boxing heavyweight champion, uses it, as does [fellow Ukrainian boxer] Vasiliy Lomachenko. I met their coach when Usyk came to London to fight Anthony Joshua in 2021. In January I went to the kayaking centre at Lee Valley. Even football – Tottenham Hotspur bought 10 PowerBreathe kits recently”. Kerr says the Ineos Grenadiers team have been in touch wanting to find out more, via a professor who had been working with British Cycling. But it seems unlikely that Ineos will go public with their PowerBreathe activities – if they take it to the next stage – and PowerBreathe as a company doesn’t have ambitions to sponsor cycling teams either.
However, Kerr did put me in touch with pro rider and PowerBreathe user Sophie Wright, who raced on the road for Fenix-Deceuninck in 2023 and 2024 and this season rides for the Ribble Outliers gravel racing team. She’s a former junior European mountain bike champion and a multiple national champion. Like the other athletes and teams, Wright contacted PowerBreathe herself wanting to find out more and they loaned her a device. I talked to her just before she raced at the Sea Otter Classic in California in April.
“It was maybe six years ago when I first got in touch, but I basically thought, this could be really good to help my performance. Obviously at our level it’s really about marginal gains, so I was keen to try, and they very kindly sent me one. My coach wasn’t involved, it was me who wanted to try it. To be honest I don’t use it religiously every day – you have to get into the habit of using it… I didn’t stick to the plan but it was good to see progression. There wasn’t a huge upward trajectory for me because as a pro athlete the improvements are always going to be small.”
Wright had mentioned she planned to warm up for her race using her PowerBreathe device, which is another of its benefits. PowerBreathe has more research with citations to back this up: “Results from trials on competitive rowers using PowerBreathe Inspiratory Muscle Training (IMT) before exercise show rowers significantly improved their rowing performance and reduced breathlessness… using a setting of approximately 40% of your normal training resistance is beneficial for warming up the respiratory muscles. More recent research shows that performing inspiratory muscle warm-up exercises with PowerBreathe IMT with 45%, 50% and 60% of MIP [maximum inspiratory pressure] however, resulted in higher improvement in respiratory parameters.”
Wright says she’s surprised that PowerBreathe doesn’t have more of a presence in professional cycling: “I’m surprised you don’t see top WorldTour teams using them. There’s no doubt it’s beneficial to performance and it’s not going to do any harm. For me, if we’re just 0.01 per cent better I’ll take it. I was intrigued to look a bit outside the box at things that other people don’t shout about. I’ve always chosen my own path, done my own research and when I found PowerBreathe it was like, great, this could be my secret weapon.”
I have to admit that my PowerBreathe usage has been similar to Sophie Wright’s. I didn’t use it religiously and had to stop when I caught a cold in the middle of my first programme, and with my slightly haphazard riding, not to mention the number of variables present in my last club time trial, it was difficult to isolate its effect. But I could feel that it was benefiting my breathing – after all, breathing is done using muscles and stronger muscles means better performance whatever the sport or activity. And the breathing training sessions themselves I found enjoyable and invigorating – just enough for a little endorphin boost. And, compared to the majority of specialist cycling equipment, it's relatively affordable – the PowerBreathe Plus IMT with the smart adaptor retails at £275, or the device without the adaptor is £59.99. As for more pro teams cycling teams using it, well, according to PowerBreathe they already do. And if they don’t, it’s hard to understand why not. It’s UCI legal, carries no risk of injury, takes about five minutes per session and there are research results in the public domain to prove it works.
