How to Breathe While Playing Football

How you breathe during football training and matches can affect how you handle repeated sprints, how breathless you feel, how you recover, and how composed you stay under pressure. Most players work hard on strength, fitness, and nutrition, but very few think about how they breathe.

These breathing techniques for football players are increasingly used by coaches at every level, from grassroots clubs to professional academies.

This guide covers the Oxygen Advantage method for football players: how nasal breathing, breath hold training, and comfort with air hunger work together to support your game.

Why Breathing Matters for Football Performance

Nose breathing during training adds a challenge that pushes your mental and physical boundaries.

Take it a step further: exhale and hold your breath. Jog or sprint with empty lungs. Keep going until you feel strong air hunger. Research on this kind of training in team sports players suggests it can improve repeated sprint ability, particularly how well you hold your speed across repeated sprints.

Add nose breathing and breath holding to your training and many players find they cope better with fatigue during play. Nose breathing adds a load. And effective training is all about adding an extra load.

The Oxygen Advantage method for football players works through two pillars:

Pillar 1: Functional Breathing

• Optimise everyday breathing for reduced breathlessness
• Breathe more economically at rest and easy intensities
• Improve energy
• Support recovery
• Strengthen the breathing muscles

Pillar 2: Breath Hold Training

Breath-hold exercises lower blood oxygen saturation and increase carbon dioxide (CO2). This is a powerful training stimulus that research suggests may improve fatigue resistance during repeated sprints and tolerance of acid build-up.

What Football Demands from Your Body

To be successful and maintain performance, you need to be faster and stronger. You need weekly strength and power training even out of season. Off the pitch, you work hard to optimise physical condition.

You need physical agility, but you also need mental focus, resilience and recovery. Skills like maximal speed and repeated sprint ability are fundamental.

From healthy diet and nutrition to interval training and core strength, you eat, sleep and breathe football. But do you think about how you breathe during exercise?

Benefits of Breathing Exercises for Football Players

For soccer players, breathing exercises may offer a range of performance benefits:

• Better repeated sprint ability
• Better tolerance of acid build-up
• Stronger breathing muscles
• Better endurance
• A short-term rise in EPO, the hormone that stimulates red blood cell production
• Calmer breathing and easier recovery between efforts
• Mental clarity and help managing performance anxiety
• Better sleep quality
• Easily integrated into your football warm-up with no extra equipment
• Gentle exercises suitable for young players, with strong breath holds reserved for healthy older players
• Gentle exercises that may help you stay engaged with training while injured, with your medical team's approval

The Oxygen Advantage method pushes you harder to maximise fitness and conditioning. It also teaches you to access your nervous system so you can maintain a calm, focused mind.

How the Oxygen Advantage Method Works

The method addresses breathing from three dimensions:

1. Biomechanical (using the diaphragm)
2. Biochemical (matching breathing to what the body needs)
3. Psychophysiological (attention, emotion and nervous system state, including paced breathing at 4.5 to 6.5 breaths per minute)

The foundation of all three dimensions is nasal breathing.

Despite what many fitness experts tell you, breathing in and out through the nose is better at rest and during easy training. During intensive play you will need to open your mouth to breathe. But when you are training at suitable intensities, nose breathing:

• Protects against dehydration
• Helps reduce exercise-induced asthma and airway irritation
• Keeps your airways clear of congestion
• Adds resistance to breathing, slowing the breath
• Engages your diaphragm, building strength in your core
• Helps you stay mentally alert and focused
• Calms your nervous system so you can make better decisions
• Supports calmer breathing and easier recovery
• Is less tiring for the breathing muscles at easy paces

Not a bad result from simply keeping your mouth shut.

Add Breathing Exercises to Your Football Warm-Up

Your football warm-up is an ideal time to add some breathing exercises. You can do this in two easy ways without interrupting your training:

1. Breathe slow and low, only through your nose

During low intensity work, nose breathing is key. Open mouth breathing makes it easier to slip into upper-chest breathing and to blow off more carbon dioxide (CO2) than you need.

CO2 is important. Together with acidity, it helps red blood cells release oxygen to the tissues. Over-breathing at rest lowers CO2 and makes this release less efficient.

Mouth breathing is also linked with:

• Mental stress
• Back and neck pain
• Muscle trigger points

When it comes to airway health, open mouth breathing bypasses the nose's filtering and defences. It leaves the goal wide open for viruses and allergens.

Recommendations: Use MyoTape Sport while your body adapts to nasal breathing. If you have a small nose, deviated septum or nasal obstruction, use a nasal dilator to optimise airflow.

Nasal breathing can help footballers stay calmer on the ball, since fast mouth breathing is associated with the stress response, which can make decision-making harder under pressure.

Many players now use mouth tape during training sessions to build the nasal breathing habit before carrying it into matches. It is a simple way to start.

Nasal strips are another tool worth adding to your football routine. They gently widen the nostrils, which can reduce airflow resistance during sprints and high-intensity match play. You can see our full guide to nasal strips for athletes for more detail.

2. Practice strong breath holds

During your football warm-up, practice 2 easy breath holds followed by 5 strong breath holds.

Strong breath holds create an altitude-like stress, challenge the body, and give the breathing muscles a workout. They can also cause a short-term rise in EPO.

• Breathe in and out through your nose.
• Pinch your nose with your fingers to hold the breath.
• Hold your breath and walk.
• As air hunger gets stronger, walk faster or begin jogging.
• Continue walking or light jogging, holding your breath until you feel a strong air hunger.
• Let go of your nose and resume breathing with six minimal breaths in and out through the nose. Try to avoid taking big breaths.
• Breathe normally for 12 to 18 breaths.
• Repeat from the top, five times. Practice once daily.

Note: Strong breath holds are not suitable for everyone. Avoid them if you have a heart condition, high or low blood pressure, epilepsy, diabetes, or another serious medical condition, unless cleared by your doctor. Children should only practice gentle versions under supervision. Never practice breath holds in or under water.

Strength Training and Sprint Speed in Football

Anaerobic capacity is an important factor in football. In any single game, you need to switch quickly between jumping, running and repeated sprints, with hundreds of changes of direction.

Aerobic capacity responds well to steady cardio training. But anaerobic capacity is different. High-intensity work drives many of the adaptations that make you faster and stronger.

Positive effects of anaerobic exercise include:

• More power
• Better bone mineral density
• Faster metabolism
• Weight management
• Higher lactate threshold
• Less depression
• Less risk of disease
• Increased energy

During training you will practice speed drills like repeated shuttle sprints. These exercises are intense and important, but high volumes can increase the risk of ankle, ACL and hamstring injuries.

Adding breath holds to some of your fitness drills can increase the training stimulus without adding extra sprint volume. It complements your speed work rather than replacing it.

It's less about lung size and more about training your breathing muscles and your response to breathlessness, which is why breathing drills are now part of many professional warm-ups.

Breath Holds and Oxygen Desaturation: What the Science Shows

Repeated sprints with normal breathing cause only a small drop in blood oxygen. With breath holds after exhalation, oxygen saturation can drop well below 90%. This strong desaturation increases reliance on anaerobic glycolysis and causes the spleen to contract, briefly releasing stored red blood cells into the circulation. Whether this leads to lasting increases in oxygen-carrying capacity is less clear.

How to Measure Your Breathing: The BOLT Score

Breathing is only one part of stamina on the pitch, but calmer, more economical breathing can help you feel less breathless and more in control.

Breathing becomes easier to manage when you are more comfortable with air hunger. When you react strongly to air hunger, you are likely to experience more breathlessness and breathe harder than you need to.

The Oxygen Advantage method uses a measure called the BOLT score. BOLT measures how quickly you feel the first clear urge to breathe during a comfortable breath hold. It is influenced by several factors, including chemical sensitivity, breathing pattern, respiratory sensation and psychological state.

To measure your BOLT score, you will need a stopwatch or timer that counts in seconds.

• Take a normal, silent breath in through your nose.
• Allow a normal, silent breath out through your nose.
• Hold your nose with your fingers to prevent air from entering your lungs.
• Count the number of seconds until you feel the first distinct desire to breathe in.

Many athletes start out with a BOLT score of about 20 seconds. If you have asthma it might be lower. Oxygen Advantage uses 40 seconds as an advanced training benchmark.

BOLT is a useful personal baseline to track your progress, but it is not a predictor of athletic performance. A 2024 study in highly trained athletes found no link between BOLT and VO2 max or anaerobic performance (Kowalski et al., 2024).

As your BOLT improves, breathing is usually lighter and calmer during rest and moderate exercise.

Muscular Endurance and Diaphragm Strength for Football

When you think about muscular endurance in football, you might not consider your breathing muscles. But any fitness program for football players can benefit from exercises to strengthen the diaphragm.

Your diaphragm forms an integral part of your core. As it moves up and down, it creates pressure in your abdomen that stabilises your spine and pelvis.

A strong diaphragm muscle supports agility. Breathing and movement are closely linked, and a fatigued diaphragm may affect core stability.

The diaphragm is made from the same type of muscle as the muscles that move your joints. Like them, it can be trained to support functional movement, power and endurance.

However, normal football training rarely loads the breathing muscles enough to strengthen them fully.

Strong breath holds exercise the diaphragm. To add a greater load to breathing, Oxygen Advantage uses the SportsMask. The mask works progressively, strengthening the diaphragm just like lifting weights builds your arm muscles.

Strong breath holds can also cause a short-term rise in EPO, and some studies suggest breath hold training can reduce blood acidosis during exercise, which may help delay fatigue.

But acid build-up is not the only cause of heavy legs. During heavy, sustained efforts, tiring breathing muscles can trigger a reflex that reduces blood flow to your legs.

Stronger, more efficient breathing muscles help reduce this effect. Research has shown that reducing the work of breathing during hard exercise can increase blood flow to the working legs.

Muscle Recovery After Training

It is normal to have sore muscles after your workout. Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is part of how muscles adapt to training. But you can use breathing exercises to help the process of recovery, post-sprint, post-match and during half time.

The Oxygen Advantage method can support recovery in three ways:

1. Calm, efficient breathing after efforts

When you bring your breathing back under control through your nose after a sprint, your breathing and heart rate settle and your nervous system calms. Pay attention to how you breathe post-sprint.

2. Breath hold training and fatigue

Some studies suggest breath hold training can improve tolerance of acid build-up and fatigue resistance during repeated efforts. Early animal research also suggests brief periods of low oxygen may play a role in muscle repair, although this has not been established in humans.

3. Paced breathing for quick muscle recovery

Slow, paced breathing at 4.5 to 6.5 breaths per minute shifts your body toward its rest-and-digest system. This increases heart rate variability and vagal activity during practice. HRV is a useful marker of mental and physical resilience.

A falling HRV trend can indicate accumulated fatigue or overtraining. Slowing your breathing before bed may also help you sleep more deeply. Deep-stage sleep is vital for your body's recovery from exercise.

Mental Toughness and Focus in Football

Mental toughness in football is not about pretending to be strong. It is about resilience, getting enough rest, recovery and confidence in your ability. It is about pre-game mental preparation, focus, concentration, and knowing how to get in the zone.

You can deliberately access this psychological control using your breath. Once you have developed this skill, it transcends every area of your game. When your mind is not racing, you can concentrate and play at your best.

The Oxygen Advantage method includes exercises to up-regulate and down-regulate your nervous system. Over time, you develop resilience to stress and learn to master the mental and physical systems you need to excel.

Stress and Performance Anxiety in Football Players

In a highly competitive sport, performance anxiety can carry a stigma. But like it or not, sports anxiety can manifest during important games or penalty shoot-outs.

It can show up as insomnia when you need a good night's sleep. And anxiety in football players can lead to problems with drug and alcohol misuse.

Performance anxiety in sport is closely related to breathing. When you are stressed and nervous, you are more likely to over-breathe. This feeds back to make your anxiety worse.

Fast, hard breathing is associated with the fight or flight response. If you watch top strikers prepare to score, you often see them focus in on the ball, with calm, controlled breathing.

Nose breathing supports calm mental focus. Taking a slow, quiet breath through your nose before a penalty can help settle your nerves.

The Oxygen Advantage method uses paced breathing at 4.5 to 6.5 breaths per minute. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system which down-regulates stress and gives you the tools to focus, even under intense pressure.

Sleep, Recovery and Performance in Football

Better quality sleep makes you a better player. But when your life revolves around football, sleep won't always be your number one priority. Intensive schedules and high stress mean sport and sleep often do not go hand in hand, even though pro football players actually need more rest.

When sleep is inadequate, stress hormones rise, and physical and mental health suffers. Research has found that sleep-disordered breathing is more common in young athletes than many people assume.

Some athletes show low blood oxygen levels and higher pulse rates at night, which is worth investigating with a doctor.

Some facts about sleep and sports performance

• During healthy sleep, the body releases growth hormone and other hormones that support muscle repair and recovery.
• When sleep is poor, performance suffers. Speed, endurance, strength, executive function, learning, attention, running performance, reaction time, mood, vigour, max bench press, leg press, deadlift and tennis serve accuracy are all affected.
• In the run up to competition, it is normal to have trouble falling or staying asleep. This may be due to stress, or it could be the result of sleep-disordered breathing. Sleep disorders are hard to self-diagnose and professional athletes are often fearful about seeking help.
• When your sleep is compromised, fitness levels drop too.

What football players can do to improve sleep

• Work to restore nasal breathing at rest and during sleep.
• Practice slow, low, paced breathing to down-regulate your nervous system before bed.
• Use MyoTape along with breathing exercises to support nasal breathing at night, if you can breathe comfortably through your nose. If you snore heavily or may have sleep apnea, see a doctor first.

FAQS

1. Why is nose breathing better than mouth breathing during a football match?

At lower intensities and during breaks in play, nasal breathing slows the breath, carries nitric oxide into the lungs, and encourages the diaphragm to work properly. It also keeps your airways moist, lowering your risk of exercise-induced breathing problems. During all-out sprints, mouth breathing is normal.

2. Can breathing exercises really improve football fitness?

Research suggests they can help. Breath-hold training may improve how well you hold your speed across repeated sprints and how you cope with heavy, burning fatigue in your legs. Breath holds can also cause the spleen to briefly release stored red blood cells.

3. How can I improve my breathing when playing football?

Practice breathing light, slow, and through your nose, even during warm-ups. Add nasal breathing and short breath-holds before training, and use a breathing resistance mask to build strength in your breathing muscles. During breaks in play, calm nasal breathing can help your breathing and heart rate settle.

4. Why do I get out of breath so quickly playing football?

Breathlessness has several causes: fitness, breathing pattern, respiratory muscle fatigue, how strongly you react to air hunger, and how your brain perceives the sensation. Fast, upper-chest breathing and a strong reaction to air hunger can make you breathe harder, sooner. Training your breathing can help with several of these.

5. How do I build better lung capacity for playing soccer?

It's less about lung size and more about training your breathing muscles and your comfort with air hunger. Breath-hold sprints, deep diaphragm breathing, and a breathing resistance mask all help delay fatigue in the muscles you use to breathe.

Take Your Football Performance Further with Oxygen Advantage

More and more team sports players are using breathing exercises as part of their training, and research in this area is growing.

The Oxygen Advantage method gives football players a structured, research-informed system to support their game, from repeated sprints and endurance to recovery, sleep, and mental focus. It requires little extra training time and can be integrated directly into your existing warm-up and cool-down.

If you work with football players, or you are one, the Oxygen Advantage Advanced Instructor Training covers everything in this blog in depth.

Module 8 is dedicated entirely to breathing for team sports, including:

• Functional breathing for football performance
• Applying nasal breathing during football training
• Breathing strategies for football warm-ups
• Breath hold training and mental resilience in football

It's part of a full certification covering performance, recovery, sleep, nervous system regulation, and sport-specific breathing protocols across team and individual sports.

👉 Explore the Advanced Instructor Training

Also explore: SportsMask | MyoTape | Free Breathing App | Nasal Strips