Review: The Airofit Pro Breathing Trainer Has Potential, But It Isn't Perfect
We all know how important breathing is. Try holding your breath for five minutes if you need a reminder of its importance. Yet how many of us take time to actually think about our breathing when we exercise?
As children, breathing is the first thing we work out how to do when we play sports. I still clearly remember my first cross country run at primary school. Nobody had ever explained to me about managing my effort and halfway around I got a stitch; my body was demanding more air than my lungs could take in, resulting in a burning pain in my side. I can’t have been more than 8 or 9 years old, but the memory of being the only kid who had to walk half the race stays with me.
As children, breathing is the first thing we work out how to do when we play sports. I still clearly remember my first cross country run at primary school. Nobody had ever explained to me about managing my effort and halfway around I got a stitch; my body was demanding more air than my lungs could take in, resulting in a burning pain in my side. I can’t have been more than 8 or 9 years old, but the memory of being the only kid who had to walk half the race stays with me.
Airofit Details
• Only takes 5-10 minutes per day
• 45 day moneyback guarantee
• 2 year warranty
• Made in Denmark
• MSRP: 299 Euros
• airofit.com
• Only takes 5-10 minutes per day
• 45 day moneyback guarantee
• 2 year warranty
• Made in Denmark
• MSRP: 299 Euros
• airofit.com
Modern athletes are familiar with splitting training down into specific blocks - maybe they lift weight for strength or head out on long rides for endurance - it is so common it hardly needs explaining. Yet how often do you hear people talking about the most fundamental part of your performance? How many of us train our breathing?
A quick Google search for “breathing training” mainly brings up results for dealing with anxiety and stress, or lung conditions like COPD, with little mention of sports. Which is odd, especially as there is emerging science that shows breathing exercises alone can help boost not only your athletic performance, but your general health too.
Description
Airofit are one of the first companies to recognise the potential of breath training, and created this eponymous device.
At its most basic, the Airofit is a T-shaped assembly with a mouthpiece attached to a small barrel with vents at either end. On each of the vents is a bevelled wheel that lets you increase or decrease the resistance for the passing air.
When you breathe into the Airofit the small computer mounted on the barrel controls which of the vents opens and relays information about the volume and speed of the air to its app. The idea is that by opening and closing the vents to restrict airflow you are making the lungs work harder and therefore training them.
When you switch the device on, the app takes you through a lung test to measure the force and volume you can inhale and exhale with. It then selects a training session based on those numbers and your recent training. Airofit make a big deal of how convenient it is - at present it is setting me a 30-second lung test, a 3-minute inhale exercise and a 3-4 minute secondary exercise to complement that. They say that you should be able to fit it into your day in 3-10 minutes.
Using the Airofit
Before we go too deep into this review, it needs to be said up front that I believe that the Airofit does exactly what they claim it does. I would go as far as to describe its results as impressive, after just a couple of weeks of use I could feel improvements in my lung performance and have the data to support what I felt. It does offer a level of performance enhancement above and beyond what I have found until now - I have been doing the Wim Hof breathing exercises since January and I would say that the gains from the Airofit are more definite.
Opening the box, my first impression of the Airofit was actually one of disappointment. I have tested a few performance-enhancing devices recently - like the similarly priced Oura ring - and it is not manufactured to the same standard. Oura have clearly invested a lot of time and effort to make their rings desirable, while the Airofit feels functional. That is not to say it feels cheap or poorly-made, but by setting themselves a €300 price tag they are creating expectations that they are not matching for me. If the device sold for €50, then this paragraph would read very differently.
My sensitivity to the device cost was heightened when I realised that part of the app requires a supplemental subscription - another €6 per month. Maybe it is my personal sensibilities, but I tend to feel that you can either do a subscription service or a high unit price, not both. Although, maybe if they unlocked the advanced data fields in the app and rebranded the service as personalised training, then it might feel better.
Before training each day the app runs a lung test to calibrate the difficulty of the session.
Progress from training is easy to see in the data and feel on the bike.
Loading the app for the first time, again the experience was not fantastic - it feels basic and a little low quality next to the other apps I use regularly for training and health. The explanation videos felt rather jarring and not fully integrated into the app and the programme of exercises a little disorientating. The part I find consistently off-putting is the “compliance” score in the top right. Even though I am trying my hardest to follow the exercise, the score frustratingly drops every time. For a lab experiment, compliance may well be a precise term, but for a consumer product, it feels rather harsh.
The exercises themselves are quite intense. The beginner level exercises I was prescribed feel like I have been working, even after just a couple of minutes of restricted airflow. Curiosity lead me to try an intermediate workout and I could not finish it, it was just brutal. Don’t get me wrong, brutal can have its place in a training programme, but it needs to be thought through. For the past few months I have been following Wim Hof’s breathing exercises consistently, and it can get brutal at times with the long breath holds, but he understood that there needs to be some payoff - after finishing Wims exercises I feel wonderful. The Airofit doesn’t seem to have any kind of payback - it is just hard work.
Then there is the final kicker - convenience. Training is not an elegant affair - the device comes out of your mouth covered in saliva, it is reasonably gross. The problem is what do you do with the device after training? It arrives in a mesh sack, which is not an ideal material for keeping saliva inside. I would take the idea of convenience to mean that you can train where and when suits you, but how can you do that if you cannot easily carry it with you? A hard, plastic carry case would have solved all this, and for the €300 asking price, I find it unforgivable that they have not addressed this issue.
Airofit's Reponse
 | The Airofit PRO device is manufactured in Denmark and produced from medically approved plastic, which follows strict quality regulations in terms of its processing and coating. Therefore, the final design of the breathing trainer gets a robust and functional appearance. In the app we have had most focus on the functions and the results. The average users are able to get 90+ % compliance in most training sessions after 4 to 8 weeks and may not ever be at 100%. The training will also be adjusted to your current lung function and the difficulty level will be re-adjusted as you get stronger. We have many people feeling multiple levels of payback from using the Airofit, a quick look at the reviews on Trustpilot will show that it’s individual - but sometimes it’s just hard :-). We are working on adjusting the sessions and programs in all our updates and finding the right balance between maintaining motivation, pushing for results and showing benefits. As a young scale-up company with 2 years in the market, at Airofit we are sure that the next few years and plenty of customer feedback, will help us make Breathing Training an integrated part of a healthy lifestyle for all - but we can always improve. All things aside - Airofit PRO is the first smart breathing trainer of its kind and both the Breathing Trainer and App are in their first and second generation - so we see endless opportunities to make it better along the journey that we have in front of us.” |
Pros
+ Relatively quick and impressive results
+ Huge potential for changing general health, not just sport
+ Discrete
+ Hard training sessions
Cons
- Expensive - high initial cost and subscription
- App feels a little basic
- Messy
- Hard training sessions
Pinkbike's Take
| The idea and the technology behind Airofit are fantastic - my results suggest that restricting your airflow can yield noticeable performance benefits quickly. Yet this poses a deeper question: is pure performance enough in a device like this? I would argue no. In the end, I found myself using the Airofit way less than I should have because I did not enjoy using it. Certainly it does not feel like great value for money, the exercises are frustrating and I end up with saliva all over the place. Airofit need to think about how they present their technology, because I do believe the potential is there. If they refine the product or rethink their pricing structure I will be at the front of the queue for version 2.0. |
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That data would really add to this review. E.g. did you do FTP tests before and after and what sort of change did you see? How did it alter your times on repeatable Zwift segments say? How did you control for other training gains?
I know the Airofit app will show its own metrics, but if you aren't actually changing your riding performance then to a degree what's the point? I'm always wary of things where the only metric is a change to something with no proven actual real-world benefit (a lot of more esoteric metrics in the sleep apps feel like that).
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26356482
Feel free to correct me, if you have evidence pointing in the other direction.
The only "data" anyone needs is that this is a simple idea that has been around for decades and ZERO elite athletes use it in their training. Only for the sponsored photo ops.
There is actually quite substantial accumulating evidence that is confirming the long-debated effects of inspiratory muscle training on athletic performance. The proposed mechanisms have nothing to do with replicating hypoxic training, but rather increasing respiratory muscle fatigue resistance.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1466853X18301652
We wrote a paper about this, "Breath Tools", showing how this could be used to improve running performance (section "Strength") www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2022.813243
Cardio, used by every successful athlete
Weight/resistance training, used by every successful athlete
Nutrition, used by every successful athlete
Fastidious recovery and sleep monitoring, used by every successful athlete
Breath training, used by paid athletes when paid to do so, and never elite current athletes.
Restricted breathing just limits your stimulus workload and artificially increases RPE. Introduce a $300 ballgag into your training and get back to me. Like I said before, this gimmick had made its rounds plenty of other places for many years, if it worked we would all know about it by now.
You got behind the curtain, so you and everyone you know who takes fitness seriously use these?
Breathe out
Repeat
That’ll be $275 sir
You know what's good for "breath training? Breathing hard when you're doing exercise.
In the quest to educate kids, we've severely hampered some basic physical functions by having them sit in a chair until adult age. A lot of adults don't know it but they're basically breathing incorrectly...
I mean, it doesn't really surprise me that doing breathing exercises makes you better at breathing exercises, you know? If doing this thing for 10 minutes per day could make a meaningful difference to my biking or general endurance I might be interested (even if it makes less of a difference than just going and riding my bike for 10 minutes, it could still be attractive because you can just do it sitting at home on the sofa).
In the past, when I worked hard. My abs sore as the diaphragm fatigue and give out then I can't breath effectively.
Using this thing make that issue vanished. And my limiting factor move to something else.
Past that point, I see no further benefit from stronger diaphragm.
So, how do you fatigue out? If it's the diaphragm/abs. Then this might help. If it's something else, skip it.
Isn't high altitude training a fairly standard exercise for top athletes?
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10912887
(It actually is for real though.)
i.ytimg.com/vi/hk6KuKgVFF4/maxresdefault.jpg
I don't want to restrict my breathing, I want to get as much air as I can so I can push out as many watts as I can so I get stronger. Same reason I run a huge fan at full blast when I am on the trainer; I don't want my workouts limited by how much heat I can reject.
But for those with no musical agility, a tool like this will probably help if you use it daily for at least a month.
It's about learning to breathe well, which is not inherent for most folks.
Seriously, 99.9% of people on PB do not breath well.
Sure it doesn't have an app, so it probably ain't for milleni'anals, or pussies.
Like any muscle that is trained, it will improve breathing capabilities due to the fact that the muscle has been improved (resistance & force), and for such, you can breath in faster intervals, fill more air into the lung (due to faster contraction), and doing so, you'll oxiginate better your blonde.
This is an add on and complementary exercise to normal training.
www.trainingmask.com
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12131262
Have a read of Breath by James Nestor or look into Wim Hof, much better information in there.
Whats the difference in performance when training between this and a mask?
Breathing technique is perhaps the most underrated part of exercise. Many people breathe erratically when the effort is minimal, and so when the effort increases, they have no headroom.
One of the best tips I ever heard is from Loana Lecompte (Current XC world cup champion). When she trains, she only breathes through her nose. If you can train your body to perform on this limited oxygen level, when you come to a competion, you can ride to a higher level due to the increased flow through the mouth.
www.physio-pedia.com/Positive_Expiratory_Pressure_(PEP)_DevicesPEP
+2
pinkbike: „WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH, AAAAARRGHHH!“
Without doing that, you don't know if you are actually strengthening the right muscles, or potentially storing up future problem. A decent biking analogy is that you can get pretty good power by using your lower back muscles for stabilising your core, but at some point you're going to throw your back out (don't ask me how I know). Only when you sort out your core strength and favour your glutes will you really generate the power consistently and without injury.