Nasal Strips: Sniffing out the Science

Nasal strips have become the latest hype in the fitness industry with claims to improve respiration, battle nasal congestion and fix your earthquake snoring.

Open up your airways and improve oxygen uptake. Sounds rather straight forward, but how strong is the evidence behind these claims? In this article we stiff out the last decade of research to determine whether they do in fact improve your performance & recovery.

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Nasal Strips and Athletic Performance

How They’re Meant to Work

Nasal strips are adhesive bands placed across the nose that mechanically widen the nasal valve, reducing airflow resistance. Theoretically, less resistance means easier breathing and better oxygen delivery.

What Research Shows

• Strength and Power Sports: From my knowledge there’s no research examining nasal strips in powerlifting, Olympic lifting, or sprinting. These activities rely on short bursts and mouth breathing (often using the Valsalva maneuver), so nasal resistance is rarely a limiting factor.

• Endurance and Aerobic Exercise:

  • A 2021 systematic review of 19 studies found no meaningful improvements in VO₂max, heart rate, or perceived exertion for healthy adults using nasal strips (Dinardi et al., 2021).

  • Studies in trained triathletes and runners show strips can make the perception of breathing easier, as well as delay the switch from nasal to mouth breathing, however overall performance (time to exhaustion, total work) remains the same (Ottaviano et al., 2017).

  • For athletes with nasal obstruction (e.g., valve compromise), improvements are possible. One trial reported better VO₂max, longer exercise time, and reduced fatigue when airflow was enhanced using internal dilators (Valsamidis et al., 2024).

  • Adolescents, especially those with allergic rhinitis saw small gains in VO₂max with nasal strips (Dinardi et al., 2017).

Bottom Line for Performance

For most healthy athletes, nasal strips don’t seem to improve aerobic capacity or strength performance however they might help if you have structural/allergic nasal blockage, or if you’re a younger athlete still refining breathing efficiency.

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Nasal Strips and Sleep

The Rationale

During sleep, nasal resistance can contribute to congestion, snoring, or disrupted breathing. By widening the nasal valve, strips aim to reduce airflow resistance and thus make sleep more restful.

What Research Shows

• Snoring and Sleep Apnea:

  • Meta-analyses and clinical trials consistently show that external strips don’t significantly improve snoring or apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) (Camacho et al., 2016; Yagihara et al., 2017).

  • Some participants report feeling slightly less sleepy or congested, but this is likely a placebo effect rather than a change in airway obstruction.

• Subjective Sleep Quality:

  • Smaller studies in people with nighttime nasal congestion report modest improvements in sleep satisfaction and waking refreshed, particularly with well-engineered strips (Schenkel et al., 2018; Wheatley et al., 2019).

  • However, larger randomized trials found no advantage over placebo (Noss et al., 2019).

  • In pregnancy-related snoring, nasal strips were safe but did not improve snoring or apnea severity (Maxwell et al., 2022).

  • Objective sleep measures like total sleep time, sleep stages, or arousal rates rarely show meaningful change.

Bottom Line for Sleep

For athletes or healthy adults, nasal strips may make breathing feel easier if you’re congested, but they won’t cure snoring, apnea, or poor sleep quality. Their benefits are mostly about comfort, not physiology.

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Final Thoughts

Nasal strips have their place, but also their limitations. They can improve subjective comfort for people with nasal obstruction or mild congestion for both training and sleep but they don’t deliver measurable boosts in performance or sleep architecture for most healthy adults.

Coaches and athletes should view nasal strips as a low-risk aid for nights of stuffy breathing or mild nasal obstruction during exercise, rather than a magic bullet for performance or recovery.

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References

1. Camacho, M., et al. (2016). Nasal Dilators (Breathe Right Strips and NoZovent) for Snoring and OSA: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Pulmonary Medicine, 2016, 4841310.
2. Dinardi, R.R., et al. (2021). Does the external nasal dilator strip help in sports activity? A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, 278, 1307-1320.
3. Dinardi, R.R., de Andrade, C.R., & Ibiapina, C.C. (2017). Effect of the external nasal dilator on adolescent athletes with and without allergic rhinitis. Int J Pediatr Otorhinolaryngol, 97, 127-134.
4. Maxwell, M., et al. (2022). Impact of nasal dilator strips on measures of sleep-disordered breathing in pregnancy. J Clin Sleep Med, 18, 235-243.
5. Noss, M.J., et al. (2019). Sleep quality and congestion with Breathe Right nasal strips: Two randomized controlled trials. Adv Ther, 36, 2398-2411.
6. Ottaviano, G., et al. (2017). Breathing parameters associated to two different external nasal dilator strips in endurance athletes. Auris Nasus Larynx, 44, 713-718.
7. Schenkel, E.J., et al. (2018). Effects of nasal dilator strips on subjective measures of sleep in subjects with chronic nocturnal nasal congestion: A randomized trial. Allergy Asthma Clin Immunol, 14, 22.
8. Valsamidis, K., et al. (2024). Improvement of the aerobic performance in endurance athletes presenting nasal valve compromise with an internal nasal dilator. Am J Otolaryngol, 45, 104059.
9. Wheatley, J.R., et al. (2019). Objective and subjective effects of a prototype nasal dilator strip on sleep in chronic congestion. Adv Ther, 36, 2398-2411.
10. Yagihara, F., et al. (2017). Nasal dilator strip is an effective placebo intervention for severe obstructive sleep apnea. J Clin Sleep Med, 13, 1285-1292.