Mark Bell's Power Project - Check Engine Light: Breath, Stress, and Human Performance (w/ Rob Wilson)

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

In this episode, Rob Wilson breaks down how breathing, stress, and performance are actually connected and why breathwork isn’t a shortcut around hard work, but a way to make hard work more sustainable.We talk about CO₂ tolerance, why panic is usually carbon dioxide and not lack of oxygen, and how high-performing athletes, fighters, and military operators can recover faster between efforts by changing how they breathe under stress.Rob explains why breathwork isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, why capacity still matters, and how coaches should adapt tools to the culture, goals, and environment of the people they’re working with. We also get into nasal breathing, heart rate recovery, conditioning mistakes, jiu-jitsu, sandbags, valsalva vs breathing with load, and how intensity can sometimes be used to hide psychology.Along the way, things take a turn into AI books, Morning Glory Milking Farm, and how to “sound less fat” when you’re out of shape.This episode is about making hard things easier without avoiding hard things.Follow Rob:https://www.instagram.com/thecheckenginelight/https://www.wilsonhealthandperformance.com/CHAPTERS:00:00 - Intro00:52 - Morning Glory Milking Farm05:48 - Breath Work for Different Populations13:02 - Benefits of Nasal Breathing16:08 - Nasal Breathing Techniques18:30 - Breathing as a Superpower25:28 - CO2 Tolerance in Breathing26:18 - Efficient Breathing Strategies27:47 - Managing Breathing Costs and Reserves31:07 - Body pH Regulation and Breathing38:34 - Methylene Blue Overview43:25 - Importance of Diaphragmatic Breathing52:39 - Free Diving Techniques1:00:00 - Effects of Nasal Breathing1:02:49 - Breathing and Weightlifting1:04:10 - Breathing and Force Production1:11:24 - Good Life Proteins: Quality Meat1:17:00 - Tips to Sound Less Fat1:22:34 - Understanding 1+11:25:30 - Inspiratory Muscle Trainers Discussion1:29:56 - Where to Find BrianSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!

When you talk about high performing people, athletes, or operators, as I show them, I can make their heart rate come down faster when they work really hard. Oh, you mean it's less expensive for me to work hard? Yeah. You can hide psychology in intensity. For any expert or coach is not to impose your interest on the group of people, but try to see what's the environment that they're working in. Who are they? What's their culture? You're talking to an active duty operator.

What they care about is staying in the fight and winning. There's no replacement for capacity. breathwork isn't a magic wand that allows you to skip hard work it takes actually if you're in decent physical condition a long time for your oxygen to get low all that panic feeling is carbon dioxide getting really hot how can people sound less fat when they're working out that's going to be the new power project shirt t-shirt says you sound fat so you wrote this book milking farm how morning glory milking Farm. What? Yeah, this is actually a bestseller on Amazon right now. 22,000 reviews. 22,000 reviews. Yeah. So you're right. There's money in this. This is a real book. This is

probably AI. This is some AI porn that some some some some nerd was like doing market research and was like, ah, women's romance craziness. Five billion dollars a year. Chat, write me a 150 page novel with these things and it was like and he put it in Amazon and then that's for sure an AI illustration a human being didn't paint that Morning Glory Farm offers full time hours, full benefits and a generous pay

with no experience needed. There's only one catch. The client's hell is grade A certified prime beef with the mainly media endowments to match. Hands on work with minotars isn't something Violet ever considered as a career option but she's determined to turn the opportunity into a reversal of fortune.

Wow, that was a good reading. He's read the book. You can tell him. That wasn't a first run, my friend. Oh, goodness. That's a world. What compelled you to write this book, Check Engine Light? Well, so a few things.

I've been wanting to write a book for forever. Long time. I've just been a personal goal. I really enjoy writing. But the book is based on a curriculum that I've been teaching as part of a program in Virginia Beach. There's a sister program in San Diego as well that specializes in what they call a hard reset for special operations, active duty operators and veterans. And so the program is called the continue mission or warrior fitness program.

And so I've been teaching that sort of health curriculum as part of that program for over three years. And as I taught it, the information sort of like told me, hey, this is a book. and I ignored it probably for like four months before the internal message was loud enough. This is a total curveball, but have you heard anything about waves of war? I have somebody told me about this recently. I haven't watched it, yeah. Or maybe waves and war. Waves and war, yeah.

It's about Ibegain. Right, military, you know, former military veterans. And so is that who you're dealing with? Are you dealing mainly with veterans? Active duty and veteran. Okay. And veteran. Even like pre-9-11, seals go through this program. So it's like a month-long holistic health reset, where it's like nutrition, strength and conditioning twice a day,

massage therapy, chiropractic, dietetics. And then the class I teach that this book is based on is sort of like a unifying framework that helps the guys understand sort of what's the backdrop. It's probably opposite of the way they've been treated. It's exactly, and that's exactly the point. I mean, they had to be treated a certain way, right, to go fight a war. You've got to be trained a very particular way. And then now they're coming to a place where they have proper, I mean, not like they don't have good nutrition, maybe when they're doing certain things. But in this particular situation, I have great training, great hydration, great sleep, great, just whatever you guys are offering.

They have kind of the highest level of that. Yeah, exactly. And it was founded by my good friend Alex Oliver. who's a retired seal so he built the program based on the operator's point of view so it's not like somebody came in from the outside he had experience he was largely responsible for the way human performance shifted in the seal teams during the war and so when he got out he created this continue mission idea which was okay how does he keep helping his brothers what can he take that he learned and build something special for them it's a really amazing program it's really cool place to

visit there's one of virginia beach and there's another facility uh in san diego about 350 guys a year go through that program and it's for sure life changing yeah it's an awesome thing to be a part of you know ral i'm curious about this when it comes to because i think the first time i ever heard of the idea of box breathing was a long time ago and they're like maybe 2013 25 14. And I heard about it within the context of like military personnel started doing box breathing. And as more and more people or as we've learned more about breathing, people tend to put breath work into a lens of techniques. Do this for this many seconds, for this many seconds. But you seem to have like an overall, I guess more systems approach to understanding how to manipulate your breath for whatever you're trying to do. So when it comes to working with, you know, you know, military personnel, how do you go about? it because I think with what you do you apply it to so many different types of people military athletes everyone but you're able to do it with a better understanding overall on the breath so how do you apply that I mean with I mean really with any

population the first thing I think is for any expert or or coach is not to impose your interest on the group of people but try to see what's the environment that they're working in who are they What's their culture? And I close your interest. Can you give us an example? Yeah. Like I think box breathing this much time, this many days is the thing.

And so I'm just going to one size fits all this and just go, you guys should do it. Instead of who am I talking to? What's their goal? How much time does this person have? What do they care about? Right. So if you're talking to an active duty operator, what they care about is staying in the fight and winning. so anything that I offer them around breath control first of all it would have to be solving a real

problem they have so I try not to go and just go well I like breath work and I've seen success so you should do breath work but instead for it actually to be a solution to a problem that they have and then say hey I can help you solve this problem with this thing that I know and then consider not just like what the research says that's important But also, what do they really have time for? What are they going to be interested in? What are they going to feel? Right?

So when you talk about high performing people, athletes, or operators, I often go based on feel, no matter what data says, you're going to go by, this feels right to me, or I felt different, or I got this result. So a lot of times I don't even start with slow breathing with these guys. I show them, I can make their heart rate come down faster when they work really hard. And it's like, oh.

Oh, you mean it's less expensive for me to work hard. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, now you have my attention, right? Instead of let's be Zen first. Now, actually, let's even talk about that specifically because that right there, I mean, think of a fighter who's in a fight and they have to go into their next round. The fighter who can bring their heart rate down faster is going to have a better start to the next round, right? So this can be applied to a lot of things.

But specifically with that, bring your heart rate down after doing something difficult. what's the process of thinking for how to do that how does somebody go about that um well so i think about it in in two ways one is first of all if you want your heart rate to come down faster between bounce of work there's no replacement for capacity so i just want to make sure like that's really clear like breathwork isn't a magic wand that allows you to skip hard work and i think sometimes it's thought of that way like if you just know this special breathing thing that you don't have to work hard anymore, which is complete horseshit. And anybody who does hard stuff knows that's not real. I think that's one of our friends meant he was on our show. And we asked him a question

about breathing. And he's like, I don't think breathing is really going to help you control your heart rate much. And I think he meant exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. If you don't have the capacity. Yeah. So you still have to build capacity. However, if you have capacity and you can alter your breathing patterns, you can do a couple of things. Maybe bring your heart rate down, but definitely change your perception of effort. And that really matters, right? Because your perception of what's going on in the environment, what effort feels like to you, and your stress physiology are all intertwined. It's not like they live in some separate universe from each other, right? And breathing is a linchpin in all of those like stones in that arch.

way. And so it's really important to know that when you start to apply breathing under real-time conditions of stress, like I'm trying to change my reaction to stress right now, that not only do you need capacity, but that you also, while you're doing it, may not feel an immediate physiological effect, but the psychological effect that you might get will affect physiology. Right. So those things are so deeply intertwined with each other that it's hard to say where one ends and the other one begins. And I don't mean to say that in like some ambiguous flowery way. Like that's that's real. Things that we perceive can change our heart rate. Somebody who's never been on a podcast like this before might get really nervous as they walk through the door and their

heart rate will go up. Start sweating. Yeah, they're not physically working any harder, but their anticipation of how others will perceive them spikes their heart rate. Well, you guys both do jujitsu and you know like when you're first starting out, it's a little bit more nerve-wracking. And when you see certain people are in class and stuff like that, it makes you a little bit more nervous. Yeah. And then you get used to it. Yeah. I think one of the things like, you know, to kind of tie that in, right, is with something like jujitsu, a lot of people have never experienced that much physical contact.

with another human. They really, that's why white belts often are so spazzy because they really don't know how to interact physically with other humans. It probably has been since they were five years old since they rough and tumble played with another person. And in other sports, there's usually like a distraction. There's like a ball, you know?

Like, so we're going to get super close because of this ball. But now we're like rolling around the ground and you're in close quarters and you've never really been that close to somebody unless you wrestled or something. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, Jiu-Jitsu in particular, in wrestling, it's like a wake-up calm because, you know, every dude thinks that they can fight. And then you get on the mat and really quickly you realize like there's like 10 chicks who can strangle you at will. And you're like, oh, shit, I am not as capable as I thought I was or, you know, some 150-pound teenager just held me down for 10 minutes.

It's embarrassing. but there's a decision to be made at that time right but it's you know to bring it back to the breathing thing even if let's say just as a hypothetical illustration you're new to jiu jitsu and you decide to use some controlled breathing in your early studies right maybe it doesn't have some tangible effect on your heart rate but what it can do is provide you an opportunity to stay focused on what you're supposed to be learning and not let your nerves overwhelm you to the point where you're disconnected from where you're actually supposed to be focused on right so everything's not about like oh I have to have this tangible this many beats a minute decrease in breathing or else it's

bullshit simply altering your point of focus under conditions of stress changes your decision making right so that's that's sort of the point I'm trying to make yeah I want to ask you this we were talking in the gym about nasal breathing something we talked about on this podcast and I'm curious what do you think that people get wrong when there may be communicating about nasal breathing some people are when they talk about nasal breathing they're like that's the only way you should be breathing you should be having to breathe any other way and if you're breathing through the mouth you're doing it wrong which is okay but what do you think

the benefit is that that's brought in your mind from all the things that you've done and what you've learned about it? And where do you think it's overblown? Well, so first of all, your nose is sort of the primary structure that deals with air as far as normal life is concerned. Right. So you have, you know, per nasal sinuses. There's hair, right? So it's meant to deal with air first as the default breathing mechanism. if you're walking around the world and your mouth is open then that tells us something so this is the way i normally explain it and i'll i'll bring this back around right so if you get on an exercise bike like an echo bike right and you're working really hard if you just keep

working harder and harder and harder at some point so much byproduct so much waste from that work will build up that you have to open your mouth to release enough exhaust out of the system to continue working carbon dioxide it's carbon dioxide right so carbon dioxide is released so that you maintain blood pH right and that's normal we look at that and we go oh that guy's mouth's open well that makes sense he's working his ass off but if you walk into stuff and you are releasing that from your nose too right yeah of course it's just a lesser degree like you can get more out by breathing out of the mouth exactly it's a bigger hole right it's just a bigger hole if the same thing is happening to your barista while she makes your

cappuccino that tells you something about that person's ability to deal with energy literally right so you go into public places and you see people who are forced to take the stairs and they're breathing like they're working hard on an echo bike that tells you something about their capacity in the domain of strength and conditioning exercise there is no catch all where we go nasal breathing is aerobic right it's going to be relative to how hard you're working it's simply a constraint that coaches could use to amplify a certain physiological outcome in training if you don't want to use it does that mean you can't develop endurance no that's ridiculous everybody knows that the best endurance athletes in the world train all the time

and their mouths are open. That's not the question. The question is, can we be more efficient in the way that we develop it? And are there cards left on the table? And the answer to that is yes. When you say there cards left on the table, what do you mean when you say? Particularly things like breath rate, right? So that's a a major card that gets left on the table is just pulmonary efficiency. Right. So how many breaths does it take to bring in the same volume of oxygen. Now, some of that is moderately correlated to nasal breathing. Just because your mouth is closed doesn't necessarily mean you're taking in bigger breaths. It's just that it's an easy way to cue somebody to breathe more slowly while they do work.

That's all it is. It's just a cue. It's just a constraint. I know that somebody is going to listen to me say this and be like, well, here's this one research paper that shows. But it's like, man, if you go out in the real world, many well-conditioned athletes don't pay attention to their breathing at all. However, can they do better if they deploy some nasal breathing in their training? My experience has been, yes. when you do that and how you do it that's a whole that's a whole another ball wax right and you can also

sort of bypass some of this a little bit uh by almost going off your heart rate i i agree with what you're saying and i'm a fan of nasal breathing and i would prefer to see people work on that um but would you agree that um you know using this kind of the this math atone type of method and and having your your heart rate just regulated in this like zone two phase would probably or potentially do some of the same things yeah i mean i use a morphius right joel jameson i i use morphius i get up every day i put a chest strap on measure my HRV and then when i get on the bike i go oh okay here are my ranges but i also do controlled nasal breathing i don't do it at a specific cadence anymore like I used to, like I once would do one breath every five seconds and it would be very

rigid. Now I just try to keep it slow, smooth, and even through my nose while I work under those conditions. It feels like a superpower getting used to that CO2 buildup. It is. Yeah, it absolutely is. Have you, oh, go ahead. But real quick on that, before we move on from it, Mark, can you explain how it is potentially feels like a superpower in that sense? Why does it feel like a superpower for people? Because again, I don't want us to overstate its importance, but I also want people to understand what's happening

when you're able to become efficient in that way and then how you would potentially have people employed for themselves. And I understand so many different sports, contexts, but generally. Sure. So just so I make sure I understand your question. So why does it feel like a superpower? Yes. And then how would somebody begin to explore it?

Yeah. Okay. So it starts to feel like a superpower because you start to develop tolerance to higher and higher levels of carbon dioxide in the system, right? So carbon dioxide other than being a metabolic waste is also the sympathetic trigger for breathing, right? And when you say sympathetic, stress trigger. Autonomic, it's a stress trigger, right? So it is the chemical trigger that tells your brain breathe heavier or breathe faster, right? So it's the indication to change breathing in the autonomic nervous system.

And that happens through chemo and barrow reflexes that are in their carotid arteries in your neck. Right. And so that thermostat is not necessarily at a set point that is designed for performance. It's designed for survival. So moving the set point farther means you move the trigger to, breathe faster or deeper under those conditions farther and that often results in calm right now in addition to that just breathing slower and smoother potentially from either orifice but nose tends to be better right because once you open your mouth it's very easy to hyperventilate right that's one of

the things about keeping your mouth closed is that you have to be more purposeful with your breathing once you open your mouth, it's really easy to start breathing faster. Again, that's not bad. But if you've decided that when you're under stress, you want to feel more calm, what your training now is feeling calm. So if you wanted to start to explore something like this, under moderate or even easy stress, right, whether it's low end rolling in jujitsu, a easier training partner or a moderate pace on some kind of cardiovascular equipment, you can just focus on breathing slow, smooth, even through your nose. It doesn't have to be any more special than that, but I find that the tempo and the rhythm for most people are enough, is enough for what they care about.

Also, what I've noticed personally by utilizing some of these strategies is that it makes things more recoverable. Now, I could go out and run and just kick my own ass and run really hard and keep my mouth shut and sort of mess up this whole thing by having my heart rate a little bit too high and have a workout that's not that easy to recover from. But basically, if I keep my mouth shut, the workout is only so hard. It only gets such an intensity. And so I think that's something that people can keep in mind.

I think if people can start to shift not only just like a little, little bit of their workouts. I know we're trying to encourage people slowly to try to move to some of these things. But if they could start to move most of their workouts to these kinds of things, they might find it to be revolutionary for their training. That's what I personally have found with it. And I know there's like this difference too between, you know, whether you're burning fat or burning carbs. And I heard you say aerobic earlier. It's like that starts to get in, we're starting to get in a different territory. We can't tell those things necessarily just from you breathing into your nose, correct? That's right. And I mean, it's like to your point, it's a

governor right but you can and for certain populations of people who will outwork their own best interest right you can keep your mouth closed and like just blow your wad training probably gotten good at it so you might be able to have your heart rate probably pretty high I've had my heart rate pretty high but I've also pissed myself on a rower doing it so literally literally I pissed myself on a rower because I pushed so I want I mean I when I was first exploring that this, I wanted to see where the limits. Yeah. And it turns out the limits are, if you get tolerant enough to carbon dioxide, you can

work really hard and to the point where you will piss yourself. How? Yeah, what's the trigger? Because you had to go to the bathroom before. You felt it, right? No, it was just more like, like you having an adrenal event while you're working really, really hard. And these are the same things that, that all kinds of, like athletes.

will bypass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, an example I'll give, and I don't mean to, I'm not comparing myself to these people, but instead the sensation. When I talk to friends of mine or guys that I work with who are in the SEAL teams, when they do water confidence, training, or when they do stress testing in the pool, most of that signal of panic, that's because your brain is telling you, you have to breathe, you have to breathe, you have to breathe, you have to breathe, you have to breathe you're going to die that's carbon dioxide that's sending that signal it takes actually if you're in decent physical condition a long time for your oxygen to get low all that panic feeling is carbon dioxide getting really high so people who learn how to deal with and bypass

that you end up figuring out on the other side of that is a huge bit of capacity now that's what free divers do, right? They develop carbon dioxide and they talk about, hey, you're bypassing all these layers of fear. And this is through breath holds. This is all through breath holds, right? And now juxtapose to that is your rate of physiological activity, right? Free divers are, they work on being completely relaxed, right? They're not doing work or dealing with a lot of environmental factors. And so that's where there's the divergence between what works in free diving and what works in other sport or combatives types environments is that you also have to problem solve so there are some things that free diving type training is helpful for and that we can learn from like developing CO2 tolerance

but there are some places where it's not relevant at all and that's when conditions get messier and messier and messier so actually a question on that note so would it be would it be safe to assume that if you're increasing your efficiency and your output while nasal breathing, you're improving your CO2 tolerance because you're not, you're not exhaling the amount of CO2, you would be through the mouth? By definition. Okay. What do you say by definition? Is that like, is that? I'm answering you. Absolutely. That's what's happening, right? So if you're increasing your, you're a work rate and you're not releasing as much carbon dioxide, assuming you're not blowing out a much of air out of your nose. That's the assumption there, right? So as long as your breath rate

remains constant and you can continue to do more work, then by definition, you're more tolerant to carbon dioxide. And last question on this, could this also be looked through the lens of you are doing more work while potentially breathing less? Yes. Because more, I think one thing that, you mean, you even see it when you see ads of people working out, you know, ads of fitness. It's like, intensity is something that we look fondly on because we kind of like it's, it's inspirational to see people breathe hard and work hard when working out. So I think when a lot of people get into stuff, they're like, I got to put it. I got to get to the red, right?

But a good goal for an athlete would be to be able to have high out, like not even be able to have high up, but like breathe less while doing more. And it doesn't mean that you'll never get to a point where you are, you know, having a high output but you want to reserve before you get there isn't isn't that always the goal you would think right to be able to to be able to have higher and higher returns on investment like in what domain is being less efficient a good idea i haven't heard anybody make a good argument for getting less back than they gave out so why would it be good idea in physiology like nobody would do that with money or wouldn't right you wouldn't want to right you go okay i'm going to spend

10 grand. If I get 8 grand back, that's a loss. Right. If I get 10 grand back, that's okay. I want more. I want to be more efficient and build over time. I can do more and more and more and get even more return with even less out. I noticed you said for yourself that it's like a lot less frequent that you're kind of going all out. And have you found that to be true with most of the people that you're working with that that's an effective strategy um for some and you know so there's there's a couple things one and this what you're asking goes actually back to what in seaman was asking which is you know we tend to glorify higher intensity and i think if your default is to work really hard that's good i've definitely seen plenty of people who don't know how to put it in the red either

And I don't think that that's a good thing. I've definitely had plenty of clients, especially from the general population, who were afraid of the red line. And I think that's a mistake too, because if life or competition, whatever, forces you in the red, and you've never been exposed to that,

you'll fall apart. Yeah. And so I think it's really important to have some regular exposure where you're not in control. Right. Now, however you do that, whether it's on a rower,

where you pee yourself or it's in jujitsu or you enter a competition or you know you write a book whatever the thing is that puts it on you where you have to be intense and do your best under less than ideal conditions that is good however people who are often high achievers whether by nature or by practice are generally not very good at cost reserve when it comes to the most themselves. And so what I found is on the later end of career, whether it's operators or competitive power lifters or elite athletes, as those folks start to get into thinking more about how can I stretch this game out. Now we've got to touch less intensity because you don't need it anymore. Like it's in reserve, right? Like, okay, I got a big block 350 in the garage. If I need

it but I don't need to I don't need to drive the general lead to work every day right like I'm comfortable with the Prius because the gas mileage is better you know and I think sometimes though high achieving people you have to go through the Dodge Charger face right and I think it's important like I look back on my own time pissing myself on the rower lifting really heavy I'm I wouldn't trade that for now where I'm okay I'm a little more laid back because it gave me a base of intensity that I can call upon if wanted or needed I just have a better relationship now with managing those costs so now I'm 45 and it's like well what's the return if I if I squat floor press overhead press right power clean heavy four or five days a week

well it's fine if that's all I care about doing but if I want to have a lot of energy for other things and not cook myself on the back end I have to be a lot more efficient with how I use my time my energy my physiology have you ever done some redlining type of work and then followed it up with nasal breathing because I've I've done this that before and it's actually insanely challenging it's really hard it's hard to like you can't it's just so it's that you can't do it but it yeah the the intensity of it of the nasal breathing is so much worse because it's hard to it seems like it's hard to regulate your heart rate after you already went to that right exactly because the CO2 is already high right you've got a lot of your pH is becoming

acidic so what is your physiology wants to do it wants to dump that CO2 so that it can maintain pH right the drive to maintain pH is a central homeostatic function in our physical You get too acidic and you sustain acidity too long. You die. You get too alkaline and you sustain alkalinity too long. You die. We have a very tight threshold. And so the mechanisms, the feedback loops that drive that tight bandwidth are very highly controlled in the system and they're predictive, right? What's really interesting, I think. So the carotid arteries, well, arteries are about blood flow out. So the measurement of when we should breathe more is actually blood going out of the system not how much is the waste that's returning so it's predictive of what will happen in the future if you keep doing this so it doesn't wait until you're about to die to make you breathe different it happens way earlier and if you're less and less fit that threshold moves lower and lower and lower i would gather with some degree of certainty

really fit people will probably be more CO2 tolerant especially if you have a really high VO2 max you could probably go oh hey we're going to get you on the spike and we're going to work at 70% of your threshold and that's not always true because there are other factors and without them practicing nasal breathing they would probably do well probably if they're actually aerobically fit and this is something in seem and I were talking about

before you came earlier is just there's a difference between being conditioned and being fit, right? So you can be very conditioned to the environment that you train or compete in, but it doesn't mean your physiology has a specific adaptive quality. That happens a lot with swimmers when they get a V-O-2 max.

It's much lower than normal because they're not testing them in a pool. They're usually on a treadmill or a bike. Exactly. And then people are like, how is their V-O-2 max only 45? Yeah, it's like only 45, but go jump in the pool and it'll smoke you.

Do you think that that could be a limitation on V-O-2 max tests? Like, I mean, a bike, is, I think, something that most people can adapt to, but running is, it's quite a mechanically demanding thing to do well for a long period of time at high intensity. That's why most exercise testing is done on a bike, right? You think, why was the bicycle invented is because it's a more efficient way for a human being to travel from one place to another, right? So it's more efficient, it's easier to standardize. So if you really want to know with a high degree of certainty,

what's happening metabolically you get on a magnetically controlled break where they have calibrated wattage right you're on a metabolic cart that's measuring gas exchange and you have a heart rate monitor on but that doesn't mean that's what's appropriate for a sport right so higher VO2 max is is good but at what point are we talking about diminishing returns for a swimmer in this performance environment the goal is to win yeah right that's the point of competing at something there's other benefits but competing is i'm going to go to this place and see where i compare against other people in an effort to be the best right so that's performance so you're in performance and your swimmer your marker isn't v02 max unless v02 max predicts with some degree of certainty that you're going

you have a higher chance of winning so it's like like okay well if we know that on average the best whatever 50 swimmers in the world i'm making this up by the way but if we knew on average the best 50 swimmers in the world were a 45 and two of the top 100 were above 50 but they didn't win what's the where's the return so that goes back to a cost analysis again right it's like well i let's spend time in the pool then i don't i just need you to be fit enough to sustain the training that's required to win right so a lot of the arguments that happen over whether it's breathing or different strength and conditioning is because we didn't define terms clearly to begin with like what what okay what precisely is the goal that we're after right

we have to bring clarity to what the problems are that we're trying to solve otherwise we just end up arguing with each other about different stuff we're not even talking about the same terms Got it. I think sometimes when people are working on conditioning, they have a hard time improving at maybe the rate that they would like. There's this idea that they're sometimes just their effort is way too little or their effort is way too hard. And my understanding from some of the stuff I've done with running is when you're running and you're doing something for like a duration, it seems like you're trying to like tap into this endurance based training system. And you're trying to keep things on the like the slower twitch side rather than the fast twitch muscle fibers. But it seems like if you get going a little too fast and you get breathing a little bit too hard, your heart rate gets a little bit too high, that you end up utilizing some of those fast twitch fibers. In an event that the fast twitch fibers are not designed for and you like burn them out, wear them out. That's the way it works in my smelly science head. And then you and then you go back to trying to read, you know, gather your breath and you.

kind of can't because you're now and in that in that state it's hard to I'm not saying that you can't but it's hard to improve when your training is like that and so I think it's important to just bring that up especially for people that might be listening that are running I think it's a crime of a lot of runners they go out and they have this intent and then they just say F the intent because they feel good and instead of staying in that 75% which they would have really gotten something great for they drift off into something slightly different that isn't actually really going to benefit them yeah well and you know I think this is where we just kind of get into like human fallacies in general I've certainly been guilty of similar just because you want

to because I want to but also you know I get on the bike and sometimes I'm like I realize like I'm going more intense than I'm supposed to be but it's because you can hide psychology in intensity right you when you work really hard that is a place where you can go to forget about other shit you don't like you get endorphins and you can kind of like I'm in this and you don't have to think you're not thinking about like

your third kids braces and there's a hole on the fucking roof and all this other shit but if your heart rate's 140 a lot of other shit can come pouring in there I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer and you know Thomas is somebody it's an animal with working out you got a chance to work out with them

I worked out with him, and he's kind of always on the front lines of, like, you know, finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that Transcriptions was the first company to put out Methylene Blue. Now, look at Methylene Blue. It's so popular. It's everywhere. It's one of those things. If you guys listen to this podcast, you know I'm very iffy with the supplements that I take.

Because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You've got to be careful. The great thing about Transcriptions is that when people want to get Methaline Blue, usually they'll go on Amazon, they're going on at these other sites. It's not third party testing. It's not it's not dosed. A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing of it. Transcriptions, they have third party testing for the products. It's dose so you know easily what exact dose of methylene blue you're getting in each troki. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not going to be anything in it. It's safe. You can have it dissolve and you

can turn your whole world blue if you want or you can just swallow it. They have two different types of Methylene Blue, they have one that is, I believe, dose at 16 milligrams, and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams. So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16, I feel, is very safe. You can also score the trokies and you can break them up into smaller bits. Yeah, so I do. And in addition to that, on top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well. They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before jiu-jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention

to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with my, with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling. And it's like, cool. That means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to, and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast, and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends Methylene Blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. And they're seeing some profound impacts.

And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those are you doing red light therapy or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight? It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're going to do outside.

And this stuff is great, but please. First off, they have stuff for staying calm. stuff for sleep. But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition. This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing. And it's going to make things so much better if you're doing everything else too. And I think this is just a little different, too, than just adding some magnesium to your diet. I think this is a little different than, you know, treat these things appropriately. Make sure you do some of your own research, but. Oh, if you're taking

medications. Yeah. SRIs, you better talk to your doctor first. Don't, don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it would be good to double triple, quadruple check and make sure that you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need. So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, week this never strength. Catch you guys later. Right. And so sometimes we go, oh, well, my goal is this endurance thing. And then you talk to these athletes for a while and you realize what they're actually doing is running to forget their problems. And so that's like, and that's not wrong, but it's like, decide what's important.

to you okay if you're really running for the outcome of improving your endurance so that you can improve your 5k or 10k or marathon time then I need you to commit to these zones of activity to this bandwidth under these conditions and not just default to what placates your ego or and again I'm as guilty of it as anybody right I'm not I'm not I'm not free of this fallacy. Yeah, we love training. It's fun and sometimes you push in a direction that maybe isn't the most useful for progress. Well, yeah. And also like if you're a hard, if you're a motivated hardworking individual, there's another component, then you know that a default road to success is to work really hard. Right. But that's not all it takes. Right. So some folks go,

okay well i know if i grind and i don't know anything else if i just work my ass off and i just put out effort that's better than not and i mean most of the time that's that's true it's just really expensive to do it like that in all capacities i'm curious about this rob because um you know a lot of uh athletes even even some who aren't breathing uh mostly through the diaphragm can still perform and do things at a high level. And how much importance do you put on the mechanics of learning how to breathe into the diaphragm versus being someone who is breathing up there in activity?

Is that something that you feel needs importance? Yes and no. Okay, right? Which is like weird because I know I'm like, especially for a long time, I was like a breathing dude. But like you just said, you can have a lot of success but not ever pay attention to it and your diaphragm is a muscle that's mostly evolved to work without your conscious influence yeah right it actually has very

low pro preceptor count that's why it's hard to feel it when you first start doing breathwork training you're like my uh with my where the fuck is this thing right um and that's because it's mostly we breathe like 24 000 times a day it's mostly meant to just do its job and to not be thought of. So if you're trying, like bring this back to my, and I hate, you know,

I hate to be overly redundant, but if you have an outcome that diaphragmatic training supports, then yes, do it. But is it a priority for every single athlete I work with?

Not necessarily. That's it. Okay, I'm curious as to why. The reason why I wonder why, because in my mind, in my mind, I'm like,

well, if an athlete learns how to better their mechanics of breathing, I would think that that would benefit every athlete. That's what my assumption would be, but why is that wrong? So, okay, you're the world champion in jujitsu. You have five world titles at Black Belt. You've won ghee and no ghee pans. You've won ghee and no ghee worlds. You've qualified for ADCC. You have very limited time in a week to train and strengthen conditioning. Yeah. And I'm going to say let's start with your diaphragm you're going to be like with who the fuck is this guy and you're going to bounce but if i can use it to improve something that you care about then i'll do it but i don't assume that the athlete cares about what i care about now rob wilson as a person i invest a lot of time

and energy in the development of my own diaphragmatic capacity but that doesn't mean that what i interested in and what works for me is appropriate immediately for every athlete that I work with my job is their coach is to help them solve their problems period so they their goal comes first now does that mean I won't find like a side door because I know it's valuable oh no I definitely oh hey what are you going to do to downshift uh at the end of the day man I'm still hyped up after training oh here's this yoga tune up ball by jill miller i just want you to lay on it and every time you you're just going to do 20 slow smooth breaths and every time you do all i want you do is to try to push into the ball and then relax and get heavier and then i wait for them to report man you know

after i did that the next day at jujitsu oh my back felt better and my hips didn't wake me up i'm like oh man you know that's probably because your diaphragm is working a little bit better oh okay hey you want to try some more of that yeah let's do it and then it's their idea Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, but to tell somebody who's already at the top of their field that you have some secret to unlock for them is like, they're gonna tell you to get fucked, right?

And so that is something that click, that's, okay, so that's why I was tripping a little bit because that is something that would help them get better, even though it might not be the thing that makes them win another world championship, it might be the thing that maybe gives them a little bit more longevity, maybe gives them a little bit better,

you know, they're able to be a bit calmer in certain situations because they're breathing into the diaphragm. And maybe. I don't, I don't operate from certainty. I don't know how things I'm going to do are going to affect the athlete until we're on the other side of trying it. Yeah. So, you know, our mutual friend Greg Souters, right, he's been on here a couple of times.

I met Greg through D'Andre. I have been D's Strengthing Conditioning coach for a long time. and I was his wife's coach. That's how I met Greg. First, Greg wanted me to work with Alex. Oh, wow. I was already working with Dee. Greg's like, hey, can you work with Alex?

And at the time, Alex had just won Worlds at Blackbell. And so we got on the phone and I was like, we started chatting. I'm like, you know, I just want to ask you, like, Alex is the best in the world. What do you want from me? Like, she's really strong, like freakishly strong. a year off double body weight deadlift strong crazy crazy freak of an athlete right I'm like what do I have to offer you guys and it was mostly like well she might be going up a weight class want to put on some muscle maybe improve some recovery still oh okay well yeah but like I'm going to

tell the best female 55 kilogram jiu jitsu player in the world like oh hey I'm going to come in you're going to breathe with your diaphragm what are you you going to be the world champion you are the world champion yeah right so i i just don't make what i care about the priority but i but i do know it's important i know that um having a more powerful diaphragm will make you breathe more efficiently right that's we know that um breathing better with your intercostals right so better rib motions better spine motion right so being able to control intratheracic pressure while you produce force is a really Can you explain that a little more?

Yeah, so just like a val salva If you're lifting right You have a barbell on your back You do a val salva maneuver You increase intratheracic pressures Right so you pressurize the rib cage Internally and allows you to It allows you to push more force into the bar

That's like the simplest example right But being able to modulate Intratheracic pressure There's some evidence that limb coordination Is better Athletes don't care about any of that shit they just want to feel it yeah right and so i don't want to give them something that's hard to feel first i want to give them something that's easy to feel first because that gives me buying they're going to

that gives me credibility with whether it's a elite athlete or it's just some executive or mom or whatever with limited time some moms and dads or people who are i train in the general population they have limited bandwidth oh here's this thing that's going to require a 20 hour a week investment for you to feel. It's like, okay. See you never, right? But it's like, hey, I'm going to show you this thing. You're going to feel different when we're done. Right. And that's like, you know, we were doing rope flow. You do a little rope flow and you get that thing moving. You start to feel like deep heat in your shoulders, right? You feel this deep heat in your spine. You feel that. You're like, oh, man, I'm looser. It even like will change your mood. I know this sounds silly, but it will. You start to

feel like, oh man, my stuff just feels good. It's like, oh, it's fun. Oh, I'm going to try this because it's fun. It's cheap. And then you actually give yourself over to the practice and the deeper parts of it unfold. And I think sometimes for guys like us who are experienced with, I mean, I assume all three of us have been involved in athletics and training our entire lives. Right. So I don't remember. I grew up in a bodybuilding gym I don't remember a time when I wasn't at a gym fit. I don't know a time

in my life when I couldn't do a pull-up. It's always been a part of my life training. So there are some things that are tacit to the way that I view the world as a professional and as a person that are not tacit to other people. That's something I've really only realized as I've matured in my

career. Yeah. Is that I have to be careful where, when, and how I deliver tools to the people and that's why I speak carefully about things like breath work because I know what I've seen and I know what the research says but I also know that there's a lot of nuance in there and mostly what I care about is that people do something

because they start to do something and they go oh man I like this or this didn't work or that didn't work let me try this thing but if you try to cram it people are like pass yeah right I'm not ready to change that fast now not everybody's like that some people are jump in head first right like oh what's that interesting thing aye right but but not everybody's not everybody's ready to dive in like that so I try to be careful okay you were mentioning free diving a while back when we're talking a

little bit more about breathing and I thought I remembered there's a guy that like broke the record and he did like 30 minutes or 33 minutes it's like he's underwater for like a longer period of time than like a dolphin or something crazy like that. Yeah. So the, I'm sorry. How does some of these people build up a capacity like that? I mean, because it's not like he's just sitting there and not doing anything. He's actually swimming as well. Well, so those static apnea are records that are 20, 30 minutes are people taking exogenous oxygen into their body. So they're getting positive pressure oxygen. So they're loading oxygen into the system. I'm not taking.

Like before they go down. So, yeah, this, this is the record for depth. But the static apnea, that would be the static apnea world record is in a pool. And those athletes are getting exogenous oxygen. Okay. For a while. And I'm not taking anything away,

but it doesn't mean it's easy, but then they float, they sort of do a dead man's float. Free diving like this is extremely difficult because as you dive down deeper, the pressure around your body increases exponentially. So it comes back up. Yeah, so the weight of water is increasing significantly, and it's trying to crush your lungs. So there's a lot more skill involved in, you know, open water free diving.

A great book about that actually is deep by James Nestor. It explores that culture and then the ocean in general. It's a fantastic. He wrote Breath as well, obviously, right? some really crazy records that are like that where people swim like for distance rather than like depth. It's just, I don't know, I just think it's insane that people can hold their breath for that long. And then some of my understanding is when they do the deep dive that other people can't even follow them or something like that because of the pressure of the tanks and stuff like that. Yeah.

So this is, I'm not a free diver. So this is like the best of my recollection that their safeties. at certain points, right? And some of that is to remind them to, like, depressurize as they're coming up so that they don't, like, blow their eardrums out and pass out, die. So those safeties are there because sometimes they're going up and the O2 is getting low and they're like, oh, I feel good. And they fall out underwater. So those safeties are there to swim them up. It's not, I mean, people die in free diving sport.

Someone actually died out of a bathhouse here in Sacramento a few years back because they were doing Wim Hof and a cold plunge. I knew you were going to say Wimhoff in a cold plunge. Yep. Yeah. So. Yeah. There's been stuff like that with the military where guys were, you know, doing hyperventilation, Wimhoff style breathing, which drives CO2 down. That's why when you do Wemhoff breathing and then you're like, yeah, I can do a gazillion pushups.

right you like front-loaded a bunch of oxygen you dumped a bunch of CO2 and so it feels like he can do more stuff but it's more like a magic trick yeah however you have to give credit where credits do probably millions of people now are exploring breathwork

because of his work I'm not saying he's the bees knees or he's the best things since sliced bread or anything like that but a lot of people saw him heard about him tried his stuff felt different and then kept exploring. Yeah.

So just don't, you've got to know the appropriate medicine and dose for the, whatever the illness is that you're trying to alleviate. But, you know, I did his online course probably 15 years ago now,

but I felt different. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. What's going on? Do you utilize any of that application anymore for anything? No. You don't think it's like applicable to much of anything. Not for me.

Okay. Yeah, not for me. So actually that that's, you know, I think, I think for good reason, we've been kind of diving down, bring, kind of calming yourself down, becoming more efficient, learning how to not stress out too much, right? And bring yourself out of that because a lot of people struggle with that. It doesn't take, it's not difficult for a lot of people to feel very stressed and hyperventilate during exercise. But what is the context for potentially faster, harder breathing with any of this for an athlete? Harder breathing in particular, especially small doses during high effort. Okay.

Can be really helpful. So I call like power exhalation or pulsing exhales, which would be like that. kind of of breathing so i'll you know use the jiu jitsu example again because that's where i personally would use it the most right you have a really hard three minute round of wrestling yeah you're getting fatigued you're like holy shit i'm gonna have to do that again you got a minute to get your shit together that kind of powerful breathing can help you dump some co2 it can redistribute your focus from out their stuff to okay what what's going on in here Let me think about what just happened.

Bring the locus of control centrally. Yeah. Calm down. And then when I feel like I'm ready, breathe normally. And then be ready to go back to work. So when you use those more powerful base or those higher-paced breathing strategies, they should be to help shift you down and then be prepared to do work. Right.

So sometimes, and this is another thing. like we're not talking about breathing as the point we're talking about performance as the point right if you're talking about breathing training to improve breathing for something else that's a related but different conversation okay in the real-time performance environment it should be to reserve energy if possible and then help you focus again so that's when I use more of that powerful breathing the other time I'll use it is when I'm accumulating some fatigue. So like yesterday I flew cross country from the East Coast of Phoenix. Then this morning I flew from Phoenix to hear to get up early again.

So I'll use faster-paced breathing with sun salutation. And because it will bring up sympathetic, it will wake me up without having to use a substance. Right. So I'll, it'll, that's what it does. it drives up the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, especially when you combine it with physical action. So that's when I'll use that mostly. But for me, it's not a major part of my practice anymore.

Something I may have forgot to mention or maybe all of us sort of forgot to mention or highlight is that when you are working on nasal breathing, there's this idea that there's plenty of oxygen within us, right? So can you explain a little bit of what's happening when you're nasal breathing and then that ox, because my understanding some of the oxygen gets kind of released from other parts of your body or something like that.

Maybe there's, so there's, there might be that, so there's a bore effect, right? So oxygen and carbon dioxide occupy the same space on hemoglobin. and somebody who knows more about exercise physiology and chemistry can explain this better than me. So shout out Dr. Andy Galpin, if you really want to get to granular about this. But essentially some of the theory says, okay, if I nasal breathe and I can do that longer,

there's some potential that I'll release a higher volume of oxygen into the bloodstream. I'm not sure that there's clear evidence for that, although the logic follows. That's the most honest thing I could say. As far as how much oxygen is in your body while you're nasal breathing, even when shit gets hard. And you can wear a SPO 2 monitor that you can get at Walgreens and work really hard nasal breathing.

And unless you have some kind of metabolic or cardiovascular issue, you could be like, oh my God, my oxygen must be. be getting low. That's why I feel like this. And you'll look and it'll be like, sorry bro, 96%. And you're like, oh shit. And it's high CO2. Right. So there's plenty of oxygen in the system. When you, when oxygen gets low, eventually the system will shut off and recalibrate for you because that's life threatening. Right. It will just power you down. And then you'll just start breathing auto. That's why hyperventilation before going underwater is so dangerous because you blow off the signal that says breathe and so you can keep doing it and eventually

drop your 02 pass out and then when your system reboots to take a breath for you you breathe water in and you die the end yeah the end but yeah if you're nasal breathing even during really hard work and you wear a SPO 2 monitor this is an easy experiment around you can get a pulse socks from any pharmacy for a few bucks, put it on your finger, bust ass on a stationary bike, it'll stay the same. It'll stay within a very tight range, no matter how shitty you feel. All right. I'm curious about the, you know, we were talking about the Val Salva. And the Valsava, when I was focusing on power lifting, obviously you don't want your body to move underneath the load, right? So you create that valsalva, create that intra-abdominal pressure,

do your movement, boom, exhale at the top, if it's a squat, et cetera. Now, I've actually, over, over time after jiu-jitsu and as I started trying to, as I started working with more sandbags, I started focusing on breathing while lifting more. So instead of like doing a valsalva in certain situations, let's say I'm squatting a sandbag. Well, I'll inhale on the way down. I will do either or growling an exhale or however strong my exhale needs to be on the way up to kind of create that brace, but also not hold my breath. Because a goal, and this is just a personal thing that I've been doing, a goal of mine has been to figure out how can I try to use the breath to create force rather than holding it in certain situations. So I'm curious what your

thoughts are on that. Because like an example of when I will do a breath hold when lifting is if I'm doing a very heavy sandbag to shoulder. And you know when you, if it's very heavy, you bring it up, exhale, hold, exhale, hold, and then, right? But outside of that, I've been trying to increase strength while breathing rather than using the Valsala.

I'm curious what your thoughts are there. The negatives and maybe if you think there are even any benefits. Yeah, so I mean, some of it is relativity, right? You've built a base of maximal strength that will allow you to pick up probably 200 and 250 pound sandbag without holding your breath I had to build to that oddly enough

like much yeah I had to because I didn't feel comfortable not holding my breath doing that for a period of time so it took me a while to get to the point where I could do that while breathing it took me having to like like again

re uh just just yeah so so let you know the point being you have a base of of structure and a base of capacity that allows you with loads that might be maximal for somebody else to more rhythmically breathe, right? So I weigh 235. My younger sister weighs 125, right? If my truck breaks down, I drive a Dodge Ram, if my truck breaks down, I could probably push it across the street and go she's probably going to be going

because she's going to exert way more energy it's going to take a lot more stability for her the ask is much higher from her structure than it is from mine right with that said breathing in rhythm with movement

may not necessarily increase force production other than it has potential to improve tempo, rhythm, coordination, timing. And so one outcome of that could be that your force is increased because of the coordination factor, but not necessarily because capacity is improved by it. Right. So the timing of the motion of your body, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the same thing like martial arts and whatever. That's the concept that I've been trying to apply. And that's why I was really curious in your thoughts, because a rule I set for myself when I started doing this was like, if I find that I'm having to hold my breath for this, I'm just going to, I'm going to go down to a weight that I can move with the load and build up. And that's what's been happening. But what I found is that kind of like the nasal breathing stuff, these heavy loads now feel easier to work with than they did when I was having to hold my breath to actually. actually do that. Of course, because you're training them, right? So if you have repeated exposure, yeah, to a thing, then it's going to feel easier because you're training it, right?

So it's not necessarily that breathing on its own offered some magic. It's that breathing under those conditions allowed you to coordinate your effort more effectively with the load you were choosing. And you use the way you were breathing. as a limiter yeah right i'm constraining myself to this weight based on how i can breathe when i do it so that actually became a a tool for awareness this is how i'm monitoring i'm not going to let myself lift this heavy unless it's moderate so what happened was you train the other thing until it became easier then the heavier thing you actually trained it's just like mark was talking about oh well now

i'm actually in the training zone yeah that oh now i'm going to lift 250 it feels easier yeah well because you're actually lifting a training load instead of just doing a max effort all the time where you had to hold your breath. So it follows the same rules as all of training. And that's the sort of probably my largest message with breathwork.

It's just training. Whatever purpose you're using it for, whether it's mechanical improvement, whether it's psychoemotional regulation, whether it's to downshift your stress response, whatever the thing is, you're consciously using a set of skeletal muscles. It's not any different than using any other skeletal muscles

that you've ever learned how to use. Yeah. They just have specific effects under specific conditions. And if you know what they are, you're just training. My add on question to that would be, what would be the weakness of how I'm approaching this for myself currently, minimizing the amount that I use of El Salvador. Again, I don't think about Salva is bad,

but my intent is to get, better at moving heavier and heavier things without having to hold my breath. That's my intent. So what am I maybe, do I have a blind spot there? What am I missing there? I don't think so because it seems like you know what your goal is. Right. But the bigger goal in that is like I want to continue just having better performance as an athlete. Right. And for me like in Jiu-Jitsu, for me, there's, I really don't end up holding my breath. So that's kind of why I applied it here. What comes in my mind is maybe attacking stuff from the other end. So you're picking up something lighter to get used to something heavier.

Maybe picking up something heavier and bracing yourself will allow you to, when you go to that 300 pound, maybe it will feel lighter to you. You know what I mean? So if you were to do like deadlifts or something, just back to kind of some of the old school stuff that you've done before, maybe that would build a capacity to, you know, because you got, you can do things from many different angles, right? you can get yourself in really good shape and have like a high VO2 max and be able to you know do certain athletic performances really well or you can work on explosiveness or you can kind of work on one thing for a little while and then work on the other like so maybe by bringing up capacities from both sides maybe that would be effective so let's say you lift sandbags twice a week once a week I I touch them every day but the intensity varies

on any given day so yes so let's say every seven to 10 days you lift something that you can't go straight from the ground to your shoulder that you have to lap first oh yeah yeah that's so right and so and so when you do it how are you breathing at the different phases of the lift so that's how you can still lift maximally and bring breath into the training so if you're at whatever 300 350 just like an atlas stone right you might have to use a val salva at first for the initial lift from the ground to your lap because that's when you have the least leverage, right?

So you may have to stabilize your trunk more by high pressure, right? Then you get it into your lap, you sit into it. And this is what happens. This is what gets expressed when you watch the best people in the world lift these things, right? Then they have more leverage. They manage pressure so they don't pass out. They get their shit together mentally and then they breathe again because they need stability because they're going to drive a lot of force into the ground.

And then it's on their shoulder and they breathe out or they scream. People yell, right? It comes out as something emotive. Yeah. Right. That's breathing. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it?

I got a secret, man. It's called Good Life Protein. Okay. Tell me about that. I've been doing some Good Life Protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. and you can get that under the umbrella of good life proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops,

all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes of mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat, and that's where I might get the sausage, and I might get their 80-20 grass-fed, grass-finish ground beef.

I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why, like, neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full.

I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know. I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it. Or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah.

And then I also love the rib-eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib-eyes. So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, pause, you can have to goodlifeproteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website, or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. But you could do it more specifically.

You can go, okay, I'm going to get it in my lap. I'm going to control. However I breathe, I'm in charge of it. Yes. Right? Okay. I'm ready. Pop, it's on my shoulder.

I'm going to control my response to this. I might feel emotional right now, like, but I'm going to, I'm going to make sure I can control smooth, slow, controlled. All right, I own this. I put it down, right? So then you're just making it on your terms rather than I'm just going to fling this shit up. Yeah. And like cross the old fingers and slap a belt on and hope for the best.

Gotcha. Is that no answer your question? It makes sense. It makes sense. Like I mentioned, the times, the only times right now in my training where I have those breath holds or when I am shouldering a very heavy sandbag. So like a 300, I'll still, I can still exhale taking a 300 off the ground. So I'll exhale to get it to my lap.

But then when I get it here, it's a, right? So there's still an exhale when I'm exerting. But there's still a breath hold when I'm getting in those different phases of it's here, tier, tier. there's breath holds there or about yeah so okay exactly you're on the right path okay I just again I just wanted to get your your thoughts on that since you have a better understanding of all this than I do yeah I mean it seems to me like your understanding is good right and that's probably because you're just you're just doing it yeah and that's why I know right is I there's no like

manual for like special breathing and it probably is now that I said that right so it's gonna be like No, the Russians wrote one in 1932. Nerds. Anyway, I didn't read some special manual for it. I just had an outcome I was driving for. And I'm patient enough to just train. And that's the same thing like you guys. Like, okay, do I have a PhD and exercise science?

I don't, right? But I train a lot. And so I'll just put in the patience. I'll just do the work. And I train other people a lot. And I'll just go, okay, we're going to run this little experiment. And I'm going to ask you to breathe like this when you lift. And I've made a lot of mistakes, right?

We've done breath hold kettlebell swings. Those suck, by the way. I'm not saying I recommend it, but there's some shit you learn from it about how your body responds to that position in space and holding your breath. You learn some things about yourself. And if you do it in a safe environment with a load you can manage, if it goes wrong, you just put the kettle bell down and breathe. It's not a big deal, right?

So you can do those experiments much more successfully than getting in water. And there's cool things you learn about how you deal with fear. Right. You're like, oh, that was panic that just came up. And where else have I felt that kind of intense panic come on? Oh, man. When my girlfriend was like, can we talk? You know?

And it's like, oh, now I know what that physiology feels like early. and so sometimes it's a mechanical outcome but sometimes it's just this deeper layer of awareness of how your physiology and your psychology are connected to each other yeah and you go ooh when I'm in a stress situation whether it's a sports performance environment or some life situation who I noticed that signal's telling me something I'm going to meter that response so that I can do what I need to do right how can people sound less fat when they're working out How can they work on their breathing? Because we've talked a lot about breathing so many different ways, nasal breathing.

How does someone actually bring up their conditioning? I know it's a really broad question, but just for some people that are listening, like, what are some strategies that you like to utilize? First of all, that is an awesome question. How can people sound less fat? Yeah, sound less fat, man. That's amazing. We've all been a little too heavy and gone up a couple flights of stairs and just been like,

man, I sound really fat. That's going to be the new power project. shirt t-shirt says you sound fat sound a little fat today maybe you should clear your throat TM that's another TM for mark bell right there um circle C circle oh oh no circle C yeah um I think if you're not a competitive athlete right you're not doing this for performance you just want to be like a healthier human being

probably one of the things you could do is walk your dog or yourself for 10, 20, 30 minutes a day, and breathe slow, smooth, and even through your nose while you do it. And if you want to take it one small step further, start doing breathing cadence with your footsteps. So inhale, one, two, three, exhale, one, two, three. And you know, that's, that's better now. Inhale, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four.

And then you get to where you can't do it, you go back to three. And you just do it for whatever the allotted time is. And that's probably a low amplitude, right, way to begin. And if at some point you don't like how it's going, like, this doesn't feel right, you breathe normally. That's probably the easiest access point, right? Right. Question on top of that. What would happen for somebody if they're doing that? They're having, you know, and they feel okay with longer inhales, longer exhales. What would happen if they have small bouts of not breathing in between their breaths? Now, not that they're becoming breathless, but they have bouts of just whole apnea. Exactly. Is what is going on there? Is it potentially good? Is it bad?

it's it's just another mechanism for carbon dioxide to increase you can play with that i've played with all that stuff whether it's biking r pms or rowing time or steps i mean i think for most people the thing is to start yes and to to plow the field that's in front of you right like start doing it and a lot of times your physiology will tell you like like oh man should I I'm getting good at this I can do 10 and 10 what if I do inhale two three hold three out three was that different ooh that's tough again if I do that for a week how do I feel oh that changed my mood or that changed how I felt when I did jiu jitsu like you got to start running experiments right so would that be another thing that could help

CO2 tolerance or is it just yeah yeah for sure okay yeah absolutely is it the same thing as like wearing a heart rate monitor on a bike and having a given wattage over a given period of time no but most people's capacity is so low to begin with that doing something is a good place to start and like I can't even tell you how many times and for how many things I've recommended go walk your dog and it worked for health you know i may i have trouble sleeping i'm gonna give a dog yeah go walk it at night after dinner without your phone oh man i sleep so much better i'm like yeah because you're out in the world like the animal that you are without a shitload more input and your brain could kind of figure out what the fuck is going on and you could rest right so walking around and

paying attention to what's in here actually helps with a whole bunch of things, not least of which is improving your conditioning. Sometimes I think even a real high level athletes, you just give them like one tiny thing to do. They can make a huge difference. I just was listening to something the other day where somebody was talking about like nutrition and training and just there's so many things to change and switch and to move around.

Sometimes for an athlete, if they lose, they could feel demoralizing. and feel like they need to change everything. They need to get rid of their strength and conditioning coach and they need to like, you know, have a new diet plan and have all these new things. But whether it's an elite athlete or even just your average person, sometimes just the message of have this input and then let's repeat it and then let's see how you feel from it.

Yeah. And maybe there's some things occasionally too that you're cutting out. I go, oh, let's get rid of that for a minute and then see how you feel from it. That sounds like that's a lot of what you do with your coaching. What else is there? That's really all there is, is I add something and see what happens or I take something away. So I'm on this side of the country right here for this podcast, but also as a tutor for the Altus Masters in Strength and Conditioning.

So I'm here lecturing. And one of the mentors for the programs names coach Nick Ward. Shout out Nick Ward is Mountain Sports, Specialist out of Tahoe. Nick is his pedigree in coaching is super impressive, look him up, but he's a great mentor to professional strength coaches. And at the end of the day yesterday, he said something that really caught my attention was, is one plus one, two? And everybody's like, yeah, and he was like, no, one of what plus one of what can tell you the outcome. But when you're dealing with human beings in a performance environment, you can't say one plus one. one equals two. You can only say one of what plus one of what. So there's always another question

there. What it is it that we are doing? What are we adding? What are we taking away? Why? Right? It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to have some sport science degree to start to affect things for your own health and performance, but you should have some clear idea of what it is you're trying to accomplish. It doesn't have to be perfect. What it is that you're going to do or take away how you will measure it and then a time period in which that will happen and that's called an experiment and so you just do an experiment and one that if it fails nothing bad will happen right it's safe to fail experiment right so nothing bad will happen and you'll learn something not least of which is a better question to ask and everybody that i've ever been exposed to guys

like you and people in the performance industry who last are the most curious tinkerers right we're on the gym side there's like a thousand toys over there oh have you ever seen those body lever thing and we got these different clubs oh i tried this one here's this rope i've done oh we've been juggling check out this belt squat machine it's like you know a bunch of stuff not because you read some paper from some university is because you've been trying a bunch of shit for like 40 years and it turns out that that matters right so if you really want to develop the knowledge that people with experience have one of the best things you can do is to develop your own experience and i think the inundation of information that people have can make it tough but just pick one

small thing like you know walking and breathing in cadence with your steps and just give it a whirl and go ah well that didn't happen exactly how i thought what else where else and keep looking i have one last question for you um what are your thoughts on inspiratory muscle trainers like uh the boss root o2 trainer or i mean i don't have experience with other ones but there are other inspiratory muscle trainers that exist what are your thoughts on those types of devices i've had limited exposure. I've never used boss's device in particular. I used to use the

what the hell was that thing called the altitude? Was it the altitude mask? Right? That had the little... Yeah, it was a full mask and it had the little mausles on it. I think one of the things it could do is develop the diaphragm right because you're inhaling against

resistance. By the way, something that I feel when I, because with the boss or anything, you can increase resistance. When I get deeper into like minute three, minute four, I feel my diaphragm tremble. It's getting tired. Yeah, but that's like, that's a thing. There's nothing else I use

that can actually make me, oh, I can feel. I mean, other than when I breathe, I understand. I still remember the first time my diaphragm got sore. From what? From from controlled nasal breathing during like long

duration work. Nothing has, so I did that's cool. I used the altitude trainer yeah right and one of the things I found was okay it did because it did offer a valve that has airflow resistance similar to bosses device one of the things is that because it has graduated resistance it's an easy way to measure progress right you go oh I was a one now I'm a two I got better right whatever that the actual outcome in is in the real world I don't know but I was a one now I'm a two great um but

But what I my experience with the altitude mask was that once I began doing real legitimate like nasal breathing training and dry land like free diving training that I could invert the seal on the hardest nozzle on the altitude mask, no problem. Like I could inhale hard enough to flip the mask inside out. So I was like, well, I guess I don't need this anymore. And it's not to say it's good, bad or other. Otherwise, just that was my experience and so I was like, okay, I'm done. It doesn't necessarily, you know, help you prepare for altitude other than it will make your diaphragm stronger. But nothing had the impact on diaphragm capacity that working really hard with breath constraints did because you're fighting the natural impulse to breathe differently. The conditions of work are telling your diaphragm to do one thing.

breathe more, breathe more, breathe more, breathe more, and you're saying, no, I'm going to breathe at this tempo. It's tempo work for that skeletal muscle. It's not any different than doing tempo work for any other skeletal muscle in your body. The fatigue and everything is saying, like, stop doing it this way. I want to contract faster and then get the fuck out of here. That's what your diaphragm is saying too. And you're just saying, no, you're going to work at this rate because I'm telling you too. That's why I say like sometimes again we put breath training in this like special filing cabinet, but it's really not. It's like I'm training a skeletal muscle to get stronger. The outcome is metabolic though. When I have a stronger diaphragm, it doesn't have to contract as hard

to pull in the same amount of air. Your diaphragm is huge. So it requires a lot of energy to contract, especially as you get fatigued. So breathing less and having a more efficient diaphragm, as other outputs but I haven't experienced bosses device in particular I would try it like I'm I'm a nerd I would love I would do it yeah you know and of course I'm sure my wife would walk in at a really inopportune time and be like what the fuck are you doing now you know but I'd be really curious for you to try to get your input on it versus what you what you see it might be doing because again like I mentioned it's it's the you I'll show it to you but As you increase the resistance, you will feel like you have to pull an air through here to be able to use that thing effectively.

So, yeah, I'd love to see what your thoughts are. Anyway, where can people grab your book, check engine light. I can go to check engine light book.com. Awesome. Where else can people find you? On Instagram at the check engine light. Great. Thank you.

Strength is never a week. This week, this never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye. Thank you.