Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 200 - Patrick McKeown

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

Patrick McKeown is the author of The Oxygen Advantage, the Clinical Director of the Buteyko Clinic International and Chairman of its Advisory Board. He completed his clinical training in the Buteyko Breathing Method at the Buteyko Clinic, Moscow, Russia in 2002. Having suffered from asthma, rhinitis and sleep-disordered breathing for over 20 years, Patrick is able to offer both theoretical knowledge and his own experiences to help clients overcome similar challenges. Patrick has written 7 books and produced 4 DVD sets on the Buteyko Method including two Amazon best sellers for the management of asthma: Close Your Mouth and Asthma-Free Naturally. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Got to breathe in your nose and out your ass. I don't think that's how it's supposed to go. We're starting this podcast on the wrong end. Who is this guy? We got Patrick McEwen on today. Really excited to have him on. He wrote a book called The Oxygen Advantage. And it's something that Nassim and I got into conversation about kind of a while back.

And this has been kind of a – he's been on the bucket list, you know, to get him on the podcast. So super fired up. There he is. Speaking of. Here he is. Hey, it's great to have you on the show. Appreciate you taking the time. We're huge fans.

And so let's kind of dive right into this. So you wrote a book called The Oxygen Advantage. Maybe just start us out and tell us why you wrote this book. My reasoning was it's to introduce breathing in terms of high performance in sports. It's the one thing that was always overlooked. If you think of what sets the limits of endurance and what sets the limits of intensity, oftentimes it was the person's breathing. It was the disproportionate breathlessness. It was the intensity of breathlessness that was setting the limits of physical ability. But yet, everything was being trained except breathing. And breathing is what influences the amount of oxygen delivered to the muscles. So here you have athletes that are training every part of their body, and they have a team of specialists around them. Like even if i work with an olympic athlete every facet of that activity you know

with that athlete is being monitored except breathing and even in a number of things it's through the breath and this is what i was hoping to impart with the oxygen advantage that we have an idea out there that the more air we breathe the better and that's not necessarily true and we also fail to consider that the respiratory muscles are prone to fatigue and up to 50 percent of athletes can experience respiratory muscle fatigue and when the respiratory muscles fatigue blood is stolen from the legs to feed the diaphragm so it's ultimately breathing that's going to dictate everything else. And that's my whole point of it. And it's also sleep and the emotions.

We need athletes to be waking up feeling very refreshed. We need good sleep for a good recovery. But I would say that at least 50% of athletes wake up with a dry mouth in the morning. would say that at least 50% of athletes wake up with a dry mouth in the morning. And if you're sleeping with an open mouth, if you have your mouth open during sleep, you're likely to wake up feeling unrefreshed. And even when I look at, I look at some athletes in press conferences and I look at how they are breathing. And during the press conference, they're breathing up her chest and they're breathing hard. And I know these guys are going to gas out too soon. But again, they fail. It's often overlooked that our everyday breathing is influencing our breathing during exercise. So that's what I wanted

to introduce by the book. You mentioned sleeping with your mouth open being problematic. Why is that problematic? Is that stealing some of our quality of sleep? Yeah, you tend to have light sleep. So it's been researched probably not as often as it should do. But we know that people who are prone to obstructive sleep apnea, it really increases dramatically when the mouth is open. Now you think of your weightlifting guys. They're big guys and they have a wide circumference of a neck and those guys are going to be more prone to obstructive sleep apnea. And this is when there's collapse of the upper airway during sleep.

So the person might be snoring and the next thing is they stop breathing. But the problem with that is that it puts the heart under pressure. And if you're an athlete and you're putting your heart under pressure during the day, nighttime is a time for the heart to recover. You don't want to be putting the heart under stress during sleep because that sets up. It's a recipe for disaster. So for sleep, Stanford Medical School recently did research about two months ago, and they got a group of individuals and they purposely blocked their noses for 10 days, both during wakefulness and sleep, and their sleep was adversely affected. But

we would know that, you know, there's quite a lot of research showing that sleep disorder breathing, including sleep apnea and snoring increases during open mouth breathing, but light sleep is just as much of an issue with it. How did you stumble upon all this? How did you stumble upon this is problematic, people are breathing the wrong way? Maybe the way people are breathing in yoga and maybe the way people are breathing in martial arts, maybe this is all backwards. How did you kind of stumble upon some of this stuff? Because I was breathing the wrong way and I was feeling the effects of it. Like I had asthma and chronic nasal obstruction, which is very common with people with asthma.

And, you know, again, in the exercise world, up to 50 percent of athletes have exercise induced bronchoconstriction. So if you have inflammation of your lungs, it travels up to your nose. So then the nose is stuffy. And if your nose is stuffy, and if you think of the guys as well, I was just talking with a professional boxer, an Irish professional boxer, 27 year old, and he has problems with his nose because of the impacts to his nose. But if your nose is stuffy, or if your nose is anyway obstructed, your sleep, you're twice as likely to have sleep problems. So I was gassing out. I was upper chest breathing, caught for breath, sleep issues, waking up tired. And also, if you're breathing fast, using the upper chest, much oxygen uptake in the blood.

So it's a very inefficient way to breathe. And yeah, fatigue and stress levels are impacted. So it's true that stress makes us breathe harder and faster. But if we're breathing harder and faster using the upper chest, it's feeding into stress. So there's a feedback loop there. So it was my own issues. I found this out in 1997. It was about 21 years ago. And I started changing to nasal breathing. And on my first night, I wore nasal dilators, but I also wore tape across my lips. And we started telling our people to wear tape for the last 20 years. And now there's many companies on the market who have

jumped onto the bandwagon set selling tape for the lips. Not us though. I was too slow. tape for the lips. Not us though. I was too slow. Yeah. That's, um, it's, it's really, uh, really some fascinating stuff. Cause I think it's just that one of these things we take for granted. We, and then also, um, in your opinion, like why, why do we naturally do these things? Why, you know, um, there's a huge line at the bank or something like that. And you, you let out that huge sigh or you hear something bad and you, you kind of, you do a lot of you know, breathing through your mouth. And then also,

you know, if someone was to dump, you know, freezing cold water on your back, maybe you would react the same way. You'd almost like hyperventilate. Are these kind of natural go-tos that we have? Are they kind of backwards too?

Or what are your opinion? Yeah, those are normal. That's normal reflexes. Are these kind of natural go-tos that we have? Are they kind of backwards too? Or what are your opinion on that? Yeah, those are normal. That's normal reflexes. And they're fine. But if you're exposed to prolonged stress over a period of time, and it will also depend on genetics. You know, just some people are better able to tolerate stress than others. So there's a genetic influence and there's your environment your food impacts your breathing your physical

exercise impacts your breathing your beliefs you know how often is it do you hear it in yoga's take that really big deep breath and is there are there breathing techniques out there that are telling you to breathe hard and fast? You know, so the more air you breathe, the more oxygen uptake in the blood. Is that necessarily true? So even a belief can do it. You know, if you have an athlete who's deliberately taking big breaths during physical exercise, well, that's going to change the biochemistry, the biomechanics.

And then that becomes a habit. So nowadays, I mean, when I was a kid kid playing soccer you always heard the coach say you know when you're sprinting and running breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth is there any merit or any benefit of in through the nose and out through the mouth or as athletes are we just trying to keep it all through the nose and for say if i'm working with recreational athletes i will always advocate for a recreational athlete to nasal breathe all the time it's more efficient now it depends on race to be honest with you as well and so say for instance if you're african-american you have a better facial structure and you'll tend to have wider nostrils and you're better able to handle air through your nose

versus caucasian like myself i've got very pinched nostrils so anatomically i'm not in a good place in terms of doing that so it if you have an athlete with a good broad facial structure and forward development of the jaws you know they've got a good airway anatomically and this is what we want athletes to be and it's better it's better that you will be able to to handle that larger volume of air but if it's an elite athlete i'll try and get them breathing through the nose for about 50 percent of the time i'm using the nose to add an extra load onto them and so you know even though it feels a little bit restrictive nasal breathing breathing does, when you switch from mouth breathing to nose breathing, it feels more restrictive. But that's the training load.

If you think about it, if the two of you now look down at your chest. So if you look down at your chest and if you take a breath through your mouth, what part of the body are you moving? The chest, yep. So that's the chest. Mouth breathing is directly activating the chest yep so that's the chest is mouth breathing is directly activating the chest but if we think of the shape of the human lungs the greatest concentration of blood is down the lower parts so if you have an individual that's going for a run they're breathing hard and fast using their upper chest but they're breathing air into the top part of the lungs but the greatest concentration of blood is in the lower part so it's inefficient in terms of oxygen transfer from the lungs to the blood.

So we know that there's a 10 to 15% increase in oxygen uptake in the blood by breathing through your nose. So the quality of the breath is different. It's slower and deeper versus faster and shallow. So mouth breathing is fast and shallow breathing. Nose breathing is slow and deep. And nose breathing has an advantage in terms of oxygen uptake versus mouth breathing. But the one thing is, even if I was to do a Google search, what's the best way to breathe when you're running?

Everybody would say your mouth is the best way. Well, it's not. The most efficient way, most efficient way most efficient way biologically um is nasal breathing but it can be a little bit tough at the start and it'll also depend on i don't want to go too complex in terms of the science but your chemo sensitivity to the gas to the accumulation of the gas carbon dioxide so if you're moving your muscles your cells are generating co2 producing carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the stimulant to breathe.

But if you have a strong sensitivity to the buildup of carbon dioxide, your breathing is going to be hard. Whereas if we have an elite athlete, we want their sensitivity to the accumulation of carbon dioxide to be reduced. In other words, we want that athlete to be able to do hard physical exercise, but with efficient and light breathing. And that's trainable. So even with Olympic athletes, I've seen some breathing issues that we use a BOLT score, which is the body oxygen level test. And so I've seen their BOLT score being 12 seconds.

And I know that that athlete's going to have disproportionate breathlessness and they're going to gas out too soon and also they're going to have muscle fatigue and just I'll give you one athlete to give you an example Conor McGregor look at his breathing when he's doing press interviews and I'm seeing fast breathing using the upper chest and that's not good that's what I want to change i'm curious like well this is going to be super specific but you've like obviously you've seen connor fight right in fights he seems super calm do you think he's breathing differently when he fights versus breathing when like he's hype connor and press conferences during the hyped up press conference you're going to be

breathing probably a little bit faster but i I'm watching him, his overall breathing during that time, even when he's resting. And any time, if you're just looking at an athlete and they're resting and in between talking, you shouldn't notice fast breathing and you shouldn't hear them taking big breaths between sentences. Because if you're running out of air during rest and during, even if you're hyped up,

you know, during rest, um, if you're running out of air there and you're, you're tending to suck large breaths of air into your, to your nose or mouth, um, you're going to run out during physical exercise. There's no way that your breathing could change. Um, because the biochemistry and the biomechanics are the same. And if anything it will get worse during physical exercise how do we progress how do we get better like um how like where should somebody start obviously it sounds like just working on some nasal breathing kind of throughout the day but if you're someone that runs or does some recreational activity i know you said you'd recommend them to learn to breathe through their nose as often as possible. But how do we kind of adapt to that?

I think a good place to start would be to see where you're at. So the bold score is your body oxygen level test. And you take a normal breath in through your nose, a normal breath out through your nose, and you pinch your nose with your fingers. And you time it in seconds until you feel the first involuntary movement of your breathing muscles or the first definite desire to breathe. If it's less than 25 seconds, it's suggestive of dysfunctional breathing patterns. And there's quite a link between dysfunctional breathing and dysfunctional movement, or conversely, to have functional movement, you need functional breathing.

So functional breathing is using the diaphragm and good core strength and taking the air deeper into the lungs, but efficiently. Because diaphragmatic breathing and having good diaphragm tone is necessary for stabilization of the spine, for motor control, for movement, and also for posture. So your diaphragm is not just a muscle that's used during breathing, but it's also stabilization of all of this area here. And individuals who don't do so well functionally, functional movement, and they're at a greater risk of injury. So the first thing I'd say is measure and see where you're at. And just sit down for five minutes and measure that. And,

you know, we've got a second test. These are all free. You just see them on our websites or whatever. A second test is called the maximum breathlessness test. And here we have an athlete breathe in through their nose, breathe out through their nose, and pinch their nose. And then they have them walk and count to many pieces. What's the maximum ability that they can tolerate breathlessness?

So the BOLD score is measuring your functional breathing. And also it measures the onset. It gives you feedback of the onset and endurance of breathlessness. But then your maximum breathlessness test is measuring what's your upper tolerance of breathlessness. Now there's a link between the two, but I want to see the two measurements, regardless of whether you're an endurance competitor or whether it's high intensity. So in terms of increasing your Bolt score, right? Yes. You talk a lot about breath holds that people can do and different types of exercises that individuals can do.

Can we dive into that? And then there's also one more thing I wanted to mention. We had somebody on the podcast named Carol Azauskas, and she has a bold score of 40, which is insane. But she said that she increased her bold by going under ice water and doing breath holds in like ice baths. So do you know anything about that too? Sure. Yes. The bold score is trainable. So basically the BOLT score is telling you your chemo sensitivity of the body to the accumulation of carbon dioxide. In other words, how sensitive are you to the buildup of CO2? And it's by practicing, like I'd say the foundation is really nasal breathing is the start of it nose breathing during sleep and practicing slowing down

your breathing during the day and then doing breath holds as well i wouldn't rely exclusively on breath holding even though breath holding is brilliant because say for instance if you have an athlete who's doing a lot of breath holding but then they're going around with their mouth open and they're sleeping with their mouth open they're going to kind of lose some of it there so we want to be looking at the two aspects of it um so yeah so so breath holding does help to change the respiratory center um to reduce the chemo sensitive to reduce the chemo sensitivity of the body to carbon dioxide all of these things will do but i've i think breath holding is brilliant in terms of disturbing the blood acid-base balance. You think of athletes who are training

really hard, and during training, they're doing high-intensity interval training to stimulate anaerobic glycolysis. Well, during a sprint, your SpO2, which is your blood oxygen saturation, that will drop down to about 91%. And you can measure it easily. We have all of the athletes use little pulse oximeters. And there's a little infrared light in it. And basically that picks up how low is your hemoglobin with oxygen. So if you did a 400-meter sprint with your mouth open,

hemoglobin with oxygen. So if you did a 400 meter sprint with your mouth open, your blood oxygen saturation will drop, say from normal of 97% down to 93%. And if you did the sprint with your mouth closed, your blood oxygen saturation will drop down to about 91%. But if you do breath holding, we would introduce breath holding, different exercises. You don't have to be sprinting, even during walking or jogging, we dropped your blood oxygen saturation down to about 87%. And that's severe hypoxia. That's about 4,500 meters, 4,000 to 5,000 meters high. And we reproduce it all the time.

So I've got different exercises. Some involve sprinting, some involve walking, some involve jogging, some involve running, press-ups, squats, anything at all. You know, we bring breath-holding into it. And we do it to lower blood oxygen saturation, but it also purposely increases carbon dioxide in the blood. And this is how it's changing the BOLT score. And it's flooding the body with hydrogen ion. You know, so what you're doing is you're forcing the body into an acidic state in order to improve buffering capacity.

So then when you do do competition, that your ability to buffer the hydrogen ion has been improved. So you're able to delay lactic acid and fatigue. But also, if you do five strong breath holds, and say, for instance instance if you do five repetitions of breath holds and three sets and it increases erythropoietin so it causes an increase to epo of about 24 percent and erythropoietin is a is a hormone that's synthesized by your your kidneys and your liver and to a lesser extent well mainly by the, but also by the liver and the brain. But it sends a message to the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. And it takes about three to four days for it to have an effect. And then also there's a spleen contraction. So your spleen is your blood bank. It's located underneath the left side of your

diaphragm. And when you do five strong breath holdings, your spleen contracts by about 20%. And that releases red blood cells into circulation. And that lasts for about an hour. So if I have an athlete pre competition, I want them to do five strong breath holds before they go out. Number one is it makes them focused. It activates the sympathetic response, but it also releases more red blood cells into circulation. And that's going to last for an hour. But after the five strong breath holds, I'll get them to take five or six big breaths just to blow off the acidity

so it doesn't make them overly breathless. So I want to get the benefits, but I don't want to cause any undue fatigue. What do the five strong breath holds look like? How long you hold your breath for? Yeah, it's the maximum intensity. So for instance, you take a normal breath in through your nose, a normal breath out through your nose, you pinch your nose, and then you start walking. And then you start, say, fast walking, light jogging, faster jogging. And you keep going

and keep relaxing into the body. And you'll feel your diaphragm contracting because you know your brain is continuously sending the impulse to breathe. And you're relaxing into the diaphragm. And then when it gets pretty difficult, you let go, but you breathe in through your nose and then minimize your breathing for about five or six breaths. And what that does is it causes an added delay to the hypoxic effect. Now, I always want my athletes to wear a pulse oximeter. And we don't want to go below 60% because you faint. There's a high risk of fainting once your SpO2 goes below 60.

But there's no need because once you're reaching 85%, you're already in severe hypoxia. That's giving you the training effect there. So I want it to be challenging and to be severe, but I don't want it to be extreme. This is amazing. You mentioned that you're, I think I heard you correctly, you're mimicking what it's like to train at high altitude.

Yeah. So that's, we've been looking at research, especially that's coming out of Europe and Mid-Sweden University have been publishing a lot of research. Now, a lot of it has come from free diving, but I'm looking at their studies and I'm saying, well, how many repetitions did they do? How long did they drop the SpO2 down to? And can we replicate that? And it's on the basis of being able to replicate that that we can take some of the information from their papers. And also, we use the exhale hold technique. And traditionally, like in the United States, James Councilman, he was one

of your really famous swimming coaches. And he used to get all of the swimmers breathing in and holding the breath. And he would say that it's a hypoxic stimulus. Now, the only thing is I say is like if you breathe in and hold, it's more difficult to lower your blood oxygen saturation because you've got lungs full of air. But if you have a normal breath in and a normal breath out, and then you pinch your nose and you hold your breath, you've got a stronger effect in terms of changing the blood gases. So to give you an example, the five repetitions would be, say, one set. And if you do three sets with a 10-minute gap between each,

that's equivalent to spending six hours at an altitude of 1780 meters, which is high altitude. So you can do something like we do repeated sprint ability. And this was tested with elite rugby players. And these exercises would apply to NFL absolutely perfectly or even ice hockey, any sport that's requiring repeated sprint ability. So what is repeated sprint ability? It's an all-out effort followed by a brief recovery. And that's what team sports are. So if you think of your NFL guys, it's all-out effort, and they might only have 30 seconds recovery before they have to do an all-out effort. So within four weeks, and they looked at this with professional rugby union players

who were elite. And usually the gains there are about one, two, maybe 3%. They dropped some high-intensity interval training sessions and they replaced them with breath-toling. So it was a 40-meter sprint

using breath-toling, 30-second recovery, 40-meter sprint using breath-toling, 30-second recovery, eight repetitions, two to three sets a week. And within four weeks, their repeated sprint ability increased by about 33%. It went from 9 to 14.9 before exhaustion. We do those with our athletes, and it takes five minutes.

You can do seven repeated sprints of 40 meters with a 30-second recovery in about five to six minutes. You can do seven repeated sprints of 40 meters with a 30-second recovery in about five to six minutes. It's very, very quick, very easy. And you hold your breath during the sprint periods, right? Yeah, you hold your breath. So you kind of have to measure it out, measure out 40 meters, or even if you're fairly close to it. Now, in the paper itself, it said that the SpO2 is dropping down to about 90%. In practice, we've used it for many athletes, MMA guys, different guys, and we see it dropping down to about 70%, 67%. So we see a stronger effect. But, yeah, I'm just following exactly what the paper is doing.

That's how we know we can produce this. Like, how many times have you heard we can, we can produce this. Like how many times have you heard? Well, we can simulate altitude training. You know, you can only simulate altitude training if you're able to drop the blood oxygen saturation, but no 91%. If it doesn't drop below 91%, you're not simulating altitude training. So I think a lot of athletes would be listening to this and even myself, because like I do jujitsu and I focus on, you know, breathing through my nose. Right. But in your book, you mentioned there's a woman at the very like an example of a woman that's a marathon runner and she did her whole marathon with her nose, just just breathing through the nose.

Can someone that's like, you know, a football player that has to do sprints than rest or, uh, you know, an MMA fighter that has these bursts of high energy, then, you know, that they're, they're chilling for a few rounds. Can they do all of that purely through the nose or are there going to be times where they actually have to intake some breaths through the mouth from application? Yes. No, with a, with an elite athlete, we wouldn't require a hundred percent nose breathing. Okay nose breathing okay and even during their training i wouldn't require 100 because i want the nose to add an extra load onto the athlete during training but i also want them to mouth breathe for say 50 of their training so that they can do all out effort just to maintain muscle condition and say for instance yeah we've had individuals

running the marathon with their mouth closed. And I've got one of the top marathon runners now in the world. He's putting it into practice. But there's times he's going to mat read. And that's fine. See, if you're running a marathon, I want your breathing to be slow and deep. So I don't want so many breaths per minute. But each breath, I want it to be larger because I need to get the air deeper into the lungs so that the oxygen transfer can take place. If you're breathing fast and shallow,

each breath, 150 mil of each breath is lost in dead space. And that's every breath that you take, there's a good proportion of that that doesn't reach the alveoli in the lungs anyway. So if you're breathing fast, you're losing a lot moreoli in the lungs anyway so if you're breathing fast you're losing a lot more air to dead space whereas if you're breathing slow but deep you're getting proportionately you're getting more oxygen into the lungs and during say sprinting or anything like that it's all mouth breathing that's fine but it's not the time to worry about breathing during competition the time to worry about breathing is your preparation. It's like the boxer there, I was talking to him just only about an hour ago, and he's a fight in about a month's time.

Now is when I'm concerned about his breathing, to get his breathing right in the weeks coming up to the fight. So it's primarily like a training tool, right? Yeah, for sure. Now we do have pre-match competition, like right up even to the night before. I don't want the athletes to be breathing through their mouth during sleep because they're more likely to wake up groggy and they don't have the focus. So I need them to be doing breath holding, even because of erythropoietin, a VPO. I want them to be using breath holding as

part of their normal training at least two days before the fight so that we can get that effect because it will take about three to four days for the increase to retropoietin to mature the red blood cells. And so even during sleep, you know, in terms of slowing down the breath, it's very good for the mind and for focus.

How many athletes suffer from anxiety? And a little bit of anxiety before a match is fine, but when it gets too much, it gets in the way because now you can't have your full attention on your game because your mind is distracted by negative thoughts or, you know, by maybe a little bit of doubt that's coming in or somebody says something to you and they mess your mind up. And this is, you know, the mind itself, you know, the psychological, the aspects of the mind and having control over the mind that if something does go wrong, that you're able to bring your attention back into what you're doing. We need athletes to be able to apply 100% of their attention on their activity, not to be distracted by a mind, not to have, you know, 50% of attention on what they're doing. And the other 50% is stuck in their heads and they've got self-doubts and that creeping in, because that's going to mess it up. But this is where sleep also comes in, because

if you really wake up and you're really waking up feeling so refreshed, then your mind is going to be calmer and more focused during the day. So, you know, I want to train the mind by focusing on the breath. And even if you think of today's day and age, like we're so distracted, Facebook, social media, everything is distracting us. Emails are coming in, there's text messaging coming in, we're distracted from all sides. And this is training the mind to be distracted. And now we're losing the capacity to control what we want to think about so what i want to do is i'm using the breath is this is what man has been using for two and a half thousand years focus on your breath so you're training the brain to hold

its attention on something for a period of time without distraction and this way when you when you train your brain then you're able to, you're able to hold your attention on what you want to hold it upon and not to be distracted by outside events. So it kind of all comes together, you know, like we're doing functional breathing, but we're also getting into the mind. And this is coming back to the thing about oxygen advantage. I was teaching mindfulness for about three years, right? I've been teaching breathing for 20 years, but I was teaching mindfulness primarily for people, say, with panic disorder and anxiety. And 95% of them were women. And I was saying to myself, where's all the men? No men, very few men coming in. So it's not

that men don't suffer from anxiety. In actual fact, women are better able to control anxiety than men are. But men wouldn't do breathing so oxygen advantages attended by 90 percent men because men want something that they're pushing themselves to the you know into a severe debt so i can sneak breathing exercises in the back door whether they like it or not i'm curious because um you talk about you've talked about light breathing in the book right um and you know making sure that you know people can't hear you breathe or even to a point where it can't you can't even tell you yourself can't tell that you're breathing. But you do mention something where you mentioned after the exhale, you want to almost have like a not a breath hold, but a pause after the exhale until you feel a need for air. And then you take an inhale and that should actually be your natural way of breathing, correct?

Yes, when your BOLT score is heading for 40 seconds, there's a natural pause after exhalation of about three seconds or so. And if you can think of it this way, say somebody with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and you know, these people, they might walk 15 yards 15 meters and they get breathless and if i look at their breathing as soon as they breathe out they need to breathe back in again and as soon as they breathe out they need to breathe back in again so their breath is generally fast and they're kind of fighting for breath a little bit that person will not have any natural pause so that's one extreme you, that's one end of the spectrum. And then we have the athletes at the other end of the spectrum. So normally you'll have a natural pause after exhalation,

depending on your BOLT score. So for every 10 seconds of your BOLT score, you'll have a one second approximately natural pause. Should we? And also just, sorry, Andrew, also what I want is I want the ratio of the breath in to the breath out should be different during rest. So during rest, the ratio of the breath in is one and the breath out should be 1.5. So your exhalation should be one and a half times your inspiration. And that's very important that you have a very passive and

gentle breath out, especially for the emotions. Because to induce relaxation of the body, we want slow breathing. There's a structure in the brain that spies on your breathing. This was, if you Google Stanford Medical School and slow breathing, they discovered this in March of 2017. And they first discovered it in mice, but they said the same structure is in humans. And this structure is spying on your breath. And if you're breathing fast, the mind gets agitated. But if you really slow down your breathing, the mind becomes quieter and especially important for sleep, but also for stress and anxiety. So yeah, the natural pause is part of that. Should we be experimenting with maybe taping our mouth shut during like a lifting session?

Yes, definitely. Like I think it's great in terms of, you know, putting an extra load on, absolutely. And there's, to give you an example, when I'm working with sprinters, I'll often get them, I'll tape them during some of the sprints. And to give like 400 meter sprinter some of their sprinting i'd have them

sprint at three for 360 meters with their mouth closed and then 40 meters from the finish 10 so 40 meters from this finish i'd be standing there and as soon as they see me they have to breathe in breathe out and hold and they have to sprint the remaining 40 meters with a breath hold because i want to add the load onto them when they're most fatigued they're not tired at the start of the sprint but it's it's the last 10 of the game that's going to if we can maintain their form and focus for the last 10 it's really going to be the driver and so so for instance that would be an example yeah and even grappling you know think of guys doing grappling i want them to be taped up during grappling i want mma fighters to have a really long breath hold so if they're in a choke hold that they don't panic you know if you're able to to improve your ability

to hold the breath, even regardless of collapse, say for instance, is it the argument could be that there's collapse of the carotid arteries as a result of the chokehold, but I need those guys to be able to sustain a long breath hold so they're not panicking and it'll give them some time that they have some leverage there. Maybe they're able to get themselves out of it, you know? I suggest 10 minute walks to people just for general health purposes all the time. You know, I ask people to, you know, try to do one or two of them every single day. I think it's something that people can very easily adopt into their lifestyle, no matter

how busy they are. Is there something that some of my listeners that may be engaged in a 10 minute walk, is there something that they could do from a breathing perspective that would help enhance some of my listeners that may be engaged in a 10 minute walk, is there something that they could do from a breathing perspective that would help enhance some of their performance? Yes. It's really about having lips together and you don't want your jaws in contact. So you don't want your teeth biting down because this creates tension then in

your jaws. So you want to have your jaws relaxed, your lips together, you're breathing in and out through your nose. And when you go for the walk, gently slow down your breathing, you know, bring your attention out of the mind onto the breath and you're slowing down the speed of the breath coming in. And then you're having a gentle and relaxed breath out. So just breathe a little bit less air during the walk. Now it's good because if you breathe a little bit less air, carbon dioxide accumulates in the blood and air carbon dioxide accumulates in the blood and as carbon dioxide accumulates in the blood it will help open up your blood vessels

but i say the best way to do this and to learn it would be to practice it sitting down so when your listeners are comfortable put one hand on their chest one hand just above their navel and focus on their breathing and start slowing down the speed of air as it comes into the nose and then on the expiration have a really relaxed and slow gentle breath out and do it to the point that you feel air hunger so the whole purpose of air hunger is that carbon dioxide is increasing in the blood and within about three to four minutes i want people to feel the effect that breathing light has on their body, they may find that their temperature, their circulation, so the internal temperature of their fingers increases. They also have increased water saliva in the mouth,

and they can feel a little bit drowsy. So light breathing will activate the parasympathetic response, which is basically your body's relaxation. So you can improve your circulation by changing your breathing. But it's not about taking big breaths because we know it ourselves. Like how many times have we taken big breaths? And the next thing is we feel lightheaded. That's not a sign of super oxygenation because even as we're just sitting here, blood oxygen, your blood oxygen is fully saturated almost,

you know, and your blood oxygen is already, you know, the amount of your hemoglobin carrying oxygen is almost fully saturated there. If you start taking big breaths, you're not going to add any more oxygen to hemoglobin, but you get rid of carbon dioxide. And if you breathe hard for 30 seconds, you can half the amount of CO2 in your blood. And for every one millimeter drop of CO2 in the blood, it can reduce blood flow to the brain by 2%. So in other words, 30 seconds of hard breathing can reduce blood flow to the brain by 40%. What would be the best way for an athlete that let's say, you know, they do a sprint and then they have to recover because they have to

do this again. And like, let's say they're, they're on the court or, you know, they're grappling and they need to, they need to recover. A lot of athletes, they tend to, they, they, you know, they start breathing through their mouth. Is there something else that they should do to be able to get to recover faster? Yeah. Well, what I do is do it during training. So everything that they do, learn to do it during training. So you're comfortable with it. Take slow deeps, sorry, take slow breaths, but it during training so you're comfortable with it take slow deeps sorry take slow breaths but deeper breaths so you're intentionally slowing down the air that's coming into the lungs but each breath that you're taking is is big because it's that way that you're able to enhance the amount of oxygen getting from the lungs into the into the blood and if you're

just breathing fast and shallow it's, it's not perfectly ideal. And also it induces that stress response. You know, how do we breathe when we're stressed, but we breathe fast and shallow. So it doesn't make sense then to be breathing fast and shallow during the day because, you know, it's saying to the body that we're stressed. So I'd be saying breathe slow but deep. And even if you have to fast breathe so in between rounds it might be no harm

even doing a little bit of hyperventilation because you're going to blow off some carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to breathe and this may help then you to prolong

the exercise intensity without feeling such excessive breathlessness. But it's all about this can vary from person to person so i'd say do it during your practice sessions first you know um and you can practice like if when i'm giving a presentation i can be giving a presentation to say five or six hundred people

and like oftentimes they can be medical doctors or dentists. There's a lot of the work that I was doing. I just came back from Ohio yesterday. I was in Columbus, Ohio at the Med Center for Sleep. And there we were speaking mainly with doctors and dentists. And I was speaking for two days. And sometimes you can be a little bit getting on stage to talk for two hours or two days. Well, two days was fine because I got used to it. But a two-hour talk to 500 people can be anxiety you know it can bring on a little bit of anxiety so i really want to use these tools for

myself and for 20 minutes to a half an hour before a big event i only focus on my breathing keep on focusing on it keep on focusing on it but now i'm too relaxed i'm focused but i'm too relaxed but then i'll do five to six strong breath holds, and that will bring me into a stress. And then I, if I'm not, I'm not an athlete, so I don't have to hyperventilate, but the athlete to take five or six big breaths, but also to flood your body with energy. And I know that sounds a bit new agey, but literally the, the wave, I want people to sense the amount of energy flooding throughout the body and deliberately flooding it there. And it just brings you into that state and bump you go out.

And you want the mind focused, but also alert. And you want to be in the present moment. This is not just new age stuff. This is about harnessing the full capacity of the mind because we're not reaching it. We're not reaching it at all. capacity of the mind because we're not reaching it you know we're not reaching it at all when it comes to you know bodybuilding powerlifting and just the fitness community in general a lot of people utilize cardiovascular training they might do steady state cardio or hit training has there been any evidence uh that this style of breathing maybe enhances fat burning or something like that maybe enhances fat burning or something like that? Yeah, it's difficult to know.

It's not an area that, you know, anecdotally what I've seen over the years was when I seen that when people were slowing down their breathing, that their appetites were changing and some of them were losing weight. And we never, I never found out what's happening here. And my thought part of it would might've been emotions that, you know, we're helping people to be calmer. We're also helping with their sleep. Because say, for instance, if you have an individual who has stopped breathing during sleep, it increases production of a hormone called ghrelin.

And ghrelin stimulates your food, your appetite. So you can imagine somebody with obstructive sleep apnea, they're stopping breathing during sleep and then they're waking up during the, when they wake up then they're feeling really hungry and they're eating so much food then during the day, but now they're putting on weight and they're putting weight on the belly. And as a result, then their diaphragm isn't working effectively and the upper airway, the lateral muscles aren't working because your breathing is also impacting your ability for your airway to stay open during sleep.

So I think in terms of slowing down the breath and relaxation, we've seen a change in metabolism and a change in the need for food, appetite change, but we don't know what's going on. There is, interestingly, there's a product, Slim Breathe or Breathe Slim. It's a product approved by the FDA. And the product is basically a breathing device that's designed to restrict and slow down your breathing. So it could be doing the same by activating the body's relaxation response. When you're, you know, if someone was to do some of these exercises, cardiovascular exercises, and they were to tape their mouth shut, I guess basically what you're saying, though, is that by practicing breathing in and out of their nose, they're going to enhance the amount of oxygen that gets their muscles.

They're going to have better endurance. what we've seen is people that have higher fitness levels, they end up becoming stronger and it ends up becoming a lot easier for them to put muscle mass on because they recover from their workouts a lot faster. What have you seen in terms of utilizing this style of breathing in terms of recovery? It's much better. Nasal breathing is, the feedback has been, it's so much better in terms of if you if you're doing your physical exercise with your mouth closed your recovery is so much better um like across all levels of sports the the feedback has been and we have athletes preparing say for instance for the next tokyo olympics and we've got some of your SWAT guys, the special weapons and tactics, putting it into practice. MMA fighters,

professional boxers, kayakers, rugby players. So across many sports. Now, it takes a little bit of work, you know, and as I said at the start, anatomy of the airway is important, but it's

really about persevering with it. Switch for some of your training sessions to nasal breathing. Now your nose will run. So just bring a hanky with you or something, if you can, but persevere with it and keep going and get your bold score up because it's your bold score. That's a measurement of your degree of breathlessness. So it's really about efficient breathing. You know, there's an energy cost associated with breathing as well. As we sit here, about 2% to 3% of our oxygen consumption is going to support our breathing muscles. If we go and do moderate physical exercise, about 5% to 6%. If we do high

intensity exercise, about 10% of your oxygen consumption is going to support your breathing muscles. And if you do maximum intensity, it's about 13%. So in order to work your breathing muscles, your breathing muscles need their own supply of oxygen. But if you're breathing inefficiently, more of your VO2 is going to be devoted to supporting your breathing muscles and less down to your motor, you know, the local motor muscles. So yeah, I think it's, it's really important. The best thing is start putting it into practice and see, see for yourself. Don't listen to me. Test it out. What I really like what you're saying is that, you know, it's going to train your mental capacity. So you know, if you're, you know, on a treadmill and you're running or you're out on a track and you're,

you're, you know, doing some sprints or you're going to have that. You're going to want to breathe in and out of your mouth. You know, naturally you're going to want to breathe in and out of your mouth. How mental is it? You know, can it, can it get to a point where it's not safe? Well, you know, if you feel that it's, if it's, if it's really taxing, this has been only studied a couple of times, what's the maximum intensity that you can, if it's really taxing, this has been only studied a couple of times.

What's the maximum intensity that you can achieve? What's the work rate? And it tends to be 85 to 90%. Now, if you look at some, one athlete, I think her name is Sonia Ross Richards. She's an African-American athlete. She did all of her sprints with her mouth closed, or at least the photographs that we're seeing is that she has her mouth closed throughout. So here's an example of an elite, high-level athlete. I think she won four gold in the London Olympics with her mouth closed. So it's going to vary. It depends on anatomy, but it also depends on form. I want to train

breathing efficiency. And you're not going to do that if you're going around with your mouth open during the day, sleeping with your mouth open, and also doing all of your physical exercise with your mouth open. What I'm saying is, for functional breathing, using the diaphragm, you want to use your diaphragm, it has to be breathing, it has to be in and out through the nose. There's no way that you're using your diaphragm muscle effectively if you're going around with your mouth open so i'd say just let's start with our everyday breathing and then bring some of it during your warm-up you don't need to have your mouth open during your cool down you don't need

to have your mouth open how about doing your warm-up for 10-15 minutes breathing in and out through the nose and also by doing five breath holds during that time. So you're doing a warm-up, you're getting the body ready for additional physical exercise, nose breathing and breath holding. Do one breath hold every minute. It's a great preparation. So yeah, so I'd say is like, I don't want to introduce something to an athlete, which is going to totally disrupt their training regime. What I'm saying is look at your training and see how you can sneak nasal breathing into it. So when the going isn't so intense, switch to nasal breathing. What are your thoughts on the Wim Hof method? I'm sure you get asked this question all the time. He's had a lot of success with training people with breathing as well, but it almost seems like

some of the stuff he speaks about is almost, I guess, opposite. Are you guys maybe after a different effect or what do you think some of the differences are there? In terms of the changes to the blood oxygen, okay, what I do is I show hypoxic hypercathletic. So I drop blood oxygen saturation down to about, say, 85%. And we increase carbon dioxide to about 55 millimeter of mercury pressure. So, you know, it's hypoxic hypercapnic. The Wim Hof technique is 30 large breaths, hyperventilation, and then exhale, hold. And you're holding the breaths for up until quite an intensity.

And then breathe in and hold for 10 seconds. for up until quite an intensity and then breathe in and hold for 10 seconds, hyperventilate for 30 seconds and repeat it. Because you hyperventilate, you blow off a lot of carbon dioxide. And because you blow off a lot of carbon dioxide, it allows you to hold your breath for longer. So it's the loss of CO2 that extends the time that you're going to hold your breath for. And this in turn then is causing a greater hypoxic response. So he can drop the SpO2 down to maybe 60, 50, or even 40%. But if you go below 60, you're at risk of passing out. So what is happening? Number one is if you hyperventilate and you do a long breath hold during the Wim Hof technique,

you're not increasing oxygen uptake in the blood. You're not increasing the saturation of hemoglobin oxygen. Physiologically, it's not possible. You are increasing the amount of oxygen dissolved in the blood and only about 2% of oxygen is dissolved in the blood, but you are increasing that. You're blowing off carbon dioxide, a lot of it, and this remains low throughout the training. So Wim Hof is hypoxic, hypocapnic. It's low oxygen, low CO2. Now, what do we have in common? They're stressors to the body. So that's what we're doing. On mine, I know that my intention is to delay lactic acid and fatigue. And my intention is to improve respiratory muscle strength. But the one thing that I'm

taking from the Wim Hof is that yes, it's a stressor to the body, which is forcing the body to make adaptations because we now live in a life of comfort. Our ancestors, you know, we were out in the colder environments. We were deprived of food every now and again. We didn't have, you know, you can compare the difference even to our parents and our parents' parents. They were working physically hard. They were eating natural foods. They were living entirely different. Now today, we're all mollycoddled and we're wrapped up in cotton wool. And the body isn't able for this

because throughout our evolution, we relied on stressors and that's how we've survived. Nature and the intelligence of the human body, we are here today because the body was able to adapt whatever the environment has thrown at us. But now the environment is not throwing anything at us, except we've got extended periods of stress, financial stress, marital stress, and all of this corporate stress. It's a different stress. We're not able to cope with that. So, yeah, back to your question. I know it's a long winded answer, but the Wim Hof technique has really opened the door for breathing techniques as a stressor to force the body to make adaptations. And I think it's wonderful.

How about, you know, because I saw you made a book with Mike Mew in the past and you mentioned like how breathing has an effect on the face. And you've talked a lot about how it's affecting our children's faces. How can parents use this to like make sure that they're getting their kids, you know, breathing correctly? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we all want to create, we want a facial structure like yours. So we want a broad facial structure and we want good nostrils and good airway. And that happens only when we have the mouth closed and nasal breathing during childhood. If a child has the mouth open, the tongue drops from the roof of the mouth, but it's the tongue that's very important for

helping to develop the shape of the maxilla, which is the top jaw. So we want the tongue resting in the roof of the mouth, driving the face forward and broadening the facial structure. But if we have the mouth open during childhood, our tongue is dropping to the floor of the mouth. And as a result, the pressures of the lips and the cheeks are causing narrow facial structure. Then we have a longer face, narrower face, smaller nostrils, but also the jaws are set back. So we have a longer face, narrower face, smaller nostrils, but also the jaws are set back so we have a smaller airway. An athlete is formed by looking also at the anatomy of the airway. If you look at the faces of top athletes, they have got good airway because you can't be a good athlete, a top athlete,

unless you have a good airway. Now, the only exception I'd say is that michael feltz he is a supreme athlete um but i think he's got away with it a little bit in terms of the sport that he's doing swimming and he's been able to to compensate and but definitely if i look at an athlete coming in, I'll typically see a facial structure, but that's influenced by how that kid was breathing when he was in younger life. What about that kind of old school way of like breathing into a bag? Like why would somebody, you know, you see the people blowing up the bag, like what was that for? Yeah. So that was carbon dioxide. So we talk about, you know, how many times have you heard

breathe in as much oxygen as you can and get rid of as much carbon dioxide. So we talk about, you know, how many times have you heard, breathe in as much oxygen as you can and get rid of as much carbon dioxide as possible. That's common, common information out there. But when oxygen moves from the lungs into the blood, it's picked up by hemoglobin. And in order for hemoglobin to release oxygen to the tissues, hemoglobin to release oxygen to the tissues, we need carbon dioxide. So for the tissues to utilize oxygen, carbon dioxide should be present. And say if you have an individual who is prone to a panic attack, they start hyperventilating and then they start blowing off carbon dioxide. And as they lose CO2, their blood vessels constrict. And also there's less oxygen getting released to the brain because of what's called the Bohr effect. And now they've got neuronal excitability.

So the purpose of the bag was to re-breathe in the carbon dioxide into their lungs. So in order to increase it in the blood, to improve circulation, but also to improve oxygen delivery to the cells. circulation, but also to improve oxygen delivery to the cells. So it's not altogether safe if you continue doing it, but it's a little bit like the masks that athletes are using. You know, like we're using masks. We use masks now. Different masks. This one here is a sports mask. You have a mask on the face, but that's designed to pool carbon dioxide. And what that does is then it's reducing the ventilatory response to CO2. And that in turn, then it can be beneficial. It's a respiratory muscle strength trainer, but it's also beneficial in terms of causing the body to make adaptations to carbon dioxide. Athletes tend to like challenges. So I bet you in some way, even though this is a pain in the ass to do, and it's probably

difficult, a lot of people probably kind of like it because it makes it harder, right? Yeah, it does. But the other thing, it's very motivating to know that you can simulate a height of about 4,000 to 5,000 meters without having to leave your sitting room. at a height of about 4,000 to 5,000 meters without having to leave your sitting room. You know, and you can feel the difference. I think athletes will put something into practice when they can feel the difference pretty quickly. And when I'm looking at athletes coming in, I want to know about their sleep.

I want to know about their ability to concentrate and to focus. And I simply find that out by asking them, focus on your breathing. Are you able to focus on your breath without the mind wandering? Or if you start focusing on your breathing, is your mind all over the place? If your mind is all over the place while you're focused on your breathing, your mind is going to be all over the place when you focus on something else. So we use breath holding. Yeah, it's a combination of everything, but physical exercise and breath holding. And I think you're right. That's why 90% of the people coming in for oxygen advantage are men.

Have you seen anything from just with the people you work with? Have you seen any improvement in maybe like blood work? You mentioned like hemoglobin and iron. Have you seen any improvement in like heart health or what have you seen? In terms of heart, say for instance, if we're looking at autonormal autonomic functioning, there is a lot of research looking at the effects

of slow breathing. And that's ultimately what we're teaching in terms of functional breathing. If you slow down your breathing rate to about six breaths per minute, you're stimulating the baroreceptors. So there's receptors in the larger blood vessels, and these receptors are monitoring your blood pressure. And if your blood pressure increases, these receptors send a message to the brain, and the brain instantaneously sends a message to the blood vessels to open up to bring down your blood pressure. These are a great measure of resilience of the human body. But people who are sick, people with cardiovascular issues, and people with high blood pressure, people with anxiety, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, etc., they've got

poor functioning of the baroreceptors. And if you look at the work of Russo, Bernardi, Bordoni, and there's a lot of research over the last 20 years that slow breathing is very important for helping to normalize autonomic activity. Heart rate variability would come into this as well. So overall, I think it's really, really important for resilience of the human being. There's a lot of stress out there. Stress changes our breathing patterns. And how do we counteract that stress? I'd say start slowing down your breathing. This stuff isn't new. This stuff has been around for thousands of years. And sometimes it's back to basics.

So for cardiovascular health, yes, I would definitely say start slowing down your breathing. And I wrote a chapter in the book looking at athletes. Why do athletes get cardiac arrest? If you breathe overly hard and you're blowing off carbon dioxide, you're also achieving a left shift of the oxyhemoglobin dissociation curve, but this reduces blood flow and oxygen delivery to the heart. So we need to be very careful. Our heart is not just the muscle that's driving blood around the body. Our heart needs its own blood supply and own oxygen supply. And we should set up the conditions for that. You know, I have, um, I have quite a few friends that that get panic attacks quite a bit.

And I've been seeing a lot of, you even mentioned how it helps individuals with anxiety. But one thing I notice when some of these individuals get it is they always say, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. But they're definitely breathing. What can people that have anxiety, that get these types of panic attacks, how can they approach this? And have you seen it actually make a big difference in terms of how often this happens? one part of it and oxygen advantages sports we've we've had many many people and hundreds thousands with anxiety panic disorder and stress the person who's having a panic disorder they're feeling strong suffocation that they're not getting enough air but during that time they are hyperventilating and hyperventilating is hyperventilation is blown off too much CO2, which in turn is reducing oxygen delivery to the brain. Now the brain gets excited and they feel a

hunger for air. They start breathing harder and it's a vicious circle. This is why the brown bag or the paper plastic bag was brought in. When I look at the breathing of an individual prone to panic disorder, generally it's abnormal. It's upper chest. It's a faster respiratory rate. We can notice it. And they sigh quite often. A sigh every now and again, no problem.

But a sigh every few minutes is a problem. It's a red flag. So what I want to do is I want to change that person's everyday breathing. Now, one exercise that we use for people with panic disorder is the breathing recovery exercise from the book. And the reason being is I have to be careful if somebody comes in with panic disorder. If I was to give them very strong exercises, I'm making them feel too suffocated and I could actually initiate the symptoms of a panic attack. So instead I give them a teaspoon of the exercises. I have them breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the nose, pinch the nose,

hold their breath for five seconds, then breathe in through the nose and breathe normal for 10 seconds. And after breathing normal for 10 seconds, breathe in, breathe out, pinch the nose, hold the breath for five, then let go, breathe in. And I have them do that for a while. And then I'll have them do some pacing exercises. I'll start activating their diaphragm and I'll start normalizing their breathing volume. And this gives them then the resilience that, see, it's not the stress that's the problem, but it's our perception or it's our reaction to the stress. And we can improve our resilience so that whatever life is thrown at us, that we can deal with it a little bit better. Yeah. Do you think you have a kind of internal desire to help people?

Because it sounds like, you know, where you came from, uh, teaching people about mindfulness and then now teaching people about, uh, how to breathe. It seems like you really just have an internal drive to, to help people. Is that, is that kind of the mission here? Yeah, it's, I was, I'm very fortunate. I've, I have a job that I absolutely love. Um, and this forces me, doesn't even force me to do anything, but my background was economics and I was in the corporate world and I hated it. I used to work for a company. I don't know if I can mention the company or not.

I'll mention it anyway. It was Enterprise Rent-A-Car. And I started some of their branches here in Ireland and I felt the stress on it. You're dictated by information technology. And it's a lot of corporate. There are pressures on employees. And maybe my ability to deal with the stress was very poor, which I'd say it was at the time. I was fairly highly strung and I was tired and I didn't have the right mind to be able to deal with stress. So it was a combination of all that. But yeah, I was lucky.

I found this and I changed careers and I retrained in this field. And I'm fortunate. I'm really, really fortunate. And I'd say anybody with kids or anybody, if you can get a job that you really love to do, it's brilliant. And yeah, helping people in the process, it's very rewarding. It's brilliant. And yeah, helping people in the process, it's very rewarding. On that topic of mindfulness, is there something that you carried over with you that you still, you know, you do a lot of seminars, a lot of speaking engagements, you train a lot of people and stuff like that. And so are there things that you carried over because, you know, the capacity

of our mind is oftentimes the one thing that's holding us back in training and not necessarily our muscles. It's very underrated breathing exercises or even just focusing on the breath. Like in various times throughout the day, I'll take my attention out of the mind and I'll place it on my breathing. And I'll just even follow the airflow coming in and out of the body. And I know it sounds totally new agey, but the connection, the breath is the connection between the mind and the body. We don't want to just keep all of our attention stuck in the head. The human mind is mad. We have about 80,000 thoughts per day and about 95% of them are repetitive and useless. thoughts per day. And about 95% of them are repetitive and useless. And here's the thing. We don't pay attention too often what we're thinking about. The human mind is the filter through which we experience life. But yet we never ask, how does my mind work? What am I

thinking about? We seldom pay attention to the patterns of thoughts. Somebody did something to us 10 years ago. They did it to us once and we are doing it to ourselves ever since. If you were married to your own mind, you'd probably have them divorced in about two weeks. So I want to see the functioning of my mind. And I don't mean about writing a PhD on how the mind works. Many people write a PhD on how the mind works. That's not what it's about. You could write a PhD on how an apple tastes, or you could bite into the apple. I want to bite into the apple. So in terms of, you know, we have to give ourselves some attention i'm taking my attention out of my mind onto my breath feeling the airflow coming in and out of the body slowing down breathing

it brings the body into relaxation and also it develops a muscle i don't know how to explain it but the mind is neuroplasticity is that the brain changes itself due to new experiences and behaviors. And now if I'm in a situation, I can automatically bring my attention to that part of the brain, hold my attention there. And it gives me the capacity to focus. If life throws something at me, I don't get stressed very often. if life throws something at me. I don't get stressed very often. And if you think of it, a pilot that's up in the sky, that pilot is trained to fly, but that jet will fly by itself. That pilot is there when things go wrong. That's why he's there. The athlete that differentiates itself from another athlete is the athlete who can deliver when things are

going wrong. It's not when things are going right. And this is where the mind kicks in. Any athlete who can deliver when things are going wrong has got the focus and the capacity to have their full attention on doing what they're doing. Most athletes will buckle and they buckle not because they're not able to do it, but because they don't have the focus of the mind to do it. They say that that's what separated Michael Jordan out from everybody else is that he, you know, he was like, I get paid to score points. I'm supposed to score points. So if I score 40 points in the game, it's no matter, right? If I get 10 rebounds, like I'm supposed to do that. I'm supposed to get assist. I'm supposed to do this, but what I'm not supposed to do is turn the ball over. I'm not supposed to

miss shots. I'm not supposed to miss free throws. So he focused in, he honed in on a lot of the things that are, that most people are kind of missing. They're not mindful of, of some of those other aspects of like, this is probably where you're going wrong. They're not mindful of, of some of those other aspects of like, this is probably where you're going wrong. And like, you know, nobody was better, like when the game was on the line and when things were going wrong and things seemed like they were pure disaster, you know, than him. Yeah. Yeah. Muscle memory. How many times has Michael Jordan performed that, you know know every move he's performed it over and over and over and over and over and over the mind is all of that programmed and during a competition

during a game all you have to do is get the mind out of the way you know the guy who's doing mixed martial arts he's performed the one move over and over and over and over. In actual fact, the mind, we're not, you know, if somebody comes to you to hit you a box, you're not going to think, well, what am I going to do next? You're relying on your instinct. You don't want to be thinking about it. You want instantaneous reaction to see everything, to anticipate it. And that's when the mind gets out of the way and you're allowing all of that practice to come into play. But we have to have trust that all of your practice and preparation is there. And I suppose it can come a little bit with experience as well. But the other aspect is, if things are going wrong, are you going to let that bring you down?

Can you remain focused? As you said, Michael Jordan could maintain focus and all top athletes will do that. Thank you so much for your time. I don't want to take up any more of your time, but we will cross paths at some point. I'm going to make sure it happens, whether I go out to Ireland and see you or we end up crossing paths here in the States, it will happen at one point or another because

you're a fantastic guest, a fantastic mind, and just appreciate you sharing your knowledge and putting out books like this. I mean, this is a huge deal and I don't think enough people are talking about it. So thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks very much. It's always good to have, you know, chats like this. It's very entertaining and also it helps to get the message out there. So I appreciate it very much. So thanks a lot. Yeah. What's your website and like, where can people find you and stuff like that? And my website is oxygenadvantage.com and some of the measurements and things to slow breathing I was talking about, you'll

get it on our YouTube channel, which is Oxygen Advantage as well. So yeah, so just, I'd say to look at the science and look at some of the papers. And if you have any questions, just drop me, you know, drop me an email. It's patrick at oxygenadvantage.com. There we go. Thank you again. Appreciate it. Have a great day.

You're welcome. Thanks, you again. Appreciate it. Have a great day. You too. Dude, that's awesome. Okay. That was great. He is now. The savage. Do you want to keep recording, Andrew?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's keep going. Yeah. I'm going to take a leak, but I'll come right back. Okay. Well, what's amazing about that is like we had just well i mean me personally barely discovered who he was because of you guys right and then so how did you hear of patrick i can never pronounce his name patrick mckeown yeah yeah so i think i read that book it was like last year

early last year okay um but my buddy uh from jujitsu, Christian Moore, he was like, he, he didn't read the book, but he was telling me, um, just talking about breathing through the nose. Right. And I was like, dude, yeah, no. Cause after I started breathing through the nose during jujitsu, I was like, dude, wow. I'm a much calmer. I'm like, I noticed a reduction in stress. I really actually noticed it while rolling. So then I started looking at nasal breathing stuff online. And then I came across the oxygen advantage. Then I was reading the book. So then I started looking up nasal breathing stuff online. And then I came across the oxygen advantage. Then I was reading the book. And then as I was like doing all the stuff and doing it more on the mats,

I was like, damn, this is crazy. Yeah. You know, and Mark by that time was already doing mouth taping and stuff. So like in the book, he mentioned mouth taping.

So Mark and I talked about it and I told Mark about it. And then I think Mark went through it too. And it's just like, it, it just went from there. Yeah. What I, what I think is great is cause I,

I mean, again, like when you guys brought it up, that was the first time I had ever even, you know, the first time I'd ever even thought about like, Oh, breathing through my mouth,

through my nose. You know, I mean, we, we hear about like, Oh, their mouth breathers. And you'll kind of associate that with like, I wish we got to ask. I know. We should have, but I mean, we hear about like, oh, they're mouth breathers and, you know, kind of associate that with like.

I wish we got to ask that question. We should have, but I mean, we'll have another opportunity. Yeah. But for a lot of people, this will be the first time that they, one, have ever heard of Patrick and then ever really considered like is nose breathing superior than mouth breathing. Yeah. So I think it's going to open a lot of eyes. And it's also i mean i i not that i know of any platform that he's been on you know that's big as this so it's like another one

of those guys like another saladino where it's like they were put on the map here first dude yeah so that's really cool it's so it's so funny like already i have a tendency of like when i'm out in public and found around around a lot of people i'll watch just like the way they stand and the way they move just because like i'm curious what's going on there. Right. But now I'm just like, I wonder how they're breathing too. And you notice a lot of people, like, especially when they're not paying attention to it. Like when people put headphones on, you notice it immediately. Like they'll, they'll stay, they won't be paying attention. Their breathing gets louder and then they start opening their mouths a little bit and they do that without

even realizing it because they're listening to music so the amount of people that are going to get such music might be kind of like hype music which kind of getting you get your yeah fired up gets you fired up exactly i noticed uh i stop breathing sometimes like when i'm making like a post like i'll just sit i'd be like almost like you're almost like if you were like i don't know fixing your car or something you might kind of like grunt or like i get like tense and i'm like and i'm like okay why why in the world am i doing that let me you know yeah mindful of what i'm doing and i'll work on my breath yeah almost every camera operator will do that when they want to get like a smooth panning shot it's almost like you know when you're going to shoot a gun you hold your breath in and then get the shot and then he's like oh my gosh i've been holding my

breath for like 20 minutes it's like what's happened yeah it's kind of weird how that works at least now people won't think you're so crazy for taping your mouth because you see all those comments like you're gonna die mark you're gonna you're not gonna be able to breathe mark it's like no it's not crazy there's something here it is from the very from the very first time i tried it it just has felt right whether i did it for lifting or whether I did it to run on the treadmill or whether I'd done it for sleep, it's felt, you know, right, right away. I just didn't know, like I was messing with it with running and I was like, I'm not really sure how, you know, now that I hear him talking about sprinting and all these other things, and I'll just utilize it a little bit more. And I just, I love when people, when he talked about high level performance, he was like, no, like, I'm not suggesting you do it 100% of the time. And I love that, that he has a lot of great information. He's studied this stuff a lot. He's got a lot of great research. He's got a lot of

great feedback, but he's also not so into what he's doing that he's ignoring what has been going on for, you know, thousands of years, which is when people are involved or engaged in something really, really tense, they might breathe differently than what he's suggesting. But what he is suggesting is this isn't any different really than like, uh, doing a tempo squat or doing a paused deadlift. What's the magic of a pause deadlift. It just makes it more difficult, you know, a deficit pull, uh, you know, uh, pause squats. I mean, any of these, we use all these techniques in the gym all the time. Well, now we have another tool, you know, we can bring breathing into it, which is how awesome is that?

It's like, especially when he mentioned, first off, I'm like, again, I'm happy we got that clarification. Like when, when the athletes doing high intensity work, okay, there's going to be some times we're going to breathe through the mouth. Like that's okay. But another thing is like when you mentioned simulating high altitude training with the sprints, right? We have this assault bike here, you know, Jess is already doing,

she's doing some like hit and she's doing, I think 20 seconds or 25 seconds on and then a minute off. But like now I think what I'm going to start doing is I'm going to get on that bike. I'm probably going to do 20 to 25 seconds holding my breath and then maybe 50 minutes to, or not 50 minutes, 50 seconds like rest, really low intensity. And I want to see how that affects me because I mean, the main way I've been increasing my cardio, like my cardiovascular outputs, just been through jujitsu and, you know, breathing through my nose. But I think this is going to be really, really beneficial because I've been trying to get that bolt score past like 30 something. I've been having the most trouble, man. I'm pissed. It's still like 20, 22, 25, 27 on a good day. Right?

So that's going to be huge. Yeah, yeah it's hard i've done it a bunch of times but i always i tend to i think i cheat every time i'm like i can still hold my breath and i'm like oh wait that's not what you're supposed to do yeah that's that's what i do too because i my first time i tried it i got like 23 seconds or something i'm like that doesn't sound right at all but how cool was it that he kept talking about your facial structure like we all we all wish we had your face to get made fun of for having a big nose hmm i guess it's good now yeah yeah i thought that was funny i thought that was hilarious like african-americans and their big nose

but he's like yeah then me over here he's like caucasian oh and i'm like oh that's great i thought that was awesome but i mean that that does like i mean i think that's good for people to like uh to think about because now you can also look at your face structure right you can see like okay well my nasal cavity my nasal passages aren't big maybe it's a good idea if i like when i am doing high intensity activity I don't focus on just doing it through my nose because a lot of people that, you know, they just listen to that. Um,

they may have tried to do like really hit like high intensity activity purely through the nose and maybe they just can't do it cause their, their nostrils aren't huge. Right. And that's fine. You know, it's really good that he, you know,

he gave us that, that, um, that idea to look at that. And that's where you might want to get one of those Breathe Right strips because it's just going to pinch your nose, going to open up your nostrils a little bit, and you may as well try something like that.

It might give you the kind of relief that you're looking for. Additionally, when I've been doing training and taping my mouth shut, your nose will go crazy. Your nose will run a lot. So one thing I didn't ask him about, which I just kind of forgot, like, what about when it's cold? Like when it's cold, it's really hard to breathe through your nose, but breathing through your nose when it's cold might be kind of an, um, it might force you to breathe the way you're supposed to, because you might take such a short breath i'm not sure because he was kind of saying like short um i guess he wanted a longer breath a

longer uh breath out than in right is what kind of what he was talking about yeah he talked about breathing slow but breathing deep and so i guess yeah in the cold it's like you take these you would take these short tiny breaths because especially through your nose it's just way too cold yeah yeah because in the book he talks about how much more effort it takes for the the breath to get uh like to to the proper temperature when you take it in through your mouth because it just has more uh you know more space in your mouth versus your nose it takes a little bit less effort to actually get like the moisture and the right temperature down. So I think during the cold, maybe like is that just amplified a little bit more? Yeah. You know, it takes a little bit like twice as much effort through the mouth than it does through the nose, even though it probably just feels uncomfortable.

Yeah. And plus you got snot coming out everywhere because it's already cold. Yeah. If it's cold, cold, it's really hard to breathe through your nose. Yeah. It's almost like trying to like, it's almost like trying to snort the smelling salts. It's like, it's a hard thing to make yourself do. Painful.

Yeah. Yeah. But his book is awesome, man. He has all kinds of great tips in there. It's definitely, it's a book that people should definitely get because there's a lot of specific techniques and exercises for like, he has exercises if your bolt is zero to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40. There's different ways of increasing your bolt past that. 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40. There's different

ways of increasing your bolt past that. And they all go into specifics in the book. So all of y'all need to really, I mean, especially if you're athletes, you need to get this book. It's huge. Yeah. And I think, you know, like taping your mouth shut seems extreme and you're like, well, why don't you just keep your mouth shut while you're doing something? And I think that can be effective, but I think taping the mouth shut is just kind of ensuring that you're not and you're like well why don't you just keep your mouth shut while you're doing something and i think that can be effective but i think taping the mouth shut is just kind of ensuring that you're not you're not going to go to it you know i actually feel less pressure when i have my mouth taped because when i when i'm like on the treadmill and i just have my mouth shut i've i have you know it's kind of like having like a a bowl of candy standing sitting right

next to you you know you're like oh i'm so tempted to like a, a bowl of candy standing, sitting right next to you. You know, you're like, Oh, I'm so tempted to just reach in there. I'm so tempted to just open my mouth. Took the equation out. Yeah. So when you tape your mouth, you're just like,

I'm just going to focus on breathing. Yeah. With that treadmill that you have, you can just fricking crank up that incline. It's so awesome. Crank up that incline and try to keep your mouth taped shut. You'll, you'll be, it's tough.

Yeah. But it's, it's tough yeah but it's it's really close like 30 or something it goes to 40 oh 40 and yeah so it's a nordic one out here goes to 15 yeah so 40 is like steep as shit yeah it's a nordic track x22i and you know they have the same thing they have like the coaches and whatnot so like for me i suck at walking or running on a treadmill, you know, whatever, but they like coaching through it. And there's times where they're like, okay, you know, I'm going to put my trekking poles down. So that means you get to put your hands on the treadmill.

And in the moment I'm like, well, I don't really need to, but I'm just going to listen to him. And then by the end, I'm like, I see why he told me to put my hands on the thing because I I'm now struggling to breathe, but I, I haven't had an instance where I couldn't keep my mouth closed. And it's just, I think it's just learning and getting used to actually breathing through the nose. Cause at first, like I had told you guys, or I think as this was when it was just me and Mark, I'm like, man, I don't think I can do it. Cause my nose is always stuffy. I can never, like I have to breathe through my mouth. But then after the first couple of nights of trying the mouth tape, I'm like, oh, by the time the morning rolls around, I can breathe just

fine. So I don't know if it's like my body is like, oh, this is where the air is coming in. We need to clear everything out. It feels like it makes it better. Yeah. A lot of people might find resistance, like especially the people that like have stuffy noses a lot you know they'll probably like ah this this isn't for me or i can't do this but literally just and i think he said on youtube there's uh he's got drills exactly to clear out the nasal sinus it takes like three minutes yeah it's really just you know breathing in and out of one nostril and breathing in and out of the other one he's got very specific drill for it but it works really well i've used it before yeah really annoying the other day as i'm trying to go to sleep my nose starts whistling you never had your

nose whistle no really like a little little uh just a little wheeze like like maybe a little booger in the way to try to rub my nose it wouldn. It wouldn't go away. It's like, God, I have to get up. And I went to the bathroom and picked my nose to try to get rid of it. You're like, there's got to be something in there. There's something in there, yeah. A whistle. Yeah. Yeah.

Not a whistle. No. It's because you have that great African-American or Nigerian bone structure. This is where the large fat nose. You got that big cold air intake. That was awesome. I'm glad we got Patrick on here the African American

advantage it's gonna be in Seema's book it's just gonna have a giant cock on the front of it oh my god this is what happens on your podcast

for too long oh man dude well there goes the tears alright peeps we're out of here strength is never weakness weakness is never strength

later peace