Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #81 Rob Wilson & Brian MacKenzie

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

Rob Wilson and Brian MacKenzie from Art Of Breath stop by to share their wealth of knowledge about breath and breath-work. We also dive into exercise, endurance, mindset, and how they take a skilled based approach toward endurance training. So many take aways in this episode there's something for everyone. Check out Power Speed Endurance: Website | https://powerspeedendurance.com/artofbreath/ YouTube | https://bit.ly/2BEMuvi Instagram | https://bit.ly/2N7vZwl Twitter | https://twitter.com/PSEndurance Facebook | https://bit.ly/2DKq9g1 Connect with Rob Wilson: Instagram | https://bit.ly/2Gf6xQD Connect with Brian MacKenzie: Instagram| https://bit.ly/2N7vZwl Show Notes Rob Wilson’s last podcast | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj7Zubx1s18 Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson | https://bit.ly/2Bcd7Yk The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown | https://bit.ly/2Ed0FJJ Jaws: The Story Of A Hidden Epidemic | https://amzn.to/2UZoudJ Weston A Price | https://www.westonaprice.org/ Pottenger Cats | https://bit.ly/2Gt8AFm Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder | https://amzn.to/1XUABbf Don Miguel Ruiz | http://www.miguelruiz.com/ Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman | https://amzn.to/2j8ogmp The Health and Human Performance Foundation | https://www.hhp-foundation.org/ Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit        Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour   iTunes  | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher  | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify  | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

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go to onnit.com slash podcast. Hello, hello. How are we today? Have we taken a deep breath? All right, enough cheesy shit. These are my dudes. This is the second time I've had Rob Wilson on from Art of Breath. The first time I've had my buddy, Brian McKenzie on, who I've been a fan of and a friend of off with the guy. Both these dudes are completely dialed in to all things that I'm into, from surfing to jujitsu to strength and conditioning to ultra endurance to breath work. How do we create a state change so we can actually shift the way we feel, think, and operate in the world?

We dive into a lot of their cool shit. Please check them out. I highly, highly recommend taking the Art of Breath online course through powerspeedendurance.com. And thanks for tuning in. Let me know what you think after the show. Brian McKenzie, Rob Wilson in from Art of Breath. We're jumping right in here though. What were we talking about just a second ago? PC.

Yeah. Yes. PC principle. Let's keep that going. PC principle. South Park. Fuck yeah. I do not recall. The Jerky Boys. If we released the Jerky Boys now, how we would be tarred, feathered,

and put out to pasture. It's been the rest of their careers. Apologize. Maybe on the West Coast and the East Coast and in Austin, but maybe not so much up the middle of the country. I don't understand why it swings so far back and forth. coast and the east coast and in austin but you know maybe not so much up the middle of the i

don't understand why it swings so far back and forth like and then now it's kind of like they're both both sides are getting more outrageous as they as they stretch into the polar opposites of one another like when does the yo-yo happen where everything kind of converges back to sensible fucking reality or in like a tolerance for other people's ideas and also like this lack of victim mentality which is all that fucking pc shit is you know you're just looking to be a fucking upset about something like that's the human dilemma i think that is the space where we have choice and the ability to manipulate stress and that comes with consequence and what and how we choose to push that whether it's mentally physically whatever inevitably bites

us in the ass because we don't understand the consequences of it so we sway one way or sway the other way we find a value system we find. We find an opinion that can validate that or that can actually be more educated than us on that and connect it to what we think and let that become our filter, which I think that's where social media falls into play. And I have an opinion on everything that gets put out on your fucking platform. And even though I may not be an expert in that gets put out on your fucking platform. And even though I may not be an expert in that or whatever, I don't know. Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, as far as some of that goes, it's always the farthest ends of the pendulum swing that get the most attention, right?

So like the squeaky wheel gets the grit you know gets the grease i think for the most part most people that i talk to are just kind of getting on with their lives because people got like kids to raise and jobs to go to and shit to do and don't really have that much time to worry about this shit um but the extreme people have such a platform to express the ideas that they do have that it can be even falsely represented as, hey, this is what everybody who files neatly into this category might think. But at least my experience traveling around and we do all these seminars, I'm sure that, let's see, in the last couple of years, I've met something like a thousand people. And most of them were just like normal folks. And probably there's things where we disagree in some places where we agree, but for the most part, it seemed like everybody was

just getting on with their business. So I think we have to be careful too, how much of what the media says, social media or the news or otherwise, what they say people think. We have to be careful about how we form our opinions around their representation of other human beings instead treat people on individual basis when we actually come into contact with them yeah i think too another thing to remember is that how we treat each other online versus how we treat each other in real life are fucking two different worlds right two different worlds so but still with that remembering like people are pretty fucking nice face to face, you know? And if you disagree on something, usually it's not, like, it doesn't spill out of control. You might, most people bite their tongue and then later they tell their significant other, I can't believe that fucking guy thought this, you know?

But that's it. They don't want the confrontation. But online, it's like for you fucking idiot or if you do have or in real life like you have an argument with your significant other you end up coming back around full circle and working that out and either a apologizing or coming to terms with something which the original meaning of what confrontation actually means is two people coming together to figure out the truth versus online it's like you're wrong you know yeah and it's us versus them it's tribalism at its i draw a line yeah yeah yeah

and which here's the fact that's the illusion like online or that that is the it's not even real it's a representation of a moment that existed and some words configured into a specific parameter that oh just so uniquely represent how to get off something very polarizing yet something that really needs to be communicated takes a lot more of a longer format yeah for sure yes yeah you think about podcasts how much information you get out of those, then a book on Audible. Or somebody puts in years into writing something, as you know. Yeah. There's a lot of, that's your whole life for a significant period of time

goes into creating that with research and fucking editors and people saying you need to word it this way. And, well, we got to include this and citations and all that shit. And it's like, yeah, you get more from that than you do from a one minute IG video. 100%. Yeah.

And I think too, we could maybe dispense with some of the unnecessary negativity. If everybody had to use their real name, you mean if they didn't have an egg on Twitter, then you're accountable right yeah responsibility like if we if we somehow figured out how responsibility became more a part of that you would see fewer and fewer people you know trying to jump on the platform and have their day you know well then you have skin in the game yeah right you got skin in the game

it's kind of like you know i'm telling you like when i i'm a you know an mma fan and when i sit with like my buddies or whatever and they're all couch fighters i'm like hey man like it's okay to have your opinion but be careful because getting punched in the face is scary yeah like i said you know it is exactly exactly it is funny though with like the the what do they call those uh armchair quarterbacks yeah like the armchair quarterback for fighting you know they'll sit there and like this guy fucking sucks i can't stand it like that 125 pound man would destroy your 250 pound ass destroy yeah you know like destroy look it would be absurd you know like so like to have just to understand that gap i think i mean it's hard to grasp people don't really

understand the gap between high school and college and college in the nfl when you're thinking of football and there's fucking huge gaps there you know but fighting is like oh i fought you know blah blah blah and that kind of thing and people say that shit because they've been in a few bar fights and then it's like they just think there's if i trained i'd be as good as those guys you know but i'm getting i'm getting off topic here we got it's actually on topic and we i think we can bring this right into wherever you're gonna go all right perfect perfect so we we're gonna link to rob wilson's podcast in the show notes for those who didn't get a chance to listen to get a lot of new fans, which is dope. Thank you for listening. We'll link to that from last year when we had you guys out for Art of Breath,

but I'm finally sitting across from BMAC, the fucking long awaited podcast with you. And I want to dive in a little bit on your background and then we'll jump into all the current events and why you guys are in town. I met you at XPT in Malibu. Yep. I think like three years ago, Kelly Sturek got me on and that was the most comprehensive training, breath work, diets, you fucking name it, lifestyle, you know, hot, cold temperature contrast. Like the, it was, it was how to live your life perfectly for three days done for you without thought but with intention and with the why you guys included all the knowledge on why this is important right so

it would be a learned skill that you took home with yourself rather than that was a dope experience let me pay and go back yeah um and now i'm glad you had fun yeah it was funny it was fucking i had fun i loved this you know the golden speedo and go on uh yeah great fucking conversations you know literally his eyes just peeled when kyle walked out in his fucking speedo he was just like oh wow but by the end of it laird was like i like this guy laird was fucking great um where do we start let's start let's start with right about the time where and maybe you blew up before this but the time that i started hearing about you was right when power speed endurance came out and everybody's like you got to fucking read this book. Like it became something that just kind of moved like with its own, its own pace, like a wildfire across CrossFit, across MMA, across a lot of places that

we were involved with. And then of course, Unbreakable Runner. I used that book religiously before I did my 55K, the only ultra I've ever run. And it was, it was absolutely incredible. So I want to dive into those, but let's talk've ever run. And it was absolutely incredible. So I want to dive into those, but let's talk about your history. What got you into all this? Because you know a lot of shit and it's not like you just fucking wake up one day and you're there, right? Yeah. Well, I think I'd like to know a lot of shit. I think my life has more or less been about learning, and I didn't really come into understanding that until but I was in some sort of a junior college setting on and off taking classes, not taking classes. And then I decided to take an exercise science class, got an A and I was like, it wasn't that I got an A. It was that I actually was like,

oh my God, like I know this. I was a swimmer. I rode bike, BMX. I skateboarded. I played water polo. I did all these things that probably saved my life to a large degree when I was younger. Um, as I fell in with a lot of wrong crowds and did a lot of wrong things, um, and maybe not wrong, but I just wasn't exactly your pinnacle child. Um, and hitting that at about 26 or 28, I, I went after it and I, and I chased it. And so I just started training people. I was fortunate where I grew up in that I grew up in Orange County in Newport Beach. And I was handed basically soccer moms who had a lot of money, but came to me with their problems and their problems where they wanted to look hot.

And so I was the guy who at the time was doing that. And then I fired probably one of the most, the reason I got successful was because I fired in that setting was because I fired one of the most popular moms or people in the area who had been a celebrity of sorts. She was on some shows and she just wasn't a good representation of what my business was at the time. And I was very serious about what I was doing with people. And that spawned something in my head like, oh, if I'm serious about what I'm doing, I get more people coming to me. And I literally could not feel like I had no room to fill for people.

And so I opened my first gym in 2005. So I started training people about 2000, 2001. Okay. And I was your typical trainer in a gym. I was constantly thinking like what's new or what's out there that I'm not thinking about. Kettlebells. Like I had kettlebells in the gym I worked at prior to anybody having kettlebells in the area. And I was like,

hey, we should be using these things. They're awesome. And I may not have been doing it totally correctly, but it just grew from there. And I opened my first gym in 2005 because I started looking at endurance training very differently than I had been doing it. I had done it one way and I had seen it done that way. And I'd studied that way. And I had gone the long, slow distance approach, the periodized approach. And I understand periodization. I understand long, slow distance, and I understand how that works. And I decided to jump off that mountain and start from the bottom again. And I started climbing up the other side and I started chipping away at things and I started doing things.

Some things worked, some things didn't. What inevitably came out of that was power, speed, endurance, that first book in 2010. Um, you know, so five years later, we had, I'd finally culminated a book. Uh, I'd been around the world and taught because of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, bless his heart, gave me a platform at the time in order to absolutely take what I was learning and put that out to the world. That was the same time I met Kelly Starrett. He and I have been close, close friends.

He's probably my closest friend at this point for 12, 13 years at this point. And he and I just magnetized to each other. He had knee cancer at the time, which is not a real thing. He had this problem with his knee every time he ran, where his knee would light up. And I helped him solve that issue. And he was the first person I had ever heard talk about the human shoulder in a way that the entire room of 100 people who were other. And so my, my career continued to accelerate because of relationships that I started to formulate with people who were very, very intelligent, but also trying to do a lot of similar things that I was. And so we were, we were learning together, um, that pushed through, you know, what, what evolved and eventually became what power speed endurance is now was a skill-based approach to endurance training, which was literally what I was talking about was like the, you know, I was, Glassman used to literally introduce me as the antichrist to the endurance community. He literally would do that. And I was like,

fuck, this is just like, this isn't going to go right. And we're in Kentucky. This is the Bible Belt. What are you doing that for? It was funny. So my fascination with all of this began with actually movement. I started as a PT assistant when I got enamored with stuff, but I quickly learned that I didn't want to be a physical therapist. Because A, nobody wanted to be in physical therapy, and B, the physical therapist didn't even want to be there at the time until I met Kelly. And there I met a guy who I ended up going and spending three days with that really was like doing things that no PT I had ever heard of was doing. And he was having people deadlift the next day after having a complete knee redone, having a brand new knee and they're deadlifting.

And granted, they had a PVC pipe, but they were doing human, they were moving like a human being again. And I was able to take a lot of the ideas that he and I saw with CrossFit, which was, and I still believe CrossFit is probably the greatest athletic screen that we have. You take any human movement that you can add intensity to it. I'm going to see your holes. I'm going to see where the problems were. And that's what we were really trying to do was exploit those holes so we could look at long-term development. That didn't mean keep going as hard as you fucking can and blow your shoulder out or destroy your back, right?

That meant back off, retrain it. That was the approach to endurance training was, hey, if you can't run more than 400 meters without hurting yourself, you shouldn't be running more than 400 meters. So let's break that off into maybe some 200 meter repeats and get better at that. Right. And so that became that progression, but this all evolved into where we were able to look and I was able to see where respiration or breathing came into play because if I'm working with an athlete and I need them to understand stability, I need them to understand motor

control. I put on a training mask and the training mask instantly made me adjust myself into better posture and create better motor control without cuing anything other than breathing. And, oh, I just turned my diaphragm completely on. And that meant I was in a better position. And so that became the catalyst in what we started doing. And this was like six years ago. And that was- I remember when you posted the first videos back when you were on social with the training mask. Yeah.

And I was using a hypoxical altitude machine, just like a $4,000, goes up to 20,000 feet. Yeah, it's amazing, right? But it's also not portable. You got fucking hoses and things like that. So you're indoors, you're on a treadmill, you're lifting weights, whatever. It's not as easy or convenient as the training mask. Obviously, the training mask, the knock is it's not changing oxygen saturation, right? No. But as you beautifully stated the obvious, but really told it how it was,

you're like, this is a diaphragmatic primer and nothing more. It's not altitude training, but this will fucking force you to breathe correctly. Correctly. And it's going, what we were seeing

were like pulmonary warmups, things that literally where people 20 minutes into a workout or needing to warm up, we were just going and almost like having that because, oh, that moment where let's say you go out on a run and you start to feel good 10, 15, 20 minutes into the run. Well, that's your pulmonary system catching up to your cardiovascular system and your muscular system. And everything's coming into play together versus it getting all jumbled up and, oh, I'm just offloading a lot of CO2 and doing that. But the training mask doesn't change pressure. And pressure is what changes the amount of oxygen

we're able to actually get into the system. Therefore, you can't change altitude with that. But we then stumbled, we then started doing more research and figured out, oh, we've got our own resistance breathing device. It's a biological thing and it's called your nose. And if we just start playing with that a little bit more, we can start to play with other things. And so all of this started to play itself out and then in understanding physiology and how that connected into that. So we've got the mechanics part, then we started understanding the physiology of it, which is actually, I think, the biggest play in that most of us who don't understand that the nose actually is a part of our respiratory system and that we should be using it when we train is that the nose actually is a part of our respiratory system and that we should be

using it when we train is that we're actually going around our own biology and therefore shunting or shutting off part of our physiological responses to things. Yeah. I think it was either you or Dr. Andy Galpin who was talking about, you know, you eat with your mouth and you breathe with your nose and there's science that supports that. Right. So if you, if you've, if you're a mouth breather, especially if you sleep fucking and breathe through your mouth where you're sleeping, that's not good sleep. And there's, there's neurochemical responses to how you breathe, how long your inhale and bridge your exhale is, but where it's coming from too, you know? And like Wim Hof, who we're both big fans of,

you know, like it's true. Like get it in any hole. It doesn't matter, right? Like when you're doing that type of extraordinary ventilation, like that's all good. But for your fucking every day, your day-to-day, 99%, it should be through the nose. 100%.

Yeah. And so this all played itself out. and this is what I've done. Yeah. Basically what I've been up to is I've been learning a lot. I've gotten stuck a few times in the knowledge realm. And, you know, I, you know, where I think we know something and then it's like, oh, this is the way it should be. But then it evolves out of that.

And it's like, that's the whole thing with mechanics is it's like, look, man, I don't need to tell you how to fix your running a whole lot anymore. If I say, hey, go and run around the block with your mouth shut and you can't do that, we got a problem. Not only do we have a mechanical problem, but we've got a physiological problem. And if those two are happening, I can guarantee you there's something going on upstairs too. And so if we can get that in order, we start to have this threefold effect, which we've put in the art of breath, which is if it's, it's mechanical, it's physiological and it's state, it's all three of these things. It should, the, the breath affects all of these things. The breath affects all of these things. Our movement affects all of these things.

Our physiology affects all of these things. It's all related. Well, fucking here we are. I wanted to touch just real quick before we get to breath because I definitely want to talk about breath. The endurance piece that I got was not just like one, one of the, I think I was reading your book along in tandem with primal endurance from our assistant. And both were saying the same narrative of you do not need to fucking pound the pavement. Like do not destroy your body and high quality, high intensity interval training is going to lead you to far less wear and tear and be much more

injury preventative. You know, strength matters. If you're fucking running long distances, all those things were like new ideas to me and what I considered endurance training. And, um, but specifically in your book, you talked about a lot of things that I had never paid attention to cadence being one of them, you know, like, like how you're actually running at what pace and what stride and the mechanics of running, right? Like that was like, shit, man. I mean, I ran sprints with Remy Corchemney back when I was working with Victor Conti

and like, he taught me how to sprint. But when I go for these long bullshit runs, it's the jog. I'm listening to music. I'm dicking off. Like, I'm not paying attention to that. And it's like, no, no, no. Whether you're fucking running a 10K, a 5K or a hundred meters, you should have a similar fucking stride, a similar gate. You should, you should be working

with similar mechanics. You know, obviously a full sprint is going to look a lot different than a marathon, but knowing, understand where your foot is landing in that stride, all those things still falls under the same laws. nothing changed other than your speed. So, but, but gravity is still playing a game and your weight body weight is still playing that game. So, you know, we, we just, we, we fall back to a lazy, I guess, a lazier, we can get away with more when it's less intense, which is the point of using intensity is, oh, in a powerful, like if I'm a fighter and I get into a fight, it's good to be in a good position. It's not good to be in a shitty position when I'm exhausted and lazy. But the better I get at it, the less effort I have to actually apply to it.

So, you know, the mechanics portion was always very important and I was lucky enough to be mentored by Dr. Romanoff who created, who's the creator of the pose method very early. Um, I met him in like 2000, 2001. Um, and he spun my head out on all of the mechanical stuff, um, and, and running and cycling and swimming. And, you know, it, it really changed or altered the direction I was headed. I literally thought I was headed in one way and he literally kicked it in the complete opposite direction. And I had questions that people couldn't answer or didn't want to answer. And that made me go in the other direction. So got to keep searching. Yeah, buddy. Always more to learn. Well, we're talking endurance. We're talking running.

We're talking all these things. And without a doubt, it doesn't matter what form of exercise you're doing or even not exercising, breath is fucking important. It's one of the most important things. Even I was just out with Paul Cech. We were talking to him before the podcast. He has his six foundational principles and in the order of how they should be ordered. First being thoughts, second being breath, third being hydration, fourth being food, fifth being movement and sixth being play.

But like, I think that's how it goes, the sixth one. But breath's really fucking up there. That's it, right? Like that's it. Like it's such a fucking massive piece. Talk about how you guys came together and informed Art of Breath, and talk about the whole fucking arc of what it's become. Robbie? of not to go into a diatribe, but Brian and I met through Kelly Storet. So he was a mentor of mine and maintained a relationship with him since way before Supple Leopard came out. So I think 06, 07-ish timeframe, maybe. Maybe not quite that far. But anyway, I had a long history with

breathwork through yoga practice and got away from it, got away from like a very literal sort of formal practice for a long time. And then came back to it maybe five or six years ago and got in deep with the Wim Hof method, like really trying to practice that and starting to combine it with pranayama techniques that I knew from yoga and noticing one, where things connected, but two, that there were gaps and that I had some questions and I wanted to really go down that rabbit hole. And I talked to Kelly and I was like, oh, this stuff is amazing. And he told me immediately,

like, you gotta talk to Brian McKenzie. He's deep on this. He's involved with XPT, knows Wim, dah, dah, dah. And so Brian and I jumped on a call. And we're just, we're kindred spirits. Like our first phone call was like 90 minutes. And if you know Brian, he doesn't talk on the phone for 90 minutes. Really?

Yes, I do. Yeah. Just the special people. Just the special people. But yeah, we got along just immediately, and we realized that we were both coming from this place of learning, and that it was more about curiosity, that I didn't feel like, oh, well, I had some answers, but that I just had a lot of questions. And I went out and did the XPT experience as well and taught with Brian,

and we just really, our teaching styles resonate well together and our personalities mesh really seamlessly. And so we started talking more. And what we realized was that neither one of us had a bunch of answers, but we had a lot of similar questions and that we wanted to explore this rabbit hole together and share the path that we were wrong with other people. And the art of breath, even now, and this is our third year going around teaching this,

we still don't have answers. And that's why the course is not a method. That's why it's not a McKinsey method or the Wilson method or whatever method. because once you name it a method, then it becomes really fragile because you're boxed in. And so the reason we wanted to purposefully put art in there is because we can come from a place of principles and learning and then let people take those principles and basically tailor it to their own needs regardless of what they are. And that's one of the really, really powerful things about breath is that it's universally applicable. There's only two limiters to using breath practice

and that's nearly dead and dead. So unless you have a severe neurological disorder or you're dead, you can use breath and you can use it for nearly anything that you want. You want more mental clarity? It works. You want better aerobic conditioning? It works. You want to be more stable under a barbell? It works. You just want to feel less stressed after a busy work day? It works. And people have known this for millennia. This isn't like a new thing. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel.

You guys invented breathing, and so I just want to really dive into that because there's no question they did it first. Well, like Paul Cech's program, I mean, you look at the oldest movement practice in the world, yoga, and at the foundation of that is a breath practice, the foundation. And yet you'll even see today that, you know, a lot of those people who are actually teaching it don't even actually understand that. And so it becomes a stretching. I mean, shit, I did yoga years ago for like, I chased a specific yogi around because she was so good. Right. And like, although she talked about breath, there was not a whole lot

of emphasis on the foundation of it. I think there's still a lot of things that get missing in today's world where we were like, wait a second, well, look at all these mature yogis. Why are they all talking about the breath? Rob did a hell of a job as he broke down pranayama into what we're actually using within the physiological component of what we do is it's energy control, man. And if you lose control of that thing that dials in energy, you've lost control of your energy. You haven't like you're done, you're cooked. And so if you're not even actually aware of that, that changes, that's a complete paradigm shift. And so you can actually manipulate, control, and do things that you didn't actually realize you could have done before,

which is huge. Yeah. That was something that blew me away as I was starting to get into this was the science that was coming out on how you literally can reverse engineer your mental state. Whether you're in a sympathetic fight or flight, panicked, mouth breathing, you can reverse engineer that through breath. Or if you're fucking super tired and run down and you need to get up for a podcast, you can shift from parasympathetic and tired into wakeful and ready. And I think that in and of itself is it just it gives us more control over our lives but it also gives us more responsibility like if you know this you're fucking responsible for your state you're responsible for how you show up to the world you're responsible for how you show up in relationships all that because you have the

power yes with great power comes great responsibility, Peter Parker. That'll be the 30-second Instagram clip we run. I mean, just that one. It's one of the great superpowers of human beings, I think. We're the only animal that I know of so far that has volitional control over our breath. Every other living being on earth ventilates unconsciously. It's the connector between the animal part of us and the human part of us. That's what connects that frontal cortex,

that thinking imaginative part of our being with the part of us that is searching and navigating the environment and helping us survive. It's the connector between the most base part of our being and the highest form of our spiritual selves. And what happens to an animal if it loses control of its breathing? It stops or it dies. And what do we do? We just continue on for years, years, years, years. It, uh, it blows me away. How many people have sleep apnea? But I mean, I think when I was reading, um, what's the oxygen advantage. Yes. Um, he's taught when he talked about taping your mouth shut and like the

nose clearing, the way you can actually open up your nose if you're constantly congested and shit like that but like those kind of like the fact that he had to write about it i was like that many people not breathe through their nose when they sleep and like i was asking buddies around in the gym like everyone everyone's sleeping like that it's fucking it's bananas it's crazy it is but if you like if you like anthropology, if you start looking back on history and you even look at us as a species and how we've evolved, you'll see, and there's a great book written. It's called Jaws, and it's about the hidden epidemic, and it's literally about our jaws and the malformation of them and what we've done. And over time, we've made it like, what do we do? We make things convenient, like supercomputer, right? Super convenient. And yet food is one of those things too that's like, we know, like we talk about real food, but how often are we

supplementing? What do we do with our kids? Some kids don't even go to the breast, right? They start on formula. Then where do they go? They go to food that's been blended up and thus they have teeth and don't actually chew with those teeth because we want to protect or be, you know, versus like we've got children that are, you know, sorry if anybody's going to take offense to this, but we've pussified children for the sake of trying to keep them safe versus you've got something that is actually, that is very passively growing on a mental standpoint better than we can as an adult, right? They pick up things like this, right? Their bones, their cartilage, the tissue adapts to things so fast.

And that jaw is one of those things to where that plate starts to form and the sinuses start to form. And it actually allows for the system to work properly. Yet we hand over things and make it easy. And no, no, no, no. You're going to, you know, you're on your shake or your little, you know, baby food, like all this stuff. And I'm not saying like you can't do that, but, you know, hey, based on what we're looking at right now, this is where we're seeing things going. And then based on positions

and where we're at and what we're doing and how it's forming, we're actually making it very possible for us to, you know, have the mouth as the primary vehicle for respiration at this point. And yet there's absolutely not one defense mechanism for air going into the lungs in that capacity. Yeah. There's no filters there. I read, and I read as you were talking about that book, Jaws, maybe think of Weston A. Price. You familiar with him? Very much so. Yeah. So Weston A. Price, dentist, circled the globe in, I think, the 30s. And as he ran into indigenous peoples from all over, he was looking to see if they had,

A, come in contact with Western civilization, if they had, what was their diet like? And then looking generationally at teeth, as a dentist, he would find if they were untouched, they had perfect teeth. And these are tribes without fucking toothbrushes, no toothbrushes, no toothpaste, perfect, healthy teeth without plaque, mind you, and living long lives. A lot of the tribes didn't have a word for cancer or heart disease. It didn't exist. So they didn't need a language for that. And then you look at tribes that had been introduced to

the four white devils, refined sugar, table salt, homogenized, pasteurized milk, and flour. If they had been introduced to any one of those four or a combination of them, their teeth would be fucked up generationally faster and what was the you remember the cat study they did was it called uh pottinger's cats no i remember the mouth i think i'm wasn't there a mouse study he did i i know yeah but anyways these cats they get they when they go to the fucking pasteurized milk their their teeth get all fucked up they start coming in on top of one another like i had braces growing up yeah so do So did I. And it's like, that's just, that's normal, right? We've got an orthodontist. That's normal. It's like, no, no, no. Like your teeth should fucking come in where they're supposed to.

Yeah. The palate works that way. Yeah. That's, it's, it's weird to see how, I mean, it's only, it's a newer concept for us to realize that what we put in our body, that's a fucking direct correlation to how we feel, think, move, but also how our body is built, it's harder to wrap our heads around the fact that we can actually make our body shitty if we grow up eating really bad food. Well, this has been part of a big conversation we've had ongoing. But the interesting part about the Weston Price thing is that they talk about that in Jaws. And they said, oh yeah, Weston Price. And he was talking about, they're like,

but he was talking about nutrients. And they don't think it's about the nutrients. It's the density of the food. Like, look, you give somebody meat or you give them a root or you give them a plant, they have to chew that shit or a nut. You know, when a kid gets teeth, they come off a nipple in indigenous society and you're going to chew your food, right? So that's where he, like, they felt like he missed some of this was the density of the food, right? And it doesn't, it's nor here nor there, but this comes back, you know, coming back to

the conversation that we've been talking about is, you know, like Rob said, we're the only species that has volitional control over respiration. Well, we're also the only species that manipulates stress in a manner in order to create adaptation. That's true. No one else is getting out there and going for a fucking 10 days. That comes with great consequence that I don't think we are paying attention to. And yet we put in our hands things like, and I'm not just harping on the phone or the social media or whatever, but if you look at the people who actually created these devices and the history of that, you could start to get a really good picture of the type of person you're going to become if you're staying on that thing and you've got middle-aged white men who didn't grow up real socially well and are creating something for you to filter into something. Right. But all of this stuff is, is important to understand because it's not to say, take it away or get rid of it. It's, Hey, understand the consequence of what it has create an adaptability versus a, you know,

I'm taking five steps back because I'm on my phone every second of the day or whatever I'm doing, the food I'm eating or, hey, what am I doing with my breathing? And, oh, I don't breathe real well at night. Well, I think this can kind of go, kind of touch a couple of things here. And that's that you can't let the tail wag the dog. And so everything we're talking about is a tool that humans created with the intention of improving our lives, whether that's food that's easier for babies to eat or dental care or a computer phone or whatever the case is. Human beings are master tool builders. And it's probably

one of the few reasons that we're still alive because as animals go, we're pretty weak. Even the strongest human being, a weak bear could kill easily or a mountain lion. I mean, like smaller and weight animals are much stronger per pound. We're not very good at endurance. We're pretty slow, but what we can do is make really good tools and work together. So we're really good at communicating, but if communication tools go awry, then we end up with social media, too much data. Our brain's not ready to organize that amount of information. By the same token, yeah, maybe there are some cases where there are some babies who need softer food, but if we give it to every baby, then maybe we weaken the natural mechanism at play. So that

kind of goes back to what we said, with great power comes great responsibility. So if we're always relying on the tool, whatever it is, even I see this, even as much as we recommend breath work, that can become a crutch too, where if you need a 30-minute breath practice every day in order to just engage the world and not be stressed out, well, then you're a slave to that practice. How much is it really done for you? And this is a concept we've been working with, which is, you know, Nassim Taleb wrote this book called Anti-Fragile. And so we're starting to look at things through this lens where tools are very fragile because they change depending on what the needs of the environment are. Methods, same thing. But if you have understanding and you're coming from a learning and principles base, then you can evolve and change and then

the tool doesn't become the thing that manipulates you. And you see this in the exercise world with whatever the fad is. Okay, well, hand balancing is the thing for a while. So everybody wants to show that they can do a handstand and I can stand on one hand and dah, dah, dah. Well, it's like, well, there's a point of diminishing returns there. Like, okay, you got it. Great. But now, is it just a thing that you're doing to show on Instagram or did you learn what

you needed to learn and then you moved on from the tool? So it's always who's the master and who's the slave so i think we have to be real careful no matter what tool we're using or we're talking about absolutely you know in in not to harp on the fact that like oh you know there's these consequences when we become you know our ability to put to endure pain far exceeds any other species on this planet i think it is absolutely why we are who we are you know and and why we've grown is because we will actually put ourselves into some very very painful situations in order to get through them whether that's mentally physically or emotionally whatever it doesn't matter it we can do that you know it and

and and progress through to something because we understand that, oh, if I push through this, I could actually, you know, adapt and get better if I pay attention to that adaptation. And I think that's where even the long, slow distance approach came to me and where adaptation hit a limitation, you know, and it was like, oh, you know, it's not, this isn't going the way that I thought it was going to go. And why am I shutting down? You know? Yeah. You guys touched on a couple of things back and forth that were really beautiful, but it reminded me of, and I fucking beat this drum a lot, so I apologize, but in The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz talks a bit about how we've been domesticated as a species,

the domestication of man, right? And so we have all these concepts that we grew up with, and we just take them as truth, as some type of fucking law of the universe. It's in physics that we stop on a red light and go on green, and all these things that we've agreed on as standard. But I mean, we're all old enough to remember when telephones were plugged into the wall on a cord and then the cordless, and then the first cell phones were in a car and it was, you couldn't leave your car. It was just in the car, you know, shit like that. So like to see the arch of this,

it's a little easier, I think for us than for the younger generations that are coming up. But it's incredibly important to be mindful of everything we fucking do. Everything does have a consequence, good or bad. And if we look at it that way and really decipher, how did our ancestors live? Can we recreate that in the modern world? And can we use the miracles of modern science to help with that? I think that's really what you got to shoot for because you can't live in this world without a fucking cell phone, not in the West. You might be able to go off grid and do some shit in a different country, but if you're working and you have a family and you have friends and all this shit, you're going to need to be plugged

in on some level. But understanding where that's an issue, when it becomes a problem. Yeah. If you want to participate in the evolution of man you're going to need to participate in the thing that society is actually using as a whole like to some degree you just need to understand that consequence you know with it comes great responsibility and this is something most of us do not want that's why social media thrives in the way it does. Literally, you know, and, and, you know, people are looking for distraction and you can find it anywhere. Yeah. I can't even tell you like in just three weeks of not being on any platform, the level of creativity and the things that have come back into me are, I'm shocked.

And I literally would go on to post and then I'd catch myself flipping through some things, but I might've spent, you know, I had a 45 minute limit limiter on my phone for social media every day. And it still would eat at my create the processes and the dopamine and all of these things that are actually happening as a result of it and so you you know understanding that can can really alter that and i think the breath is one of those things that it's like the why is the breath so important well if you're actually aware of your breathing you're actually taking back control of your state and you have something that like,

when you look at meditation and you look at, it's a great book out there called Altered Traits. I just finished it and it was recommended by- Altered Traits? Altered Traits. Okay. Yeah. And it's a couple of scientists

that are heavily involved in meditation who have studied meditation and broken down the science of meditation. And what you hear about this is just incredible from the place of like plasticity and the brain's growth in a positive manner. And yet at the base layer of meditation sits, I mean, they talked about Vipassana left and right in this thing. And Vipassana is a breath practice, literally becoming aware of your breath. And when I'm aware of my breath, I'm actually taking back control of what's going on, but getting too clogged up in that can have its hindrances. And so if I have to be dependent upon

that, this is where Rob just talked about, is I have to become dependent upon that, that I'm actually not getting the point of what it's actually about. And so using the breath to actually manipulate plasticity is actually a positive thing. And so you can see things and I, you know, you can actually alter things even in your training practice, whether that's MMA, whether that's CrossFit, whether that's just some monostructural movement or going out for a run, controlling the respiration has an effect on how the brain's going to actually react to things. And Rob just did this exact thing with a little experiment we're kind of piloting right now on cadence because you brought up cadence, right? And cadence has a direct impact on mechanics and skill. And when you have a hole in some sort of cadence pattern within something that is seen as mechanically efficient, we know that there's going to be a metabolic problem, all of this stuff.

And that's exactly what we're seeing. And I even see this with myself, right? It's specific cadences, what's happening metabolically. Oh, the cadences that are more difficult to hold or have, I actually am metabolically losing it at. Oh, weird. Like there's a connection to that. And then my head's taking a dump and going into the shitter versus,

oh, I'm gonna pull back, learn how to get to this place, touch it, touch that thing, stress, control the stress, pull back to allow the adaptation to happen, then come back to it again. And breathing literally, and this is what the art of breath is 100% about. Yeah. And that's skill, right? That's a skill and you have to practice, right? Nobody escapes practice if you want access to a skill, right? You have to put in the time. But the beautiful thing about breath work

in particular is, yes, you can approach it from a formal perspective where you sit in a quiet place or you lay down, but you breathe every moment of your day. So you can have breath practice all the time. Fucking morning commute, work in between sets. Bro, if you're going to sit in traffic, I would highly advise using some breathing. That's going to change the landscape of what's going on with what you're doing. And it doesn't come at any cost. It's just you controlling something. And there isn't... Every shred of research that's coming out on slowed, controlled breathing is nothing but positive like hey this is actually calming the brain calming it down and the science is showing what yogis have been talking about for millennia right i think it's critical now because we're in a world where it is go go go

do do do do more we're constantly comparing and competing with one another and comparing and competing with ourselves even right but in all those experiences it's we're overstressed and we're not we don't so many people don't understand the tools are right here they're right there they are accessible if we know them right and then if we know them then we have to that's the responsibility fucking use it right yeah exactly don't just not enough to know we must do Bruce Lee. Right. So I think I said that last year with you, um, running it back already. Um, talk a bit about where you guys see this going, because you're always in a state of learning, always asking more questions. And you're always, I mean, you're on the fucking forefront of this. You know, you're the first people that I saw taking the Wim Hof method and taking, you know, nasal breathing from oxygen advantage and all these different modalities and combining them to tailor and then

fine tuning and trial and error and having the masses do it through trial and error and seeing what works and what doesn't. What are you guys looking into going forward? Cause you got, you were saying there's some big changes coming. Oh yeah.. Yeah. So I think one of the things that is most interesting right now is that there is a direct, and I mean, anybody who's an exercise physiologist will go, yeah, of course. But there's a direct link between volitional control of breathing and taking control over the way that your body produces and uses energy. So from a physiological standpoint, all energy in the human body boils down to the production of ATP, right? Adenosine triphosphate. And that's either through aerobic respiration or anaerobic respiration. And there's a big continuum in there that we don't have to get into right now,

but it's not an either-or thing. And both, even though it's called anaerobic, still relies on oxygen in order to process the waste from that system and then convert that back into energy. And what we have found out is that there are some really potent, obvious, and simple heuristics for understanding when respiration changes or ventilation changes, that your body is shifting metabolically from aerobic to anaerobic, and that you can also control the shift back and forth between those systems. And you and I touched on that a little bit when I was sort of first exploring it last year in the gear system. Yeah.

Right. And we basically created names for some of the touch points along this continuum. And it was just a suspicion based on what we knew about physiology last year. But now we're actually using metabolic breath analyzers and running tests. And literally, just to boil it down to brass tacks, once you open your mouth, you are no longer aerobically efficient, period. You would have to be controlling that significantly with your mouth in order to, but anybody who's breathing out of their mouth is really just doing that to offload something that they're not aware of what they're doing. So it's a really exciting avenue for us.

We're doing a lot of testing and having access to some pretty advanced metabolic analyzers is really cool. We're working with a company called Panoi Analytics, which basically took nanotech and converted what would normally look like. If you've ever done a VO2 max test, basically you have this Darth Vader mask hanging off your face and then a giant machine trying to compute all the data. Well, this thing does breath-by-breath analysis on a small face mask and then a battery pack about the size of a pillar candle and sends everything to the cloud. Breath-by-breath analysis, respiratory exchange rate, all the VO2, VCO2, and then graphs it in real time with heart rate. And it's pretty cool what we can see in real time and actually have an athlete or ourselves running through a metabolic

test and not just a run or a bike, which we'd still use, but because this thing is so small and portable, we can have athletes do a lot more movement options and see where their respiratory control breaks down. Yeah. It's funny. The, um, the, the owners of the company didn't really buy in to what we were saying. And, and one of the guys is a very educated exercise physiologist from Stanford. And tested Rob, lost his shit. And then he came out to my house and we did a test where I did some mouth breathing into nasal breathing. And literally the guy was jumping up and down going, what in the fuck are you doing? And then asked me to do something for the recovery

and showed him how quickly I could make recovery happen through ventilation. And he just, they lost it. And look, I'm not special. I'm not an elite athlete. I'm just somebody who's fucking around with a lot of things and trying to learn. And what we've stumbled on, I've never heard anybody talk or play with in the manner that we're doing that right now, which is, I think, the interesting part. And I don't understand why nobody grasped this quite the way that we did, because I don't think we're any different than anybody else out there. But what we're seeing and what's happening is pretty revolutionary.

Fuck yeah. Yeah. Well, I think a credit to both of you is that you're hungry. You know, you want to learn more. You want to know more and you want to push the envelope and explore all the possibilities. I think a lot of people come into contact with something like the Wim Hof method or these other things and they're like, that's fucking amazing. Like I have a breath practice.

Yeah. And they don't piece together all the different ways you can have a breath practice. Or like you were saying, Rob, earlier earlier you got your 30 minutes of breath each day but the other 23 and a half hours you're not thinking about your fucking breathing it's like we're kind of missing the mark there right let's not all get into one window let's think about the breath throughout the day yeah i've had a couple guys you know that i work with who've got i got them really into doing the ice thing, heat and ice. And one of the guys maybe a couple months ago was like, man, I just don't feel right without doing the ice.

And I'm like, well, then you haven't learned anything from it. You know? Why do you think that is? You really haven't gotten the lesson. So I guess you still need to keep going. And I know this is true for myself as well as Brian. We take long breaks from those practices, like heat and ice, super potent, great, 100% an advocate for using those tools. But I like to take a long break and then see, okay, I haven't been in 34, 32 degree water in three months, can I still keep my shit together when I get in there? And, you know, is it as good as if I'm in there a few times a week? No, but if I'm sort of within

90% of where my margins are, then I'm like, okay, good. Got into a bit of a scuffle online with that statement. We talked about this and exposure is exposure. And if you think exposure is constantly going in, it's like the intermittent fasting game. How many fucking people think they're intermittent fasting, but they're literally fasting every single day? Like, oh, that's not intermittent fasting. You're not teaching your body anything. You're just repeating the same thing over and over, expecting this thing to change, and that's called insanity. But take the ICE concept, and it's like, if you can't pull

yourself away from that and then get back in in weeks after you've removed your adaptive process from it, how quickly can you use the tools that you have in order to get to the, and it literally, I can do it in about two or three breaths. I can literally get to control to parasympathetic in a 32 degree water without being in it for time because of the amount of time that I sat and fucking trained that thing in order to understand it. And it wasn't until he really brought this into our sights of, hey, if you're doing it every day, it's not exactly exposure, bro. Like, oh yeah, it's just, it's the same thing as turning the air conditioner on or off in the house. It's no different. Like change up the scenery, it's not just about heat and ice. It's what are you exposing and what are you learning? This is all about deep practice. And the martial arts has done an incredible job of that. Unfortunately, we live in a time where a lot of people don't not to knock the martial arts. I'm a big fan of the martial arts. But yoga was originally and methodically designed as a deep practice to teach you what

you're learning in your life. This place, what you have here is something that should be teaching people when they're here. What are you learning when you're here and you're training and doing something and taking into your life? What are you doing? What do you get from that? And if you're not getting shit other than to come in and just get your high or get your dosing of endorphins,

you're just another addict. And so the responsibility has been lost to what it is you actually are trying to actually learn, right? And I think this is that process where we see people breaking down and getting stuck in the convenience of something. And it's just like, click, click, click. Oh, no, I'm going to go here to feel good about myself. And so I can accomplish my day. And I think there's a deeper path to this. And this is what we are trying to

really push. And breathing is one of the easy vehicles for that, but ultimately it comes down to deep practice. Fuck yeah. Where you guys have, talk about the website, talk a bit about where people can access you, talk about where you travel all over the world internationally for these seminars. Yeah, so the easiest way to find us

is powerspeedendurance.com forward slash Art of Breath. We're all over the place. So we're here in Austin this weekend. The next spot is March 9th, Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And then that's a double. So we have an Art of Breath on a Saturday and then an exposure seminar on a Sunday, which will include heat and ice, but we take a meta perspective around that as well, as Brian mentioned. April, we're in Vancouver. Then we go to Australia, and we're in various spots throughout the states until the fall where we go to Europe.

And it's going to be a pretty packed year, and that's just what we have planned so far. But anybody who wants to know where to find us can go there if you want to find us on social media power speed endurance as well yeah i fucking highly recommend and i you thankfully hooked me up with uh code to get in on the website and i've been following that but it's and the online course yes there is online course exactly that's what i'm referring to is phenomenal. But to be walked through it the way we were a year ago, and we get to do that tomorrow, which I'm fucking stoked for. It's just, there's a different, it's a different layer of learning. It's more visceral.

And if you have questions, you get them answered. And so I can't recommend enough that people actually attend a seminar. You learn it all in a day, and it'll change the way you fucking live. There's no doubt yeah you know and and just to add to this because it just we just kicked this off um we started a foundation and because we we really wanted to really understand the work this go around and we i partnered with uh a gal by the name of Dr. Tanya Bentley who is running the Health and Human Performance Foundation,

which is hhp-foundation.org. And there's going to be direct ability for people to actually donate and get involved in the research. We've already got, I think, three or four studies kicked off already. And we plan on going after all this stuff, not just breathwork, but everything in order to not only scrutinize the work, but to figure out what is actually going, what we're going to be doing in the future. And that's a pretty important piece for us. And the next layer of putting this into a, you know, the stratosphere. Always learning. Always learning. Fuck, man. Thank you both for

coming on. Thanks for having us. Awesome. Appreciate you. Looking forward to tomorrow. It's going to be awesome. Thank you, brothers. Right on. Fuck yeah. Thank you guys for listening to the HOH with the Art of Breath. Rob Wilson and Brian McKenzie have become two of my good friends. I hope you guys enjoy this one as much as I did. If you can, make it out to one of their art of breath seminars or start taking their art of breath course online. It is fire.

You will not be disappointed. And as always, 10% off all supplements and food products at onnit.com slash podcast.