Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #432 The Path to Healing & Performance Through Breathwork w/ Nick Sweeney

Episode Date: November 16, 2025

In this episode, Kyle has on Nick Sweeney, a breathwork expert with a background in athletics. Nick shares his journey from being a ski racer to overcoming a severe injury through breathwork after a mountain biking accident left him unable to walk for months. The discussion covers various aspects of breathwork, including its role in regulating the nervous system, enhancing athletic performance, and promoting healing. Nick and the host explore different breathing techniques like the Wim Hof Method, physiological sighs, and Buteyko breathing. The importance of balancing upregulating and downregulating techniques is emphasized. The conversation also touches on spirituality, faith, and the role of breathwork in connecting with the Creator and achieving a state of coherence. Nick outlines his mission to get as many people as possible to synchronize their breathing for a collective impact on the world's nervous system. He offers resources and tools for individuals to integrate breathwork into their daily routines for improved mental, physical, and spiritual well-being.   Connect with Nick here: Instagram Coherence Breath   From Kyle: The Community is coming! Click here to learn more   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. These are the b3 bands. They are amazing, I highly recommend incorporating them into your movement practice. To SUPERCHARGE YOUR STEM CELLS, go to qualialife.com/kyle15 for up to 50% off, and use code KYLE15 for an additional 15%. Go to tonum.com/KKP, use the code KKP, and get 10% off your first order of Nouro.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyle-Kingsbury Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome to today's podcast. We have Nick Sweeney in the house. Nick came in from Colorado all the way to be here with me in Texas. I love it when I get face-to-face interviews. And Nick's somebody having to follow him for a while online. I really appreciate his content. He's got some really cool outlooks. He is just a unique dude. And he comes from, you know, a space that's kind of oversaturated here in Austin. It's not saturated where he lives. But he comes at it from an athlete's background. And, you know, just a beautiful mind. We do dive into spirituality. because it's kind of where my head's at these days with all the messed up stuff in the world. But there's a lot of practical tips that we get into in this podcast that I think people really appreciate. Nick does some really cool stuff out there so if you're interested in more,

definitely hit him up. We'll have him linked in the show notes here and support this podcast by sharing it with friends. Simple enough and support our sponsors that make this show possible. All right, without further ado, my brother, Nick Sweeney. Nick Sweeney, welcome to the podcast, brother. Thanks for having me.

This is awesome. It's funny. You reached out online. and I never checked DMs, and I had been following you already, and I was like, hell yeah, perfect timing. You know, I wanted to talk breathwork and a bunch of cool stuff, and you've got such a rad story. I always like when anytime somebody dives well into a space and becomes an expert at something,

if they have like a real shit transition, you know, like something that's like a true dark night of the soul, not just mentally and spiritually, but physically get their ass kicked and then crawl out of that space. So I've got mad appreciation for your background. Tell us who you are. Tell us about life growing up and then tell us about, you know, this life-altering point where you started to change things. Yeah. So I'm Nick Sweeney and I grew up in Colorado and I was a ski racer athlete, had a beautiful family.

And I was training really hard and learning how to cross-country ski at a high level. And there's a lot of breathing involved in that. And I ended up going to one of the best college teams in the country, university. of Denver and was able to ski race there for the first two years but then the third year after life of just training and moving my body and enjoying nature at like the highest level I had all of that taken away from me when I got in an accident right after COVID hit so quarantined at home during COVID was making mountain bike trails in my yard and I ate it biking in my yard and I ended up twisting my foot, torquing my foot in a very non-natural way and splitting my shin open.

And at first, I didn't think that it was a big deal, but it ended up being me out of commission for 10 months, unable to walk, essentially. And I didn't know what to do. 10 months went by. It was actually, yeah, 2020 of October when I went to a doctor. And he was like, I don't think that you're going to be able to walk again normally. your career is over and just, you know, we're going to give you some pain medication. And I, that was the beginning of the dark night of the soul to the deepest level, I would say.

And so I went home. I began to just reconcile what was going on. My career was over. Everything I kind of lived for was trying to go to the Olympics to ski race. and now I was faced with confronted with this different reality and I was still moving my body and I at one point just went in the gym and did one of those rage sessions where you're not thinking and you're not moving your body and you're just like disassociated but you're so much emotion and I was doing pull-ups not on or some death metal yeah there's noise going on for sure

and I was doing weighted pull-ups and I pulled my rib out doing it. And I was essentially then unable to do anything. I was kind of paralyzed within my body. And I didn't know what to do, super depressed. And my brother had recently gotten into Transcendental Meditation. So I was doing TM with him, but it just wasn't hitting. I was like, my mind was so depressed and anxious and all over the place. Question on that, because I've tried many different forms of meditation and I kind of geeked out. I don't want to derail your story. I was the guy that tried all the different gadgets to gizmos it on it. You know, like, does this work?

That kind of shit. And most of it was crap. Years later, link up with Emily Fletcher. She teaches something similar, a Vedic style meditation that's mantra based, akin to TM, but not TM. Right? And that was like, the mantra just got me there. That was my first vehicle to, holy shit, this is what they're talking about. And then I furthered that with the work with Michael Holt, who's from the company Savage and Saint,

who's just a brilliant, brilliant meditation teacher. he's trained under Shinzen-Young and Dan Brown, who's just an awesome, awesome guy who was like perfect medicine for me. But I wonder like when you do TM, it's kind of by the book, right? Like you got to have so many sessions, then you get your mantra.

Did your brother just give you a mantra? Did the mantra not vibe with you? Like it was just something that because of the pain you were in and the mental state and you look pretty young too. So age, I couldn't meditate in my 20s to save my life. How old are you now? I'm 28 now. Okay.

So you were like early 20s. Yep, when this was going down. Yep, 25. And my brother and I were like, we're not paying for that transcendental meditation course. We're just going to come up with our own mantras and rip it. And we were doing 20 minutes twice a day. I was definitely getting to those places of kind of oneness and samadhi. And I was like, wow, this is cool.

But for the circumstances I was in, it was like, great, I have 20 minutes of like, okay, kind of eased off the pressure, but then I'm right back in it. I'm right back in that kind of darkness and crazy news. noise in my brain. And so I began to, I had James Nestor's book, Breath, just sort of come into my life. I don't even remember how it got to me. But I read that. And so I started doing breath work before the TM and I would go so much deeper. I'd drop into just pure kind of not in my body, not my name, not my story, none of it. And it was really powerful. Yeah. And that was a big light bulb moment and that really is what brought me to Wim Hof again. So I started doing Wim Hof.

I had been doing Wim Hof for a performance enhancing thing for racing and training but never for recovering or rehabilitation and whatnot. And so what I would do is just every morning on my back in bed I would do like 30 minutes of Wim Hof and I was then applying some practices from the book Breath and I was able to within three months begin walking. normally without pain and so the psychosomatic pain loop that I was stuck in started to dissolve and then within six months I was able to walk again then the next year I was able to train fully and go to Olympic trials and most importantly do what I loved to do again and be in the woods and be in nature and just be able to move my freaking body and since then I've just had so much

awareness around what's possible and so many questions too breathworks like freaking wild west and so i have that's pretty much you know the synopsis of where i'm coming from is this crazy healing journey of thinking i wouldn't be able to walk again normally to at the highest level competing and then all the other things that breath can do beyond that i've been able to experiment with i began coaching a lot of pro athletes a year and a half ago and really have seen it affect their mental health physical health performance in the game outside of of the game, their general long-term, like, ability to outpace their competitors by recovering better and that kind of thing. So I'm just, like, I'm obsessed. I'm like breathwork cowboy.

I, I, I fricking, uh, I passed out driving doing breathwork when I was doing that shit. I think, I should be dead. I think that's what happened with Aubrey and is Tesla. And, uh, you know, he's thankful to be alive. Do you have the auto driving on? No, he was taking a turn. And, uh, I think it might have been, you know, one of the, um, we were experimenting with different things. we're going to go into alpha brain black label it's not in there now because of this uh scenario but you know he had done a little bit of breath work you know in the car that kind of thing he had a big podcast he wanted to clear his mind for and um you know no super long holds or anything but i think it had to do with this this uh new tropic that can shut you off basically so

but still i mean he freaking went you know full speed on a turn into the pylon and the or the guardrail went up and hit him in the face well instead of peeling back like it's supposed to peel back like a sardine can right and this thing jumped on the top of his car went straight through the windshield into his face and it was like just because it glanced glancingly you know came shaved off his cheek and busted his nose wow wild right yeah the breathwork in the car thing is something that i'm like i don't know man maybe for a season season vet um there's so many aviars i want to dive into here because this is this is awesome i think first and foremost to frame it for the crowd listening

I've seen breath work work in so many ways, almost as people talk about biohacking, right, but a mind hack because it gives us something to focus on. Any great meditation teacher is going to, like, it's not to just fucking unwind and stop. It's the focus, right, to gather your concentration onto something, which then quiets the mind. That's one of the major techniques that's used.

Not always. But breath can be that focus, right? And it could be something that we use to harness our focusing powers and attention towards that alleviates us of the fucking monkey mind that keeps going, right? And that's especially important for people who have competitions, you know, something big where their, you know, negative mind can come in quite easily. Uh, I used to have to deal with, I, I learned breath work just for the weigh-ins because weigh-ins would freak me out worse than the fight would. I'm, I'm

there. I'm depleted. I'm looking at the guy and I'm sizing it. Like, oh, man, he's got bigger arms than me or oh, man, you know, whatever the thing is, you know? Like, um, and, and so that I would be doing breathwork while standing in line because you'd have to somehow, you'd make weight instead of standing this long-ass, long, line to weigh in, you know, before the cameras are going and everything's right. And I was like, I was a mental headcase on those days. I, you know, the fight was like, I got, I'm warming up, I'm punching something, I'm walking out, I'm feeling the crowd. And then the door shuts and all right, whatever nerves I have, I've got seconds before it starts anyway. So, but yeah, I remember

Wimhoff working with Alistair Overreem when Overim, you know, and was eating the horse meat and getting jacked and tanned. But something I noticed about him was how calm he was. And It wasn't just his calmness. His mastery of breath allowed him to have endurance with all that extra muscle. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about Qualia stem cell. Here's a question. What if your body already had everything it needed to repair, recover, and renew itself? It's just waiting for a little nudge.

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slash Kyle-15 for an extra 15% off, awaken your body's repair crew and supercharge your stem cells. I've been 260 pounds when I played football at ASU, but I had no endurance whatsoever. And this dude, juiced or not, gained 50 pounds of muscle and still had endurance, and I think it was because of the mastery of breath

and his work with Wimhoff. right that says a lot right it really does because you know you're a fit dude you're tall but add 50 pounds i mean your heart's got to pump through all that extra stuff and so i just see so many benefits here for the masses don't have to be a pro athlete but the mastery of breath helps us harness and put the mind in the passenger seat right it also can prepare us and lift us or we can downshift and get us into a state where we can relax fully into meditation yeah yeah i mean there's millions and millions of ways to apply it it truly and for the average person that's just wanting to maybe have less anxiety I think that it's

something that is so vital to at least have a little bit of awareness around because the number of breaths you have per minute dictate the number of beats your heart beats and it also your breathing rate is going to correlate to how quick your brain waves are so the slower you breathing the slower your brain waves etc that's why we can like drop in and fall into sleep um i listen to some of your podcasts with dan party about that kind of stuff super interesting how at some point in sleep your brain waves are way more active than any time you're awake but i also see how people with sleep apnea or really high breaths per minute you are kind of working against biology because the amount of thoughts you have is, that's the number one lever is your breath.

And so training, like, I can't remember his name, Uber. Alistair Overere. Elister Oberim is his name of the gills. Alistair Oberim. Yeah. I mean, I've worked with athletes where they don't change their training, they don't change their diet, they don't change anything except they start doing breathwork and breath holds every day.

And that increases your heart health. it decreases the amount of beats you need to beat per minute, which increases your endurance. You have more heart health, and then you also, depending on the breath work you're doing, you're loading up on a ton of resources that can contribute to more muscle mass, if that's what your goal is for a fight or something like that. And so, yeah, I mean, increased recovery at the very least, right? Totally, totally. At the highest level, like, these guys don't need to work harder.

They just need to recover better. And it's whoever's can recover, like, 1% better. and everyone else every single day and compound that, then it's like, that's how you win. So, yeah, it's fascinating. I dig that. I want to stay on breath, but that it'll be the meat and potatoes of our conversation.

And I want to shift for a second to your healing. Did you have any, you know, on one of your posts, you were talking about, you know, the things that are necessary for healing. It was a great post. You listed a bunch of cool stuff. You talked about fasting for 24 hours once a week. You know, cold minimum of 30 seconds daily, right? Like, all these things that are just very good.

And most of us in this space, if you're listening to a podcast like this, probably no, but maybe don't do all of them, you know, when you're thinking about that. So, like, it's a really good post to have it, like, just list it out for you. Damn, where was I going with this? Healing. So, and you mentioned, like, love of your creator, right? Like, I don't know, I don't know anybody that's healed themselves miraculously. That was atheist.

I don't. I really don't. I'm sure they exist. you know there's always an exception to the rule but most people when I hear of stories of miraculous comebacks and and healing do believe in a higher power or call it something like dispenza for sure does but dispens a way call that the the quantum right that way it's a little bit more applicable to science scientific folk and and whatnot but I'm wondering if you had you know did you grow up religious did you have have you gotten in a Neil Goddard or Joe Dispenza's work or any of those

things because like it it framed similarly with dispenza you know with the broken spine all he could do is meditate you know that's really it i don't think he had the physical stature as you do to like to breathe into that space and actually open up through breathwork but these are all forms of yoga right so i think that's a yeah it's a worthwhile conversation what was your you know where are your thoughts on those for sure i mean i grew up with mother nature is kind of my god i we didn't go to church I was never, you know, my parents never impressed anything really upon me, and I was left to my own devices to kind of figure it out what my true beliefs were. And when you have a injury or a disease or some sort of diagnosis, it can be really jarring because your impulse is to heal

yourself, kind of on your own. And I had to go through this totally humbling experience of like, I can't do this on my own and I need to not continue to like hold myself so accountable and try to be three steps ahead of the universe and like tricking whatever this process is meant to be and that's why I tell people when when they have something happened to them I'm like this is potentially the greatest thing to ever happen to you and it's happening for a reason and when you can move through whatever your process with acceptance and faith, I truly believe that's how miracles happen and how you expedite the healing process. And when you increase your level of faith in your creator, whoever that may be, you are subsequently increasing your faith in your body and your body's inherent abundance and healing capabilities. And you are no longer, you know, you are circumventing the issue that all of us have that we're born in a hospital where our nervous system thinks that the doctor is God.

We were born in a hospital and the first set of eyes you look into is like a doctor in a white lab coat. And deep in your nervous system you have a feeling like maybe I'm going to die in a hospital too. And so you give your power away to this lab coat on a nervous system level. You're not even necessarily conscious of it.

And that's why we go in and we are so suggestible when we go to the doctor's office, most of us. We allow the doctor to label us and to confine us and to put a, yeah, put a label on us and we are at their mercy, basically. And I think it's vital if you want to reclaim your power, reclaim your ability to heal and have faith and surrender, to surrender to God and have faith in God and faith in your creator, whoever that may be.

I know that that was massive, massive part for it. and marrying this belief to that unconditional love is the most powerful force in the universe and that's synonymous with your creator because love is that expanding energy it's that energy that can just light up your body like a lightning bolt in a eureka moment when you're doing breathwork or meditating or just anything like that and it's so so healing so I think it's so crucial I mean it's really what you should start with if you're on a healing journey is evaluate what's my value hierarchy what are my beliefs am i trying to do this on my own in an arrogant way or should i actually take a step back meet my body where it's at surrender to what's

going on and begin to basically how can i increase my level of faith because when your level of faith is higher you are granted authority in god's kingdom you're granted more power as a co-creator in god's kingdom power of authority is dictated by your faith that's why you know churches and also cult leaders like they're getting power by getting people to have faith in them and it's very important especially in 2025 with all the craziness going on you got to be very explicit and clear about what you believe and who you believe and who you place your faith in so yeah it's so crucial yeah like that i think too like a check always talks about the pain teacher you know the pain teacher whispers at first then gently knocks at the door and sometimes it you know

shoves a piece of metal through your face whatever yeah that the pain teacher when we're when we're fully disabled like that's the ultimate time to say to listen like what's going on what what what is what how am i living right now that's not in accordance with what i set out to do you know do i even know what i set out to do um what is my mission in life one of my mission vision and values what am I creating, you know, and I think there's an ample opportunity there when that reset button gets pushed thoroughly enough that you can't do anything. You know, I'm reading, I'm actually diving deep back deep into the law of one. I'm in book four rereading them all, and I really appreciate the verbiage in there in terms of like how, how we live. At a great

podcast with Edmund Knight and said, just lit a fire into my ass. And then I've really been drawn to the teachings of Christ, but I wanted to learn from, not inside Christianity. I wanted to learned from a spiritual master where I appreciate, and it just popped into my thing. I was thinking about Yogananda, and he wrote the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of Christ within you. And I was like, oh, shit. Show my friends. They're like, blast with me.

I was like, this is the fucking best. He's a two-volume, and it's probably the best interpretation of the Bible I've ever read in my life. But it's, again, it's not pointing to, you know, the worship of Jesus is pointing to us allowing Christ's consciousness within, whatever you want to call that, Buddhist consciousness, the Tao. the, the point of, the central point of the divine, which could have an infinite number of names, but that, allowing that space to dwell within us, understanding there is no separation, right? And so, like, I think there are things like that.

And for me, the no separation piece came from plant medicines. I could read about that all day long and never understood it. And obviously, you know, you're here in Austin. Plant medicine's a plenty. Yep. Life coaches are plenty, you know, but I think the cream rises to the top. And there are a point to those things where they become. no longer useful. And I think we see a lot of that these days, but there is a point in that

it can expand one's consciousness to remember that the nature of reality is non-dual, right? And when we have that understanding, then it's the practice. That brings us back to that, not going back to the wishing well and driving, you know, flying back to the Amazon, you know, every quarter or, you know, grabbing an ounce of mushrooms and figuring out what your ceremonies are going to look like for the year. It's like, no, like, what does my daily practice look like? You can't do drugs every day. You can't, right? You just can't. They don't work. you can do breathwork and meditation every day. You know, and all the great teachers, especially from the East,

that meditation is the key code. You know, but for many of us that can't get out of our own heads, breathwork is part and parcel the way that we get out of our heads and can drop into meditation, correct? Yeah, I mean, it's a gateway drug, for lack of a better word, into those states and those states of remembering and knowing. And I think that if anyone's on a healing journey, like there's going to have to be a reconstruction of maybe what you think you're able to do,

what you think is possible. And for me, breathwork was that vehicle and that teacher that taught me what was possible and inspired me so much. And I've read Yogananda and, you know, he's got amazing words on breath, Crea yoga and that kind of thing. And it's just, it's so omnipresent wherever you go, whatever, scripture you want to read there are mentions of how important it is and it's all it's our birthright it's something that you can always call upon and you can go to those states of bliss

and ecstasy and knowing from breath you can also just enter that state of presence and deep groundedness in the moment with breath too and so it's it's something that that's really what I end up trying to get people to whether it's an athlete or an entrepreneur or someone that's trying to heal a disease or an injury, it's getting to that state where you really connect with your creator and you connect with the oneness and the realization that we are not separate because that's when the healing really can come in and occur and miracles can happen. And I've seen it happen. I have experienced it myself. And once that happens, it lives in my nervous system now. It's something that is felt and known, and it can be this thing where you don't have to go to Flado Amazon or you don't need to take any drugs.

I'm huge on being sober amidst Austinites. It's a little different, but it's the same because I'm doing it on my own power. And when people reach that state on their own power, it hits differently than taking an exogenous substance or whatever. So it's a way for you to reclaim your power. from the protocols and the prescriptions and the doctors and all that kind of stuff. And it's like, oh, it's all here. The kingdom of heaven lies within. I'm a co-creator.

I have authority. I have power. I have faith. I can do it. And that's a beautiful thing to see when someone's light bulb goes off like that. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about one of our longest running show sponsors, Lucy.com. Let's level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. go to lucy.co slash kkp and use promo code kkp to get 20% off your first order

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You know, there's that keyboard insider head and there's, you know, four different emotions and they've got like the angry button and all these different buttons, right? But that's kind of there's, there is, the thing does exist inside us. It may not look that way, but you could consider these epigenetic on-off switches, right? The lifestyle choices can can affect viscerally, how much sunlight do you get each day. All these things matter on those switches. But in terms of working with the nervous system, which is really what has the greatest effect of our experience of reality where our nervous system is. is at in any given moment, we have the keys there, too. And that was something that was brilliant from Wimov was he's like,

this is, he's doing shit that you're not supposed to be able to do, right? He's, he's playing parasympathetic and sympathetic and doing things autonomic that he shouldn't, he shouldn't be able to control, but he is, right? And I think they did it scientifically, which I thought was brilliant. And many people before him, it's not, it's not like he's the first, but he's the first well-known guy in the West that really did this. Talk about the shifting of gears, right? Because we can use breath to, you know,

hyper tune in we can use breath to slow down before bed and I'm thinking about Andrew Huberman you know at the human lab before he blew up we did a podcast and went out there and I was like what are you studying here and he said simple yogic breathwork practices that help people sleep and I was like get the fuck out of you seriously he's like yeah you know the doubling of an exhale from an inhale while you're lying in bed before bed and then listening to you know these great sages and saints ohm right so they're chanting and you're just doubling your exhale. It could be 7 in, 14 out, 10 in, 20 out, whatever that looked like, and just you're

dropping, dropping, dropping. And he mapped it. He was looking at fMRI and all sorts of cool shit, verifying, you know, these 8,000, 6,000-year-old teachings work, right? It was pretty cool. But talk about the gear shifting because I think this is great, and you know so many forms of breath where it could be great for people to know, like, when I'm tired, what's the best way to gas up? When I'm anxious and feeling like the weight of the world's on my chest, how do I slow down and clear? Yeah. Yeah, the way that I describe it for people is that most people, 90% of the world is breathing wrong most of the time. 90% of people are essentially an automatic transmission, where they're a car with drive neutral and reverse. You got fight or flight,

freeze, and then sleep pretty much. When you can tune into your breath, you've suddenly become a manual where you can shift up to fifth gear if you need energy you can shift down to first gear if you need to relax and the simplest way to explain it is that when your inhales are faster fuller and longer you're shifting up your heart rate's going up your body temperature's going up your brain activity's going up you're loading up on oxygen and resources when you're breathing like whimhoff style as if you're on a brisk jog that's up regulating shifting up Shifting down is the opposite where it's longer, slower, and smoother exhales. So most people listening to this, your best friend is long exhales.

When you're just feeling like the weight of your body, you're feeling gravity as your exhales are lengthened. And that's a lot of what Huberman talks about. They have the number one science-backed stress relief breathwork, the physiological sigh, where you breathe in all the way. and then you do a short pump at the top. And then the key is that long, super drawn out, exhale, even humming.

They just showed that humming increases nitric oxide. Like, I don't know what it was. If you saw on Instagram, it's like 1,000% or something like that. I don't remember, yeah, I remember what was his name? It was before Nestor's book, Oxygen Advantage. Patrick McCown talked about humming and, you know, the nasal breathing being so important at night because of NO2 and its ability to regulate immune function, you know,

through the nasal pastures way and things like that, you know, upper respiratory immune health, and just getting blood and nutrients to where you want them to go. That's all NO2 related. It's regulated. So vasodilation and things like that, I think are, it's fantastic. But yeah, the humming, that was interesting because that two pointed back to the east 8,000 years ago, probably before that, you know, like humming, chanting, all these things tone the vagus nerve, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important. I think that a lot of people get turned off by breathwork because they think it's woo-woo. They think that there's some Eastern nonsense. sense going on. And to ground breathwork in the West requires that science to backfill behind it

for people to see on their whoop strap, like, oh, my resting heart rate went down or my HRV went up from this. And it's just like boil it down to be as simple as possible. When your breaths are quicker, faster, and fuller in, you get more energy. When they're longer, slower, and smoother out, you relax. And when you can then learn to just experiment and make it your own journey every single day, what happens when I breathe this way? What happens when I breathe that way? What do I feel like when I do this? What happens if I breathe super long exhales right before a meal? I'll absorb more nutrients. I'll be able to digest better. If I relax and do super long exhales before I go to bed, I'll capitalize on the first 90-minute sleep cycle with the majority of your growth

hormones released. If you're an athlete and you just finish to work out, instead of staying 15 beats above your resting heart rate for another two hours so that your body can just, for your body to just relax, what if you just hit some physiological size right after your workout, and now you're recovering two hours more efficiently than every other competitor you have? And so many different ways to like throw it in the more aware i am of my breath the more content ideas i guess like well how am i breathing on this podcast right now how am i breathing when i'm driving how am i breathing when i'm eating how am i breathing when i'm doom scrolling it's like it's all there for you um and you can create this dual consciousness dual awareness of i'm aware of like how my feet feel right now

i'm feeling my feet right now as i'm also listening to my voice and i'm breathing at the same time and then just holding that and trying to stay in this place where you feel and you breathe and you can consciously logically also operate and I think that that's when you're really powerful when you're really present that's your seat of personal power and it comes from your sensations in the body and your senses and your breath and that's when you can just drop in trying to just be present logically never works you try to think your way to presence it doesn't work so you You got to feel it. So, yeah, I mean, the shifting up and shifting down is so powerful, and that's where

I think people can really get a lot of benefit right away. You don't have to go to some retreat or some 200-person breathwork in a room where they crack you open and you're crying and screaming with everyone else. I'm actually, like, kind of against that for an intro for people because it cracks them open. It's a lot for somebody that doesn't have particular practices on their own. I mean, we would do that in fit for service. we would have those, but, you know, they're like, we have a four month lead before our event or two months ahead and then two months after really work with people and help them process

that. But yeah, to your point, if it's just a weekend deal and there's nothing before and after that can leave people pretty freaking jarred, you know, it is, it's a psychic, it's an altered state, right? It's a psychedelic experience. And you're probably entering those spaces is when you're doing 30 minutes of Wimhoff. Like it's that 30 to 60 minute mark is where you start to pop. You know, DMT is kicking off in the brain. It can be highly visionary.

Body starts to vibrate and dissolve, you know, that, and that's really what it is. You know, Stanislav Grove, holotropic breathwork, was trying to design that because LSD became illegal. And he wanted to use it as such a great therapeutic drug. He was like, what can I legally use in place of LSD that can have that big of an impact? And it was holotropic breathing.

Yeah. Yeah, it's so powerful. Holotropic, super powerful. When I was just starting, I was winging it, and I was doing three hours of Wimhoff a day sometimes, and I was just going way too much, really, in retrospect, and I had to get injured again. I concussed myself doing breathwork. I passed out on a bench, and I was like, shit. And then I healed that concussion in time for Olympic trials with breathwork, but I did parasympathetic,

so I learned the other side of the coin. Wimhoff is this like ramping up, you know, you get your breath holds in, you got the ice factor marrying fire and ice together, amazing stuff. Some people in the breathwork space are super against Wimhoff and that type of breathing. I personally love Wimhoff. I think it's so powerful. I wouldn't have healed without it, and that's where I'm coming from, is that it's a way for you to really tap into what's possible and to flush your body with oxygen. during the breath hold all that oxygen releases and it goes into every single cell all at once boosting growth hormone boosting turning on stem cells genes activating ancient survival pathways

intermittent hypoxia 1 alpha and that's like the next phase i think we talked about saunas and ice plunges in the health space for a couple years now fasting but now it's like fasting from air what does that do um that's what i'm most excited about to explore and so holotroval When you're doing holotropic, you're doing Wimhoff, you're really ramping it up. And I think that for anyone that's doing Wimhoff, you can begin to, like, force through things in your life that you're not meant to force through. I know I've done that where you're just, I get to, I've had a couple burnouts where I'm like, this is really, really gnarly that I'm so burnt out. And I must have gone way past and overextended myself. There's not a lot of breaks with your biology.

And so if you're doing that Wimhoff stuff, I definitely recommend doing as much or more parasympathetic breathwork and grounding yourself. And throughout my healing journeys, breaking my bones, concussions, the foot injury, a bunch of other things. I created basically a modification on Wimhoff where in the beginning you load up on a bunch of resources,

you activate and open the blood vessels, you get everything running. And then you do a couple breath holds. and then you slowly bring your breath into a coherence breath six in six out and then you slowly bring it into like you're barely breathing into butako at the end so i call it the vortex because it's kind of shaped like a vortex and it's bringing you to okay we just load it up and got all these resources surplus of energy in the body but then we snapped into parasympathetic optimal healing state for the body

zero point consciousness barely breathing your body is able to just be like we have all of these resources like what are we going to do now let's just go start turning on genes healing making making shit happen and lowering inflammation all that kind of stuff so talk about but tinko because i remember um it's funny i had a couple good friends in here that i've learned a lot from dr dan stickler and dr micro hamilton micro hamilton who you know they were they were against win off you know for for just jacking people up getting them to breathe into their chest not teach about belly breathing or Zen breathing. And they were one of the first because they do so much, you know, neuroscience and brain

mapping where they were starting to talk about heart coherence, right? And they were matching that with heart math. And I want to dive into that part of the conversation too, but how that, you know, equal in, equal out, bottom of the belly. So you're at a full exhale and you're just breathing in slightly and then exhaling slightly. And you're like, she's, yeah, the analogy she gave me was, you know, can you see a Zen master breathe? the answer is no right you don't know if he's inhaler and exhaling because it's such a small

minute little inhale and exhale and it's that one-to-one relationship that starts to create the heart coherence and the brain shift in neurochemistry that that's sought after right i don't know if that comes from butaco or not but you mentioned his name i remember that that name in oxygen advantage and it's been a long time since i've read it so break down some of those principles yeah yeah when you're doing boutako you are essentially training your body to become more efficient at using oxygen. You're breathing as little as possible and breathing as little as possible is signaling to the body. There's more CO2. It's not very comfortable to do Butako. And that is creating that adaptation response. It's subtly activating that

intermittent hypoxia, hypoxia inducible Factor 1A pathway. And that is going to make your heart healthier, make your brain healthier, make whatever else is going on in your body healthier because you're in that super slow brainwave, super slow breathing state. And I think it's a really powerful modality. And it's extremely, it's extremely powerful in the sense of how it slows down your brain waves. And it brings you to that Zen master state. So when I was first experimenting, I was doing Butteco, but I was doing my TM mantra. So every inhale of the Butako, I would say one part of the mantra, the next inhale would be the second part, the next inhale would be the third part, and I would just drop like a stone into some deep state. So the slower your breathing is and the less you're breathing, the less perception you have of like your body.

Your perceptions begins to go down because when you're in fight or flight, you're breathing a lot because you need to like pay attention to what's going on. external to you. When you're breathing a lot less and barely at all, your perception begins to basically turn inward and you begin to enter what Joe Dispensit would call that quantum state where you're not your body, you're not your name, you're not your story, and you enter that field of infinite potentiality. And that's why I think Butteco is really powerful. I love it for performance and increasing your heart health and allowing you to get like an adaptation response as if you're living at high elevation, but you can also do that, in my opinion, and Wimhoff is showing this. Patrick McEwen and Wimhoeff are kind of at odds right now. And I think that's why it's

good to not be siloed and to think anything is possible. It really is the freaking Wild West. I mean, with all the research I've done, I have more questions than I have answers. And when you are doing that breath hold with Wimhoff, you're getting a lot of those benefits, too. I think that the key is, you know, if you go into the gym, you want to get a three out of ten on the pain scale to get some hypertrophic effect. It's kind of the same with breath holds or Boutaco. Boutaco you could think of as like, I'm doing 200 step-ups. A breath hold is like, I'm doing three by two, 25 squats or something like that. So it depends on everyone's specific nervous system, how hyperactive they are, what's happened in their life, what's living in their nervous system.

because sometimes you don't want to take someone to a Wimhoff plan for every single day, especially, and I learned this the hard way I'm still learning this, but when I was doing all of that Wimhoff stuff, I was breathing with improper mechanics, and I was reintegrating the wrong breathing mechanics, the wrong breathing form. I was breathing good. I was good at breathing from being a cross-country skier,

but I wasn't breathing into my back. wasn't breathing into my lower ribs and opening my lower ribs. I was breathing into my stomach and chest and I just, my posture got all out of whack. And so I think it's really important if you are going to do Wim Hof, you want to be doing it with the right posture and the right mechanics. Same with Boutteco. And yeah, with the Boutteco stuff, like I totally recommend anyone just start trying it out. I like to begin doing Boutteco where I'm not exhaled and held. I'm not at the bottom of my breath. I'm more in a neutral state. And I find that, you know, I'm not trying to get some adaptation. I'm just trying to enter a really deep state of healing in the body and let it feel safe.

Not a full breath, but not a all the way exhale, just somewhere in between. And then you hold the breath from there. Like 50% of the air in your lungs. And just can I make the breath a perfect circle, super slow, super focused on the breath, barely moving my nose hairs, and being very conscious of like what part of my stomach is breathing. What am I moving? Trying to be like a Zen master so still, except for like the tiny little spot in your diaphragm that's moving. I've entered some really cool states doing that. Yeah. You guys know I've tried just about everything when it comes to human optimization from fasting and peptides to breathwork. But the biggest breakthroughs usually come from getting your baseline right. And that starts with your

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retention right is a big piece of this and there's multiple ways to skin a cat but like one of the things they do is they're you know and they're older too but they've been athletes their whole lives so they like the pool because you're it's not as damaging to the joints right you weigh less but you can still lift like crazy and hit plyometrics and do a whole bunch of endurance stuff unheld breath so they have the shallow end portion and they have the deep end portion and i remember you know the freaking giant pool in their backyard in malibu and through three days of training i could go down and back you know the width of the pool underwater with whatever 70 pounds in each hand something like that the weight didn't matter it was just the ability to

stay under. And Gabby said, Laird can do that, can go down and back eight times on a single breath. And I was like, get the fuck out of here, dude. Are you serious right now? Yeah. You know, and he was like, and he over here's being that like freaking out. And he's like, you just stay calm. Just that you're not lifting the weight. You're just leaning. You're walking. It's a meditation. And I was like, all right. You know, but like that, I mean, you can't. That there is, I just point that out because I had pretty good endurance at the time. It was like fresh out of fighting. Oh, was it a peak prime shape. but I certainly wasn't in bad shape, you know,

and this dude's literally 8x better, you know, and of course he's, you know, one of the greatest superhumans of all time in practices, but it showed, you know, there's levels to the game, right? White belt, black belt, that kind of thing. And he was into it for all the same benefits, you know, that those are different ways to go about things like that. I think in oxygen advantage, they talk about taking it,

when you're on a walk, take a breath in, go to a full exhale, and a hold on the full exhale, while walking and see how many steps you can get you know and then don't panic for air when you go to breathe again just breathe in lightly fully exhale and see how many more steps you can get like that was one of the ways i was doing that on walks which i felt was like the you know kindergarten version of playing with that stuff yeah in a way it's the kindergarten version um also in a way it's way harder to just do it while you're on a walk x in it in terms of uh you're not getting what's called the mammal

the mammal has this reflex of like yo chill when you're in water because if you don't chill we're going to lose oxygen we're going to die and when you're doing those underwater runs you are dropping into that mammalian

dive reflex heart rates going down everything's like all right calm down we got to make it three times back and forth or we're going to die when you're out for a walk just anywhere you don't get that advantage of having that mammalian dive reflex you're almost training like i had a pro track guy and we were doing that where you know exhale and

hold your breath and walk or exhale and hold your breath and run exhale and hold your breath and do shit in the gym um i don't recommend doing inhale holds for any of this stuff because that's why i've passed out a bunch if i had you inhale right now and hold your breath and squeeze all your muscles you would pass out um i've seen that uh jesse burdick famously has done that many times he would do that on uh you max double or triple deadlift and it was so common that he just put a bench right behind where he was deadlifting and up against the wall so you know he's pulling big sumo deadlift he's hits his second one and he could see him at the top and he just drops it and sits back day like he sits back into the bench and I was like there's a dude who's got a lot of experience with pushing him right to himself

to the edge that knows like this is how he needs to be set up yeah to hit the weights is incredible wow but yeah that that's how he braced his spine you know it wasn't that he was trying to to work the CO2 is that he you know realized like this is the most the safest he can possibly be is on a full breath held with a weight belt to make sure that his spine is perfectly erect and held in place you know no injuries in that way and i could see the benefit there too but it definitely not for the faint of heart not for the faint of heart i've had some training blocks where i would make sure that i'm like leaning back on my bed ready to hit the pillow in case something happens and I think when you're doing breathwork and stuff, it's just, I really should be dead.

I was doing stupid shit in the pool alone. No one's home. I was doing it driving. I would sit down mid-workout. That's how I concussed myself. Sit down mid-work, do some breathwork, pass down on a bench. So if you throw in a bunch of factors, you're hung over, you had drugs, you are in the middle of a workout, your heart rate's high, you are more susceptible to, you know, passing out.

And Wimhoff, it's like a lot of people are against Wimhoff just because, people have been irresponsible with it and have unfortunately passed away. So a big part for me is the safety component and not reintegrating bad patterns, not reintegrating trauma, which goes back to like, you know, doing breathwork in a 200-person event with all these people releasing entities and stuff or whatever else is going on. It's a lot of energy, dude, for certain. Yeah. And I think it's good for you to like be in the safety of your own home and feel the point of

the healing and the performance and all the stuff, it's like you've got to feel safe. You've got to bring that feeling of safety to your nervous system again. And I think that a lot of people, when they start doing breathwork, feel unsafe being safe. And that throws them off potentially.

Their body's like, we've been chronically hyperventilating for five years and now you want us to breathe even more. That doesn't make sense to the body at first. But then once you start retraining the diaphragm, the muscles, the breath holds, you lower your breaths per minute suddenly your body's like more of that let's keep doing that i want to breathe less i want to live longer i want to lower heart rate less anxiety less thoughts in my brain

um because if you're breathing 12 to 20 breaths per minute you're you're having 60 000 to 120 000 thoughts a day ish if you're doing six breaths per minute you're doing 60 000 thoughts or you're doing 30 000 thoughts to 60 000 thoughts a day and thinking thoughts is wildly inefficient. A lot of thoughts are just mental inefficiency. And so if you're on a healing journey, it's like part of it is let's stop having fear-based thoughts 24-7 or ruminating about, should I take this supplement? Should I try this? Should I do that? Just can we bring the body back into a state of safety? I think that that's like people roll their eyes, but that's everything really when it comes

to the starting point. Hell yeah, brother. That's phenomenal. Talk about coherence. You had a post on there akin to, I remember when I was first getting into like some of the spiritual space and Eckartoulli, somebody was talking about, you know, this, this 1% rule. If you get to 1% of the planet, then the flowering of human consciousness takes place, right? And what's cool is that, you know, scientifically they've started to map, you know, on big days like 9-11 or different things. You know, the random number, random, number simulators right start to shift right some of these is the energy is actually changing the way things ought to behave and that's one of the ways they can verify that human energy is a part of the wheel right um and so you know you talked about getting people to breathe uh together and i remember first hearing about that with heart math but like what a cool thing that is talk about what you guys are working on there yeah we thought you know it's so powerful when we're doing breath work together And we started doing research, my brother and I.

And my mission right now is to get as many people breathing in sync as possible because, yeah, 1%. But regardless, it's a connected field. We're all connected. And when you come into coherence with yourself, when you marry your heart and your brain, the two organs, everything works better, your field gets bigger. And basically what our mission is is to create the largest billion person. breathing session where you have a billion people breathing in and breathing out at the same time throughout the entire world and we're going to start small we're just going to get as many people as we can you know every day and we're going to start doing it on international healing day

international meditation day how many people can we get together and breathe in sync with the intention of love and action unconditional love and um not making it about any any sort of like spiritual vein or anything just everyone breathes everyone's been in love we all know that these things can be positive so love in action through the breath getting as many people together basically can we regulate the nervous system of earth with as many people as possible and when you're in a room you walk into a room and um let's say you're in a room and someone walks in and they're super chill. That regulates everyone in the room. Someone walks in, they're like hyperactive. You know, they got something to prove or something like that. You can feel that up regulation in the room.

And our question, Jack and I, my brother, was like, well, what happens when we do that on like a mass scale? This is my best guess on how to make the world a better place and override all this intellectual nonsense that's happening and the stuff that's just standing in the way of our greatest version, our greatest future as a species, is why don't we just get people in the right state of mind and then have that be a butterfly effect and have that wrap out? If you get 10 people doing breathwork and they're centered in their heart in the morning, that's going to spread to a ton of people by the end of the day. And so our mission is just to get as many people breathing together as possible.

We'll see what we can do. I want to shoot for a billion because like, fuck it. Shoot for a billion. Yeah, fuck it. Shoot for a billion. Why not? I mean, that's the far higher number than 1%. That would be, that makes some big shifts.

That'd be a very palpable thing. Well, I'd love to be a part of that. Where can people jump into, I mean, you've got to talk about, you know, some of your offerings that people are interested from this podcast and want to work with you as a coach. If you've got classes, cohorts, all that stuff, you know, what are you working with right now? And then where can people, you know, get on with this, this massive heart coherence breathwork session?

Yeah. anyone can join these live synchronized breathwork events that happen twice a day every day for five minutes when you go to coherencebreath.com slash sync and it's free it's encouraged to just share it with as many people as possible happens twice a day every day five minutes five and a half seconds in five and a half seconds out you're going to feel better and that's the main thing is let's get as many people breathing together as possible that's what I really care about. You can download the app from that website, coherencebreath.com slash sync.

The app has the sessions in the app as well. They have a bunch of other sessions and journeys and also just really easy breathing techniques to basically be a breathwork coach in your pocket. So coherencebreath.com, coherencebreath.com slash sync. And then you can follow me online at based ethos, B-A-S-E-D-T-H-O-S.

and I run a bunch of coaching containers for men and women that are wanting to introduce themselves to themselves, become in alignment with their greatest versions, tap into their breath, reverse chronic conditions, diseases, illnesses, injuries, and yeah, that's the mission. Let's heal the world with breath. So thank you so much for having me on. That's been a pleasure, brother. Thank you, Nick. I appreciate you.

Awesome.