What a treat it is to welcome Brian MacKenzie back to the show!
Brian first appeared on the podcast back in 2018, and that episode remains to this day one of the most downloaded ever! Brian can always be counted on to share tons of interesting, cutting edge insights, and also he brings a philosophical perspective to this wide-ranging and reflective conversation about athletic training, the many facets to human performance, our obsession with “capacity,” and why his main area of interest has become breathwork.
In this episode, Brian talks about his background and how he became interested in alternative approaches to endurance training, and shares fascinating scientific facts about breathing and the role our breathing technique plays in our health. We then discuss why and how breathwork can contribute to your athletic performance and fitness goals, as well as the benefits of minimizing breathing to improve your C02 tolerance.
Anyone with an interest in fitness, athletic training, and human performance can greatly benefit from this show and an opportunity to learn about the integral role breathwork plays in our health. Don’t forget to check out Shift Adapt, Brian’s website!
TIMESTAMPS:
Brian MacKenzie brings his insights on athletic training with a focus on breathing. [01:27]
In order to make your workouts less stressful, improve your tolerance to carbon dioxide, not through breathing in more oxygen. [03:34]
The human performance experience has been vastly misunderstood. [08:55]
Comfort is the difference between how things are and how you want them to be. [09:38]
Endurance athletes need to look at their sport with a more holistic approach. [11:00]
The foundation of all exercise and athletic endeavors is breath practice. [14:23]
Calorie burning as related to exercise has been misunderstood. [17:12]
When you are mouth breathing you offload carbon dioxide which you need. [24:02]
What is actually happening to CO2 when the mouth breather changes to nose breathing? [26:41]
Many professional athletes struggle with identity because once the game is over, they don’t know who they are. [29:36]
Your normal breathing should be short and small through the nose. [36:55]
You can be a world class athlete and be CO2 intolerant and be aerobically inefficient at low levels. [43:46]
On a day-to-day basis we can train ourselves in proper nose breathing techniques with some of the practices on Shift Adapt.com. [46:42]
The major benefit is that the workout itself is going to be less stressful if you minimize your breathing. [51:47]
It takes time to adapt to nasal breathing but you can actually increase your performance across the board. [55:45]
Is it cheating to use the Breathe Right Nasal strips? [01:05:46]
Where can we get more information from Brian MacKenzie? [01:08:10]
LINKS:
QUOTES:
- “At the foundation of yoga is breath practice. At the foundation of a Tai Chi practice is breath work. The foundation of most martial arts is breath practice.”
- “People today are convinced that if they don’t get a run in, or if they don’t go work out, they’re not going to be “healthy.”
- “Gorillas don’t have the ability to put on body fat the way we do, that was our gift. Our gift was to be able to store things in order to survive, if we weren’t getting food.”
LISTEN:
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B.Rad Podcast
Brad (1m 27s): Hey listeners, what a treat to welcome Brian McKenzie, back to the show after almost two and a half years, he was one of the first shows ever on the podcast and also remaining today, one of the most downloaded episodes. So boy, this guy is cutting edge. He’s got some really interesting insights to discuss always and also a lot of philosophy interjected. So we’re going to have a wide ranging conversation. Some of is going to get pretty scientific, just jumping right in there. So if you fall behind, just try to extract the big picture insights about breathing, but you’re going to love his, his style because he’s really reflective. Brad (2m 12s): And he goes much deeper than the typical approach and mindset about athletic training human performance. Oh my gosh. He talks about how we’re obsessed with capacity. What’s the most you can do? The best you can do? And performance is really has many other facets to it. And breathing is his main area of interest. Now his organization is called Shift Adapt.com and he’s coming to there from his lauded history, founding CrossFit endurance, and then founding power speed endurance, but always on the cutting edge stuff, exploring the limits of the human and how we can optimize performance. Brad (2m 52s): So today we’re going to talk a little bit about his background. We’re going to get some interesting CrossFit endurance insights about how he got started with kind of a, an alternative approach to endurance training, rather than just hitting the, hitting the mileage and struggling and suffering. Trying to build a stronger organism to persevere through these endurance athletic challenges. And today with the central focus on breathing at Shift Adapt.com and we get into some of these really popular current insights about stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, rather than the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system and how important breathing and our technique that we use for breathing is contributing to those goals. Brad (3m 35s): Obviously it’s has been a centerpiece of yoga, Tai Chi, meditation for thousands of years, but we’re just now bridging that gap. And I think Brian’s on the leading edge of this effort, bridging that gap to apply a breathing protocol to athletic performance. Essentially the goal here is to make your workouts less stressful. So the way to do that is by improving your tolerance to carbon dioxide, not through breathing in more oxygen. So I think I’ll tee you up a little bit. So when he gets a little scientific, maybe you can have some better grasp here. But essentially we, we already have plenty of oxygen in our blood all the time. Brad (4m 18s): You know, those little pulse oximeters they use in the hospital to attract hospital patients and you put it on your finger and it shows 96 or 97 or 98 for the most part, unless we’re having an illness, we have plenty of oxygen. So opening our mouth and sucking these huge breasts of more and more oxygen is highly inefficient and it stimulates the sympathetic nervous system response. So if you can set the goal, the overall overarching goal in life is to breathe minimally through your nose at all times, except when you absolutely need to gasp for air. When you’re doing a high intensity physical exercise. So a steady state cardio at aerobic heart rate, you should be able to breathe through your nose for the duration of the workout. Brad (5m 1s): And when you breathe through your nose, you have all these peripheral benefits or accorded benefits such as stimulating parasympathetic function, using the lower lobes of your lungs where there’s more LV and more oxygen, rich, lower lobes of the lungs. So you can get a more efficient exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. And when you improve your tolerance to carbon dioxide by minimizing breathing, rather than being a big air sucker, when you minimize. When you improve your carbon dioxide tolerance, guess what? More blood is offloaded to the working muscle. So you experience a performance benefit. Hopefully that will help you when Brian digs deep and I will do a breather show with more simplified insights about nose breathing, parasympathetic, diaphragmatic breathing, but for now let’s listen to one of the great philosophers of fitness, athletic training, human performance, Brian MacKenzie Shift Adapt.com Here we go. Brad (5m 60s): Brian MacKenzie. I am so glad to connect with you again. I’m sorry, it’s over zoom, but next time we were close, but the world’s opening up. Let’s put it that way. Brian (6m 12s): World opening up, and we almost pulled off you being in the same area as me. And then you’re just a little bit outside of my reach. Brad (6m 19s): Now, you know what? This is show number 250, 260 something on the B.rad podcast. And going back to 2018, your show was still one of the top five most downloaded. So it hit a nerve and we talked about some cool stuff, and I think we need to, we need to catch up because, oh my gosh, in the last few years you’ve shifted, you’ve adapted. You’ve, you know, kept, kept this trend setting going where the, the cutting edge of fitness and rethinking a lot of the, the notions. And I got to admit, I’m a drag ass on this whole breathing thing. I, you know, I feel like I have so much on my plate anyway, right? Brad (7m 1s): I’m trying to optimize my workouts and my diet. And oh, now we have to do these, the, these crazy huff and puff Wim Hoff things. But it’s, it’s a lot more than that. And I think I’d love to centerpiece the conversation on, on this cause you, you hinted at it at our last show. And now boy, it seems to be the, the centerpiece of Shift Adapt And I’m going to set you up with a long question, cause I want you to take us through your journey. Maybe even dating back to CrossFit endurance days and power speed endurance. And now this Shift Adapt organization and kinda kind of, kind of just give us the storyline. Brian (7m 35s): Sure. I mean, what we’re doing now, what I’m doing now, which, which ironically, you know, although we’re gonna talk about breathing, I’ve been stating for probably the last five years that by the time people catch onto this breathing thing, we’re going to be moving on from it. And we are. But like any decent practice, especially like you look at yoga, there’s a foundation to what it is we’re doing. And breathing is at the foundation of that. Brian (8m 15s): And you know, I, when I originally got into coaching, even before I was doing it professionally getting paid to do it, I could kind of see that there were some under there, there were some underlying principles that were being missed, but I didn’t totally understand what they were. And, and, you know, it’s taken a good portion of 20 years. Maybe we’ll get towards, get, get to this towards the end of things today. But you know, currently now we’re in a point where I don’t think anybody I’ve recognized or have been able to find, and this doesn’t make us more important. Brian (8m 56s): It just means we’re, we’re, we’re just looking at something that I don’t know that anybody else has that performance is. And the human performance experience has been vastly misunderstood. And we’ve looked at it from a capacity standpoint and we’ve looked at health from a perspective of ideas and health has nothing to do with ideas and performance really doesn’t have anything to do with capacity and less and less efficiency as attached to it. And, you know, unfortunately capacity doesn’t have to be a part of the process if you’re efficient enough. And if you are opportunistic enough and these things lie within what we call nature. Brian (9m 38s): And unfortunately we try to remove ourselves as quickly as we can from the prophecy of what nature is and take on this more civilized world. I mean, I think this was the beginning of our conversation when we first started talking about how we love this minimalist lifestyle, but yet you and I both, if we were to, we were to present people with our credit card statements, they’d be like, you’re full of shit. You know, cause we’re all participating in this world. That is very interesting and it’s very easy to get caught up in, you know, and I’ll, I’ll quote a little bit of Greg Glassman, Comfort and Convenience. It is an illusion. Brian (10m 20s): Comfort is the difference between the way things are and the way we want them to be. And, you know, it’s a very difficult thing to chew on in a society where we’ve made it so safety is kinda not even thought about really. You know, like, are we, we don’t really understand that. We’ve let go of the idea that we have to be on, like aware of our surroundings all the time. Due to the fact that we’re not literally going to be killed, you know, around a tree, right? Like there’s something waiting for us around that tree to eat us, right? Like we’re no longer participating in that. Brian (11m 1s): And I’m not suggesting we need to go back out into the wild with like cave people. But, you know, I, I th my background began in movement and understanding movement and seeing discrepancies and movement, I help shift make, make, make a little bit of a paradigm shift inside the endurance world with rethinking how endurance athletes were doing things. Because what I saw was I saw people really just suffering and, and, and, and thinking that that was the whole goal and, you know, and barefoot, barefoot Ted is? Brad (11m 36s): Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Brian (11m 37s): Well, I mean, he’s such a wonderful human being and I’ve been doing ultras. I will, I no longer do an ultra spec Ted’s been doing, he was Ted was doing, started doing ultras when I did. And Ted and I had been friends for years and we’re going on. I mean, it’s probably close to 15 years. And Ted has always looked at this thing is kind of like this fun, joyous thing that he’s doing. And it’s not this like super fast that he needs to go out and do to prove something to himself where as, and this is where performance went, but, you know, we, my background took off because I shift that helped create a shift towards having endurance athletes look at endurance as through the skill-based approach and using strength and conditioning. Brian (12m 21s): And that gave it more of this holistic approach versus just strictly going and running, cycling or swimming, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with either of those three things. But what I saw happening to people over periods of time told me a very different story that people weren’t getting what it was that they actually wanted. And they were there, they’re getting what they needed. And they didn’t like what they needed. They didn’t like that, you know, our wants and needs got separated. And, you know, that was pain. That was discomfort. That was literally being injured and not understanding why we’re injured, having nutritional disorders that, you know, were, were just huge. Brian (13m 3s): And then I kept pushing with this stuff and understanding movement and learning more and more about physiology, obviously. And then I got hit knocked on the head with somebody handing me a training mask and I put it on and I took a breath, right. When I, when I drew a breath in with putting this resistance breathing device on, I sat up and organize myself differently. And that kind of blew my head open. And I was just like, oh, like I just used my diaphragm. And in order to use diaphragm, we were always using our diaphragm, but I just use my diaphragm and a much more efficient way. Brian (13m 43s): And in order to do that, I organized myself very differently to do that. And I was like, just roll it back to my time in yoga and how I ignored the whole breathing aspect of it. You’re breathing into a position. You breathe out of the position you go through. Pranayamas, you know, you could do Kundalini breathing. You can do, there’s so many aspects to yoga and breathing. And, and in essence at the foundation of yoga is a breath practice. And at the foundation of the practice of Tai Chi is a breath practice. Brian (14m 23s): And that the foundation of most martial arts is a breath practice. And largely why those things exist is because the people that took the time to actually explore this idea weren’t that they had far more control over energy and movement through breath control and allowing their body to adapt to that process. So I entered into this world probably, I don’t know, eight years ago at this point, and just started exploring everything I could on it, namely studying respiratory physiology and then understanding the neurobiology of our respiration centers and how they’re linked up into the brain, why they’re linked up the way they are, how they’re affecting us, all of this stuff. Brian (15m 17s): And it sent me down a big rabbit hole that had me exploring many different aspects of it, but really just instead of getting caught up in the hoopla of, you know, wanting to be this breath guy or whatever, we just simply wanted to teach the principles of breath control. What it meant was why is breathing important and what can you do in order to adjust that? Which is basically nobody’s doing that. Most people are just teaching a methodology. Which is perfectly fine. Brad (15m 48s): Well, especially as applied to athletic performance and fitness endeavors. I mean, we know we can go get a instruction at the meditation retreat, yoga Tai Chi, but I think that’s the, the gap here is that, like I admit to myself, I, I didn’t, you know, I know how to breathe through the, the guided meditation, but then when I’m out at the track and gasping for air, the reason is, is because I ran so fast at high altitude. Right? Well, maybe, maybe there’s more there. And I think that’s, that’ll be exciting for us to get deeper into, but before I depart from that endurance reference a little bit, it, it now appears years later, there’s some pretty strong evidence argument that the cardiovascular training effect occurs across all intensity levels. Brad (16m 38s): So I remember people criticizing you for getting your athletes to jump up and down off the box or do the, the rope swings if they’re training for an iron man, because what’s the, what’s the direct relevance there? but the direct relevance is now quite clear. Doug McGuff does it really well. And Body by Science. He says, there’s no such thing as cardio because you can’t extract the cardiovascular system from everything else you’re doing, including some brief explosive work. That’s going to build strong glutes and hip flexors for running mile 20 to mile 26 on the marathon instead of shuffling it. Brian (17m 12s): Correct. I mean your heart and your pulmonary system work with everything else in the system. In fact, they work with your psychology. So if I get, you know, as I start to talk, my heart rate will increase. If I’m talking about a subject that I enjoy, or I’m engaged in a conversation when I stopped talking, and if I shut my mouth, my heart rate will decrease. Right? You know, there’s, there’s, there’s very good reason that, well, we’re, we’re an interesting lot, that’s for sure. And that we believe that we need to go out and really work ourselves physically in order to do this thing called burning calories of which is very, it’s just been terribly misunderstood, you know, and, and there’s a reason why a free diver can burn up upwards of 600 calories in an hour, just diving up and down in the water, holding your breath. Brian (18m 9s): There’s a reason why a chess player sitting in a chess tournament can burn 6,000 calories a day without really moving too much at all. Right? And yet we’ve got people today that are convinced that if they don’t they’ll get their run or they don’t go work out, they’re not going to be healthy and they’re not going to exercise. Or they’re not going to get the health benefits that they need. And that couldn’t be further from the truth and that, and I don’t, and I’m not suggesting not to go, not exercise. I’m, I’m suggesting maybe there’s more to this than you understand. And there’s far more that you could be doing for yourself to understand what health really means outside of the idea of what health is. Brad (18m 55s): Well, certainly with calorie burning, I love how Dr. Herman Pontzer his new book Burn is, is kind of, you know, blowing the lid off this notion that we’re going to burn more calories if we work out. And he says from his life’s work and evolutionary anthropology, we burn the same around the same number of calories a day, whether we exercise or not WTF, how does that work? I actually had them on for a second show. And the second show was just challenging him with all these it devil’s advocate insights. Like what about the Tour de France guys? They are known to burn 8,000 calories per day. Yeah. Guess what they do over the ensuing four or five months. They, you know, they, they lay around when they’re off the bike and they’re extremely efficient to where everything starts to regulate and compensate. Brad (19m 39s): Therefore, you know, the foundation of the fitness industry is go burn calories and sweat toward a better life. And now that’s kind of been shattered. So, yeah, man, go pick it up. Brian (19m 52s): Someone’s work is great. I loved his book, you know, and, and I love the theory that we evolved because of our metabolism. I kind of on, I was already on board with that, in that metabolically speaking like work look, man, we are the only species that is consciously were aware about adaptation. We are the only thing that understands only sentient being understands. I can go do stress to create an adaptability. Yet, we forget that stress is energy and, and Hermon broke that entire process down, you know? Brian (20m 38s): And I find it fascinating that w you know, we, you know, you look at like an eight, right? You know, you look, you look at these animals, you obviously read the book, but it was like, what happens to a gorilla in captivity? He doesn’t put on a whole lot of body fat. How come well, they don’t have the ability to actually put on body fat like we do. That was our gift was to store things in order to survive. If we weren’t getting food, right? They don’t have that. They put on more muscle. Right. And, and what happened. But the big thing here is that all energy in the human body is transferred through the pulmonary system. Brian (21m 21s): So our respiratory system transfers all energy, meaning whether it’s 90% of that energy is aerobic, which means it’s the oxygen we’re pulling in the other 10% is anaerobic, right. Which we still have to offload. The carbon dioxide is a by-product of that gas exchange of what’s occurring at the, at the metabolic level. Right? So I have to breathe off the CO2. That’s coming out as a result of that. And we need more oxygen in order to buffer a lot of the hydrogen ions and the acidic processes that are going at those higher intensities. And this is why we’ve really looked at breathing as a principle versus strictly going here’s a method, even though, you know, we’ve created a bit of a methodology around the paradigm within performance, through a gear system, which is where we go from gear one to gear five. Brian (22m 19s): And we start with strict nasal breathing, which is an equal in and out inhale and exhale through the nose that works its way, all the way up to gear five, which is a mouth and mouth out. There are times and places for mouth breathing. Unfortunately, it’s not where most people think they are. It’s, you know, it’s an easy thing to think about. Well, yeah, when it’s super intense. Yeah. You go to any CrossFit gym, you go to any, you, you, you observe any runner on the highway and you’re going to see somebody who’s slack-jawed, and running around with their mouth open. And you’ll, you have a fingerprint. If that’s what you’re doing all of the time. We know there’s an inefficiency occurring at some, at some stage because we can’t actually maintain that level of energy. Brian (23m 6s): And these are, this is stuff we tested was the differences between nasal breathing and mouth breathing at specific intensity. And it’s not like I just came up with this idea and nose breathing and was like, everybody needs to be nasal breathing on the contrary. We were like, I wonder what, what happened when I was breathing? I wonder what would happen if we tested that on our metabolic on our metabolic heart. And so we started doing that. And one of the most interesting things we picked up on was, you know, sticking somebody at 200 Watts on a bike, having them breathe out of their mouth for three to five minutes and then shut their mouth for three to five minutes and then breathe out of their mouth to five minutes, three to five minutes, and then breathe through their nose for three to five minutes. Brian (23m 51s): And you had two entirely different systems of energy being used in that process with the same workload being done. Brad (23m 59s): What happened are they, their heart rate went up when they were mouth breathing or something? Brian (24m 3s): Not just the heart rate going up or changing. It’s the fact that metabolically what’s happening is you’re triggering when your mouth is open, you instantaneously can offload more carbon dioxide and you can bring in more oxygen a lot quicker, right? Unfortunately, through one of the principles called the BOHR effect, you have to actually have enough carbon dioxide present to use enough oxygen. And it’s not that you’re not using oxygen. If you’re breathing out of your mouth, it’s efficiency thing, it’s not a light switch thing on a wrong, that’s not how we work it’s to what degree? Brian (24m 46s): Cause you’ve got trillions of oxygen molecules in a single red blood cell. Well, it just so happens that that red blood cell would prefer the hemoglobin for, to hold on to carbon dioxide, which is the by-product of cellular respiration, regardless of which process we’re going through, anaerobic or aerobic,. Nonetheless, that CO2 hijacks, it jumps back on that red blood cell. And when it comes into the red blood cell, it offloads, it removes that oxygen so that the oxygen can then perfuse with a cell in that, in that environment. And that’s where the demand starts to go up. And this is where a lot of the exercise scientists who were not looking at this stuff so closely, we’re missing some of the points of breathing and breath control because they’re, you know, they’re of the mind, a lot of them are of the mindset will breathing is just a by-product of work. Brian (25m 40s): And that’s just actually the tail wagging the dog If I go work hard and just let my breathing happen, I’m just letting metabolic activity occur. The way I’m I’m I’m working. Right. But if I worked and I control my breathing and limit my work to what my breathing allows, I’ve now changed how that energy is, is working. So I, then it’s not an instantaneous thing, but it’s pretty damn quick. Like we’re talking within a few breaths. It changes pretty quickly and you can only go so hard with keeping your mouth shut. Brian (26m 20s): And then the the interesting thing is, is how many people jump onto this and instantaneously are like, oh, this isn’t for me. I can’t do this. I can’t, I’m nowhere near what I can do with my mouth open. And that’s the indication that you’re nowhere nearly as aerobotic as you think you are. Brad (26m 42s): Yeah. Okay. Let’s back a little in case anyone’s getting lost. Cause this is a big dump. That was a nice, that was a nice big dump. But I think one of the, one of the key insights to pull out there is that you just said, if we work at the capacity of our, of our breathing. So in other words, try to keep that mouth closed, even during exercise and pull as much air as possible through the nose until we can’t stand it anymore. Cause now we’re doing 300 Watts and we have to open their mouth. That’s a whole different story. But that guy, that, that subject who’s peddling at 200 Watts and trying the mouth breathing and then the nose breathing. What is, what is the advantage there that’s happening when the person is, I guess they’re preserving or they’re building up more CO2, they’re tolerating more CO2 because they’re not gasping for every breath what’s going on. Brad (27m 35s): When you say profusion, I think that’s a good thing to those working muscles, right? Yeah. Brian (27m 41s): You’re actually using more oxygen. You’re actually more aerobic. You’re actually more efficient. So what do I mean by that? When you become more anaerobic, you only get two currencies of ATP, right? So ATP is the currency for it’s our money for energy, right? So with anaerobic, you get to ATP on anaerobic cellular respiration and aerobics cellular respiration. You get upwards of 32 ATP. And in some cases over a hundred, Brad (28m 16s): Now you get the two really, really quickly without any trouble. And that’s great when you’re sprinting and need to fuel that ATP to do maximum output. When, when you’re going for 20 minutes, an hour, five hours, then you want the 30 to a hundred, Brian (28m 32s): You are absolutely correct. And this is where it starts to have its real impact is, oh, well I thought I was doing a moderately aerobic workout, but tense. It just so happens. I wasn’t. So I was burning through more glycogen, into glucose than necessary from these anaerobic sides of things. So I was burning through more carbohydrate unnecessarily, right? This creates more of a stress effect. This requires more recovery. This requires more downshifting, more regulation. So this is where we see, and we can get away with this for years. I mean, I’ve got world-class athletes at this point who I consult for, who are very capable of going very fast and very, and going through brick walls, let’s call it. Brian (29m 23s): But their time has come and they’re starting to feel the consequences of those things. Brad (29m 31s): Brian’s clientele is world-class athletes who have hit 35 and now are wondering what the hell, how come Brian (29m 36s): Not even 35. Right? Right. A lot of these kids actually are much, much, much younger. They’re dealing with this thing called anxiety. That is a by-product of this as well because anxiety there’s direct correlation between lactate in the system and actually anxiety. And the inability to process that and being aerobically inefficient would mean you’ve got more lactate in the system and you can actually handle as well. And there’s a lot to that. But you will see athletes at this point who won’t even show up for races because they’re so panicked about their performance. And, and, and this is partly their job. Brian (30m 18s): I’ve got athletes who, who have been afraid to even do the testing, just testing because they don’t want to score so low that it’s evident that they’re where they’re at. But yet I already know where they’re at based on the behavior, because we’ve looked at this with so many people that, and it’s not that it’s a low score. It’s simply an assessment to understand how much more potential you’ve got. And people are afraid of that. That’s the reality is that they misunderstood what performance was about. And performance was, is not just about winning it’s about authentically competing and being yourself. Brian (31m 1s): And this is why so many professional athletes struggle with identity as well as because once the game’s over, they don’t know who they are. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know what to do. And this is actually an epidemic. Brad (31m 13s): Let’s go all the way to gold. The documentary led by Michael Phelps. That was, that was an eye opener. And boy, yeah. Th the mindset is pretty distorted. And arguably, if people were working with your protocols and, and consulting with the right people, they could be just as successful, probably more successful without all the, without all the junk in their mind and the recalibration and the struggles after off the course. . Brian (31m 41s): Yeah. I mean, it’s really simple. I mean, it’s not very difficult either, but yeah. It’s, I mean, it’s completely evident even if you’re not somebody isn’t talking about what they’re dealing with, when you’ve got somebody like a Michael Jordan or a Michael Phelps or a Lance Armstrong, you already know these are Brad (31m 59s): Tiger Woods Brian (32m 0s): Tiger Woods. You already know, you already know because it’s all about I have to win. I have to win. And it’s already telling the story of what’s going on. I know too many athletes in this realm and I’ve worked with too many to not know what the signature looks like. You know, it’s the same signature. And look, it’s not just athletes. This falls into our corporate structure. This falls into the parents. This falls into the everyday person and dealing with stress. And especially around this time, especially with what’s happening to this pandemic. You know, the isolation, the change in lifestyle, all of that stuff has had a massive impact on the psyche and the psyche affects breathing as well. Brian (32m 48s): And so the breathing will respond to stress either way. It’s a predictive system that that is a systems wide thing. And your breath responds, whether it’s through metabolic activity or my emotional system is going haywire. It will change. You will start to burn energy differently. You will start to use energy much differently when you are heavily stressed. Brad (33m 13s): Hmm. So if we can take control of this involuntary action of breathing, one of the, one of the few examples of something we can take control of, right? We can, we can take control blinking if someone asks us to or take control of our breathing. And I guess the basic insight that I’m I’m gathering is if we can learn to breathe through our nose as a default and keep our mouth closed, like, like many other or all other animals in the animal kingdom that will kind of calibrate us toward a more relaxed or stress balanced state. Is that, is that kind of an insight we could pull here? Brian (33m 49s): You very much. So I think that the base, the real foundation of any breath practice begins with an understanding of the difference between mouth and nose breathing. Indigenous cultures and animals understand this intuitive intuitively. That it’s just this innate process they pick up. You will not find an indigenous culture where they talk about mouth breathing. You will only find if anybody has done their homework, which a guy by the name of George Catlin did, who is a historian, wrote a book in 1867 called Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. And it was because he picked up on the fact that of the million million and a half indigenous people he had seen in north and south America, the largest difference between them and the civilized culture was that they kept their mouth shut. Brian (34m 36s): And they did it on purpose most of the time, because they were in fear of what would happen, that they would get the black mouth, which is what we have. Brad (34m 46s): What’s the black mouth?, Brian (34m 48s): Black mouth became of teeth and crack, you know, and people whose, who would breathe out of their mouth routinely.No animal breathes out of their mouth sitting still. That’s, that’s the indication of sickness and we are doing it. You can, you can see it everywhere at this point. You know, not everybody’s doing it, but there are enough people doing. But the moment I get up and go to war, you will see people who just instantly will open their mouth. The other by-product of this is our position has changed to something like this. Brad (35m 30s): Crunching his neck forward people, the computer screen postures demonstrating for you on YouTube. Brian (35m 37s): That posture instantaneously makes it different cult to pull air into. So the fastest and easiest way to do anything is to chest breathe., which sets off my sympathetic cascade, which also I’m offloading unnecessarily carbon dioxide, which instantly moves me into more sympathetic activity, which now I’m just spent my day in a low level of low to mid level of more sympathetic activity. And I don’t know why I’m so stressed. Brad (36m 11s): So the chest breathing this, this shallow panting breath, that’s been criticized to be a stress promoting we’re we’re offloading unnecessarily, extra CO2. And are we also taking in more oxygen than we need to our detriment? Brian (36m 29s): Now we’re always kind of re-ask anything submaximal, you’re always taking excess oxygen. You like you, you actually exhaled more oxygen than you actually can absorb, which is perfectly fine. But when we start to get up to higher intensities, you will need to absorb that, which is why you will take deeper breaths as you begin to, as metabolic activity starts to increase, right? So you’ll want to take deeper breaths because at the end ranges of those lungs, your alveolar sacs are much more sensitive and they, and they diffuse much more oxygen and carbon dioxide. Those end ranges versus these shallow small ranges. Brian (37m 12s): That does not mean you should be taking deep breaths all day long. Your normal breathing should be short and small, but it should be through the nose where we’re actually engaging that diaphragm and using more of the lower lobes and upper lobes of the lungs. Brad (37m 28s): And that’s been a big misunderstanding, or at least for me, and the stuff I’ve been exposed to is that you need to take these deep, huge diaphragmatic breaths with great aggression and blowing up your inflating, your, your tube all the way. And that’s the proper way to breathe for stress management. And that seems to be off, off course here from, yeah, from what you said, Brian (37m 53s): that just sounds stressful in another self, you know, so, you know what I mean, if you think about it, it’s like, if it’s not necessary, what’s necessary, right. And if I’m in a highly stressful situation, I may need to take a deep breath just to, right. And if I have a breath back, I’m probably working through long, deep controlled exercises of breathing to actually stimulate the energy down a lot more to actually bring my high level of intensity down to a calmer level. Right? So breathing is actually the fastest way for us. Brian (38m 34s): For the most part. It’s not the fastest, it’s the most potent way to get up, to get ahold of our autonomic nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system, the fastest way is through the visual system, which is the eyes. So if I’m looking outside, which I just did, if I look out in the distance, the trees automatically trigger a response to kind of drop down. This is a lot of the work that Dr. Andrew Huberman has done. Who’s a good friend. And you know, and then when you’ve got something in front of you, like the screen that we’ve got right now, you are, it, you are instantly sending a signal, which your eyes are a part of your brain. They’re not separate from your brain. They are a part of the brain. And so it’s the fastest signal to the brain in order to change our activities. Brian (39m 18s): So being in front of screens all day is a good indicator that you’re probably a little bit more stressed than you think, or want to give credit to. And our problem is that we think we understand this when we don’t really have any idea that we understand this. Brad (39m 34s): Whew, I thought you were, I was going to guess the fastest way to recalibrate was getting slapped in the face, but I like gazing off into the distance. Instead. That sounds a little more, a little more doable. Brian (39m 44s): Yeah. Nobody’s freaked out. Nobody’s ever freaked out, Brad (39m 46s): looking at a sunset that’s right. Looking over the calm ocean at sunset, not stress promoting. Okay. So this, this idea that we’re unnecessarily or unloading unnecessary amounts of CO2, and if we kind of get back into you made that pinch sound on, on the screen, like get back into this minimalist, breathing along with our minimalist spending habits on Amazon. If we tone it down and I suppose build up our tolerance to more CO2, because we’re not taking these, these crazy breaths or we’re going to get, we’re going to get benefits, not only in athletic performance, but also at rest, Brian (40m 31s): correct. Brad (40m 33s): You talked a bit about the athletic performance part where the, the, the muscles are actually able to use more oxygen because we’re tolerating more CO2 because we’re breathing through our nose at 200 Watts instead of opening our mouth and just getting the, the, the massive dump of oxygen. Brian (40m 53s): Yes. I mean, it’ll feel a lot better. They’ll feel a lot easier right. At first. Brad (40m 57s): But th th th it feels a lot easier to, to, to open wide. You mean? Brian (41m 2s): Correct. Brad (41m 3s): As we normally do, even at volunteering. Brian (41m 5s): And here’s why we’re, we’re set up to breathe through carbon dioxide, not oxygen. We don’t we have very, very little in the system that detects oxygen levels, our, our system for, our needs, for detection of low oxygen or oxygen being too low is to make you lose the, and then pass you out. Brad (41m 33s): That’s it, Brian (41m 34s): that’s it. It’s preparation for death. So if you’ve ever talked to, or if you’ve ever heard stories, I’ve actually personally talked to several people who’ve drowned and come back and they’ve talked about how an incredible experience it was, how euphoric and beautiful it got. Where at first, it wasn’t. But then all of a sudden it became blissful. That’s that oxygen getting low. And then you going lights out and into a dream state and being free to go. The fortunate part for these folks that I’ve talked to is that there were people there, or they had washed up on shore and the breath that they took after passing out, because that’s what will happen. Brian (42m 26s): This is what happens in shallow water blackouts. When people who are free diving are trying to hold their breath for longer than they can. Oxygen levels get too low. They start to feel actually good. So they don’t know what that feeling is. And all of a sudden, the next moment it just goes, and you’ll see this in MMA as well for people who don’t tap quickly enough in choke holds, and they’ll struggle at first. And then all of a sudden they’ll get calm and then slow down, and then they’re out. And it’s the same thing. Although it’s being, it’s the fact that you’re just getting blood supply cut off to the brain. Brian (43m 6s): But so back to my point is that we’re breathing because of carbon dioxide, water and CO2. We have, we have what are called chemo receptors. They’re set up in the aortic and the carotid arteries. And that simply indicates that not nothing has happened yet. Blood is going outward because it’s in the arteries, especially the aortic okay. Which is off of the heart and the carotid, which is going to the brain. Those have the detection systems in them that connect up to the brainstem. So from an unconscious state, we’re in this constant predictive place, and we are a predictive system. That’s how we work. Brian (43m 46s): We, we love making predictions about things when we don’t make the right prediction, the mind gets a little crazy, and that goes with everything and anything. So if I’m predicting to win something or to do well in something, and I don’t see, well, what happens to, it’s just the expectation prophecy, right? Well, carbon dioxide just so happens to be involved in that equation. Especially from the psychological side of things. So in my psychology or on my emotional state, it takes on too much, or I’m doing too much thinking. I have suppressed my ability to tolerate carbon dioxide because I’m requiring more energy for the brain. Brian (44m 27s): And although we say the brain requires 20% of the energy, that’s not, if I’m actually somebody who’s anxious or doing a considerable amount of thinking in my day, that goes way upwards of that. That’s why we can see chess players who burn upwards of 6,000 calories in a day. Is the amount of activity that’s going on metabolically required for that type of thinking goes up. And so we start to suppress our ability to tolerate CO2. So we start breathing more. And so the more we breathe and unnecessarily or huffing and puffing, the more I retard my ability to tolerate carbon dioxide, which is simply just the stress molecule. Brian (45m 9s): This is our indicator for stress. And so if I suppress my ability to tolerate that, I breathe more. Once that marker goes up, and here’s the kicker for all of you, fitness freaks, you can’t out train this unless you actually play with breath control. So you can be a world-class Olympic gold medalist world champion, and you can be heavily CO2 intolerant and be aerobically inefficient at low levels, but you can certainly perform at high levels and go through brick walls for some time. Brian (45m 49s): It’s just how long. And the tissue, the joints, the system takes the brunt of this, but we’re so flexible. And we’re such a flexible species. We’re so able to hang on to, to, to deal with stress for so long as any animal. It just takes time. And so sometimes it’s a year. Sometimes it’s three, sometimes it’s a decade, but you’ll see. It just starts to show up. And then I’ve got tissue that doesn’t move well on my back is stuck, my spine doesn’t move. These are very good indications that we are been sympathetically dominant. The tissue doesn’t respond the way it should. Brian (46m 30s): Oh yeah. I mean the nervous systems, the nervous system, if I’m constantly signaling my nervous system to be in more, more sympathetic tone, I will have stiffer tissue. Bar none Brad (46m 42s): So we can, we can work on this, whether or not we’re a beat up old war, horse, or not through breath practice along with all the other healthy lifestyle habits. But I guess the goal of building up our CO2 tolerance will directly correlate with being less stressed. And then how would we do that on a day-to-day basis, both in and out of workouts? Brian (47m 6s): Very, very easily. So there on our website on Shift Adapters of what we do tab, and if you go to how to start a breath practice, which is right there, there’s a free little link that goes into this and being able to do an exhale test, and that will show you where you stand, what sort of protocols you can start with. Our membership actually offers ways to actually build on this and everything that we do from a standardized breath practice to movement, flexibility stuff, to strength and conditioning work, to sports specific or cardio, I guess you could call it work. Brian (47m 49s): So if you’re going and running or riding your bike, we have a program called Sustain that we’re releasing next week that is literally devised as the gear system and getting people through this to understand how to work with the whole thing. Brad (48m 8s): The gear system is just the escalation of breathing as you go through higher intensities of exercise or something, correct? Brian (48m 17s): Correct. Yeah. Brad (48m 19s): We’re starting with this gentle nose breathing, which we can practice at rest all the time. And then getting back to that bike example, which is so fascinating. Someone peddling along at a comfortable 200 Watts pace, and either choosing mouth breathing or nose breathing, I’m going to raise my hand and say, you know, it’s a bit of a hassle, the snots blowing out of your nose. It would be so much easier to just open my mouth. But you know, I’ve been, I’ve been working at this for a long time when I go on a, a gently paced run. And now I’m kind of bringing it into when I do my high intensity running drills that lasts 20 seconds. I’m trying to keep just nose breathing throughout that whole thing, and then do the bare minimum necessary to recalibrate afterward. Brad (49m 4s): It might be three big breaths instead of seven or 10. And so I guess I’m putting this goal in mind of just trying to breathe minimally, not only during the day, but even when I’m out there working out and doing hard stuff or easy stuff. Brian (49m 17s): Yeah. The first thing is something like introducing nasal breathing is going to do is it’s going to slow down your respiration rate. So you’re instantaneously slow that respiration rate down. And that’s one of the big players in this, but the fact is, is most work, we do should be nasal breathing, but if you’re doing 20 second efforts, 40 second, five 40 second efforts, one minute efforts. If you’re actually doing those in all out effort, there will be the byproduct of mouth breathing at that. There’s just going to be so much metabolic waste that’s coming up, that you’re going to need to offload that. Which is exactly where the gear system comes in. Because if I get up to that gear five, I can also gear down and teach myself how to recover or use breathing to drop down a lot quicker as well. Brian (50m 8s): So if I get a 20 second sprint and I didn’t need them outbreathe, but I did it at the end. Like let’s say, in the recovery, we’d use something like a five, seven, nine, where it’s like five breaths of gear five, seven breasts in gear four, and then try and get into a gear one within the nine breath sequence of nose only. Right? And so it’s just a transition down and being able to get somebody to regulate a lot quicker and people, you know, I mean, the, the, the interesting thing here is that you can play with this in ways that you’re actually, Hey, I’m going to go do some maximal work. I’m going to go as hard as I can. I can get up to gear five, but as soon as my interval is over, I’m going to force myself to nasal breathe. Brian (50m 49s): Which is going to be a very, very difficult thing to do. But this helps kind of build something like CO2 tolerance, especially working CO2 tolerance and how we’re stressing the cells and how to use oxygen and how to what’s going on with anaerobic, aerobic, all of that. Or we could use things like hypoxic work. I’m using a breath hold towards the end of my intervals, so that it’s actually stimulating more of a stress response towards the end. And I’m creating a different type of energy work that is required there. And that in of itself is stuff we’ve played with and are doing. But all of this is all applicable to, you know, the idea around the principles behind breath work is we’re just taking things from varying sources, from varying ideas that have always been there and just applying them into the kind of human performance spectrum. Brad (51m 48s): So I’m, I’m thinking that the, the major benefit is that the workout itself is going to be less stressful. If I, if I minimize my breathing rather than maximize one of the main benefits. Brian (52m 6s): Yeah. That is usually what happens. Unfortunately, the beginning of this for most people is they’re getting, what’s called an ego check. And so they get very, they get, they get very frustrated and they don’t want, this is where the work we’re doing now is really moving into. And this is why I’ve harped on, you know, performance not being necessarily about capacity is we’re always in this, especially the general population. It’s like, you know, you see people going into CrossFit gyms, and it’s like, they want a PR every workout. And it’s like, yeah, that’s a work like that. But the idea that it works like that is the problem. And so by putting a gut check in, like, you’re going to be limited to nasal breathing. Brian (52m 51s): You’re going to have to slow down because you’re probably not as efficient as you thought you were. And it’s just a different variable that you’ve not considered. And I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to do this, but it’s what we’ve found to be kind of the thing that is separating this world. We’ve been discussing where people are really missing the gap between where they are functioning aerobically versus anaerobically. And they’re stressing themselves out for workouts, thinking that completing the workout in a timeframe or a certain distance is the goal. When in fact, that has nothing to do with the means for staying healthy. Brian (53m 35s): Why are you doing this? What’s the goal of this? And if it’s to be healthy well, aerobic activity, is the foundation of our lifespan, right? The better we function aerobically the better our mitochondria function, right? Mitochondria don’t function under anaerobic activity resilience. Brad (53m 60s): Right. I heard, I don’t know if it was you or a guest talking on your podcasts about how the, the, the threshold represented by heart rate where they could nose breathe, increased over time, over practice. So at first they could go at 120 beats a minute through their nose. No problem. But then when asked to, to go faster, that’s when the mouth opens. And then over time, you can get that thing up to 150 beats or whatever, which, which suggested another big performance event. Brian (54m 35s): Yes, correct. Yeah. I, I, somebody sent me a video of some coach saying that he can’t run you can’t nasal breathe and run more than 60% of your max heart rate. So it’s not necessary. And it was when people say things like that, it’s very obvious they haven’t done the work. Brad (54m 55s): Well, maybe they have, and it was super hard. And they said, okay, that’s it 60%. Yeah. Brian (55m 1s): Well, well, that’s not actually doing the work, especially being an exercise science or in and around human performance, you know, that adaptability comes with costs. There was a barely, very poorly done study that came out of the University of Colorado. I believe where they tested nasal breathing against mouth breathing. And they had subjects in two different areas and they tested them and they found that the nose breathing group did not perform as well as the mouth breathing group. Unfortunately, what they didn’t look at with the nose breathing group is they had no adaptive process to that. Fortunately, there was another group that actually caught on to this and did a study. And we posted it not too long ago, where they actually had a group that spent about six months adapting the nose breathing. Brian (55m 45s): And it turns out across the board. If you take the time to adapt to this thing called nasal breathing, you actually can increase your performance across the boards. And you become much more efficient than mouth breathing. And almost every aspect, nose breathing, beat out mouth breathing. It’s gonna require it’s gonna require that thing called adaptation to occur. And so for somebody like me, who likes to ride a bike, so I can do intervals at about 90 to 95%` preferably nose breathing. Brian (56m 28s): I, if I switched to mouth holding the same wattage, I can feel the stress change. I can feel the change in the system, but I can’t go any harder at that effort. Now, shorter, harder efforts, I will need to mouth breathe. So if I push it further, I will need a mouth breathe because I’m going to actually be stimulating a higher demand for metabolic activity, but controlling it with mouth breathing. But I can function around 300 Watts on a bike for sustained time. Periods nose only breathing and prefer it. Brad (57m 3s): And that’s from, I mean, you’ve had years to work, but it seems to me that the adaptation can occur pretty quickly, especially when you come in. I mean, I took my first BOLT test. I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago. And it was pathetic. You know, it was under 20 seconds for exhaling and then needing a new breath. And now I don’t know if I’m cheating or not. Brian. I know you’re supposed to wait until you, you, I want you to describe the test, but if I, if I push it a little, if I’m looking at the stopwatch, I can get up there over 35 up to 40. But I think my, my true improvement has been probably double from, you know, let’s say 17 seconds to 35 in just a couple of weeks. Brian (57m 43s): You’ll see most people who have low scores with inside, something like the BOLT will have a pretty quick increase, but the BOLTis a pretty subjective test. We don’t, we don’t use it because it’s too subjective for the reason that you can really start to train yourself, to develop CO2 tolerance. And so you don’t know what your first urge to breathe becomes, but you cannot cheat an exhale test, which is what free divers came up with. And the free diving community has been using this forever. And it’s a max exhale test where you actually sit and you take a full breath and you exhale through your nose as long and as slow as you possibly can. Brian (58m 23s): And there is no cheating that task, you can’t stop. You can’t pause. You can’t swallow the moment you need air or the moment you to get rid of the air. That’s when the test stops, Brad (58m 35s): Right. So if you discover yourself pausing or whatever the test is over. So it’s a really controlled exhale. And if you get good, you can, I get a little whistle sound coming out of my nose to where I know I’m still exhaling. And then you’re allowed at the very end to clear your lungs and get an extra five seconds. And then you’re in your stopwatch stops. Okay. So the, yeah. Brian (58m 58s): Yeah. Like, I mean, you should, when you get good at it, it should be questionable. If you’re actually exhaling, you should like, you should be thinking like, fuck, am I actually exhaling? But then if you put your fingers on your nose, it starts to build quite quickly. So you should be able to trickle the air out just slightly. And I look, this is coming from somebody who started a 40 second exhale test. And now, you know, I’m probably sitting in the 90 second range. I’ve had upwards of two minutes, but that was when I was training strictly to build, build, build CO2 tolerance in a very specific way that has consequences. Brian (59m 39s): So a freediver is not going to be a great Olympic weightlifter, right? So as human beings, we just forget that there’s consequences for everything. And we think that specialization doesn’t have consequences and constant. There are consequences for everything and especially specialization, and we are not specialists. We are generalists. Brad (1h 0m 3s): Do you think there’s a sacrifice if you’re going for peak performance and trying to set a PR, not every day, but if you want to compete in, you know, high level sport and you’re, you’re, you’re making the commitment to, you know, do the, the, the nose breathing, minimal breathing, throw that into your workouts now, are you going to come out better, somewhere down the line? Is there just going to be an adjustment? Like, like they talk about when a athlete goes on a ketogenic diet and then they come around six weeks later? Brian (1h 0m 38s): There will be a ceiling, but that ceiling, I don’t think will occur unless we’ve got somebody young enough who engages in this early enough. And that I I’m thinking it’s somewhere in that 70 to 90 second range where the, see it with the max, with the exhale task. And performance wise. And it has nothing to do with me that just has to do having a high functioning elite athlete that actually can metabolically handle enough carbon dioxide to where they can control. Most of what’s going on that way. You’re going to have a very tuned in person. Brad (1h 1m 20s): So an extreme free diver breaking the records, what was the guy’s name, Pippin or something? He went down hundreds of feet. What would be like top score on an exhale test? And then what would be someone who’s, you know, maybe in poor health and on the bottom, on the bottom rung? Brian (1h 1m 39s): But let’s just, we’ll just use an easier marker, which is like a breath hold. So Stig Severinsen just held his breath for over 20 minutes and he was like 22 minutes, you know, that was on supplemental oxygen and static. So, you know, he was hopping on pure oxygen, right. And then he laid in the pool on face down and just held his breath for 20 minutes. Right. I’d say that marker’s probably around, more around like the 12 to 13, 15 minute mark without the supplemental oxygen, maybe in a proper breathe up and being monitored. I’ve held my breath for over, just over five minutes. Brad (1h 2m 23s): In the water? Brian (1h 2m 24s): No, no, no statically outside of the water. So now I had a friend Mark Healey. Who’s a waterman who big wave surfer. He holds, he can hold his breath under water five minutes. No problem. Now he’s also a big wave surfer and a water spear fishes. Now, if I w if we were to put a barbell on Mark’s back, I’m pretty sure that’s going to change a lot of things for him. Right? So, and, and, and rightfully so, unless mark starts to train those variables, which then start to have an impact on his demand. I mean, the more muscle you have, the more metabolic demand you’ve got, because you’ve got more weight on you. Brian (1h 3m 4s): You’ve got more organic, you know, you’ve got more biological, you know, density that requires energy. So that energy has an off and off put as well, has a demand for oxygen. And it also has a demand to put off carbon dioxide. This is why you will see football players on sidelines sucking on supplemental oxygen, because they are actually aerobically, inefficient, and cannot tolerate their so CO2 intolerance. I think they need oxygen. But the thing is, is that they can’t get a breath because they’re actually CO2 intolerant. This is what tends to happen in a lot of the elderly population as well. Brian (1h 3m 45s): But what you also have on the flip side of that is hypercapnic, which is where, or hypercapnic where people become. They, they have excess carbon dioxide. And this also happens in the elderly population and, and can be of detriment. But these are extreme situations. Nonetheless, when the need, the urge for air is not a need urge for oxygen. It is a need urge to get rid of carbon dioxide. Remember how I said that in normal breathing, you, you actually exhale most of the oxygen coming out of you went in. So it’s not the oxygen isn’t available. And if somebody can hold their breath for 20 minutes, that body can store a lot of oxygen in it that can get used. Brian (1h 4m 35s): So it becomes how tolerant I am to the CO2 to actually help use that oxygen. And that has some limitations to it. You can end up getting a little too acidic and you have to pay attention to those signals and those signs, but that’s the whole point of nose breathing, right? If I’m training, if I actually like spend some time with nose breathing strictly, I’m going to develop my fingerprint to using oxygen because my nose is limiting how much CO2 is going in and out. I’m also engaging in immune system at the first layers of response, which is a no brainer for anybody. Brian (1h 5m 21s): But unfortunately, most people still don’t care enough about that. Especially in side performance Brad (1h 5m 27s): Especially during times of a global pandemic. Brian (1h 5m 30s): Yeah. Yeah. You want to know how you fight a virus? Brad (1h 5m 35s): Yeah. Brian (1h 5m 35s): That snot that’s in there that mucus, that is a, that is literally a super power for dealing with virus and bacteria. Brad (1h 5m 46s): Maybe related to that, or just the general question, like the, the nasal strips, the Breathe Right. Is that cheating or is that, is that going to compromise any of the functionality of the nasal passageway? Or can we, can we throw that on, especially when we’re doing a workout? Brian (1h 6m 2s): It can, it can, for sure. I’ve I I’ve literally burnt through my nose and blown out the turbinates on time to time. Oh yeah. Like there’s there’s devices that are like, I think they’re called turbines. You put in he’s, Brad (1h 6m 18s): he’s opening his nose. People on YouTube. Brian (1h 6m 21s): Yeah. It ends up those nostrils. So now I’ve created more of an air passage way that I actually have. So I’m moving more air in and out of my nose than I would normally be able to do. And that can have very look I’ve used those things. I’ve used the strips. I think those things have a place with sleep potentially in training. I would stay as far away from them, unless you’ve got a nose that’s collapsing, which you would need, which I would recommend using our nasal development program because we teach people how to start to open up those passageways. You can manipulate them, you can use it in breath, practice and learning how to open up the nostrils. Brian (1h 7m 5s): There’s a lot of things you’ll start to learn. But I mean, when I start to get the higher intensities, I’ve learned to take a very crooked lows and you can see that yeah. More. Brad (1h 7m 15s): You got to go on YouTube now. People, if you’re just listening, we’ve got so much value added. Brian (1h 7m 20s): Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at my nose, if you see this on YouTube, you’ll see a very collapsed side and a very open side to my nose. When I start training, that’s what happens. And now I’ve got two sides and just opened up equally, right? And so you learn to start to use your facial structure in a different way. And here’s the thing, your face, your body, everything in your, including your bones is plastic till the day you die. It’s entirely up to you. It’s our unfortunate part is that we want now and we wanted it yesterday. And this is where that ego kick comes in to where, sorry, man, it’s a process. Brian (1h 8m 4s): And, but at the end of this rainbow, I promise you, you’re going to feel a lot better. Brad (1h 8m 11s): You’re going to Shift Adapt. I love it, man. Thank you so much. It’s a always wild times with you. Tell us a little bit about signing up for one of the programs, especially all the offerings, just going to the website. There’s a lot of free stuff, but tell us about some of the programming and then also plug your podcast. Brian (1h 8m 29s): Yeah. Yeah. The programming simple. I mean, the membership is robust in that we offer training with whether it’s a breathe and move per program, which integrates breathing into some movement stuff, especially with mobility, our conditioning, our daily training, which is strength and conditioning with the gear system program attached to it. Both of those programs are the gear system. Sustain, which is about to launch, which is more of your kind of like if I’m looking to, I’m a runner, I’m a cyclist, whatever. And I want to learn how to use these gears. That program is developed for that. Then there’s going to be stuff where we have a lot of just breath work in general, that’ll be coming in. Brian (1h 9m 9s): From whether myself or Emily Hightower with she’ll be doing like a yoga nidra, neuronidra which are what meditative practices can help reset the system. We have webinars that are on that membership as well, that go into the details just about, I mean, they go into the weeds of everything. I’ve kind of brought up today and further. And then we have programs that are built in there, like nasal development, your system. You can really get into all of these things through these systems. And they’re on our platform of teachable, which is our education platform. So it’s very easy to integrate and go through and learn these things through these programs. Brad (1h 9m 51s): And the podcast? Brian (1h 9m 52s): Podcast is our a ship perspective with Rob and I, that’s basically just he and I kind of screwing around and love it. Sometimes we talk about breathing. Other times, we’re just talking about life in general, but we typically, it gets a little deeper than, you know, than the norm on things. Brad (1h 10m 11s): That is joke people fun times. And you’re keeping your shows. You’re trying to hit that 30 minute mark. I think so it’s a nice little tidbit and who knows what, who knows what you’re going to cover in the first, first 10 minutes? That’s the fun part. Brian (1h 10m 24s): That is, that is yeah. Brad (1h 10m 26s): And McKenzie people bringing it as usual. We may now both close our mouth and breathe through our nose the rest of the day after this wonderful conversation. Thank you for listening to everybody. Brian (1h 10m 37s): Thanks for having me Brad. Brad (1h 10m 39s): Thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support please. Email podcast@bradventures.com with feedback, suggestions and questions for the Q and A shows. Subscribe to our email list of Brad kearns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful bimonthly newsletter edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with apple podcasts or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. Brad (1h 11m 23s): It helps raise the profile of the be read podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called overcast allows you to actually record a soundbite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much for the word. And remember B.rad.
