Barbell Shrugged - Optimizing Performance Using the Power of Heat, Cold, and Breath Work w/ Coach PJ Nestler Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #702

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Coach PJ Nestler, the Director of Performance at XPT and Fitlab. Is a human performance specialist with over a decade of experience preparing top athletes for competition. His life mission is to help athletes and coaches realize their true potential.  With a passion for sports and a commitment to excellence, PJ has become a leader in sports performance training. He has trained dozens of athletes from the NFL, NHL and MLB and has worked extensively with over 100 fighters, including multiple Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Champions and Top 10 ranked UFC fighters.  Through the application of his progressive training philosophy and unique approach to every situation, Coach PJ continues to raise the bar for fitness professionals. He has emerged as a sought-after expert in human performance and trainer education. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have him on the XPT team, as the new Director of Performance! Coach PJ Nestler on Instagram  Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Start family this week on Barbell Shrugged. Coach PJ Nessler from XPT is coming in. We're going to learn about breathing. He's also been a friend of ours for, man, five, six, seven, maybe even longer. Long time here. And it's always great to have PJ on the show. He brings a depth of knowledge from some things that we don't normally talk about. I guess they're becoming a little bit more mainstream, but the work with XPT from ice baths and heat exposures, as well as the breath work. We didn't even really get into the underwater training side of things and kind of like changing your environment,

but he's been up to doing some more tactical game stuff, which is really cool. It's very outside the box and how his training with XPT, how he trains his athletes and how that worked into him training for the tactical game. So super cool show. And it's always just great to reconnect with friends on here and dig into where their brains are at these, these days with, with training, coaching, and some of the tools that they're using. As always friends,

you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galvin and Dan Garner are doing a lab lifestyle and performance analysis for one of our members inside, one of our clients inside Rapid Health Optimization, which everybody will get one of these rad videos and big breakdown of their labs, lifestyle performance. And you can see that over at rapidhealthreport.com.

Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson. PJ Nessler. Performance director at XPT. How's life, man? Life's amazing. It bothers me that we're doing this on the internet, by the way. I know. We're supposed to be at Laird's Pool trying to drown ourselves. I know. It's been a while since you guys have been up there. It's a, that is like a, an experience unlike any other. And every time somebody from the XPT universe comes in to our programs, I'm like, Oh, we all need to do this thing. We all need to go lift weights underwater and try and freeze ourselves and then cook ourselves. There's like not a single thing you guys do in that experience that isn't like

borderline killing each person. And then everybody walks out there like, I feel so amazing. Yeah. Like I was in a, I was in an ice bath for like 12 minutes today. And then in between these three minute sessions, I went into a 220 degree sauna. Yeah. I'm currently putting together some ways. Uh, we're getting ready for Malibu coming up in a couple of weeks. So I'm currently trying to think of what new ways I'm always like, it's got to be different. It's not fun to do the same thing. I want to hear about the tactical games. You just competed in these. I've seen them, but you're the first person that I actually kind of know that has done them. What are the demands of that weekend? I'd love to talk about kind of the training that you did leading up to it. Yeah, it's super fun.

It's become a new passion of mine. I did one, my first one last year, like last September in Arizona. And then I did another one in March in Texas. And then we just did a little like made up our own version, uh, like two weeks ago here in California, kind of just a training, uh, training for it, but it's super fun because I think it was something I was missing, which was one competition and two was competition where it's not just fitness. I enjoyed some fitness competition stuff, but like a Spartan race is just a shit ton of running and there's some cool obstacles, but it's a, it's a running

event with a little bit of obstacles in it. Um, and I was doing some of those. So I was just looking for something new to train for. I wasn't competing in jujitsu anymore, but my training was always kind of around jujitsu, but I wanted something to compete in. So I got into shooting and I found out about the tactical games. I was like, this seems right up my alley, fitness and shooting. And it's awesome for me because it's such a mix of people. A lot of people that are there are shooters

and they come from a shooting background. So the fitness is very daunting for them. Yeah. Obviously come from a fitness background. So I'm like, this is my advantage, but I'm brand new to shooting.

Yeah. I actually don't do as well because the competition definitely favors shooters. Uh, but it's, it's still an advantage. I mean, I placed 11th in my first one uh which is way

better than i thought i would yeah it was because i'm pretty decent at shooting but like there are people who are really good they come in just they don't miss a shot and they get through the shooting way faster uh but it's super cool i mean i love the way that they put the events on i love the fact that you don't know what you're going to do until you show up. So the training, I'm a nerd on training, as you know. So I love, I've been putting together training plans for myself and then also for the team that I've been competing with. So I've like, we have four or five people that did the first one and then another group that did the second one. So I put together like full training plans and then trying to figure out how to incorporate the tactical components into the

fitness. Uh, it's super fun. I mean, it gives me a little bit what I used to get training fighters, which was, I got to figure out how to put all these puzzle pieces together and, uh, it's impossible to do it all. So how can I put the pieces together? Yeah. Yo, you hit on something that is very, very top of mind in the lack of competing that goes on in life and finding a new, a new thing. One, how did you choose the chat tactical games and then how do you keep the, how do you keep the juice going in your training when you aren't really training for anything? Yeah, I think that's what I was looking for. And honestly, it kind of came back

up because this is a big premise behind what we're doing at FitLab, which is building these fitness businesses. But our three avenues are studio gyms, digital apps, and events. And our goal is to integrate all three of them together so that people can train at home, train in the gym and have something to train for. And they all align. So you're not using whatever gym to go train for a Spartan race. And those two things don't really overlap. So that's kind of the concept. And as we were building a lot of that, I was like, yeah, I need that myself. I need something.

I lost, like, I wasn't super passionate about training, especially during the pandemic. I mean, I was training regularly, but because schedules were getting screwed up, I couldn't, I couldn't stick to a training program because my workouts keep going from like, my workout window would go from 90 minutes to 40 minutes. So I'd have to scrap workouts. So I just kind of was doing stuff to stay fit. And I was with it. It's boring, super boring. And then we just did a Spartan race for fun. A few of me and a couple of buddies, we're just going to do one. And I was like, I don't run ever. So I'm going to have to like

train a little bit for this and prepare for it. Yeah. Which was cool for me. It was just an, you know, I don't train athletes anymore at all. And my whole life I've been writing programs since I was 12 years old for myself, for my friends, for my family, and then, you know, professionally for 15 years. So it was fun for me to kind of like put the program together for that Spartan race, But the Spartan race wasn't hard for me. It was like, I need to run more, but it wasn't like, I knew I could show up and just do it. I just wanted to train for it. So then I was like, what's something that we could find

that I actually don't, I'm not prepared for. And I actually have to, like, I can't do it if I don't train for it. And because I had gotten in during 2020s, when I first started to, like, I can't do it if I don't train for it. And because I had gotten in during 2020 is when I first started getting into firearms. I started training at like this tactical place here in Costa Mesa and I loved it. So when I saw that, I was like, well, this is perfect. It's the new thing I've been learning. Yeah. Fitness stuff that looks super challenging.

It's not all running. That's what I love about it like most fitness events is just so much running that it even when you do like strength work you're doing um you know you it's it's just strength endurance work it's just like you pick up a moderate weight and you do it for a long period of time and i like the cool thing about the tactical games is there's so many different divisions that like you actually have to move some heavy weights and there's some shit that like is really heavy. Yeah. Cool.

I mean, that's my passion. So, yeah, the competition thing to me, it was always about the experience. And I feel like that's one of the pieces that I have just noticed over the last specifically called when the pandemic, when like the entire world just shifted, you're not on the road that much anymore. Like we used to go to the Spartan world championships each year and run that race. And it's just like the coolest experience one year with all these people up and down the mountains. Like it's, it's just an awesome experience to go do it. And then when you get out of the competition vibe and you're not training specific, you're just kind of like in the gym and you gotta get, got to get your juice from somewhere and like experience something new um so i was really stoked when i saw you were doing it i was like damn that's like something i've never done especially

shooting guns competitively or like any any of that those pieces of it um so it fired me up that you were you were still doing it yeah uh yo actually i'm really curious since you have like a breathwork background like i i went out with uh some guys they were their special officer special operations guys that started a company called it was like a german term like it sounds like design but it was like the sign like the whatever the german term is for that whatever that means but their their whole gig was long-range shooting combined with like mindfulness and meditation. So you would like you would do this meditation practice, like calm yourself. And then when you went to go shoot, you'd be extra calm.

So you were very steady, et cetera. Given you have like a meditation slash mindfulness breathwork type background, were you able to kind of effectively utilize that when you're under fatigue in the tactical games competition? And presumably if you're under fatigue, it's like it's hard to hold your gun as steady as if you're not fatigued, et cetera. Were the breath work practices that you've had that you've, that you're so comfortable with useful in kind of calming your mind and staying steady when you're under fatigue and trying to get, you know, trying to hit a bullseye, so to speak? Yeah, I think it was a huge advantage for me. And I've actually, so at the time, because I got into tactical training at the time, I was also doing a bunch of, we, we got to work with a bunch of different special forces groups during like

2019 through 2022, we were traveling to a variety of pretty much every branch of like special forces. And we got to work with a lot of groups and obviously talking to them about breath work and recovery. So a lot of what we did was share insights back and forth because most of them were experienced in this stuff. So it wasn't like I was teaching them all the breath work. I was just like kind of troubleshooting situations that they were running into, but they were already doing a lot of what we teach. But through that, I was starting to develop some of my own tactical breathing strategies, which is like, how do we apply breathing into life or death scenarios? How do we apply it into competitive shooting scenarios? Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation,

I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're

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the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. How do we apply breathing into life or death scenarios? How do we apply it into competitive shooting scenarios? So I was already kind of working on that. So I developed it exactly for the tactical games too. I think that was knowing that I had the ability to manage and control my 400 meter run and then come back and do another shooting sequence. And you do that three times.

And then you went into this other fitness thing that was like carrying sandbags and throwing them and doing burpees, but you're running in full gear. You have your guns, you have all your stuff, you have a plate carrier. So you're probably wearing 30, 30, 40 pounds of gear. Everybody in my group, I would always take off last because I was in the last one. I was at the last end here. And as they would take off, everybody would take off running and they were all faster shooters than me. So they would finish the shooting first. And I would pass everybody on the run because they were all trying to go slow enough that it didn't cause an issue for them. We were also shooting in a really compromised position. So we were like sitting down where your plate carrier was pressed into your stomach. Um, but I always knew like I can slow my breathing really fast

after high intensity exercise. Cause I do it every day. So I would run really hard. I would already start a specific breathing pattern as I was approaching the end of that 400 meter run. And then I would, as I'm loading my rifle and everything, I'd be going through a specific breathing sequence so that by the time I was ready to shoot, I had already slowed my breathing drastically. Um, and it was super helpful. I mean, even if it, I don't know whether or not it improved my performance. So it's not like I won the competition. It can be like, yeah, this was the thing. If you're mouth breathing, you would at least finish in 10th. Yeah, exactly. But I feel like it was a big advantage from a confidence perspective and just having a technique perspective. People just do all of

those things unconsciously. And that'd be the same as people who approach the line and don't take their magazines out and they lose seconds in all of these things because they don't have a strategy for it. So I think it was a huge advantage. And I actually took a lot of that stuff that I learned and I developed a breathing curriculum for this tactical training center where I train that's being taught in there to their instructors. And then within their thing, because breathing is a thing in shooting, people talk about it all the time, but it's lip service, right? It's like people who talk about breathing at most yoga classes I've been to where like, follow the breath is what they say, but they never tell you what that means or how to do it or how to link, like some really good yoga instructors do, but I've been to a lot of yoga classes where I'm just like, everybody just says the word breathing and pay attention to how you're breathing and talks about breathing, but nobody actually tells you what that means. So it just gets said and forgotten. So yeah, it's been really cool to kind of implement some of that

stuff. And the principles are the same. The principles that we teach people how to calm your nervous system and your, your emotional response in an ice bath are the same as when you're, or the way we teach you to recover. When you get off of a sprint on the bike, we combine those two things together. And that's exactly how you down regulate when you're about to run up to the line and go shoot. I won't say it's how you would do it in like a life or death scenario because I'd never been in combat, but in a competitive shooting scenario, especially when you have to do intense fitness

right beforehand, it's a perfect strategy. Yo, let's go down the ice bath path just for a second. Like probably way more people listening to this show are gonna have an ice bath experience versus a competitive shooting experience in the very near future. You were talking about calming yourself as you enter the ice bath. How do you guys teach people to enter an ice bath effectively in XBT or in any other context? Yeah. One of the things that I tried to do, we used to have so many different protocols and stuff

we taught people. And what I found was there was really three principles that went across all of them, whether it was calming down in a stressful scenario, getting control in the ice bath, actually calming down from a high intensity exercise. Like the principles were exactly the same. There's a slight difference in application. But the first thing that I tell people to do is get control. And what I mean by get control is get control of your mind, get control of your body, get control of your breathing. And all three of those things overlap. So if the thing I need to get control of is my mind is going crazy because I just got into this ice bath and I'm freaking out, I need to get control of that. Usually getting control of your breathing is the way to do that.

So the way I teach people to do that is breathing faster than you feel like you need to through the mouth. So, and this is really kind of inverse from what you hear a lot of times from breathing people. Sorry, I'm going to take this on a slight tangent. I have heard so many people in my time of breath work talk about down regulation type breathing techniques as a way as a tool to use in stressful scenarios. And the one I always heard about, especially when I got into the tactical community, was box breathing. Everybody talks about four, four, four, four box breathing and like, just do that. I actually watched I don't know if you all watch the Limitless series with Chris Hemsworth. Uh, yeah, parts of it. It's pretty cool series. Like he's doing a bunch of, a bunch of crazy stuff. But one of the things he does, he meets with this psychologist woman who is trying to teach him how to control his nervous system in a stressful

environment. And he's going to have to go run into a burning building and like do a fireman rescue. And she's telling him to use this four, four, four box breathing. I don't know if you've ever tried that, but nobody, I would, I would venture to say that not one person ever in the history of humanity has done four, four, four, four box breathing in a stressful environment, even if it's just psychological stress, but with physiological stress, it's impossible. You can't hold your breath for four seconds on an exhale while you're doing a thing. It's just, it's not a realistic thing. And the problem is they're trying to apply an offline tool to a real-time environment. So box breathing is a great offline tool to use when you're not in a super heightened

moment of stress. Like you're just a little overwhelmed and you're just trying to calm down or you're doing some morning meditation or nighttime breathing. Great protocol. But that can't be applied into somebody having an anxiety attack or getting in an ice bath or any of those things because it it's a, it's not a real time tool. You can't use it when running in a burning building. Um, could you imagine running into a burning building and being like, hold my breath one, two, I'm hot. I should probably keep

moving. I can't breathe. They told me not to like, I mean, I tell anybody go for a jog and try to do it. Do four, four, four, four box breathing while you're going for a moderate pace jog. It's going to be really hard to do, probably impossible and not optimal. So what we like to tell people to do is meet the nervous system where it's at, right? If you're in this super heightened state of stress, get control by meeting the nervous system and the respiratory demand. Cause it might be in the case of exercise, it might be respiratory demand in an ice bath. It's not because you don't, you don't actually have to breathe harder. You're only breathing harder because of the psychological stress, um, but meet the nervous system where it's at and get

control. So we do that by taking big, powerful breaths in and out through the mouth. And that's just to like, stop the erratic breathing. So that immediate panic response where I have no control, I'll tell people to, we call it fire breathing, where they'll just take big breaths in and out through the mouth. And usually I'll, I'll give them a number. Um, the number is relatively arbitrary, but I give them a number. So it just is simple to understand how many they should target. So I say four, four of those breaths, then as quickly as they can, as soon as they have control, I want them to get nasal. So that's number two. So I'll have them breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. I don't care how fast it is. I'm just trying to exert some control over

the passage of the breath and get them to breathing through your nose. Again, if it's in the workout context, there's a ton of benefits of nasal breathing for, you know, physiological adaptations, but just in the terms of getting control shift over to the nose as quick as they can. So the pattern I teach them there is in the nose, out the mouth, we call it power breathing. So it's a big full inhale and still a forceful exhale. So it might sound like this. Then the third principle and the most important one, the step that you want to get to as fast as you can is slow it down. And that's when you'll actually start to see the heart rate start to drop, blood pressure start to drop, stress hormones start to

drop. And that's where you can start to implement longer, slower exhales. But what I found in practice anecdotally with thousands of people doing ice baths and training was if you don't do those first steps, you can't get to step three, because if you've already destabilized your, either your respiratory demand by, by exercise or your psychological demand in an ice bath or a high stress situation, if you're at level five and I'm asking you to breathe at level two, you can't bridge that gap. It's too big of a gap and people can't get there. But if you start with, if you're at level five and I give you this breath protocol that's at level five, so now we've met your breathing where it's at.

Now we have the control to dial it back one. Let's come down to level three and a half with the power breathing. And then as quickly as you can start to slow the breath down. And that's where we'll get into those things. And how long you take to get through those stages all depends on how high of a level of arousal you had and how much practice you have with those techniques, because the more you practice them, the quicker you can shift down. So it might be one fast, big explosive, fast breath right into the power breathing nose mouth, and then right into slow exhales. Or it might be right into stage two. Maybe you don't even need the fast breathing. For

me, when I do an ice bath, I don't need the fast breathing anymore because it's not that stressful. So I only, I'm only aroused to level three and therefore I only have to come back down from level three. But I found that that's come back down from level three. Uh, but I found that that's a really simple kind of rule book for people. And then it doesn't matter what the count of the breath is and what the cadence is. And like, there's all of those kinds of things we can play with. Once you're at that, like level one, once you have control, then we can do this with a lot of that kind of stuff. But I actually developed that when we did a thing out for a special forces group in hawaii because i was trying to teach them this kind of complex downshift recovery thing that we have that we teach as part of our trainer certification

and i just noticed that like these were not trainers these were all military commanders and and navy seals and operators. Like none of these people were trainers. So I was like, I have to simplify the message and give them the principles so that they can go apply this stuff and apply it outside of exercise context. Because I don't know what situations they'll have to apply it to. So I want to give them some principles that they can apply. Yeah.

You have a really unique position in that you have actually seen people breathing under severe stress, like thousands of them. You mentioned it earlier. You put all the people that have been through an XPT and you've done it on your own in your own training, put them into an ice bath. You just get to witness thousands of people breathing. And I feel like when breathwork became very popular and I'm not talking like long, long time ago, but in, in kind of like the, the mainstream now,

the benefits of it, everyone really just started with, you have to do Wim Hof. And then we all realized like, we're kind of just hyperventilating every single day. One, I'd love to dig into kind of a two part of like, where do you kind of see the benefits and drawbacks of doing something specific like that on a daily basis? But more importantly, the progression since then and the way that it's being taught, the different stages that people can go through, because I'm assuming your practice has progressed a ton from whatever beginning level that it was. And I think many people get into it through finding something like Wim Hof. But I'd love to just hear you kind of riff on like where that Wim Hof method as an entry point is great, which it is for many people. And then how do they progress out of that and kind of like making it more personalized to themselves? Yeah, I think I'll start with, I think the Wim Hof method has done more for breath work than it's done bad for

sure. It's a great point. I'd say 50 to 70% of the people who've come to XPT breathwork either had some experience with Wim Hof or were have heard of Wim Hof. Like it's been a catalyst for them. Um, but I, what I always tell people is like the Wim Hof method is like, uh, it's like the back squat. It's a great thing when used appropriately, but it's only one very small sliver of the entire breathwork spectrum. Uh, so you have to understand where to apply it. And the biggest problem I think is the way it's being, the reason it's so catchy, not only because of the sensations people feel and the kind of culty,

to be honest, but it's also simple. It's just like, do this. Everybody do it. There's no context. There's no, it depends. There's no nothing. We know no, it depends. There's no nothing. We know as trainers, like that doesn't work. That's not how the human body works. You need to understand context, but nobody wants to hear it depends. Well, when should I do this? It depends.

Well, what about this? It depends. Then they're like, fuck it. I'm just going to go to the guy who says, do this thing tomorrow. I do this diet. It's just, that's the diet. That's what you do. They said, don't eat carbs. So I'm not eating carbs. Nothing else. There's no other context. So that's what the Wim Hof method has done really well. But I think also then underserves people because there's a lot of contexts that it's not good for. So I think it has a lot of,

outside of being an entry point for people, I think there's a lot of good application for it as like an emotional tool because it can trigger any hyperventilation practice, can trigger some strong emotional responses. I find it personally as a really good way to downshift from heightened states of emotional stress. I'm somebody who struggles with, uh, when I get triggered in anger, it's hard for me to come down from that. And I find that an intense, and this doesn't even make like, this isn't how I apply it with most people that I work with, but it works for me, which is like, when I'm in that triggered state, I can't really just like sit down and do slow box breathing. It but it works for me, which is like when I'm in that triggered state, I can't really just like sit down and do slow box breathing. It doesn't work for me because I'm, I'm

here and I'm trying to breathe here. So if I can do something more intense that creates some pretty strong physiological sensations that allows me an opportunity to downshift, uh, kind of like foam rolling before you work out, right? Foam rolling is not doing anything physically, but it is sending a signal to your nervous system to get some things to maybe relax for a short window. You can go train and hopefully lay down some new paths or patterns. So that's one context where I see it being really applicable. I think there's more to it too, from an emotional side, but only when done by somebody who understands that lens, because I think there's way too many breath specialists out there that are taking people through these like intense holotropic breathing journeys are not qualified for the

next step of that, which is like, it's kind of like taking somebody through a psychedelic journey, but then not being able to guide them through those emotions and thoughts afterwards. Just like, hey, here's some shit, deal with it. Dude, I know what you're talking about. I walked into a random yoga class in the middle of San Diego.

They were just doing breath work. Little did I know I was gonna go tumbling through the universe over the next 30 minutes while people are crying and losing their minds in there and then the guy just stood up was like game over you can go home now i was like are we gonna integrate any of this into what's going on in the outside world what did i just go through for the last half an hour it was madness i didn't even know that was possible. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. And that's what I think is really cool about it too, but it's, it has to be done appropriately through people who really understand it. And there's very few,

I'm not one, somebody who understands it. I don't take people through intense spiritual journeys. I play with some of those protocols. Like you've been to XPT. We take people into some intense breathing things so they can experience it, but it's not 30 minutes of hyperventilation where they're, you know, some people have some emotional responses, but it's not anything that's designed to trigger that because you have to be prepared to help people at that end. And I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a counselor. I'm not a therapist. So I don't do that kind of stuff. Um, so that's where I think there's some danger. It's just people playing with things that they're not qualified to do. And, uh, you know, you're, you're messing around in people's consciousness and emotions. And, um, so that, that's some stuff I think is contraindicated and, and you can also trigger some pretty strong negative responses like hyper hyperventilation, breathing and really trigger people who are prone to anxiety, panic attacks, stuff like that.

So you've got to know those contraindications before you take anybody and throw them in. Again, it's just like exercise. If you get into some super high intense crazy thing and it's great for you, you can't just throw everybody into it because eventually you're going to run into the person who already has a heart issue and they can't do a VO2 max test because, you know. Yeah. I thought you guys, and I still think that you guys do a great job and i when the emotional response piece comes up i feel like a lot of times it's because you can sit there at the beginning of that and go we're gonna do a two minute breath hold and they're like no way and then three minutes goes by at the end of it but it took an hour to like build them up to that to do something that they didn't know was possible and they don't even know they're doing it while they're doing this big breath hold at the end. And then you go, well,

that's three minutes. Everybody can come out of it. And they've accomplished something that was never even a skill set that they thought they had before. And I think that that's really the empowering piece of going through a lot of this stuff is that it gives them the ability to know that they can do things through their breath, calm their body down, achieve things that they didn't know were possible where going off the deep end and doing that halotropic breathing stuff will uncover some really crazy stuff if you allow it. Yeah. And that's what I love about the ice baths. Like ice baths are one of my favorite things to teach to people, not because of the positive benefits of ice baths, like the physiological it's because it's such a, it's such

a scary thing for most people. It's so difficult. Even people who aren't scared will get in and like, they're not prepared for the feeling of that 36 to 39 degrees. Like, even if they've done ice baths, when they get in that, they're like, like wow this is a different thing it's painful and i don't and they freak out and it's like it's the most controlled environment to create those feelings of panic fear anxiety failure and then teach the tools that you that help them get through it So I actually spent a lot of time with, I know you guys are familiar with Lenny Wiersma. I spent a lot of time with him customizing the language that we're using when we teach these things to people to make sure that they actually align with the psychological principles because I think it's so powerful.

And that's what people leave. I love when someone gets into an ice bath and freaks out and gets out because then it's like, okay, watch how impactful this is when this person actually does it. We, we, I would, um, we were down at Sandlot Jack's festival a couple of weeks ago and we had ice baths there and we were teaching stuff. And we had these two ladies who came over and they were, one of them was just like, no way. I'm not getting an ice bath. No chance. I'm not doing it. That was the day one. I was like, come back tomorrow. I'll, I'll coach you through it. She came back the next day and I wasn't there. I was giving a presentation. Somebody else coached her through it. She got in for like 10 seconds and got out. And then she came back by our booth later that afternoon. And I was like, when are you coming back? And she's like, oh, I did it earlier. And I was like, how did it go? And she's telling me that she was, I believe she's in the Air Force.

And she was like, yeah, I get, no, I got out. I was, she was, you could tell she was really bummed out. She was beating herself up about it. And I was like, look, come back this afternoon. I will be here. I guarantee you, I will get you through it. She came back. I talked to her beforehand. I prepped her mentally. I gave her some breath tools. I was you, I will get you through it. She came back. I talked to her beforehand. I prepped her mentally. I gave her some breath tools. I was there with her. She got in. I was

there coaching her through the whole thing. She did like two minutes or whatever the goal was I had set for her. And she got out and she was like in tears. And I was like, man, that's so powerful because she's going to leave here with such a sense of accomplishment and a new tool set that she could use for the rest of her life. Like being a mom, whatever else she's going to do, she can apply that, that one tool that we just worked on for five minutes. Um, so that's why I love teaching that stuff. Cause I think it's just so powerful. It's so empowering to know that you have the ability to regulate your thoughts and your nervous system in those like states where you just, you thought you had no control. Yeah. I'd love to dig into kind of two, two aspects of the breath work that I play with all the time. And I don't fully

understand what I'm doing. I just know that I enjoy it. One piece of it being kind of like the down regulation side. And I think a lot of people understand that just if you've been to a yoga class, they're going to teach you how to slow your breath down and calm down. And I do a lot of that, like getting ready for bed, laying in bed. I've got 10 minutes. I own it before I fall asleep, slow the breath down, going to help you fall asleep. The other side of it being kind of like the performance side of getting to maximal heart rate, doing nasal breathing, being able to control your breath without forcing yourself to go into like some zone five where you're just panting and trying to like, you know, sprint as hard as you can or whatever. On the physiological side of that, what are really like the benefits to doing higher intensity conditioning work, even if it's like zone two conditioning work and only doing nasal breathing on the performance side, really? I do a lot of it.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I just like it. Yeah. I think on the performance side for nasal breathing, there's kind of two main avenues. The first is you're building a foundation like nasal breathing is your, your lower gear switch, right? So the more you can work at that lower gear, the more efficient you are. It's like doing zone two cardio. The bigger that base is, the more you can build that pyramid on top and nasal breathing. The more you have the ability to do greater amounts of work, you're going to be able to do more work at less cost. And that's kind of the general principle behind it. But I always tell people there are, there are a lot of contexts where nasal breathing

is not the best strategy. It's actually a subpar strategy. Once you get above a certain threshold, because the whole purpose of breathing faster is you're trying to create a balance of blood gases as quickly as you can to start to blunt out all of the, uh, the acid that's building up. So when you build up a lot of carbon dioxide, it's creating an acid environment in the blood. And you want to try to balance that back out by getting the oxygen in and getting the CO2 out. And that'll help balance blood pH and all of that, which is a big part of what we're doing in recovery. That's why we start breathing really fast in order to create that

balance because we now have an oxygen debt that we've created, but really more it's, it's, we have this CO2 excess that we've built up. Um, so the nose is not the best way to balance those blood gases out once you've reached a certain level of destabilization. But what I teach people is like, when you have that tool and you have that foundation, now you have the choice when you want to switch to the most efficient pattern. So I, I breathe mostly in the nose, out the mouth when I train, when I'm doing power work, when I'm doing strength work, when I'm doing most of my conditioning work, unless it's specifically I'm doing zone two, I do all nasal, or sometimes I'll do some conditioning sessions where I do all nasal. But then the other, the reason I do that is one sometimes I'll do some conditioning sessions where I do all nasal. But then the other, the reason I do that is one, give me the ability to work at a slightly higher threshold through the nose. Yeah. And then two, which is kind of like the same premise of like

increasing your lactate threshold. Like we're just keep working at a little, little bit higher threshold. And therefore I can now work a little harder at the same cost as it was to work one step, you know, less hard. Um, but the other thing is the mental aspect of it, like knowing that you have the tools and knowing that you're, you're forcing yourself to work in a sub optimal environment, basically, basically, which is kind of what we do in training, right? It's like training when it's really hot out or doing it, anything you're adding to it, it's like working out with a weight vest on, right? When I go do, if you're going to do some hard, like, um, Metcon style workout where you're going to be pushing to a really, really high intensity and you do that

nasal breathing only, you're basically doing that with a weight vest on. So you've added an extra layer of resistance to the whole thing that's going to hinder your performance, but it's just going to be an extra challenge for you to adapt to. But I always tell athletes, and I know your audience is very active, make sure you know what you're doing and what you're trying to adapt to, because it can very quickly become a limitation. You know, it's like high altitude training. The reason they got out of high altitude training was because they found that when people went to high altitude and trained, they weren't able to work as hard. So even though they were adapting to the high altitude, their actual training effect was going down because

they're not able to work as hard at high altitude. So they were losing out on what they were trying to get. So it wasn't actually beneficial to go train at high altitude. It was beneficial to go live at high altitude and then train at low altitude. So you could still get a training effect. So you just have to know what's the limiting factor and make sure that if your goal is maximizing your physiological adaptation to your Tabata bike sprints on an assault bike, nasal breathing is probably not the best strategy for that. But if your goal is pushing your nasal breathing and adapting to that, well, then whatever modality you use of exercise doesn't actually matter because the goal was nasal breathing.

But you got to keep the goal the goal. Yeah. Do you guys specifically test for and train people to improve CO2 tolerance? I know Brian does that shift adapt. I figured you guys probably do at XPT as well. Yeah, we really look at like, if we assess people, we look at three main areas, we look at CO2, like the chemical dimension, which CO2 tolerance is the main kind of indicator there. We look at the mechanical dimension, which is obviously just the mechanics of how you breathe. And then we look at the psychophysiological, which is the influence that your mind has on the way you breathe and vice versa. But the only ones we really assess,

because there's some like questionnaires you can do in that psychological domain, but I honestly don't use any of them. We teach them in the XPT course, just so our coaches are familiar with them. But I don't use them. Sorry, what was it? Oh, yeah. So I lost my train of thought there. So we assess people in those avenues. And then we figure out what's the lowest hanging fruit. And then what are the issues that they're having and which one should we start with? So what's the biggest performance limiter that we're running into? Um, and if they came in and they're just like,

I think I need to improve my breathing. And I jet, I test them across all of them. And like, they're all relatively low. I typically start with mechanics. I feel like mechanics is the biggest, is the one that creates the most movement for people. Um, and then I build CO2 tolerance stuff on top of that. Uh, I know other people do it inverse or kind of do both of them together. I used to do all of it. And what I found was you can't apply that approach to breath work because people won't sit down. And like, if I build you a breath work program, you could, you could do all of those things. If you did a breath work thing in the morning and a breathwork thing at night, and you did that five or six days a week, then we could hit both, both things at the same time. But what I found was I would write

those programs and nobody would do them. So I was like, I need to keep it so simple, like one thing per week. And the protocol is the same. And the goal is just get it in a minimum of three times this week, five, if you can, but like, as long as you do a minimum of three and you do the same exact protocol three times, then maybe we'll have a semblance of improvement. And then we can move to the next thing next week and then the next thing, and then eventually layer the other stuff on, um, but we have programs. So like, we'll figure out which one was the prime. It's the same as training, right? We'll figure out which one was the prime. It's the same as training, right? We'll figure out like, was endurance the thing you needed or strength or mobility?

And the first, we have like a six week program for each of those components. So if like psychological control was the main thing you needed for breathing, we have a six week program that you can follow where you're just focused on the mind. And that's really for people who are like super stressed or dealing with anxiety or like they need breath work to trigger or to help control their emotions and their, their stress. Um, or see, we have another thing for CO2 tolerance. If we decided that was your priority, or we have another thing for mechanics, and then we'll just layer those on top of each other. So you might do the six weeks of mechanics. Okay, we feel like you're interested in the breathwork. Well, let's layer on the six weeks of CO2 tolerance. Let's retest, see where you're at.

Maybe we come back to mechanics, or we start to do more of a hybrid program once you've got a good baseline of all of those. Yeah, so continuing on with the CO2 tolerance question, if we zoom out from a high-level perspective, if you do increase somebody's CO2 tolerance, what does that mean for their overall health or performance? It depends where they're starting at. And it depends where their goal is there. There I go with, it depends. It depends. Um, like generally speaking, somebody who has a really low CO2 tolerance, they'll have issues in fitness performance because they don't manage, they don't balance blood gas as well. So that means they don't deal with buildup of CO2 well. So when they start working out at higher intensities, it's going to be a higher cost. They also probably ability to use oxygen because that relationship balance of that relationship is necessary for using the oxygen appropriately. So fitness or performance will suffer. You'll also see people with a really, really low CO2 tolerance typically are higher in

anxiety and psychological issues. Like they'll typically be people who are more prone to panic attacks and anxiety and have those issues that they deal with, which overlays on fitness performance and health. And there's a big, there's a pretty strong association with a lot of chronic diseases and illnesses. I think there's like, there's a really good study or list from a book from Timothy with Timmons and Lay where they have like 800 plus diseases that have been associated with over-breathing. And the main effect of over-breathing is low CO2 tolerance because you create that imbalance in CO2. So chronically, I believe there's really long-term things because basically what you're doing is you're robbing your

body of oxygen. So imagine anything you starve of oxygen for a long period of time, if it's muscles, they become hypertonic, not as pliable. They don't function not as powerful. If it's organs, you can only imagine what kind of chronic issues happen with those, um, brain function, all of that kind of stuff. So elevating CO2 tolerance to what we would call like an acceptable threshold is a, is a priority for us. Uh, once you're there, then it becomes, do we need to get into like good and great categories? And that becomes more just the demand of what you do. And if you're an athlete, then yeah, we want to get that as high as we can,

but you know, we have to balance all of the other things that you're doing and figure out is that going to be the, a good use of your time. And then if you're like a general fitness person, it kind of becomes, what's the biggest limiting factor? Like, do you have really good CO2 tolerance, but your mechanics are really poor. And therefore you can't breathe in all the positions that you need to breathe in for your sport and, or your activity. Like you're riding a bike all the time and you can't breathe into your low back and your mid back. And you're just a belly breather. Then we probably should spend our time. Maybe your CO2 tolerance is really high because you're a

cyclist and you've like developed these, uh, not that not saying that being an endurance athlete necessarily dictates that you have a high CO2 tolerance, but maybe it is. But we also find that you're not a very good mechanical breather. So those are some of the benefits that you'll find, or I guess the limitations that we're trying to remove with having a low CO2 tolerance. You're back on the ice bath front. you mentioned the kind of the obvious discomfort of getting into a 30X degrees ice bath. And now people may lean toward like having a panic attack or having anxiety or just kind of, you know, they're not able to control their breathing unless they're trained to do so.

That makes sense for the ice bath. I hear much less about any breathing protocols with sauna use. Obviously, it's easy to get into a sauna, maybe harder to stay in it for a long time as you get excessively hot. But do you guys have any breathing advice for people getting into a sauna? Or is that just like, don't worry about it, but that kind of takes care of itself. Just worry about the ice bath. So we do have specific protocols, particularly for people that are trying to use the sauna as a stressor, because as you mentioned, the biggest difference in sauna versus ice bath is the kind of fast oncoming stress of an ice bath. It's immediate. The sauna stressor is much slower. So you don't really have to teach people how to like deal with that because they don't go from zero to a hundred. They go from zero to nine to 14 to 20,

but at some point people will reach a limitation. So if you're trying to use heat stress as a stressor, so we have a protocol where we try to get like an hour of combined heat stress, and you can do that in multiple bouts, but it's like a full hour of exposure to a heat stress. And that's to create adaptations to heat. And that becomes really challenging at 200 plus degrees. So what we teach people there is really the same. Those are almost more like offline tools, the same tool that I would teach you to just keep control of your breath

because you don't have to insert it when you're already stressed. The goal is maintain it as you go up. So keep that slower pace breathing. So we can use box breathing in there. Triangle breathing is another formation. Really simple cadence breathing, like slow inhale, like a one to two ratio of inhale to exhale. Just trying to focus on slowing the exhales.

The one challenge in the sauna, especially the ones we use that are 220 degrees, it's really hard to nasal breathe because it just burns your nose as you're trying to breathe. Like if you're in an infrared sauna, which I don't recommend, but if you are, you can nasal breathe there.

That's what we have. We totally agree. We used to work with the infrared sauna company. So they shipped us both infrared saunas. So that's what we have we totally we used to work with the infrared sauna company so they shipped us both infrared saunas so that's what we use they're not very hot they're not hot at all we appreciate them it sounds ridiculous but i actually put a heater inside my infrared sauna after being in the xbt saunas where it's like everyone's like it's 220 should we go higher and then i look at mine it's like 155 max like, it's 220. Should we go higher? And then I look at mine, it's like 155 max. And I'm like, what are we doing in here? This isn't even like halfway of what I'm supposed to be doing.

I mean, there's still benefits, right? It's like, if it's all you have, like if it's your way to get hot, get hot. If you can get a hot tub, get in the hot tub. Like there's always a, this is better, but I don't want people to, you know, don't let a perfect be the enemy of good enough or whatever they're saying for sure. Um, but yeah, in an infrared sauna, you can nasal breathe and I would recommend you do, and you can focus on slow nasal breathing, but like the actual cadence or ratio you use is a little bit more open. Same as the ice bath. Basically in the sauna, you're kind of staying at that, what I called level one at the beginning of this conversation,

where we went from level three to level two to level one, which was that slow balanced breathing. You're already there. So the goal is just maintaining that and not allowing yourself to get into fast paced breathing. But we get a lot of people who freak out and they're like, I noticed that I'm always mouth breathing in the sauna. And I'm like, if you're nasal breathing the rest of your life, don't worry about it. If you can't nasal breathe in the sauna, like it'd be great if you could link those together. Um, I've tried a bunch of products. Like I've tried things where I was trying to like put stuff in my nose that would cool the air. Uh, I haven't found anything that worked well for that. Uh, I haven't found anything

that worked well for that. Uh, because for me, it was a huge bummer to be like spending when I was doing tons of sauna work, I'd be doing that four to five days a week for at least 20 to 60 minutes. And I was like, man, that's a bummer to like have to mouth breathe that whole time. Or most of that time, um, your nose does adapt a little bit, though. I'm able to nasal breathe in my sauna, even when it's 220 degrees, as long as I'm breathing really slow. Your nose does adapt. I've noticed that when I get on the like the road, whatever it's called, the road bike and doing it used to just burn the entire time. Now you're good to go.

I don't know what changes in there, but it does adapt to it. You probably just singe all the nerve endings. Yeah, who needs them? They're overgrown anyways by being in there. Just get rid of them. Yeah, exactly. PJ, where can people find you?

Most of anything from me, you can find at XPT Life. So xptlife.com, xptlife on social. My personal social is Coach PJ Nessler, which these days is pretty much just me posting cool firearm stuff and workouts because all the educational content we post on XPT. But yeah, those are the best places to find me. Love it.

Doug Larson. Right on.j uh good catching up man yeah thanks for having me it's been uh good to be back i think the last time we did one of these was like 2017 or 2016 it's been many many many years uh yeah i was actually stoked to see that you were doing tactical game stuff one of my best friends here in town also competes in the tactical games so he's been giving me um know, personal tactical shooting lessons whenever we go to the range. So, um,

we're actually heading to the range here, hopefully in a, in a couple of weeks. So, uh, cool to see you're doing that, man. It looks really fun.

Let's link up and do some shooting and some fitness. Yeah. Hell yeah, man. Next time we're out in California. Uh, we're right on, man.

Uh, good to see you. My Instagram is Douglas E. Larson. Uh, one of my favorite behind the scenes,-scenes stories of the last year, we were all somewhere in the world hanging out, me, Doug, Galpin, and Dan Garner. And Dan still has in his phone Doug Larson's name.

It says, like, Doug Barbell Shrugged or something, where you tried to connect Dan to Doug like a decade ago to have him on the show. Doug just straight up stood him up. I was like, I don't know this Dan Garner guy. Little did we know a decade later, here we are doing this business thing together.

It's very, very funny. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to Rapididhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a lab lifestyle and performance analysis. Everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.