Breathing for GAA Players: A Performance and Attention Protocol for Football and Hurling
I recently worked with a county-level Gaelic footballer to develop a performance protocol. Gaelic football and hurling, governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), are widely regarded as Ireland's national sports, played and followed at a scale few other sports in the country can match.
Both are amateur games rooted deeply in local and county identity, yet they demand a level of physical and mental performance that rivals any professional sport.
We spent an hour mapping out how he could integrate breathing work, attention training, and nervous system regulation into his daily routine, team training, and match play. What struck me most wasn't the breathing exercises themselves. It was how much of his performance challenge came down to one thing: attention.
The mind produces thoughts constantly. We can't stop that. What we can train is our ability to recognize when attention has wandered and bring it back. I want to share this protocol because it applies to any sport. And because it fundamentally changes how athletes think about performance training.
Why Attention Matters in GAA Performance
Research from Queen's University estimated the average person experiences around 6,200 thought transitions a day. Spread across sixteen waking hours, a seventy-minute football match accounts for roughly 450 thought transitions.
That doesn't mean your mind wanders off the game 450 times. Many of those thoughts are directly relevant to what is happening on the pitch. But the number shows how active and how reactive the mind is during a match.
A mistake happens. You're replaying it. You think about the referee's last call, the scoreboard, what the manager is thinking, or what might happen in the closing minutes.
Each pulls attention out of the game.
The goal isn't to stop thoughts. They will always come. The real training is learning to notice sooner when attention has left and bring it back faster. Most value in mental focus training for GAA players comes from that return, not from forcing a blank mind.
Building Attention Away From the Pitch
You can't build this skill only during training or matches. You must practice it daily, in ordinary moments, so it's strong when you need it under pressure.
A simple way to start:
- While walking the dog, bring your attention to your breath. Feel the air moving in and out through your nose.
- When your mind wanders, notice where it went. Maybe you're replaying yesterday, planning tomorrow, or thinking about training. As soon as you notice, bring your attention back to the breath.
- Repeat this anywhere: making breakfast, showering, stretching, driving, waiting in a queue, or sitting quietly for a minute.
You don't need formal meditation for this. Just ask yourself occasionally, "Where is my attention right now?" That question alone starts to build awareness.
The reverse is also true. If you spend most of your day distracted, checking your phone, jumping between messages and social media, you get good at being distracted. If you want sharper concentration on the pitch, some of that training has to happen off it.
Sleep: The Foundation Everything Else Rests On
Poor sleep undermines attention, concentration, recovery, and your ability to stay regulated under pressure. It's the foundation that every other part of this protocol depends on.
The target is simple: sleep with your mouth closed, breathe through your nose all night, and wake without a dry mouth. A dry mouth in the morning usually means your nervous system didn't fully downshift overnight, so your recovery was incomplete even if you got a full eight hours. You can use MyoTape at night to encourage nose breathing while sleeping.
If you have a poor night, don't think the whole day is written off. Get up, eat breakfast, and follow it with a twenty-minute guided relaxation. The free Buteyko Clinic app has a good option under its Adults section. Lie down, close your eyes, and let your body settle.
You're not forcing sleep to return. You're giving your nervous system the recovery it missed. Sleep and recovery aren't separate from performance. They are performance.
A Ten-Minute Morning Routine
Keep this part light. This isn't the time for strong breath-holds.
Wear a sports mask and breathe through your nose for ten minutes, allowing some air hunger. At the same time, practice holding your attention in your body rather than your head.
- Bring attention into your legs and notice your feet making contact with the floor.
- Move attention into your abdomen and chest, staying with the physical sensation of breathing.
- When your mind drifts to the day ahead or replays yesterday, notice it and bring attention back to the body.
Save stronger breath-holds for later in the day, once you're properly awake and warmed up. This routine is one of the simplest GAA breathing exercises to build into a daily habit, and it does double duty: training breath and attention at the same time.
Breathing Techniques During GAA Team Training
The warm-up is where this protocol becomes practical. It's not just about loosening muscles. It opens the nose and lungs, trains attention, balances the nervous system, and improves circulation before the real work starts.
During warm-up:
- Breathe through your nose as much as possible.
- Bring in breath-holds gradually, starting easy so it isn't a shock to the system.
- Progress to around three to five stronger breath-holds as the warm-up continues.
- Keep bringing attention out of your head and into your body, or onto your breath.
This is where CO2 tolerance training for athletes starts to matter. The idea is to train your breathing system to work with lower ventilation while training your brain's response to air hunger. Used consistently, these breathing techniques for Gaelic football and hurling become part of normal training rather than something separate.
Breath Control During Match Practice
This is where the protocol becomes specific to the game itself, and where many GAA players' breathing drills actually pay off.
Off the ball, breathe through your nose as much as you can. Moving back into position, waiting for a break in play, or scanning the pitch at lower intensity are all opportunities for GAA players to breathe through their nose.
On the ball or during high-intensity passages, breathe through your mouth and take the ventilation you need. The point of nasal breathing and breath-holds isn't to force nose breathing at all costs. They are training methods. They add load to your breathing system, so your body learns to exercise with lower ventilation and cope better with air hunger. That adaptation carries over even when sprinting flat out with your mouth open.
After hard efforts, most players default to fast, shallow breaths. A more effective recovery breathing technique for GAA players is to take larger, fuller breaths but fewer of them. This isn't about restricting air.
You still get what you need. You just change the pattern from many small breaths to fewer, bigger ones, and that pattern sends a different signal to your brain. A fast breathing rate signals high exertion. A slower rate signals control, and that's the message you want your body to send in the closing minutes of a tight match.
The Science Behind This Approach
Research on rugby players backs up why this kind of breathwork for GAA players is worth the effort. In a 2018 study by Woorons and colleagues, 21 highly trained rugby players completed four weeks of repeated sprint training. One group held their breath after exhaling. The other trained with normal breathing.
- The breath-hold group improved from 9.1 to 14.9 sprints, a 64 percent improvement.
- The normal breathing group improved by only 6 percent, which wasn't statistically significant.
The breath-hold group nearly doubled their repeated sprint capacity. That's a substantial gap for a four-week intervention, and it points to something beyond just training the lungs. You're also training the brain to tolerate air hunger with less distress, which matters directly in a sport built around repeated high-intensity efforts.
Managing Fatigue and Focus in the Final Minutes
This is where everything in this protocol gets tested.
Physical fatigue and mental fatigue feed off each other. In the last ten minutes of a hard game, legs tired and breathing elevated, concentration slips fastest exactly when you need it most. You might be slower getting back into position, react to a referee's decision, replay a missed chance, or switch off for a few seconds without realizing it.
Improving concentration in Gaelic football under fatigue starts with a simple check. If you catch yourself replaying the same mistake for several minutes without it leading anywhere useful, ask whether that thinking produces anything new. If it doesn't, the fix isn't to think harder. It's to change state.
Get out of your head and back into your body. Feel your legs, abdomen, chest. Bring attention to your breath. Slow your exhale. Breathe gently through your nose if you can. You're not thinking your way out of fatigue. You're changing your physiological state, and your focus follows.
Applying This to Standing Over a Free
Free-taking is one of the clearest examples of where breathing and attention training show up directly in a match. Missing a free under pressure is rarely a technical problem. It's usually an attention and nervous system problem showing up at the worst possible moment.
If you're wondering how to stay calm when taking a free, the same principles from this protocol apply directly:
- Take one or two slower exhales before you approach the ball, long enough to signal control to your nervous system rather than urgency.
- Bring your attention fully into your body, your standing foot, your grip, your breath, rather than the crowd, the scoreboard, or what happens if you miss.
- If a thought about the outcome creeps in, notice it and return your attention to the routine you've practiced. Don't fight the thought. Just come back.
None of this replaces technical practice. But a player who has trained attention and breath control away from the pitch has a real advantage in these moments, because the skill of noticing and returning is already built.
Halftime Recovery
Halftime doesn't need to be spent talking through every detail of the first half or burning mental energy.
Find a quiet corner if you can. Sit down, close your eyes for a few minutes, and draw your attention inward. Let your body settle and your breathing slow. You can still hear the coach and take in what matters without spending every second of the break in conversation. You are conserving mental and physical energy for the second half.
Some players recharge through talking and interaction. Others need quiet. Neither is wrong, but it is worth knowing which one you are and building your halftime routine around it rather than defaulting to whatever the group around you is doing.
The Bigger Picture: Flow
Years of playing football or hurling mean you have already stored an enormous amount of skill and instinct in your brain and body. Often, the biggest barrier to performance isn't a lack of ability. It is a mind that is too busy to get out of its own way.
Flow is what happens when you are fully absorbed in what you are doing. The game can slow down and speed up at once. You see things earlier, know where to be, and respond instead of overthinking.
Flow doesn't happen when attention is scattered across hundreds of thought transitions in a match. It happens when you train your attention to stay grounded and return quickly when it drifts. That's the real link between GAA performance training and this kind of mental work. It's not separate from physical preparation. It's part of it.
The Full Protocol, Summarized
Sleep: mouth closed, nasal breathing through the night, waking without a dry mouth.
Morning routine (10 minutes): Sports mask, nasal breathing, attention training in the body, no strong breath-holds yet.
Warm-up: Build breath-holds from easy to strong; nasal breathing; attention held in the body and breath.
Match practice
- Off the ball: nasal breathing
- On the ball or high intensity: mouth breathing as needed
- After hard efforts: larger, fewer breaths for faster recovery
Throughout the day: notice when attention wanders. Bring it back. This is the training, whether you're on the pitch or not.
Halftime: Quiet recovery, nervous system settling, mental energy conserved for the second half.
Evening Practice: downregulating with slow exhales and nasal breathing to transition out of a high-stress state.
Final Thought
Every training session is both a physical session and an attention session, whether you treat it that way or not.
During drills, ask yourself where your attention is right now. If you gave the ball away thirty seconds ago and you are still thinking about it, notice that and come back. If the coach said something and you are replaying it instead of focusing on the next rep, notice that too, and come back.
Train that return often enough away from the pitch, and it becomes available when you need it most: in the final ten minutes of a match, legs tired, breathing high, everyone around you losing a little clarity. That is when the work you have put into breathing and attention pays off.
Everything in this protocol- the breathing work, the attention training, the CO2 tolerance building- comes from the same system taught in the Oxygen Advantage Advanced Instructor Training with Patrick McKeown.
It's a 36-module certification covering the full Body, Mind, and Sport framework, built for coaches and practitioners who want to bring this level of depth to their own athletes, not just borrow a few drills from an article. Explore the course here.