Did you know that Rowers have among the healthiest lungs of all athletes? Our VO2 max is unmatched in the world of sports.
Rowing a 2000 metre race takes the same physiological toll as playing two back to back basketball games - and it exacts that toll in about 6 mins or so.
Take that NBA!
Pound per Pound our Olympic Rowers are taking in and processing as much Oxygen as a Thoroughbred race horse. **
Learn more about the science of your lungs and the art of breathing in the Instant New York Times Bestseller BREATH - by James Nestor.
“A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love
From the inside jacket:
"There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.
Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.
Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.
Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again."
** Rowing statistics from The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
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