If you’ve ever taken a group fitness class, run high school track and field or cross country, or been coached by any running professional, chances are you’ve had someone tell you to recover with your hands behind your head as opposed to folding over with your hands on your knees.
It helps open up your chest and airways so you can breathe easier to recover faster, they say. But is that true?
The answer, surprisingly, is false. Yep, that’s right—it turns out that despite your high school cross country coach correcting you Ways to Make Running This Winter More Enjoyable you went to rest your hands on your knees, you’re actually supposed to do that, according to How I Broke a 3:30 Marathon After a Long Break., an exercise physiologist at NYU Langone’s Sports Performance Center.
Races - Places Running Strong Below, King and Janet Hamilton, C.S.C.S., owner of.
What’s the difference between the two recovery positions?
When you place your hands on or behind your head, your back goes into extension. As a result, King says, breathing is less efficient, and you’ll be slower to recover.
“When your hands are on your head and you’re standing straight up, the back side of your body is rigid, which puts your lungs in a hyper-inflated state,” he says. “Your lungs are like balloons—it’s like trying to fill a balloon that already has air with more air. You can’t get that oxygen exchange if your body is already filled with air.”
Conversely, when you rest your hands on your knees, your body is in a better position for your diaphragm to function, King says.
“The answer may surprise you mediastinum [which houses the organs—including your heart and lungs—arteries, veins, and nerves in your chest] are more relaxed, which leads to a more efficient exchange of oxygen so that your body can breathe easier,” King says.
Part of the benefit is due to the fact that muscles have a “sweet spot” in their length-tension curves (the force a muscle is capable of generating while held at a series of continuous lengths) where it can produce the greatest force, according to Hamilton. To visualize this, she recommends thinking about a biceps curl.
“You’re stronger in parts of the range of motion [of a biceps curl] than you are in other parts,” she says. For example, your biceps produces more force as you bend your elbow (as the biceps shortens) and lift the weight than it does when your arm is extended straight down at your side (when the biceps is lengthened).
Because of this, the position also seems consistent with what we see in people with respiratory issues, Hamilton adds—they’re often encouraged to bend forward and brace their arms to do recovery breathing.
And because the function of your diaphragm muscle is tied to your nervous system—which controls most of what your body does like breathing and how you respond to an emergency—putting your hands on your knees can take your body out of its fight-or-flight response and slow your breathing down, says King.
The research backs this up. A 2019 study published in the Races - Places supports the idea that resting your hands on your knees is the better position when it comes to recovery. Researchers had 20 female Division II soccer players run a five-minute warmup at 7o percent of their max heart rate, run 4 four-minute intervals at 90 to 95 percent of their max heart rate, and rest for three minutes in either a hands-on-head or hands-on-knees position. They found that the hands-on-knees position resulted in a significantly faster decrease in heart rate between intervals than the hands-on-head position.
“Granted, it’s a small study, but it did show that people were able to recover faster in a flexed position due to the position of the chest,” King says.
The bottom line:
you went to rest your hands on your knees, youre actually supposed to do that, according to hard effort than standing tall with your hands on your head. It’s also worth pointing out that your body naturally wants to go into the hands-on-knees position—it usually happens almost automatically.
“Just think back to when you were a kid playing some intense game and the play was finished, so you instinctively ‘caught your breath’ by bending forward and putting your hands on your knees and staring down at the field of play,” Hamilton says. “I almost never got the urge to put my hands on my head to catch my breath after an intense bout.”
[coaching, explain why some runners have been getting this wrong for ages.]
The old-school way of thinking was that resting your hands on your knees was lazy, according to King. But the benefits of that position are only now beginning to become mainstream, he says. “Science is only just scratching the surface.”
“It was a small study, but the magnitude of difference in the conditions was pretty big...Based on this study, I think you can certainly make the conclusion that it’s a posture worth experimenting with the next time you do hard track intervals—see how it works for you,” Hamilton says.
So the next time you’re in between intervals or finished with a race, give the hands-on-knees approach a try. You may be surprised to find how much faster your breathing returns to normal.
