Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #33 Rob Wilson

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

Art of Breath Co-Founder Rob Wilson talks breath work, martial arts, and surfing. Rob Wilson on Instagram Check out Powerspeedendurance.com Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast              Onnit Twitter        Onnit Instagram

All right, guys, I want to tell you about PowerDot. PowerDot is the world's first smart muscle stimulator. This thing hooks up through Bluetooth right to your phone, way less cords. You can use it on airplanes and road trips. It helps with recovery and muscle stimulation for performance. There's 10 preset muscle recovery and performance programs, 25 plus preset muscle groups. There's nothing like it on the market right now, go to PowerDot.com and save 25% when you use code ONIT at checkout. Butcher Box is an absolutely essential add-on that you can take the best quality ingredients, the best quality meats, and have them delivered straight to your door to grill, to cook, to roast, to make the most out of your dinners, your lunches, your breakfasts. We use 100% grass-fed

and grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, and heritage breed pork. That's old world pork before they bred out all the fat and flavor to make it the other white meat. These are the pigs the way they were meant to be. It's incredibly convenient. It's delivered right to your door on dry ice, free shipping anywhere in the 48 states. Unbelievable taste. There's a huge difference in taste between animals raised on pasture and those fed grain in concentrated animal feedlot operations bottom line is you get the best quality food delivered straight to your door at a great price they're offering you a great discount at butcherbox.com using the code word on it you get 20 off and free bacon. And who the fuck does not love free bacon?

Check it out. And last but not least is Lisa. Lisa is the best mattress I've ever slept on. I own a Tempur-Pedic. I spent way more money than I needed to on that mattress. Still a good mattress, but I think I sleep better on the Lisa. And the truth is, it's an amazing mattress for way less money. I've got a king-size bed in my master bedroom.

My son is sleeping on a twin in his bedroom, which is arguably just as good. Absolutely amazing. You get $160 off now. That's the deepest discount they've ever done at lisa.com slash on it. Rob, Rob, Rob, Wilson, Wilson, Wilson. Rob Wilson is in the house from Art of Breath. Rob is a co-founder of Art of Breath. He's a surfer. He's into jujitsu, a lifelong martial artist. He's got a wealth of knowledge on how we can change our neurochemistry through breath,

through very simple, easy to do forms of breath work that he's basically taken from thousands of years of meditation, thousands of years of breath work and yoga practices basically taken from thousands of years of meditation, thousands of years of breath work and yoga practices from the East and distilled them down into very easy and fast ways that we can alter our neurochemistry and feel better, think more clearly, optimize our day. And I know you guys are going to dig this one. Check it out. Timer's going on a podcast, Rob Wilson in the house. What's up, brother? Thanks for having me. Fuck yeah.

It's an absolute pleasure. I got to admit, I was a little, I can't, I don't know how this works. There we go. Now I know how this works. I'm trying to come up with the analogy. So we were just talking about Paul check. I did his holistic life coach level one back in the day. And for whatever reason, I thought he'd be at the entry level course.

So when I showed up and he wasn't teaching it and it was a first timer i was like fuck man i got the rookie here you know but that's that's one of his that's his second wife angie and angie lustrick is phenomenal so like after like an hour into it i'm like oh she's fucking amazing like totally worth it you know and so when i wanted art of breath to come here i thought mckenzie was going to be here with other guys so like it's like dope man i'll get i'll get him on the show and then of course he's like no i'm not coming out but you got rob wilson and i was like all right and i think i've seen you on the uh art of breath or or power speed endurance doing some different things on that website right yeah yeah so then i was like all right having experience with with that with not getting the the the the creator it was like maybe maybe rob will be a cool guy and you've been fucking awesome man it's been great to spend the last

two days with you thank you very much i'm stoked to be out here um i've wanted to come out to on it for a long time so uh it's a it's a bucket list item for me. Just to be clear, though, I am the co-founder. Co-founder. Yeah, so you're not the underling. But I mean, Brian, of course, has been in the human performance game a long time. And that's something that we sort of have to, that you get a lot, right? Because his name is so pervasive in the human performance community because all the work that he's done

and so and mine's not it's just i just haven't done as much work yet like i don't have as high a volume of creation out there um but one thing that i really appreciate about people like brian is that he doesn't make the work about him so it's not like the Brian McKenzie show at all he's totally about the work and making sure that it's about people getting the information in the best way possible whether he's present in body at the seminar or not and so you know in order to scale anything you have to start handing off and even like yesterday I didn't teach the entire course you know, in order to scale anything, you have to start handing off. And even like yesterday, I didn't teach the entire course. You know, I have guys who are teaching with me.

And in order for anything to grow, you have to be willing to and scale. You have to be willing to say, hey, there's good people here. And not only are they capable of teaching what we created, but also like these guys have their own valuable input that can make all of us better. Because no single human being has it all figured out. But if you can create a really good team like you guys have here, right? So that's the feeling you get when you come around here. It's not like walking around today and talking to people. You're the host of the show, but the whole thing, it's not like the walking around today and talking to people it's not the you're the host

of the show but the whole thing it's not like the kyle show right it's like yeah hey this guy has his unique contribution and we've learned a lot about this and that's the sense that you get when you come here is that it's about learning and growing and then taking that information and distributing it out to people right total human optimization saying, hey, this is what we've learned. Take what you can from that. Not, hey, let's create a guru, right? Because what happens when that person goes away if they don't want to do it anymore? What happens if they die?

The market changes. So you have to, over time, have a way to scale that information and make the the actual body of knowledge alive and important on its own and not make it about a singular person or individual that's truly you know that's something again paul check talks about is like what legacy will you leave you know and as you build a system that can live on past yourself your name your your your competence and also your ability to reach the masses right like whoever the person is can only be in one place at one time right so to scale to the masses you have to teach a system that can be translated to other coaches and people and ultimately that system can live online it can

live in person it can live in many different forms and then that reaches far more people and helps far more people when you construct it that way i agree and you know sometimes i think some people can become and even myself like you can become cynic like there's a can be a tendency for some to be a little cynical like oh it's things might get diluted but i. But I prefer to think of it as distillation, right? So I enjoy the challenge of, okay, well, if I have to communicate this to a broad set of individuals, then it challenges me as an educator, teacher, provider to distill information down to its most basic and true components and to be able to communicate those across a broad set of interests, personality types. So, if you're trying to make what you're teaching

universal and scalable, then you have to boil it down to principles, which requires from an individual, like creator or a teacher, to truly understand what they're talking about from a most basic component level and everybody knows no matter what you do the key to mastery is fundamentals right so the understanding those fundamental components makes it easier to transmit across lots of different types of populations yeah you hit you hit the nail on the head with that there's something

i love distillation as a term because i was just talking to aubrey about this the best the greatest masters in anything dumb it down you know they make it so available john dudley was just here uh one of the best archers in the world joe rogan's coach uh hooked me up with a bow for my birthday and gave me like 48 hours of private lessons and i was like man you fucking make it so simple because it's like a golf swing i've never shot a bow we were talking about bow hunting and uh he tries to break it down in just five easy steps five easy simple steps that you can remember and you just go through sequentially all the way up from your feet to your draw to the finish right and so it's like

and it doesn't matter who it is like you know wim hof like somebody will talk about on this show today take all the dogma take all the bullshit take everything that's unnecessary out of that and just leave them with something that's usable totally you know there's no doubt that that's what true mastery is totally and look at so you know so Kelly Starrett is a mentor of mine. And you look at the mobility one. And sometimes, of course, once you are as successful as he is, immediately that levies tremendous criticism from people who have not done anything. There's no shortage of trolls.

There's no shortage of trolls there's no shortage of trolls right and so they're they sort of pick on the nuances of um some of his contributions but i say he took these incredibly like the complicated idea of human movement biomechanics and kinematics all this force trajectory and all this stuff and boiled it down into archetypes that are easy to understand. Hey, here's a shape. Can you make this shape? If you can't make this shape, here's how to change it so you can. And that makes it so usable for so many types of people. If you're an elite athlete, that can make sense to you. If you're a movement teacher, it doesn't matter if you're teaching uh advanced yoga you still there's still certain shapes that your body has to pass

through it won't really matter it sort of distills it down and that is a very very hard thing to do it's it's easy to make something sound complicated you know what's that einstein quote if you can't explain it to a six-year-old you don't really understand it right and i always really like that and and and to also like balance that out of course einstein also said make something as simple as possible but not any simpler so to boil it again to distill something down to its simplest components but also not ignore the fact that there are some complexities right but yeah i for me that the focus in the especially the last year has been on communication right and it's especially with the volume and speed that we can get new information, it becomes really easy to get addicted to, well, I've done so much.

I've done this research. I've read all this stuff. And then to realize when you go to actually communicate with most people, they're not interested in you proving your depth of knowledge to them. That person is living their own life and they're also being bombarded by information and they just want to leave the conversation with a usable concept that they can practically and pragmatically integrate into their life right now right and in the heart of that if you're a teacher is communication right and so being able to really hone the capacity to speak in concise and direct ways that make sense to people quickly so that they can get buy-in and then they'll actually use the thing like because you can i could talk about all day like the research data around breath

work and how important it is and how many cultures blah blah blah blah blah but if it's if it seems too complex for like a stay-at-home mom who does yoga in her living room to use doesn't even matter she's not going to do it she'll be like oh neat and then they'll never actually engage in the practice so the idea is communicate the importance and then make a usable tool so that the person will engage you know so eventually everything boils down to engage engage and that's why you know we end up the day out in the art of breath seminar with basically two and a half hours of trials because talk is talk right like okay let's put this stuff to work let's see how you guys will actually use it feel it for yourself and that is what really creates buy-in for people like oh okay well when i do the thing that i care about this makes me feel different all right i'm in now i'm in yeah now i'll use it

that's something i loved about wim hof one of his great quotes is feeling is believing right when you feel that change in neurochemistry and your body's charged up there's no fucking doubt it worked you don't have to ask somebody else like am i doing it right like am i supposed to like no this is like you feel fucking charged you're lit brain chemistry's changed focus is enhanced or you relax you know you you hit the modality for for calm and you're able to fucking bring that heart rate way down post-workout after you just crushed yourself on an airdyne or or a skierg whatever you've done there's there's different applications for that and i want to jump

into that for sure but i also want to backtrack because i know we've made our way into this podcast and i'd like to get the origin story okay all right i want to see like how do you you know you talked about being um with kelly for some time and uh training with him and working with him but really like let's talk about the whole kit and caboodle where'd you grow up athletic background all that shit yeah so i'm from virginia beach virginia which is you know like it's kind of every town USA. When you go there, like it stays the same.

The market never gets super awesome, but it never crashes either because it's the, it's the highest density of military population in the world. So it's a very transient culture. A lot of people are in and out. Um, I moved there when I was like like maybe six my parents are both retired police officers um so i grew up in a house with uh with a lot of cops around so i have a really sick sense of humor because if you want to meet people with like the most inappropriate sense of humor ever it's police officers no doubt um but my sports background is actually primarily martial arts. I started when I was about six or seven

with judo. And I did judo from that time until I was about 13. And sort of my preteen era is when I found Bruce Lee. And I'm kind of a weirdo. So I'm an incredibly obsessive person. And truth be told, I did terrible in school most of the time because um i was largely uninspired but i'm a big time like autodidact so if i want to learn about something i will ferret out every piece of available information about that thing until i feel satisfied with my knowledge level which is almost never um but i became really obsessed with not just sort of the practical applications of the martial arts but also like the philosophical origins of the martial arts so i've been tremendously influenced by uh zen buddhism and daoism especially and i've been reading that stuff

probably since i was 12 or 13 um give me some books what are you what are you like your favorite books with zen buddhism and then uh taoism um i really like uh like the old stuff like the dao de jing like i i like it because it boils it down to observing nature and then you know i mean there's some like dt suzuki books sort of and alan watts is alan watts is one of my he's incredible he's all-time but what's what's interesting is in the West we tend to intellectualize so you know you have a system of thinking that's about not thinking or not intellectualizing and then you have somebody really brilliant like Alan Watts who intellectualized Buddhism because he came from the culture of intellectualization and he wanted to make it accessible for people who are westerners right but what i like about the da de shing is it's like

slow water cuts rock and you have to think about that like what does that mean right when i when you think about something like as amazing geographically as the grand canyon that was carved out by water you know something i said to my daughter the other day because we were talking about working hard for a long time it doesn't happen in a day water slow water cuts rock right and it's just this sort of slow over time staying repetitive you know so those really old sayings i mean there's zen in the art of archery is another one that's unbelievable um which is also like a westerner's introduction into zen practice and how you know to reconcile intellectualization with the act of just doing

right in our culture we tend to intellectualize there's a guy actually at the seminar on sunday not to drift too far from the origin story but um who is asking me a question about sort of like what are the physiological mechanisms about around how um cold therapy works and all you know how does this relate to the breath work and as we're talking you know if you do this long enough and you really pay attention to people you get a sense of is their question coming from a place of experience or is it just a bubble in their head and um very nice guy did a great job at the seminar super interested in what we're doing but i just asked him how much experience do you have with that work and he said well i did a you know i've done uh and it was kind

of a stutter like that and i was like no no i've taken a cold shower before yes right it was something in the order of that and i said before you ask these questions do the thing try it go through the process engage yourself Make yourself vulnerable to the process. Some of these questions will just answer themselves. You'll figure it out. How do you think other people have the answer? The reason I personally know about cold work and sort of the nuances is because I completely made myself vulnerable to the practice for a year and did all kinds of weird stuff with it in different scenarios and messed up i've had tremendous failures with all kinds of training programs and stuff and that's that's how you learn things right you try things out and then you fail and

then for me i'll research why um because i'm a teacher but that was sort of the point is like, and that's what I like about Eastern is it's direct. Like I don't need an intermediary necessarily all the time. That I need to have a direct experience of something. And that a true teacher is just a guide towards a direct experience. Not somebody who, you know, hands you a worksheet. Yeah. Eckhart Tolle talks about that like these are all pointers towards the truth towards god great spirit whatever you want to call it right

towards self-realization exactly and it's that in and of itself is not the thing and they talk about that in in the data chain like the the world of 10 000 things we can have a description of that thing but whatever that thing is is is unknowable it's unspeakable you can't put language around it yeah it's like um so you have kids trying to explain to somebody who doesn't have children what it's like to be a father it's impossible like the joy that comes from watching a human being from like go from completely vulnerable into their own like thinking acting they're creating their own idea of the world it's an amazing process to be a part of and and the hardest most difficult thing on earth yeah you know all rolled into one yeah i mean if you want to really

learn about how to be a teacher have kids that's one of the coolest things too that i've seen is it's like this beautiful yin yang of teacher student you know like my son is my greatest teacher like he i've been learning constantly through the last three years how to teach in a more gentle way you know and like there's there's a way to orchestrate language and reaction that has made me a better person yeah and it's and it's he's a great teacher in that like he doesn't respond to spanking he doesn't respond to any you know what i'm saying so it's like oh these old things that i was accustomed to they're no longer valuable yeah or there's a different way yeah or or even if it was viable at the time do we

have a better solution right so like you know i think sometimes when we look at any old tradition we tend to think uh one trap can be like that was that was bad or we can create a negative connotation but just to say well this is the best solution that this group of individuals had available to them either through their own training experience or um through just their their life like the life and culture they were they were in right and then to go okay well just because that was the solution for for them at that time does that mean it's the best one for me in this situation now? Sometimes the answer is yes. There are some things that I, that my, some ways that like my mom, I was raised by my mom,

and there are some things that she did where I'm like, yes, I agree with that a hundred percent. And that helped shape me in an important way. And there are some things I go, that doesn't work for me. I'm going to address this with my child a little differently right and it doesn't mean her way was bad it means she used the tools she had available to shape me and i'm going to use the tools that i and that's what should happen that's what i think that's what any parent would hope for like when my daughter when and if my daughter has children i would hope she would do she would learn from some things that she didn't like or didn't work for her from how I raised her and then improve. Because that's evolution.

Every generation should exceed the previous. Exactly. And now they teach how they learn all that stuff. So it's really interesting. But anyway, I segued way off topic there, way off your question. So yeah, I grew up doing martial arts. I did judo until I was about 13. so it's really interesting but anyway i segued way off topic there way off your question so yeah i grew up doing martial arts i did judo until i was about 13 and then i got really really interested in the jeet kune do concepts bruce lee and i was super fortunate because one of

dan inosanto's students so if anybody's familiar with dan inosanto he's like he's like an og in martial arts. I mean, he's in his 70s now. I think he's in his late 70s, still studies with Jean-Jacques Machado. He, you know, he has, he's one of Bruce Lee's only students. Like when Bruce died, he's like a legit Sifu of the Jeet Kune Do concepts. He's got multiple black belts. He studied Muay Thai under Sirachai Sirasud when he first came to the states he's got

deep deep knowledge and one of his students um Frank Cucci who owns links Academy in Virginia Beach Virginia retired military guy has a school open up like right around the inception of UFC one so 94 I was 13 and they offered jeikundo concepts but it was sort of under the banner of muay thai we did uh mafalindo silat and kali um and then the junfan kung fu um and then he would mix in all kinds of other stuff and it was kind of neat because i saw like brazilian jiu-jitsu start to creep into the culture at that time. And actually, Frank, I remember him getting his blue belt from Pedro Sauer and it being like, whoa, like there weren't blue belts around back then, you know? And so just as I was in my mid teens, we started doing more grappling. But in any case, I was there from about 13 to 19.

And that was a really formative experience my dad wasn't really around and retrospectively i realized that my mom put me there with some like some badass dudes like hardcore there's like a lot of special warfare guys training they're really nice people but she wanted me to be around some like strong male figures and that really shaped me as a person toughened me up for sure um like being exposed to like legitimate legit muay thai training especially just sort of gives you a base of like you might feel like you're gonna die right now but you're not actually gonna die and it ain't point karate that's something that's one of the biggest differences when you think of all traditional martial arts and then you think of how muay thai fits in that equation it's a different

animal there's no doubt like you're tested it's not far from its roots of warfare you know some martial arts have like this their sport application has drifted quite far and you have some systems like i think roshan khan and full contact and stuff keep some of that sort of edge um but muay thai has like a when you're doing it you realize that the purpose of the blow you're inflict your your your the blow is to inflict damage on the other person there's no like i'm touching for a point it's like you drive your shin into the leg and you try to break it like and kick in the banana bag and do it like practicing cut kicks and like trying to like thinking about that like someone's leg wrapping around your shin

like the banana bag wraps around your shin and um but in it but also knowing like one of the I said this to somebody recently like one of the really cool things about martial arts and i think one of the things that humbles you is that not only do you realize like you have this power but you also realize you can get gotten yeah right like it's very humbling it's a two-way street like i get you you can get me and that can happen with anybody and you might not be able to judge that by how somebody looks and that okay now i realize that there's this two-way street in the world and i have to respect it and if not it will make me right and so um i really enjoyed that and then the instruction there was excellent so i was exposed to really incredible teachers

all through that time and i had the really great experience to learn directly from master chai um several times over the course of my teen years and like go to seminars with dan inosanto i had no idea how lucky i was i appreciate my mom so much it's like yes she would say yes to everything you know so she'd be like yeah you want to go somewhere else she would just want to put me in that environment it was really cool because even as a young teen um those martial arts weren't popular enough to have kids classes yet so i was like 13 with like guys like us like guys in their 30s who were in good shape just got out of the military tough dudes they were good to me but also not a i mean when i was 13 i was 5'9 so like also let me know so it was a really good formative experience and

then all through that time too i surfed i was really into water sports i lifted my parents were competitive athletes you know so my stepdad and my mom were both into self-defense actually my both my parents teach self-defense and defensive tactics to law enforcement for a living. So I've been in that sort of environ for a long time and around a lot of people who are not teachers like in a scholastic sense, but that's at the core of their being, like sharing information for the improvement of another individual so i've been around a lot of really really good teachers um and i had some good and bad i would seek out good teachers as i as i grew up and got older but i would also recognize poor ones you know so when i was in school if somebody who is in an academic environment wasn't truly engaged, I could recognize it. And this is only retrospectively, I realized this, but if somebody wasn't really engaged

with me and I realized they were just there to punch a clock, forget it. I'm not interested in your class. I'm not doing this work. And as a result, unfortunately do i didn't do very well uh in middle school high school i was like average ish student you know but d pluses and c minuses quite a bit in high school yeah if it's something i was interested in i could get an a you know like i took a russian language all through high school and then into college a little bit too and i did very well because the not only was it an interesting subject but the teacher was so excited to be there and to

share what she knew that it made us excited to be there and to learn it and as a result everybody in class did pretty well on average you know way better than like the average spanish student was doing because they were just taking it because whatever they needed that credit right um so having being around really good teachers has always been really important and then um i kind of bumped into kelly by accident i'm a massage therapist by trade so i went to massage therapy school actually in my college dropout so i went to college for a while and i was like i don't fit in academia the way my mind works is i like to explore what i'm interested in i think that's probably more common for young men like our minds just want to be more exploratory you know and i hope that doesn't sound misogynist i just i'm speaking from my own experience right um but uh

i just wanted to explore what I wanted to explore. And I'd always been interested in health and wellness. And I was studying international business and foreign language. And I was like, this job is going to lead to me wearing a suit, being at a desk, looking at a computer. And I am not built for that. I'm a wild thing. And I want to be out moving around and

exploring things and i'm interested in movement i had been all through high school i was lifting me and my buddies would go to the gym my buddies would call me up hey how do we want to i want to get strong what do we do so i would take guys to the gym even then so i wanted to get into the field of health and help people and um actually the the Edgar Cayce Center is, if you're familiar with Edgar Cayce and who Edgar Cayce is, so Edgar Cayce Center is about 10 minutes from my house. No shit. Yeah. It's the largest metaphysical library in the world next to the Vatican. So the Vatican's one.

The Edgar Cayce Library's two. Wow. So I started going there and reading and stuff when i was about 16 um so i knew about it knew what was there knew what that that there was that sort of metaphysical knowledge and philosophical hub near me and so i started going there i knew there was a massage therapy school and um i said screw it i'm gonna give it a whirl. So I was 19, went to massage therapy school, 19 or 20. And I loved it instantly and did like the, everybody in that field, entry level, you're working in a spa, right?

Because it's a way you can make money. And I knew right away, I was like, this isn't the work that I want to be doing in 10 years. But I like manipulation. I still do some manual therapy as part of a practice. So I coach, I do manual therapy, I teach. But that was sort of my introduction to starting to work one-on-one with people and try to explain to them, how does your body work?

Why doesn't it feel good what can you do to help yourself and that was something that sort of came out of me right away you know so it was like people would come in and i could say okay here's your one hour rub down and like thanks a lot see you later but that's just not that's not part of who i am so i started educating right away what are some stretches this person can do and i was known for homework out of the gate like i would go photocopy stretches out of books for people and go all right the ones i circled do these two or three days because i just knew if you don't give the power back to the person you're going to see the same broken person every time they come in plenty of chiropractors that want to see you three days a week for the rest of your life and they're not teaching you how to fix yourself yeah yeah and

i mean you know it's that old like give a man a fish eats for a day teach a man a fish he's for life so i would much rather you know give the give the power back to the person some people though operate from a fear base they're afraid if they give too much that they won't be able to make a living which is a on some level that's a legitimate concern right like kind of how do i yeah but but the the long game the reality there is if i give then this person, even if you just look at it from an economic level, the person now sees me as a resource and I truly help them and it made an effect. So what's the likelihood

that they're gonna tell other people, this person really helped me and it changed me. And then it takes longer. So you have to be patient for that to become viable financially. But if you're patient, it's viable for a longer period of time, right? So it starts to have longevity.

And then on top of that, it creates a reputation that you truly help people, you gain knowledge, and then what happens? If there's another rung of the ladder, you can step up on it. And that's why I'm not still doing that thing because i'm truly interested in what's the next step in helping people right yeah we just interviewed dr bo hightower and you talk about that give like he can i don't want to say he can fix people in four treatments but i mean he

on average it takes three or four treatments for him to correct something and there's a lot of homework that goes into that. And ultimately, if you're a professional fighter, you're going to get dinged up. You're going to need to come back to see him. He works out of Albuquerque, New Mexico with all of Greg Jackson, Jackson Wink. Oh, nice. But he's got people fucking flying in from all over the country. People jump in their car and go spend a week there just to work with this guy.

And that's the return on investment is that people are getting healed. They're getting fixed then they're telling everyone they fucking know like i got a guy so people travel from all around to do that you know and you look at a guy like kelly stirret how do we break this down you still have the super friends where you might need to go get an adjustment or you might need a massage or you might need some external help but what's the most amount of give we can give to you so you know how to go head to toe on your body and correct things that are out of balance yeah well that's power and one is based in a lower level of maturity that's based more in like it's centered in the ego right this is more like how you would see a kid operate right a small child like how much do i get what's my next this and that's that's okay if i'm not saying that's bad i'm just saying that's the reality right it comes from a more self-centered point of view but if you

want to mature as a person as a human being then the natural step is how does what i do help a larger scale so first it's my friends then it's my you know my family and friends my close community larger community and you if you are maturing with your thought process at least in my view then those concentric rings of who you're willing to help that should grow I'm willing to give out farther because I no longer have the fear that I won't be taken care of all right and what my experience has been and I've certainly had some some strong failures right right where my judgment was poor but my my sense is is that at least for me it's better to take the risk and give than to stay selfish because that's a very lonely

existence I would much rather give and not get anything back than not give at all yeah like i feel like that's a very poor it's a very poor existence and i think some of the disappointments that i've had around giving and then not getting back um whether personally financially or otherwise are because i didn't measure i didn't temper my expectations well and and i didn't really predict i had some prediction problems like if i worked with an athlete or or a client or something like that and i gave them something and i didn't temper my expectations well and i mean unfortunately that can only come with experience and going whoo screwed that up try again yeah you know so um but but for me there was a point where i felt myself become slightly like the tendency

to become jaded by those kinds of experiences but i just decided like i don't want to be miserable i feel better when i give i just feel better and for me that might not that's just information you know i feel it's more part of who i am naturally and i would rather honor that and like look back on retrospect on a life where i was myself then go oh i kept it all and then well i was super lonely and i accomplished nothing and leave nothing behind leave nothing behind what's my legacy yeah you know and you know i guess you can take a cynical view of like we're all gonna return to dust like yeah but not right now yeah right now and there's a lot we can do in between that time till we return

wherever we came from yeah and i mean yeah i mean even from a just like being even if you want to make it only like about the me it feels better it just feels better i feel better when i you know when i teach when i share you know like you and i had a 20 minute session before this where i was just sharing some more in-depth information about how to apply the breath practices fucking cutting edge shit that the that couldn't be taught at art of breath i broke it i broke it was the top tier i broke some stuff down right yeah and um i wasn't like in my mind i wasn't like 21 minutes what's the dollar value you know what i mean because who cares right me having an opportunity to share with you i mean that that sharpens my blade as a teacher right so just like okay well here's a person that i've never worked with before we have this block

of time so i'd rather shift my perspective to how can i make this time meaningful for kyle and then he can take a couple things away from this that he can actually use like i enjoy the chat like okay cool let's make this session a challenge i I'm a little bit late. There was traffic. Awesome. Let's see, like, am I a good enough teacher to make this important for him? That's the payback that I get for that time that I go, okay, yes. How can I make this valuable for Kyle in that, that, that, that, that minutes? And I got to break that down. So that's the reward, right? And then that kind of experience, when you are in a position where I go speak somewhere and there is a financial return, I actually have something to talk about.

I got some experience like, oh, well, actually, I have worked with people. And it turns out if you have seven minutes, you can actually make somebody really, really warm and prepped. Right? And, you know, I've worked with somebody who's, you know, I did a little session with a guy who was a UFC fighter. He was like, man, I feel super loose. Right? So now I have this metric that I can actually, like, I actually have something to talk about if I go talk. You know, so it's not just, I think people get so into the nitty gritty of like, you know, X dollar a minute. You know, they just want to see that.

What is this exchange exactly? What I'm worth, my time, all that shit. Maybe it's not so tangible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's differences among that. I've found that too.

Like there's certainly, like when I was fighting in the ufc making shit money um i trained people you know and then ultimately like you're talking about massage it's it's not what you do for them in the hour that matters it's what they do the other 23 you know and if you want to see change so most like every fuck in between every fucking set i'm talking about diet nutrition sleep all the all the other factors that probably weigh in far more than the hour they spend with me right so there is that give that doesn't have to be there you know but it's necessary if you actually give a shit totally and let's let's let's jump in let's jump into this art of breath because we're mowing through this thing okay and and really you know i i had a chance

just to back up on one of the reasons i was like so adamant about having you guys here was um i got a chance to meet brian mckenzie at xpt with gabby reese lard hamilton dr kelly sturette hooked that up huge huge fucking thank you to kelly and um it was an amazing experience and i had done the 10-week wim hof training course but to go in there and to feel all the different types of breath work. You know, like we were doing, Dr. Andy Galpin was sitting right next to me. I was telling you that we did like a five-minute

super deep meditative breath work and dude starts like full-on body shakes. Like he's going in, he's going deep. And I'm like, is he breathing different air than me? Like, what the fuck? I want that experience. Move over. I want to leave is is that is there a vortex where he's laying like what's going on but um ultimately it was my first exposure to different modalities of breath work and of course you know there's i've done breath of fire and yoga you feel it uh doing wim hof you

feel it you know and then um when i was driving up to interview greenfield i heard him podcast with the writer of uh oxygen advantage so immediately downloaded that on audible and listened to that entire book because it was a thousand miles each direction fantastic book right absolutely fantastic and you mentioned all these people that have influenced art of breath you know and who was the russian guy uh constantin bucheko bucheko yeah and so like there's all these names and you hear about all these different methods and it's funny because as with religion or a personal diet there's this dogma and identity attached to like this is the way no this is the way you know and as i've said a hundred times you know there's many paths up the mountain right and all these things have application in different areas

so what you guys have really broken down is this a systemic approach to how you breathe how you open the body first thing in the morning so you get the most out of your breathing and then how you charge the body how to reset the body after workout how to breathe in between sets like there's it's so fucking in depth on every little way you can adapt a different form of breath work and when it's used best yeah it's it's really i mean the most comprehensive breath i i really encourage people to check out power speed endurance yeah there's there's a breath section there totally yeah if you go to power speed endurance uh forwards.com forward slash art of breath it'll be it's a fucking game changer it really is and if you can make it to a seminar

you guys are traveling all over the place right yeah so next month we're in europe so we're going to be in florence italy uh april 21st and then we have two dates in london at crossfit perpetua 28th and 29th of april which i'm stoked because i've never been to london and it's like i've been wanting to go to that city forever um i mean man a lot of gluten in that city i'm gonna eat it all no it's beef wellington and fucking you want to know what a nerd i am so i got back into martial arts in the last year and i'm like one of the things i'm most excited about is going to hodger gracie's and getting a session hell yeah i already emailed them i'm like hey what is it what do i need to do they're like just come in you know my friend hey my friend just come

in that's awesome yeah i fought nottingham in 2012 and had my face crushed in and i have a gluten intolerance so i was planning on throwing caution to the wind and just eating bad and drinking warm beer and doing the whole london thing after and um because of the head pressure from a orbital blowout like they'll like you can't fly sometimes and they're like look we think you'll be okay to fly we're going to give you a anti-inflammout, you can't fly sometimes. And they're like, look, we think you'll be okay to fly. We're going to give you anti-inflammatory so you can actually fly home rather than wait a month or two for this thing to go down. But I couldn't eat fucking gluten or drink beer.

So I was like, I'm walking around three days in London after the fight in Nottingham, and I'm like, fuck. We're doing all the sightseeing. We went to Big we did the london eye we did all that shit and i was like man i mean the experience is really to enjoy the local flavor you know so i felt like i was robbed i gotta have some more gotta go back i gotta go back for sure man for sure so you guys are traveling everywhere you're you have it set up to where it's scalable now and truly i encourage people to make it to an art of breath seminar because it's you know you can learn a lot from the online program there's no doubt but being immersed in it where you are actually walked

through each step changes it especially when you have people there like um some of your guys were walking around when i was doing some of the mobility stuff and you know like just like with the tennis ball on the back as you're breathing through hugging yourself and to open up the thoracic and get those upper ribs to really move you know like hey you know they'd come by and just you know whisper in my ear go ahead roll around on that move side to side make a little adjustment yeah make a little adjustment it was like oh shit that's where there's pain and then breathe through the pain and then all of a sudden it releases you know know, like figuring out where are the tight spots that I can open up the body.

Yeah. And you start to figure out. Yeah, it's the nuance. Right? So you can go through the online. So we have some online programs that are really great. You know, that focus on the fundamental aspects like breathing mechanics, nasal breathing development. We have an energy system control program coming out soon.

But to go to a course, one, you can hear from someone directly the fluidity of the concepts, which I think is really important to connect the concepts because what we tend to do is sort of like think, okay, well, over here is my performance for sports and then over here is this uh one that does some stuff for my mobility and really to be able to connect those concepts and see how fluidly they affect one another is a powerful thing because then it it doesn't seem like i have to have five practices yeah they're not all separate yeah you realize it's one practice

and they're all coming from you. And then you can kind of pick the tools as you see fit throughout the day, which ones affect me most right now and sort of boil those down into things that I'm going to use right away. But I think one of the most important takeaways overall from the concept, from the course is the fluidity of the connection between the concepts so like we talk about state mechanics and physiology right so the ability to control your mindset by grabbing hold of your physiology right being able to actually instead of using something that seems sort of um ethereal like ethereal ideas like for example if you say to somebody like hey man focus that doesn't like does that really work right but if you give someone somebody like, hey man, focus, that doesn't, like, does that really work,

right? But if you give someone a parameter of breathing that requires focus, you know, like in a warmup and you're trying to get an athlete to focus, or you yourself are trying to get to focus, if you're just like thinking to yourself, like focus harder, I got to really get into this. It can be tough, but if you create a parameter, like I'm only going to breathe through my nose through these sort of graduated movement patterns, it requires focus by nature. So I can actually use my breath to grab a hold of my mind in a very tangible way because of how it affects my brain, right? And then the mechanics part is it's all about movement, position, posture, right? One affects the other. If I can't fully access my

breath, then I can't use my breath to control my state and it's going to affect the way that my mindset is working. The physiology, it's the same, right? If my mechanics aren't in a good position, then my physiology can't be fully expressed because I'm not taking full breaths. I'm not taking full breaths. That affects my state. If I'm in a performance scenario, we can see how that loop can start to connect, but it goes the other way too. I start to take better breaths. I'm controlling the rhythm of my breathing in reference to what I'm doing.

That's going to affect my mind as a direct relationship with my brain. We start to see this fluidity between the different concepts, whereas I think a lot of times people think they're sort of disparate ideas. Like I do one thing for relaxing and controlling my mindfulness. And then there's this other thing that only applies to my performance.

But they're all you. They're all part of the human experience. And what we try to do is, like some of the big names that you mentioned before, Bucciego, Wim Hof, Patrick McKeown, who's the author of Oxygen Advantage. We tried to take the codifier, distill, right? The concepts from their work and make it accessible

into these sort of simple categories. You know, so if you read the Ox read the oxygen advantage it's pretty dense with physiology and me personally i'm a nerd so i really geek the fuck out yeah i love it i really appreciate the explanation of the aerobic system and how it truly works and and how to actually access it but most people don't give a shit they just want to do the thing better and so you can go okay well here's the basic idea if you're not within these sort of guidelines you're not actually accessing the aerobic system right and they go oh man okay well guess what if you're not actually if you're at an aerobic deficit what's going to happen sooner

when you do that how does that make you think? When somebody's standing around going, does it seem like they're ready to perform well again? Of course not. That's an intuitive concept. So then people go, oh man, if I'm not controlling my breathing, that's going to create a different conversation in my own mind when I'm in the midst of performance. So when a situation gets tough,

like for example, you know, we're talking about jujitsu when you're in a tough spot. Well, not only is that keeping me from being energetically efficient, that's a signal to my brain panic. That's a signal like somebody who's breathing like that they're calm right and not only is it affecting you but your partner or your competition they can hear that like they someone sees you over on the side shaking it out and breathing slow that doesn't look like somebody who's scared yeah that dude's game that dude's game so okay well now i can make myself game right i have control over that mechanism so um, that's the idea with the art of breath

is sort of to take like this concept over here and this one over here and this one over here and boil it down into the very simplest. And really what you experienced yesterday represents like the 101. Like this is brass tacks. If you only want to learn the very basics, this is it. But there's so many different places that you can take it and

some of the more advanced work that we did today um is sort of a window into some of that work like being able to control what energy system you're in yeah shifting gears shifting that'll be made available to the public at some point right very soon the next couple weeks it'll be it'll be out oh this will this will probably come out i'm guessing in late april or early may okay awesome at that so you know with that i think i think we'll we'll have the stuff we're talking about available yes yeah yeah definitely definitely by then for sure it's kind of funny because so this isn't really a concept this energy system control these gears isn't it's it's a new thing and i have like i kind of feel bad for like the

couple few guys that i've been working with because it would be like yeah it'll be ready by tuesday and then tuesday would come and be like hey is it done i'm like nope and i mean i've shot something in the order of like 40 or 50 videos for this and then we're doing gonna do an accompanying webinar as well and so that's a lot of work and it's all original content to us. So we're not like, oh, and for this part, go look at so-and-so. This is original to our team. So that creates a lot of work and there's a lot of problems that you have to think through. And then some come up that you could not anticipate. I'm sure you guys are innovators in the market. That happens when you're trying to innovate something. You run into a problem that has never been seen before and you

go oh man that doesn't that doesn't work at all i guess we have to push the date for this because this has to if we want to stay to the quality that we're comfortable with and that people are accustomed to they're gonna have to wait right and so but i feel like my team is like hey man uh you said tuesday i was like i'm so sorry and like everybody's super cool that they're like cool they're super supportive and helpful and i'm kind of new to creating video content so everything takes like 90 takes this is a little slow for me yeah well good stuff takes time, you know? It does. It's definitely worth, definitely worth the wait. Just a little teaser that I got today is something that I'll implement on a daily. And it's funny because,

you know, you brought up this concept of stress management, you know, you're in an argument with your wife or your boss and there's different breath work that we can do to shift our, you know, all breath work shifts neurochemistry and we can upregulate, downregulate, but there's different breath work that we can do to shift our you know all breath work shifts neurochemistry and we can up regulate down regulate but there's a dramatic impact on the body you know and so what are the modes you know what are the different areas and avenues that we can take our breath work to shift ourselves in the direction we want to go and it's funny because we did we did this gear shift this morning and no argument with my wife this morning but we've got a three-year-old who's been a handful since she's been out of town he likes to let us know that's unacceptable

behavior to leave for a few days even if it's for work and uh so you know dealing with a sick and tired and angry uh three-year-old all morning i had one cup of coffee and i normally drink two i had one cup and i felt jacked to the gills and i was like my second cup dumped over on the floor while i was trying to put the lid on and i was like is that an accident or is that on purpose i'm not having a fucking second cup yeah you know i was like i'm fucking good and then we came in and obviously there's a shift when i leave that situation of being a dad where it's you know full court press to hey i'm in work this is us this is a safe place i get to meditate here i get to work out i get to have awesome podcasts i get to research cool new supplements and shit like that so there was a frame change in my mental state but getting with you and going through that like there was a fucking

palpable difference in how i felt and it was cool because i my mind shifted to a place of wakefulness and my heart rate dropped there was no panic so it was like this two-for-one of i've elevated my brain cognitively and i've allowed my body internally to rest there is no fight or flight anymore right it was dope that's what we call fucking incredible so that's common alert right that's an ideal state of mind to be in calm but alert it's like uh um have you ever heard like have you ever watched dog whisperer national geographic caesar milan stuff right so when he what does he talk about the pack leader right common assertive right but calm calm is always part of it so like my level of reactivity to environmental stimuli

is decreased if i'm alert then i'm still aware of what's happening in my environment you don't want to be drowsy you want to be calm and drowsy right so these are actually some of the measurable states that we've been working with on identifying uh through the work at huberman lab and stanford and so there's like common alert is like the ideal state when you're get closer and closer higher and higher levels of peak arousal that's like panic and on the far end is like coma and death on the other side when you're too low right so in between there's like calm but drowsy like oh man i'm so tired i want to do anything well we don't want to be panicked and you don't want to be drowsy especially in your workplace right and you don't want to be if something doesn't go exactly as planned you don't want to become agitated not only because of the social ramifications that could potentially come from

that, but also it doesn't help create strong solutions to problems that will inevitably arise, but calm and alert helps me foresee and deal with environmental stimuli, but with my best cognitive abilities available. And the reality is that our chemistry and especially our breath, they're managing the physiological components of that all the time, just below our conscious level of awareness. And the idea, one of the analogies that I use a lot is going from automatic transmission to manual transmission,

and basically deciding like wait a second i can i can grab a hold of these gears and and make some decisions and change my behavior right now in a way that's like you said really palpable and the time we spent together i mean that was that wasn't even 10 minutes of actual doing things right because there was some instruction and stuff in there so it was less than 10 minutes of actual doing things, right? Because there was some instruction and stuff in there. So it was less than 10 minutes of your life. You moved around and breathed in a certain way. And then we came in here to do the podcast. So that's the idea.

It doesn't take a lot of time. The more precise you are. But that's why it's important to have labels and language. Because it makes it easier for me to communicate with you. If I didn't have a lexicon around that, it'd be hard for us to communicate about it. And I think that's one of the other things with the art of breath that we really tried to do is create a language around a lot of these sort of ethereal concepts and make it easy to talk about so if i instead of me just saying okay nasal only you know that can be kind of hard to wrap your head around but i say okay well this is what first gear means well then now from from now on now you know what first gear is you had some

intuitive sense of it before but now your mind has a label to give that that sort of spectrum of feeling and so when you're doing things you can go oh man i don't want to be in fourth gear right now because what i'm doing doesn't match fourth gear man i'm trying to chase my kid actually i don't want to be in fourth gear i want to stay calm and you can downshift yourself right and you now okay well but i have some sense of what that what that is and once you give your brain a label it's easier for it to start making connections and linking it up so hey you create a roadmap that's easier to navigate exactly you only need gps for so long and then you memorize the route back yeah it's much easier to get there exactly exactly well and now you can take a different part of the sort of a different slice of that pie of

consciousness and devote it to the the task right so um just like if you're driving when you're going somewhere new you're really focused on the getting to the place but you know you live here and you drive back and forth to on it all the time like you said you're listening to books and now you're you're optimizing your time usage because you don't have to focus so much on the particulars so once you understand something like the gear structure of breathing okay well now once the gears are a part of the way that i operate now and i can shift my attention onto a different you know different developing a different skill mechanism but i think because breath is such a fundamental component of the way that we operate in so many ways it it's amazing to me that no one has systematized the instruction of it in this way

prior to now i mean there's there's some truly it's been used for thousands of years in many many cultures yeah you know and there's some system systemization around like yoga they have practices but not in terms of like mechanic like this is step one and this step one applies in these different environments especially in performance environments i think there's a lack of teaching an athlete specifically or somebody who's interested in human performance how to optimize that output with different breath patterns um and yoga has definitely Yoga is definitely probably has the deepest tradition around teaching breath work. It's hard to say what though in the United States

because it's been diluted quite a bit. Yeah, and most of that is focused on meditative practices or in opening up the body in yoga and those are all fucking super important. They're great, I love it. That isn't necessarily translating over to what you do in a fight or what you do as you warm up for jiu-jitsu or what you do in between sets crushing it on a skier or on an airdyne yeah you know how can i recover the fastest right system systematically going through different breathwork protocols

to down regulate my heart rate, bring me back to a place where I can stay consistent on that. So each round, my numbers don't see this giant drop off. Yeah. And you know, here's the thing. It's like, so I have a pretty strong yoga. You know, I took did yoga all through college. And then I basically took six years off of strength training. Just to get a piece of ass. Okay. So you say that so embarrassingly at the conference or at the at the seminar but you know i had some ulterior motives like every dude in that class who took yoga in college was taking that yeah i was like of course just just to look at the hot chicks yeah myself included like you're gonna should just ask

people to raise their hands and if there was an honest group there they all would have gone out raise their hand well yeah so that's the deal right i was 19 i was i was like hey i need a p credit at the university and there was pretty girls in yoga yeah i was walking by the gym and i was like okay yoga got it you know and then i went and i had an amazing instructor and her first name is penny and i feel terrible because I can't remember her last name anymore. But she's an old school Iyengar instructor. And I just ended up getting really steeped in the practice over the course of the next few years. And I had some instructors who had studied in India.

And I learned a lot about position, movement, and breath through that exploration. But then I would always wonder like, okay, well, there's some system here, but what about when I'm not relaxed? You know, so I would try things when I was, I had some things I would try when I was surfing or kayaking or whatever. And this was all sort of subconscious process, but you know, now it comes out to like, okay, well, what happens in real time? There's a threatening, threatening stimulation, or, or what if it's just an environment that requires a higher level of arousal than a relaxing yoga practice i have to be able to cross that bridge and i don't want to have two different systems i want to have one that includes

both and that's the idea is okay well now then that requires a better distillation of the concepts so that now somebody who's doing art of breath they can go oh this is like this these gear these are they start to see okay well i can use this if i am in my yoga practice or i can use it in a performance environment, it crosses the bridge because the concepts have become boiled down for them. Hell yeah, brother. Well, shit, man. We did it. Did we cook?

We did it. Yeah, I could run off at the mouth for a while. But where can people find you and mention websites and all that good stuff over again? We'll link to this in the show notes. But where are you at on social media? For sure. So the website, the easiest website is powerspeedendurance.com forward slash Art of Breath.

That has all the information about upcoming seminars, programs that we have, all that jazz. You can find me on instagram at prepare to perform um and then also at power speed endurance and of course brian mckenzie is at i am unscared and he's putting out awesome content all the time as well great stuff so yeah those are the easiest channels to find us awesome brother thank you so much appreciate you guys thank you brother we'll have you back awesome thank you thank you guys for listening to the On It podcast with Rob Wilson. Check out powerspeedendurance.com slash art of breath for more information on how you can learn these wonderful techniques on breath work.

Also, follow my man online. We'll link to his social media in the show notes to make it easy for you. One click, one like. Let him know that you loved him on the podcast. And thank you guys very much for listening.