An inspiratory muscle warm-up is a short, specific warm-up that prepares your breathing muscles for exercise, the same way a normal warm-up prepares your legs. In Volianitis et al. (1999, PMID 10606219) it raised inspiratory muscle strength by 8.5%, while a whole-body warm-up did not change it. The effect on sports performance is small and still uncertain.
Watch a team warm up before training. Jogging, skips, leg swings, a few accelerations. Hips, calves and hamstrings all get their share of attention. And the diaphragm? It works from the very first minute, and nobody asks it anything.
That raises a fair question. If the breathing muscles are muscles, can you prepare them for work like the rest of the body?
Do breathing muscles need a warm-up like other muscles?
Research shows they respond to a warm-up much like other muscles, but they need a specific one. Running or cycling on its own does not seem to wake them up.
The clearest evidence comes from Volianitis and colleagues (1999). In rowers, a rowing warm-up increased knee extensor strength by 3.8%. Inspiratory muscle strength stayed exactly where it was, both in them and in students after a general cycling warm-up. Only a warm-up aimed directly at the inspiratory muscles raised it, by 8.5%.
Legs ready. Breathing not yet.
This is not a one-off finding. In a systematic review of 31 studies (Cirino 2023), 88% of the studies that measured inspiratory parameters reported an improvement after this kind of warm-up. Higher inspiratory muscle strength is the best-documented effect in the whole field.
Does the diaphragm get tired during exercise?
Yes. After intense exercise, diaphragm strength drops, and it takes a long time to come back.
Johnson et al. (1993) measured this precisely by stimulating the phrenic nerve in 12 healthy people. After exercise at 95% of VO₂max, the pressure generated by the diaphragm fell by up to 32%. Near-full recovery took 70 minutes on average. Longer than a half of football.
High fitness does not protect you from it. In highly trained and trained people the drop in diaphragm strength was similar, and recovery took 60 minutes (Babcock 1996). Inspiratory muscle fatigue also showed up after short, maximal 400 m and 800 m runs (Ohya 2016).
Here is the interesting part. Romer et al. (2006) showed that heavy breathing muscle work can add to fatigue in the legs. When cyclists had their breathing unloaded, the quadriceps fatigued less. When it was loaded, they fatigued more. We look at how the diaphragm works in footballers in the diaphragm in football, and at breathing physiology in our breathing science section.
One caveat. None of the studies we know of has shown that a breathing warm-up prevents this fatigue. The problem is real. The answer is still being built.
Does an inspiratory muscle warm-up improve sports performance?
It raises inspiratory muscle strength in the vast majority of studies, and performance less often and to a smaller degree. Some studies also found less breathlessness.
The study closest to football is Tong and Fu (2006). Ten men ran the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test, the same test you know from club fitness testing. After a breathing warm-up they completed 19.5% more shuttles than without it, and breathlessness built up more slowly. After a placebo warm-up the changes were not significant.
Sounds strong. But it is 10 people with a wide spread of results, so we do not turn it into a promise for every player.
The latest meta-analysis gives the wider picture (Wang 2026): 11 studies, 139 competitive athletes. The effect on performance was small but positive (g = 0.285). In intermittent sports, the kind football belongs to, it came out larger than in endurance sports (g = 0.418 vs 0.142). The authors treat that comparison as preliminary, because it depended heavily on a single badminton study. They rated the certainty of evidence as low: in 10 of 11 studies the confidence interval crossed zero.
The Cirino review (2023) points the same way. Only 45% of the studies that measured performance reported an improvement.
On the pitch it comes down to this: you prepare a muscle that responds to a warm-up in most studies. Whether that carries over to the next run in behind depends on plenty of other things.
Why does half-time matter for your breathing muscles?
Because in a simulated match, inspiratory muscle strength dropped after the first part and barely came back during a passive break.
Tong et al. (2019) recreated team-sport exercise on a treadmill: two parts with a 15-minute break in between, with 9 players. After the first part, inspiratory muscle strength fell by 8.1%. After 15 minutes of passive rest it was still 6.4% lower.
Think of a typical half-time. Dressing room, water, the coach’s notes. Then out for the second half after a quarter of an hour of passive rest.
In the condition with an active re-warm-up, combining trunk exercises with breathing work, the strength loss shrank to 0.9%. Repeated sprints in the second part were then faster than in the first: peak speed by 3.0% and mean speed by 2.0%. After passive rest, they tended to be slower (Tong 2019).
The catch is that this is one small study, and the breathing work was combined with core exercises. So we cannot say how much came from breathing alone. For football, though, the direction is very concrete. How breathing works in the short breaks during play is covered in breathing after a sprint.
Is a normal warm-up enough?
Sometimes it is. The results here are not clear-cut.
Johnson et al. (2014) tested this in 10 cyclists in a time trial. A well-planned cycling warm-up gave a better time than no warm-up. Adding a breathing warm-up raised inspiratory muscle strength by 8%, but did not improve the time any further. After the trial, strength was back to baseline.
In repeated cycle sprints (Ohya 2015) there was no difference in power either. And the only study with footballers, 10 female players, was done on a bike (Cheng 2013). Their leg muscles were better oxygenated after the breathing warm-up, but their sprints did not improve.
That is why a breathing warm-up does not replace a normal one. The best results came from combining the two, for example in elite swimmers (Wilson 2014) and rowers (Volianitis 2001).
Can you warm up your breathing without equipment or through your nose?
There is no good evidence for that yet. Almost all studies used a device that adds resistance to inhalation.
A diaphragmatic breathing warm-up has been tested in one study, and in the deadlift, not in anything resembling football (Katz 2026). We found no study in PubMed that tested a nasal breathing warm-up before exercise. The nasal breathing data we do have covers breathing during and after exercise. We cover it in nasal breathing after exercise.
This is open ground. The logic of preparing a muscle before it works is the same, but the proof is not there yet.
Where does the evidence end?
The studies are small (usually a dozen or so people), one-off and almost always away from the pitch. We found no studies on footballers in a match, and it is not known how long the warm-up effect lasts. That is why we say a breathing warm-up prepares the inspiratory muscles, not that it guarantees a better match.
At AirFlow Performance we treat the breathing muscles like any others: you can prepare them for a session and, over a longer period, train them. That second topic, multi-week inspiratory muscle training, is covered in inspiratory muscle training in football. How we connect breathing with movement and match preparation is shown in our three-stage breathing training programme, and what we measured in a 7-week pilot at Lech Poznań is on our results page.
FAQ
What is an inspiratory muscle warm-up? An inspiratory muscle warm-up is a short, specific preparation of the breathing muscles before training or a match. In research it usually means breathing in through a device with resistance. It raises inspiratory muscle strength, which a whole-body warm-up did not do in the study by Volianitis et al. (Volianitis 1999).
Does a breathing warm-up improve performance? Sometimes, but the effect is small. A meta-analysis of 11 studies and 139 athletes found a small positive effect on performance (g = 0.285), with low certainty of evidence (Wang 2026). In a review of 31 studies, 45% of those that measured performance reported an improvement (Cirino 2023). The rise in inspiratory muscle strength is far more consistent.
Does the diaphragm get tired during exercise? Yes. After exercise at 95% of VO₂max, the pressure generated by the diaphragm fell by up to 32%, and near-full recovery took 70 minutes on average (Johnson 1993). High fitness did not protect against this fatigue (Babcock 1996). Heavy breathing muscle work can also add to leg muscle fatigue (Romer 2006).
Is a half-time breathing re-warm-up worth it in football or soccer? The first data are encouraging. In a treadmill match simulation, inspiratory muscle strength was still 6.4% lower after 15 minutes of passive rest. A re-warm-up combining trunk exercises with breathing work cut that loss to 0.9% and improved second-half sprints (Tong 2019). It is a single study of 9 players.
Does a breathing warm-up replace a normal warm-up? No. A breathing warm-up complements a normal warm-up rather than replacing it. In elite swimmers, the fastest result came from combining a pool warm-up with a breathing warm-up, and the breathing warm-up alone was slower (Wilson 2014). Rowers showed the same pattern, with the highest power when the breathing warm-up was added to a rowing one (Volianitis 2001).
Does a nasal breathing warm-up work? We do not know yet. We found no studies in PubMed that tested a nasal breathing warm-up as preparation for training or a match. Almost all research on breathing warm-ups used a device that adds resistance to inhalation. The nasal breathing data we have covers exercise and the period after it, not the warm-up itself.
About AirFlow Performance
AirFlow Performance runs breathing training for footballers. We ran a 7-week breathing training pilot at Lech Poznań, and today we work one-to-one with individual players.
Published: 26 October 2026
Want to know how your breathing muscles are working? Get in touch with AirFlow Performance
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Sources
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