WHOOP Podcast - Breathing Your Way to Better Health & Performance with Expert Brian MacKenzie

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Brian MacKenzie is a human performance and endurance expert, and the President and co-founder of The Health & Human Performance Foundation. He is on a mission to help everyone from top executives to the US military understand how breath can help optimize their health and performance. Brian joins the podcast to talk about what hypoxia is and why it matters (6:37), the downstream effects of improper breathing (10:42), the characteristics of optimal breathing (15:30), the physiological impact of mouth breathing (20:24), benefits of nasal breathing (28:13), elevating your awareness and achieving an optimal breath practice (35:27), and how to think about your breath in gears (35:59).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to unlock your own best performance, I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Okay, this is a topic that is close to my heart. On this episode, we're talking about something we all do about 26,000 times a day. It's a little bit of a brain teaser. What do we do 26,000 times a day? Think, think, think.

We breathe. Okay. Kristen Holmes, our VP of Performance, sits down with Brian McKenzie to talk about how breathing can reduce stress, strengthen your body's immune response, help you sleep better, and improve your performance. Brian is a human performance and endurance expert, the founder and CEO of Shift, and the president and co-founder of the Health and Human Performance Foundation.

He's worked with top executives, the U.S. military, and CrossFit champions to help them understand how breath can help optimize health and performance. Brian and Kristen discussed why it's important to engage your diaphragm. What breathing does for you physiologically and psychologically, nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, how breathing protocols can help you regulate your system, and how being aware of your breathing without controlling it is the ultimate goal of your breath practice.

I have to say, I got into meditation years ago and just learning how to breathe will completely change your life. So this is a very important podcast. We also have an exciting new offer for Whoop podcast listeners. If you're a new member signing up for Whoop, use the code Will. That's just W-I-L-L when you're checking out, and you can get a $60 credit on Whoop accessories. That's right. When you get a new membership, you'll also get $60 off on bands, battery packs, or Whoop body apparel.

So head over to join.Woop.com to get started. Also, if you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast, email us. podcast at whoop.com or call us 508443-4952, and your question will be answered on a future episode. Without further ado, here is our discussion with Brian McKenzie. Breathing is something we do every day, yet roughly 50% of the population is actually doing it incorrectly. So it seems pretty clear that proper breathing is something we should be focused on. It has an outsized impact on mental clarity, sleep quality, exercise capacity, longevity, and mental health. You know, for us to just understand more clearly how our own breathing is impacting our life, I think is definitely a worthy project.

And here to help us better understand the mechanisms and various techniques we can deploy to get the most out of our breath is a world-renowned expert on all things breathing of breathwork. Brian McKenzie, Brian, welcome. Thank you for having me, Kristen. I'd love to just know a little bit more about your personal. journey and how you did get to this moment where you know, you're an expert in breathing and you're teaching this to hundreds and thousands of folks, you know, every day. What did that journey look like? I've been studying aspects around respiration for probably 15 plus years, but it's been more related to altitude and hypoxia. And I largely use those things and have learned and developed a lot

of information around how to get adaptations through hypoxia. I don't talk about that a lot. because it's not something that, like, publicly, a lot of people should be actively pursuing because there are health concerns, and that's the thing with breathing that I'll probably layer in here, that people don't truly consider with it, is that there are actual health concerns because breeding is so interconnected with the entire playbook of the human being, that it can be very stressful on the system to a larger degree. If we're intervening in certain ways, that being said, My background began a human movement with really ultimately fixing the housewives of Newport Beach with their broken running technique.

And that was kind of how I like got my go. I was working out of a gym and I was just working with a lot of housewives who were coming in there that had disposable income. And so I was a trainer. And my background really began in understanding running mechanics. And I was utilizing strength and conditioning also, which made me an anomaly. in the endurance world at that point. I was on an island at that point as well where I was having people squat

and deadlift who were endurance athletes and that was kind of unheard of at the time. I just found that there was no one protocol that was really doing the same thing for everybody. And that was when I really made a hard left turn out of the breathwork space and stopped doing a lot of the blanket breathwork that a lot of people do.

But I was introduced about 10 years ago to a training mask, so a resistance breeding device. And it said elevation training mask on it. And that was why I prefaced the whole hypoxia thing. I have enough of an understanding on physiology with hypoxia that I knew a pressure mask that had no oxygen hooked up to it. It wasn't going to change the atmospheric pressure enough to actually change diffusion to where we were going to create a hypoxic environment. So I kind of balked at this thing, right? But that wasn't why they named it, what they named it. And I was balking in something I had never used. And so I just was like, okay, this is quite literally the definition of ignorance right now.

So I put the thing on, sitting down, and I put it on. And I started to draw a breath in. And as I drew a breath in, I organized myself and sat up. And I was like, oh. And so having the background that I had in movement and understanding that organization and stability are pretty critical to the entire human movement game, I was like, oh, maybe the diaphragms, the epicenter of human movement. And that is really today where it begins with me and what I teach, especially with inside the art of breath, is the diaphragm and the intercostals or the ribcage

are the epicenter of human movement. And those are where our primary breathing muscles are located. And maybe just real quick kind of tap into just the tissues and maintenance of homestasis, just maybe back up a little bit on just the mechanisms, because a lot of folks don't know what hypoxia is, I'm sure. Well, hypoxia, interesting enough, won the Nobel Prize for the researchers in 2019 because hypoxia is actually lowered oxygen concentrations or levels in the cells, right? So that means we're below 94% roughly. I would take it more extreme than that, but that's the definition of hypoxia.

If we were to pull a pulse oxymeter on and we were to put you at altitude and you were from sea level, within a minute or two, your tissue saturation would drop to roughly 94, 95%, just depending on where you were at, right? You get up 12,000 feet and your O2 stat's going to drop into the 80s or even lower for some people. Right, right. That being said, the tissues are struggling because of the pressure that's happening with oxygen. So the partial pressure of oxygen has changed. So it's not that the actual oxygen percentage has changed, the actual density of the molecule, so we can't diffuse it as well. So the tissue needs to be retrained to organize itself. And what we know is that that takes roughly two weeks, right?

So really getting somebody up to two weeks of altitude training is really where that physiological adaptation will start to occur. So you'll start to feel better like you could go work out pretty normally at that point, but you won't be able to until up to that point. It's really important to understand this stuff because there's people who are not healthy and this is the interesting thing about hypoxia is that when people go to altitude, and a lot of people understand this, is that when we go to altitude, there's like a differentiation, there's a big large differentiation of how quickly people acclimatized to

things. So people who are sea level dwellers, when they get to something like six, seven, eight, nine thousand feet, there's always a difference in how quickly people acclimatized to things. And that fits in actually the paradigm with how I look at breathing. That was the road I ended up on after really looking at how these primary breathing muscles and then secondary breathing muscles were playing a role in physiology and the mechanisms behind that. And it's really interesting because what we see is that when the primary muscles are involved strictly without the secondary, you see fairly aerobic activity. When you start to get into secondary tissues, you start to see this more anaerobic activity. And that makes a whole,

lot of sense, meaning anaerobic activity isn't going to really last much past two minutes, maybe three minutes in most cases. And a lot of these muscles are small enough and they work off the limbs of the neck, right? And so there's this, hey, if I'm using these things far too early, I'm probably going to get stiff. I'm probably going to alter things a little differently. I'm going to find myself in awkward positions that may be compromised down the road. and that's essentially what I'm kind of putting out there at this point is that there's this connection between not only movement but the physiological aspects of what's happening with how we're using oxygen and then when you couple that with the brain's way of working with

that and that is all connected there is no disconnection to it and although I've just talked about three separate topics around breathing that's the only place that we get to do that is in conversation really, is talking about how breathing works with my movement, how breathing works in my physiology, and how it works with my psychology. The fact is, is it works simultaneously at the same time. And that's what I've actually been studying for probably the last six years. I'd love to talk about some of the compensatory effects of just this inefficiency that you describe. When we are not able to breathe correctly, when we're not using these primary and secondary muscles, like appropriately,

what is that downstream effect? How does that impact our psychology? How is that impacting our physiology? You know, what would one expect to see decline if we're not using these muscles correctly? I think just starting with movement, you're just going to start to see things that will show up at a certain time, not immediately. After a period of time, let's just say I've been a runner for years, right? And these were the things that I ran into. It was like all of a sudden, I've got me pain. All of a sudden, I've got ankle pain. We start to get pain from a movement perspective. And pain is the last frontier of the body's way of saying,

okay, it's now time to make a different decision. But what we're not realizing prior to that is there's typically from the cognitive side or the psychological side, there's usually an identity wrapped up in what it is we're actually doing versus trying to look at what we're really doing and how we're trying to make adaptations to that. Meaning when we've got, I wouldn't say false goals. I just would say maybe second or tertiary goals that sit in front of something like, hey, how am I breathing while I'm doing this? And that's how I look at things at this point, because the respiration muscles are the last frontier no matter what in what we do.

So there's this thing called blood stealing, or it's a metaboreflex, right? And the respiratory muscles are actually prioritized over every single other locomotor muscle. So if I'm rolled forward and tight, my respiratory muscles are going to steal blood from where that's tight in order to compensate because I'm in a poor position to actually work. So I'm now engaging secondary muscles as a result of this, but I'm actually in this kind of compensatory mechanism that is typical of where we're in kind of this identity play at first, then it becomes later down the road, anxiety, depression, et cetera. So this is why I don't think the health industry will ever solve health in general.

It's why we see a hockey stick effect with mental health. I mean, mental health is health. And health in the fitness industry itself has never really broadly looked at this where it was yoga that actually was like, hey, this is the foundation. This is where we begin. You know, although that's really kind of altered a bit at this point with inside the westernized version of yoga, most of the teachers are teaching from a standpoint of not truly understanding things, you know, from the physiological side or even the psychological side of things. And it's usually used as a means for just finding relief when in fact it's about building resilience within the practice and understanding where I'm at in the practice. And so if I'm actually

prioritizing my breathing muscles or my breathing over the weight I'm moving, the speed I'm going, I'm actually in unison with the system. And I'm actually developing the system in the way that we really want. The problem is that the ego, mine in particular, got involved pretty quickly when I started screwing around with this stuff. And I was like, well, now I got to walk or now I got to set this down and I got to calm down a bit. And it was like, yeah, well, maybe you're not as fit as you think. And that's just the thing is that a lot of us, especially in this world of fitness, are working far harder than we actually need to. And that doesn't mean that we can't work up to maximum capacity. I mean, I work with power lifters. I've worked with world-class power lifters.

This is tremendous amount of power, but there is still a prioritization of how we would be looking at this from a biological sense. And if you look at the reality of that, biology says, yeah, breathing is at the front because that's metabolism. And we evolved to breathe for metabolism, where plants evolved a very different way. But if you were to retard the way they were doing it, you're going to see a faulty plant. That's kind of where the thinking's at right now, where we prioritize breathing with inside the structure of what it is we're doing so that we're not getting away from the reality of how fit we are and how well we are going to adapt to something. What are the descriptive characteristics of someone who's an optimal kind of

breather versus someone who's kind of a diseased breather, for a lack of better word. You know, because I think for folks listening, like, you know, if we really look at the data and 50% of folks are breathing incorrectly, what does my breath actually look like? And, you know, how is that kind of helping me toward my future or not helping me toward my future? Yeah, I would say starting with respiration rate, one, which is a very hard thing to do. We do track it on whoop. We're within one breath of the gold standard.

Yep. So on your whoop, you can track this. And understanding respiration rate is a good place to start. Above what you will see with respiration rate is what we've really driven this term, which is called CO2 tolerance. This is a term of how sensitive we are to CO2. So CO2 plays the primary role in why we draw a conscious breath. So we've got chemoreceptors, not like smell. taste, but chemoreceptors as in like carbon dioxide pH sensors, largely in the aortic and carotid arteries. And then we have CO2 sensing chemoreceptors specifically in the brain. And these are all in a predictive sense. So if I'm in arteries coming off the heart and I'm going to the brain, nothing has happened yet within the physiological mechanism, right? So meaning we haven't used up all a lot of the oxygen that's in the red blood cell. So not a lot of energy has been created, right? So whatever's carbon dioxide's in the arteries and being detected, that's being relayed up to the sensors in the brain stem, which is also using a relay from the brain on how much

carbon dioxide is going on. So there's a predictive system at play. The easiest way to understand that is the CO2 tolerance test. Most people I mentor or work with will go through that test on a daily basis for quite some time to get a very good understanding of the slight fluctuations that start to happen with that test. You get good at it after about a week or so, and so it starts to level out because there is some motor control and learning how to exhale slowly out of one's nose. That will line up below that with a series of rhythms that we've pulled based on really more beginner to advanced protocols. The higher the sensitivity to CO2, the easier the protocol should be, the lower the sensitivity is, or the higher the test is, the more advanced the protocol could be.

And a more advanced protocol would be something like if we're using a one, four, two, if I was using 10 seconds as my one, that would be 10 second inhale, 40 second hold, 20 second exhale, right? That would be something somebody who's very advanced that that would be able to follow through. You're talking about people who've been at breathwork for quite some time. Largely, you're free diving, watering in communities. Most professional athletes are not capable of this type of exhale test quite yet. This is where it's important to understand about that 50% rule that it's actually probably much higher. The reason being is that the psychological component has the same effect as a metabolic component, meaning if I'm working out, yeah, we all understand

respiration rate goes up. But if my psychology, if I'm a bit more anxious or I'm dealing with more cognitively, my respiration rate trails that as well. So it's an awareness tool to be aware of. And so getting a gauge on that, it's a good starting point to start with and starting with about five to ten minutes of that stuff. Everybody and anybody can benefit from simply just slowing down their breathing and breathing out of their nose like you are right now. Like, As I've observed the conversation, when I stop talking, I breathe out of my nose. When you stop talking, you're breathing out of your nose. This is exactly how it should be going so that you're actually more, you transition back

into more parasympathetic tone, right? Because as I'm speaking, I'm actually putting myself into more of a high arousal state so I'm more sympathetically turned on, right? And then it's, okay, well, if I'm going to remain that way, I'm going to keep talking or I'm going to breathe out of my mouth. And this is one of the easier frontiers to look at is people who are just simply walking, sitting, not doing a whole lot or not working out real hard, and automatically mouth breathing. That is the first and most fundamental toll-tale sign that we have somebody who's probably got

some dysfunctional breathing patterns and dealing with a lot more of them is necessary. These are also the same that over-breathed by day but under-breathed by night. So you're talking about your sleep apnea crowd. Once I became aware of the health ramifications of mouth breathing, I, you know, over the course of the last six, seven years have become pretty much exclusively a nasal breather. But as I walk around and observe people, I would say more than 50 percent are breathing out of their mouth.

So maybe just talk a little bit about the health ramifications of mouth breathing. Why is that so bad for us? And then maybe what are some of the things people can do to kind of get them into a nasal breathing kind of practice? So fundamentally speaking, if we look at the nose, this metabolic process that began roughly 2.4 billion years ago, and now it's evolved into what it is now, we have a automatic from a movement or a mechanical standpoint. You have a slower respiration rate that's driving your diaphragm and intercostals to work. So your diaphragm and intercostals are our primary breathing muscles. It's not just the diaphragm, although if I'm lying down on the floor or asleep, I don't really need a whole lot of activity out of my intercostals because the breathing depth doesn't need to be that big. But our primary breathing muscles are the diaphragm and the intercostals. And when I sit here and I go, I'm strictly using those muscles to open my rib cage to create a

reverse vacuum so that my lungs can pull in air. From there, what we have is arguably the greatest filtering system of air that we have, right? So you've got hair and cilia. You have as many follicles of hair with inside the structure of the nose that you do on your head. So there is hair there to grab particles, viruses, et cetera, that has mucus aligned on every single hair particle to catch that. The mucus has its own defense system. It's the first line of defense for the immune system. It's where killer B cells, all these cells, all these things that are launched for your immune system that could detect things not only now, but within a 10 years span. So if you were to get some sort of a virus that popped in there or bacterium that was brand new

and the system were to catch it, it would be able to launch an attack the next time it showed up and diffuse that attack on that. So then you've got what are called the turbinus. which the turbinates are kind of like these little hooks that work up in the nose and the air gets caught in them and spins real fast, right? And we don't know how to replicate this in any sort of filtering system that we try and design. And then we've got our sinuses which humidify things, warm the air. Then at the bottom end of that with the airflow is our tonsils. And the tonsils are like the fourth line in defense, right? So you'd get less oxygen in metabolically dependent. So meaning if I'm working out more, yeah, I'm getting less oxygen in, meaning I'm up closer to

maximal or just under submaximal levels. I'm not getting as much oxygen in as I would with my mouth. But the real kicker here is that you're getting less CO2 out. And what that's doing is that's actually initiating what's called the bore effect. So, it's initiating two principles. The bore effect and the Haldane effect, which are basically they're the same features of the same phenomenon, but the Haldane effect is what happens to the pH and CO2 binding because of oxygen, all right? And the bore effect is what happens, and this is what everybody's really aware of at this point, is what happens to oxygen binding because of CO2 and lower pH. Both are critically important. Hal Dane is important for, in a

fact because of CO2 sensitivity, right? So if I'm hyper CO2 sensitive, I'm going to feel the urge to have to mouth breathe much sooner than I did. And this is what you probably experienced and I experienced in anybody who actually decided to start nasal breathing experienced in the first few weeks of doing it was like almost this panic like or like, holy crap, I got to slow down if I'm going to actually do this. And is this really working? And yes, it actually was. It was just retraining how your brain works with CO2. We see a very big difference when we're nasal breathing as opposed to mouth breathing, that we are much more aerobic in energy. We are far closer to beta oxidation or slow glycolysis than we would be if we were mouth breathing. That's critical

in understanding with how that also works with our autonomic nervous system. So the nose is a direct line into us maintaining more parasympathetic tone, regardless of how hard we're working. Yes, you can get anaerobic while nasal breathing, but you will maintain some parasympathetic tone, which I've got more perception or awareness of what it is that's kind of going on, right? Then when we move towards the mouth, it's not that the mouth, we need to just get rid of the mouth breathing. That's not exactly how this works, although a lot of people have. And I actually deal with a lot of clients who end up going this far down the road. And I'm like, no, no, no, there's a time and a place for this.

It really is easier and faster with respiration rate. And that comes once we've crossed that aerobic into anaerobic threshold. So you're able to actually get more oxygen in. So metabolic independent, you can, I can get more oxygen in. However, you and I sitting here talking, if I breathe in through my mouth versus my nose, I absorb no more oxygen. by breathing in through my nose or my mouth. There's no difference.

However, there is a difference in the CO2. So if I exhale through my nose versus my mouth, that's a big difference. And the offloading of that CO2 within a few breaths changes my pH. And we feel that. And we all can feel that. Just go do five deep breaths with your nose. stop for a few seconds, then do five deep breaths for your mouth and feel how quickly the change

happens with inside the brain. That switch is your sympathetic nervous system and your brain. So your nervous system has the profound intelligence in that when it senses this pH change to more alkaline, it'll restrict blood flow to the brain instantaneously. So that's that euphoric feeling that a lot of people who do Wim Hof or holotropic breathing or rebirthing breathing or who engage in hyperventilation techniques feel. It's not more oxygen. You don't get more oxygen by hyperventilating. It's quite the opposite. In fact, you retard your time to passing out or actually shortening your bell curve towards oxygen depletion. You're missing out on the training of the CO2. But we also know that when we're mouth breathing, you're also moving more into

carbohydrate burning. And although we burn glucose when we are aerobic in slow glycolysis, beta oxidation is fatty acid, but we know that when we are mouth breathing, we have moved more towards not only slow glycolysis, but even glycolysis because of the fact that we are physiologically changing how the cells can use oxygen. So there's not as many oxygen molecules that are coming off when we're over-breathing. So if I'm breathing out of my mouth when I don't need to. Over-breathing is over-breathing at any stage, whether I'm working out or not. And so learning where that works and how to actually train that up and get better at it only trains the aerobic system much higher. So we build a much more robust aerobic system.

So if folks were to prioritize breathing through the nose and I suppose breathe less, In addition to kind of, I think, the aerobic benefits, what other benefits could an individual see, whether it's appetite, sleep? I mean, I imagine it impacts really every aspect of your life, but maybe if you can outline, you know, the benefits. The things that I've seen, we haven't run research on this, but the things I've seen clinically, meaning the clients that I've worked with and we've recorded a lot of this data, is increase in REM and deep sleep. Even if we don't see an increase in time in sleep, we do see those increases. We see that in our data, too. It's, you know, antic data at this point, you know, just people reporting, hey, we've taped our mouth, and then they see huge increases in both REM and soy sleep.

Yeah. So we've seen this also. with just engagement of five to ten minutes by bookending my day with breathing protocols that match my exhale test, help regulate the system a bit more. Stress has three parts to it, right? It's the stimulus or the event, which is us talking, right? And then there's the actual nervous system's response to that. So how the nervous system interprets that and sends signals. But then there's the behavior that follows that. So if you ask a question that I don't totally understand or something were to go or you were to ask something that was like I didn't like that can change the dynamic of things right and so my breathing follows these patterns of psychology of what's

happening right so breathing is emotional just like my tissue's emotional I carry emotion of my tissues right which is why we see people who have profound events happen through body work but if we take this even further what we see is that the breathing is affected when we're going through something like this but so are my hormones. So take a high stress situation. I'm driving in traffic. Somebody cuts me off. My adrenaline spikes. I hit the brakes, but then I get pissed and I react and go, you, and I start yelling and I scream, right? Take it personally. You get this response. Well, that hormonal flood of adrenaline, of the glucose corticoids that are happening, all of that then carries proteins that now work into genetic folling. So now I've created a behavioral

pattern that's followed suit into something that I believe is just me, right? Where the real thing and what I was getting at at this is if you and I were really smart after we get off this call, it would just be to sit there for however long it takes to just do a few deep breaths until you feel that come down happen. That come down is part of ultrate and what is called an ultradian cycle, which is very similar to the stuff you guys are measuring. at night. Okay, so your REM, you're deep, all that. That stuff is happening during the day, but most of us are blowing through it because we've got so much on our plate. And that's where the breathing comes in is it's like, okay, go into something for like 90, 120 minutes and then

calm down, chill out for 20 minutes, and let the system reorganize itself and do what it naturally will do. And that's where the creativity stuff starts to really blossom. And this is where breathing really should from a release standpoint come in, in my humble opinion, is that the relief stuff is being way overused. And what we're seeing is that every app on the market simply just is some breathing protocol for calming down or doing. And it's like you can't actually do that if you don't actually understand how the person responds to stress and how well they tolerate CO2. Because a box breathing set done 4444 is going to affect you and I differently, and we can see that metabolically.

That's such an important point. There's just so much variability. You know, what do these protocols kind of look like and what you're trying to achieve with a certain protocol? Like, what is the actual outcome you're trying to get after? I start with the exhale test. I don't always run a client through the psychological assessment because I just get on the phone or I'm in front of them and I'm getting to know them and I just start to pick up on the habits. It's not a judgment. It's a, okay, this is where they're at. I got to meet them there. When I'm working with somebody to start, it's usually I'm bookending their day with something in

the morning that gives them the open door to then go get coffee if they're a coffee drinker, right? like don't drink the coffee until you've actually done the breath work do the breath work then you can drink the coffee that starts a habit that changes the reward or the motivation towards something and longer term it helps develop but we're looking for something that can drive a calm but still alert state in the morning i don't need somebody going back to sleep at night we're looking to get somebody something that really downshifts them or drops them out and that varies wildly. We will also take what it is that evening protocol is. And I will insert that somewhere after physical exercise, but I will drop it a number of points because the after

effect of physical exercises is that got an excessive load of CO2. So you've got EPOP going on, exercise post-oxygen consumption going on. So you've got a lot more CO2 in the system still. so you want to allow for that to kind of adjust. So there's an adjustment that's happening with that. The other part is having people just understand to take a deep breath through their nose, nice and slow like a three to five count in, and just let or relax the exhale happen. So don't try and control that axle, let it be passive.

But think of it extending just slightly every single time as you're going through this to comfort, not to discomfort. And that's a very easy, emotional or high stress situation exit or way to control things versus letting it get away and allowing the whole hormonal shift to happen and the reactiveness to occur. I think the easiest is for anybody, which you've already adopted, is just take the next four weeks and breathe out of your nose unless you're eating or talking and if those two things aren't happening I don't care how hard you think you need to work out unless you're going after unless you're in a competition of some sort there's no reason you need to be breathing out of your

mouth and just go do this and what what inevitably begins to happen is not only the sleep stuff that I was talking about but you start to feel a bit more calm throughout your day less reactive a lot more clear-headed, the ability to absorb things, but you also become more aware of how much you were actually trying to do that you weren't actually probably accomplishing. I think the big value of nasal breathing is it just elevates the awareness. Like you just become way more aware of your body and the end of your mind. Well, you just nailed it. The only reason we need breath control is to bring us back to a homeostatic place where

our biology does what it's supposed to do. and we can get our minds out of the way. So the creme de la creme of a breath practice is literally the ability to be aware of your breathing without controlling it. Last thing I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned it just very quickly in passing, but you mentioned this concept of gears. Is it related to respiratory rate? Is it related to heart rate, some combination of the two? No. So it's related to my ventilation. And so when I talk about the gears, gear one is an equal inhale, exhale. So like I usually start people off somewhere between a four and a six second breath cycle.

So that's inhale for, if it's four seconds, inhale for two, exhale for two, right? Follow that rhythm and keep working, right? So there's gear one. And this is a strict aerobic gear. Gear two is a power nasal in, power nasal out. So that's just I'm working out nasal breathing. gear three is where I would inhale through my nose exhale through my mouth and that's really just a transitional gear whether I'm going up or usually down then we would go to gear four which is mouth in

mouth out so gears go one to four and then typically we bring them back down from four to one but we would go four three and then usually trying to get people to a one and allow for just calm breathing when they're recovering. So, Brian, thank you so much for this incredible conversation. I can't wait for our listeners to absorb all this knowledge and apply a lot of this in their daily lives. Thanks, Kristen. Thank you to Brian for coming on the WOOP podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please subscribe, leave a rating or review. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. members can use the code will W ILL to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. And with that,

folks, I wish you a terrific week.