When you're stressed, you probably know what to do. Just take a big belly breath. What if that is the worst thing you can do? Ooh, we're gonna find out on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who wanna know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body.
Usually starting feet first, because that's what I do over here at Zero Shoes. And now we're gonna start with something even more essential. We'll get into that in just a sec. That's the breathing shouldn't be a secret effort for the intro that I just gave.
Anyway, here's where we break down, like I said, the propaganda, the mythology. Sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to walk a run or hike or play or to yogurt or crossfit, or in this case, breathe. Anything that you think that you should do or wanna do or enjoy doing, how to do it enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. Did I mention enjoyably?
Trick question I know I did, because look, if you're not having fun, do something different so you are, you won't keep it up if you're not having a good time. So as I said, I'm Stephen Satchin, CEO of Zero Shoes, host of the Movement Movement Podcast. And we call it that, because we here at Zero Shoes are creating a movement that involves you, easy, free, I'll tell you one second, about natural movement. Teaching your body or remembering actually, how to let your body do what it's naturally designed to do.
We wanna make natural movement the obvious, better, healthy choice, the way we currently think of natural food. And the movement part that involves you, simple, if you find anything here interesting, spread the word, share, like, review, et cetera, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, nothing that you have to be joined, just the domain that I found. And you'll find all the previous episodes and all the ways you can interact with us all the places. You can find us in short, you know the drill, if you wanna be part of the tribe, please subscribe.
All right, let's jump in. Patrick, it is a pleasure having you here. Do me a favor, tell human beings who you are and what you do. Thanks very much, Sim.
So yeah, my name is Patrick McChon and I teach people how to breathe. I adore that you did that. And I know it's not the first time you've said that. You know, one of these four Zero Shoes, people think, oh, I know how to walk, I know how to run.
But there is effective ways of walking and running. And the idea of breathing, the idea that any of us may be breathing wrong, whether there's other ways to breathe, is gonna make people think that's a little nutty. So, and actually before you even dive in, wait, I pulled something out, I see, I have to see if I can find it. I did something very entertaining before we jumped on this.
And I thought I kept it on. Oh yeah, I did a search for you on Google, just for the fun of it, to see what comes up. And I love this line, if you search for your name, it says world around author and breathing practitioner. I think the idea of breathing practitioner is one of the funniest phrases I've ever heard, because we all practice breathing.
In fact, we all think we do it, but you have a whole different take on this. And I'm so excited to be presenting this to people listening and watching. So, can you say a little more about what you meant when you say you teach people how to breathe? Yeah, it's very common for people who develop poor breathing habits.
And I give you my example. I was a child growing up with a stuffy nose and asthma. And I never realized that because of my stuffy nose, I had sleep disorder and breathing, and I'd obstruct with sleep apnea, and it really dramatically affected my concentration. Because of my stuffy nose, I was my breathing and upper chest breathing.
And this will affect your focus and it'll affect your agitation of mind. But also, there's even a connection between movement and breathing. And we have to think of the diet from breathing muscles, not just for respiration, but it provides stabilization for its mind. 50% of people with lower back pain are poor breathing patterns.
75% of people with anxiety and panic disorder are poor breathing patterns. 30% of people with asthma and likely 20% of the general population. But just when I'm on the topic, I remember being at a medical conference in Italy about five years ago, and we were watching a video clip of a patient walking down a hospital corridor, and the patient had a poor gage. Mobility was not very good.
The doctor stopped the patient in the corridor as the patient to get the tongue resting and the roof them out, breathing through the nose, the camera kept running. And when the patient started walking again, they're mobility improved instantly. So we often fail to think that, yes, breathing could be under power and breathing could be holding us back. And for me, it was falling me back.
And it changed my life when I came across it 25 years ago and I ended up making, I've written nine bucks on how to breathe. So, you know, there must be something in it. And the last book was 190,000 words, 500 pages. But that just shows you the application of it across sports, psychology, focus, movement, respiration, dental health.
You know, there's so many, I would say that all of the major disciplines of health are influenced by how you breathe. Well, one thing that I think about is there, if you go into breathing things, and I've done a lot of things with breathing and breath work as well, actually, in the last, holy smokes, 40 years. I'm an older guy than I like to think sometimes. And you'll find so many different people teaching so many different things.
But the most common thing that people are teaching is you wanna take deep belly breaths. That's, you know, like, that's a foundation of a lot of what people are discovering. And I had a sneaking suspicion that you have thought about that. Yes, because if you just focus on the biomechanics, you can screw up the biochemistry.
Now, what I mean by that is, have we ever seen a horse out in the field taking deep belly breaths? Have you ever seen a cow doing it? Have you ever seen any animal do it? No animals, heads are full of stupid ideas like that.
And that's been honest with you. Where did this big deep breath get out of? You know, the problem with this is that if the individual takes loans full of air and breathes too much air into their body, which will happen if you're taking these full big breaths like that, it blows off too much carbon dioxide from the blood through the loans. Carbon dioxide is not just a waste gas.
Your blood vessels constrict when carbon dioxide in the blood goes lower. So people with cold hands and cold feet are typically breathing a little bit faster and harder than they should be. Now, it is correct to say, breathe with a natural expansion of the lower ribs. We certainly want to have optimum movement of the diaphragm.
But the problem is, when people focus in on the diaphragm, breathing muscle, they disrupt the biochemistry and you can't just disrupt the biochemistry. You have to have a balance between the biochemistry, the biomechanics and resonance frequency of the reading. And it is about that balance. And one is intersecting into the other.
And it's just one of those things, look at nature, look at how animals breathe. They will tell us a lot more than what humans have. There's the interesting thing about the biochemistry. I have a vivid memory.
When I was in college, I must have been, let's say, 21 years old and to make a long story medium short, I found myself essentially hyperventilating. Not intentionally, but again, long story was happening. And what was very interesting was the first time I had this experience, my fingers started doing this, my face started doing this, and I couldn't, so I was puckered up, my fingers were listening, my fingers all kind of bunched together. My face puckered up.
I had no idea what was happening then. My girlfriend was with me at the time and she was freaked out, because I couldn't really talk or move properly. And then only years later, when I was doing some work with a very interesting psychologist and doing something that was a deliberate hyperventilating breathing, it wasn't a wholeotropic breathing, which from Sandra Offa to variation on that idea. And you can do some wacky things with your biochemistry neurology when you do that kind of reading.
We're not clearly talking about that. But it's interesting, to your point, I don't remember anyone ever talking about the biochemistry of it, just talking about maybe the psychological or the perceptual effects that could happen when you do certain reading things, either hyperventilating or hyperventilating, trying to hold your breath or do various things like that. But that's not where we're ultimately going. But it's an interesting thing about how much you can do in both directions by altering the breath.
Yeah, like there was two ways. If you want to stress your body and mind, you can do it by two ways. You can hyperventilate. Taking full big breaths, start to 20, 30 full big breaths in and out of your mouth or your nose, it's a stressor.
And the second way to stress the body and mind in terms of breathing would be to breathe in, breathe out, and pinch your nose and hold your breath as long as you can, or breathe in and hold your breath. So if you do and allow breath to hold, it's a stressor. And if you hyperventilate, it's a stressor. And both by doing a short term can cause bodily adaptations.
Now, then we have to think about, well, what about people who are in that sympathetic stress response all the time? How can we have to alleviate that? By activating and by dampening the stress response, activating the relaxation response. And we can also do that by the breath.
And by carrying breathing techniques into where every day, like how many people wake up for the dry mouth in the morning? They're more likely to be snoring. They're more likely to have obstructive sleep apnea. Their dental health is impacted.
How many people in an effort that say, for instance, they're in the corporate world? And say your shop assistants or your shoes are sold in a shop. An angry customer comes in. The customer representative in the shop is getting stressed.
And the normal reaction to stress is the hyperventilation. What, how about if that customer representative knew immediately how to change their states by slowing down the exhalation? And by slowing down the exhalation within 90 seconds, you can tell the brain that everything is OK. So the one thing about the breath is that if we improve our everyday breathing patterns, it can improve all of those traits that we use in society.
Our ability to be focused, our ability to be concentrated, our ability to have a decent attention span. But it also helps with your work, creativity, intuition, problem solving. And I, as a kid, go to school and university. As I said earlier on, I don't diagnose sleep apnea.
My concentration was terrible. And yet society will grade us based on our academic achievements. Nobody is teaching us how to concentrate. And mindfulness is not going to do it for the very, very person who needs it the most.
75% of the individuals with an anxiety impact disorder have this functional breathing patterns. Their respiratory physiology is off. They're in that increased sympathetic drive. And mindfulness does not address that.
So really, we have to be looking at the hierarchy of needs here, sleep, functional breathing, and to know when to change states. Now, Stephen, you will know that some people will practice a hyperventilation technique. And they will believe that this technique is flooding their body with oxygen, increasing oxygen's levels of tissues, whereas the opposite is having effect. So I think we need to have an understanding that just there are different breathing techniques for different things.
And to know when do you want to use one? And when do you need to use one? So I want to jump into some of the techniques and some of the ways that people can improve their breathing. But before we do that, I want to start with the simple thing.
How is it that people end up adopting dysfunctional breathing patterns to begin with? Oh, it could be any amount of reasons. I think genetically, there's definitely something there. I see it as a tendency to run that it runs in families.
Maybe it's a learned behavior that children learn from parents. Maybe it is a genetic perfectionist. It sees people with perfectionist tendencies are very prone to hyperventilation. And the reason being is because they set high demands themselves.
Hormonal changes in females can contribute to hyperventilation. And that's known for 106 years since 1915. And yet it doesn't get discussed. People with a genetic predisposition towards anxiety or panic disorder, people who've been true trauma in their life.
The first description of dysfunctional breathing and hyperventilation syndrome came from the American Civil War. And it was recognized by a doctor called the Costa. And he noticed that the soldiers coming back from the front line, they exhibited symptoms of recklessness, fatigue, and it took them a long time to come back into recovery. Now, we as human beings, we're not able for long-term stresses.
We've never had to cope with long-term stresses throughout revolution. And we have been evolving for 10 million years. And all of a sudden, in the last very short period of time, there's long-term stresses in terms of mortgages, and business, and competition, and kids getting into school, and university students. And it's crazy stuff.
It's crazy. And I have to say that without the bread, it has been a tremendous tool for me personally. And it's just one of those things that there is a lot of pressure out there on people. And one way that you're going to have to counter that is by bringing your attention inwards and onto the bread.
And the platform's technology has increased all of this, as well, even though we all use it, because we use it to get our own information out there. But I would say to people, be very selective about the amount of time that you're spending, because we have to think that, for example, we have faster breathing and harder breathing. If the bread itself is agitated, the mind is agitated. It occurs to me that we use the word hyperventilation in two different contexts.
One is for deliberation of the breath, in and out. And then you're using it sounds like what you're just saying, it's slightly different contexts. Can you say more about that? So you're going to have chronic hyperventilation.
So a while ago, I was working with Jean-Claude Atleshe. And I was looking at his breathing. And I could see his breathing during rest. And he's professional top of the top.
His breathing during rest is faster breathing and upper chest breathing. Now, hyperventilation means that you have a habit of breathing more rare than what you need. And that can happen as a result of breathing a little bit too faster and or a little bit too deeper. That the volume of air that you take into your lungs in one minute is greater than your metabolic needs.
It's a habit. And that would be chronic hyperventilation. It's not that the person is having an acute hyperventilation attack, but any time I look at people with anxiety and practice order, very often we will see that their breathing is faster and upper chest. It's not just that trauma situation has changed breathing patterns.
Of course it can. But a faster and harder breathing pattern feeds back into the trauma. So there's chronic hyperventilation, which is bad, bad, bad, bad, not good. And then people will do short term hyperventilation to get a stress response.
You maybe think of two things. One, there's a famous late psychologist Fritz Purls. He had a line that anxiety is just excitement without the breathing. Anxiety is excitement without over breathing.
Anxiety is excitement without the breathing. Without breathing. There's some tension to it and there's not breathing. But you're also describing something that's the flip side of that, where anxiety is excessive breathing, if you will, hyperventilation.
I can imagine how both of those could do it. Like we said before, too much or too little can create that stress response. So I'm imagining now that we've redefined, if you will, hyperventilation. People may be thinking, okay, how do I know if I'm doing this?
And you identify two things. Breathing in the upper chest. And I imagine the easiest way to tell if you're doing that is if you're trying to, as soon as you pay attention to something with breath, you're going to offer it a little bit. But if you can, put one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly and keep it there until you realize you weren't paying attention.
And then notice to see what's happening. But about the breathing speed, I imagine people might be thinking, you've asked or not, how might they be able to self-diagnose whether they're hyperventilating based on this idea of taking in doing more breathing than is necessary to sustain metabolic activity. There's a breathable time you can use. And the breathable time has been used for about 50 years.
And it's undergone as well some research in the last two to three years. And basically the individual is sitting down, an adult sitting down for maybe five, ten minutes with normal breathing that settled. And they need to get a timer. They take a normal breath in and act through their nose and pinch their nose and stop breathing.
And they time it in seconds. How long does it take until they feel the first step in the breathable time? And then to let go and have normal breathing. So it's the length of your comfortable breathable time.
People who are in chronic hyperventilation have a lower breathable time. People who are breathing upper chest and faster and harder have a lower breathable time. And we do see it, of course, people who are highly stressed. People with panic disorder, typically.
Not all people with anxiety, typically, but not all. So your breathable time can give you a fairly good feedback of how well do you breathe. So again, the obvious question people may be asking. How much is it?
Twenty-five seconds. Twenty-five seconds. It has to be above twenty-five seconds. Wow.
And it's only your comfortable breathable time and a paper by a professor of physical therapy from Evansville University and I must check on state. But his name is Professor Kyle Kiesel. So he left it 51. He studied 51 subjects.
And he concluded what that if your breathable time is above twenty-five seconds, there is an 89% chance that this functional breathing is not present. And so just to be really clear, we said the comfortable breath all time, you know, there's that you start to, because I've been not surprisingly doing this as you were just writing it and I got to like 15. So there's a point where it starts to get progressively more discomforting or progressively less comfortable. Obviously, if you start breathing in the moment, it becomes mildly uncomfortable.
That's going to shorten it dramatically. But you don't want to be straining to keep your breath out. So it seems like there's a bit of a balance in that comfortable breath whole time, just letting your breath out. Hold your nose.
I mean, I wasn't pinching my nose. You can see. But I was definitely not breathing. But take that breath out comfortably and then wait, wait, wait, wait.
Can you give any more subtle guidance about what that point is where you're going to say stop and look at your stopwatch and most likely be disappointed? Yeah, your breath at the end should be normal. Interesting. So in other words, the breath at the end should be no bigger than the breath at the start.
Okay, that's a really good barometer. So that suggests that you'll probably get it wrong a couple of times until you find, okay, I just let it out. I'm waiting, waiting, waiting, and then I'm letting that next breath in and it doesn't feel like you're gasping for air or panic about getting air. It's just like a normal breath.
Yes. Now, are you suggesting then that if people do some things that we will no doubt talk about in just a few moments and adopt a more functional rather than dysfunctional breathing pattern that just normally the breathing pattern will be in, out, and then some significant pause before the next breath? No. Well, yes or no?
When the breath whole time increases, the breath whole time that we measure there was the length of time of comfortable breath whole time. It doesn't mean that you're going to have a 25 second pause after every exhalation. Right. But what it does mean is that when you improve your breath whole time, your breathing then becomes smooth, your breathing becomes regular.
The respiratory rate is coming down towards normal, maybe 14, 12, 10 breaths per minute. Breathing driven by the die from an in the natura nose with a natural pause on the exhalation. So breathing during rest should always be effortless and breathing should never be an effort. And this also translates into sleep because if you think of the individual who is breathing faster and harder during the day, they're going to have faster and harder breathing during sleep.
This increases turbulence in the upper ways. This is contributing to snoring and also to obstructive sleep up near. But when you breathe faster and harder, what is the brain interpreting? Well, the brain is interpreting that if you breathe fast and hard during rest or sleep, the brain interprets that the body is under the nose.
So for example, it can manifest as insomnia, but it's also more likely to manifest as increased sympathetic drive or increased stress response. So, you know, as opposed to rule of thumb is that we should have the mouse closed pretty much all of the time. Yes, there's going to be exceptions during talking. There may be exceptions during swimming.
There may be exceptions every now and again. Well, just as a rule of thumb that the mouse should be closed and breathing should be difficult to pick up on. And if people think that, well, that's not really true. Well, think about having a run with elite athletes with good functional breathing patterns.
And you're running down the street next to this elite athlete. Who is going to be breathing the hardest and fastest? And it's likely to be the person who is untrained is likely to be the person with dysfunctional breathing patterns. But even the situations that you'd see somebody walking down the footpath, but you call it a sidewalk, walking down a sidewalk, and they've got a labored breathing even from the minute of physical exercise.
So it's not good to have labored breathing. So we started the conversation by talking about the biochemical effects of changing one's. So what's going on biochemically that allows for that longer, comfortable, breath whole time? Yeah.
Primary stimulus to breathe is carbon dioxide. Every breath that we take is driven by carbon dioxide. And it's only when oxygen has dropped by about half the lack of oxygen is driving breathing. So if you have an individual who is overly sensitive to the build up of carbon dioxide, then their breathing is harder and faster.
So increase chemo-sensitivity to the gas carbon dioxide implies a harder and faster breathing. Interesting. So clearly then we're going to be in the talking about what to do about this. We're going to be jumping into what it takes to become less hypersensitive to carbon dioxide build up.
But before we get there, I've got to say it's very entertaining. There was someone who put out an e-book that was all about generating nitric oxide, which can be valuable ways to do it. So dilator, electrolyte blood vessels, et cetera. And the technique they were teaching was go sprint and then just maintain breathing through the nose.
Now, I responded to the guy and said, look, if you can do what you described, whatever that person is doing is not sprinting. They may be running as fast as they can, but I can tell you as a master's all American sprinter is one of the fastest guys in my age in the country. When I finish 100 meters, I've got five seconds until it's all I can do to get any air into my body and recover from that anaerobic activity. I mean, I'm like sucking air, mouth open, nose open.
The idea of breathing through my nose at that point, it's just not even remotely possible. So there are people who have misinterpreted this into your point again, times where you are going to be breathing through your mouth. That's in my experience, definitely one of them. But again, I just love how people twist and turn this and try to make a single box that you're going to get put in for what you can do.
And I love what you're saying before of understanding breathing enough so that you know what to do when rather than trying to do anything all the time. Yeah. Like nitric oxide, the individual is correct in terms of the benefits of it. And it's nitric oxide inside the nasal cavity, every breath that you take, through the nose, you harness nasal nitric oxide.
If you want to increase nitric oxide, do some breath holes, and especially after an exhalation or hum. So for example, breathe in through your nose and that generates more nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is antiviral. Yeah.
So it's very, very potent in terms of and it should have been information should have been put out there by COVID that the body has its own antiviral defense. And I'm not going to say that if you nasal breathe that you are not likely to get covered. But what I am saying is that their nose is the first line of the fence and NO is an antiviral. It's the body's antiviral approach for antiviruses that are coming in to have neutralized them.
So I believe that that's. There's another, I'm so glad you made that qualification because so many people love to say, hey, if you do the following thing, if you stand in one foot and spin around three times, then you will get COVID and say, oh, Jesus, but that's a whole other story. There's another thing about the generate nitric oxide that I love, which is basically for causing just jumping up and down lightly. If you're jumping over running, of course, that does it.
There are some hospitals where if people are in bed, they literally just have a device that taps on the heel to kind of gently rock the person back and forth. And that also generates nitric oxide from the blood vessels themselves, which is also very interesting. I think it's a very misunderstood chemical and certainly what it can't all the things that can do biologically that I think it's well understood. I think it's well understood.
I think it's missed what we're looking for. It doesn't get enough attention, whatever the appropriate word is. Yeah. Well, I suppose it's relatively like nitric oxide from the airways is related to the airways.
Nitric oxide in the blood vessels is primarily in the endothelial. It's different isoforms of nitric oxide, but it was only discovered on the exhale of breath with the human being in 1991. Oh, wow. So I don't think it's fully realized what discounts those in the airways.
It plays a role in sleep, for example. So it's an air-equivalent messenger from the nose to the upper-airway of the lateral muscles. And yet how many people are waking up and enjoying that in the morning? Yeah.
Yeah. And that shouldn't be happening. Yeah. Well, let's jump in to the fun part of what are the things that people can do to, from what we described biochemically, start becoming less hypersensitive to carbon dioxide so that they have a more functional breathing pattern.
Sure. So what you can do is I'm going to have you put your finger under nature nose as follows. I've got my eye on my eye. I'd like you to really use this as a measurement of your concentration.
Now we're going to see just how destructive the mind is. So take it. I'm not fair. I'm the guy who's doing the damn podcast.
Come on. But you asked me. Yes. That's David.
I need you to take a very soft breath into your nose and a really relaxed and a slow and a gentle exhalation into your nose. And the whole purpose of this is really focus on taking a very soft breath coming into your nose. And a really relaxed and a slow and a gentle exhalation through your nose. Breathe out so slowly that you feel hardly any air onto your finger.
So your whole objective is that you have such conservation of the breath. You're taking a very soft breath coming into your nose and you're really having a relaxed and a slow and a gentle exhalation. The objective here is that you feel that you are not getting an affair. I need you to deliberately slow down your breathing to the point that you would like to take more air in.
And I would like you to do this for three to four minutes. Now what we are doing is deliberately taking a very soft breath into your nose and really relaxed and a slow and gentle exhalation to breathe less air to increase carbon dioxide in the blood. And as carbon dioxide increases in the blood, you feel air hunger because carbon dioxide is the primary stimulus to breathe. Now what that does is opens up your blood vessels.
It also activates the body's relaxation response and it stimulates nerve called the vagus nerve. If you notice that if you were to do that for three to four minutes, generally your hands would get warmer. And also you feel drizzier and also there's increased watery slide in the mouth. So there's an example of breathing less air to improve blood circulation but also to improve oxygen delivery, also to harness nasal nitric oxide and also to stimulate the vagus nerve.
And that flies in the very face of what people are typically talking about breathing. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I'm going to pause on that one. And it's not that it looks like I was about to say something.
So again, it seems like there's a bit of a balance because if you slow down too much, that urge to breathe gets super, super intense. Yes, it's not to be there. That's there is a balance. Yeah.
Yeah. And what you're doing by doing that in a way is what's the word? I mean, desensitizing. I think it's like doing it.
Yes, yes. That's desensitizing the bodies. And it's also a lot of people have a fear around suffocation. So when people come into me with panic disorder, the fear of suffocation or even the minuteness feeling of suffocation can put them into a panic attack.
And I bring them in. And part of what we do is we deliberately expose them to very controlled doses of suffocation to desensitize the body's reaction to it. You gave me a wacky thing that happened in my brain. My completely irrational fear of dying, or let me say that differently.
I have a completely irrational fear that involves dying. And it's that I'm like in a swimming pool or in a, in the ocean or something, and my foot gets caught on something in the bottom. Never had anything remotely like it. Don't know where that thought came from.
But it's literally the only fear that I can find of almost anything that I can think of. That idea just like makes me stop breathing immediately. Again, I have no idea why I have that. Yeah.
No, it is. It's very primordial. So one of the thought that you just reminded me of another one just for the fun of it. So I was doing Tai Chi years ago with a guy who he'd been doing Tai Chi for 22 years when I met him.
He was 27 at the time. His dad was a big deal judo guy for some reason got him into Tai Chi and he treated Tai Chi like the way it was originally developed as a fighting art, not just a thing that old people do to relax. And so we got into a conversation that the most important thing in fighting is to be able to come back from being knocked out as quickly and as alert as possible. And people talked about getting knocked out or being choked out.
And I made the comment that I've never passed out. And so he said, oh, let me choke you out. He's, I'm going to choke you out. It's like, okay, I'm game.
So he basically gets, you know, gets his arm wrapped around my neck around the carotid arteries. He's put your arm up in the air because that's how I'm going to know when you pass out, your arm will fall down and I'm just going to do it until you pass out. And then I'll gently put you on the ground and let's just see what happens. And so the experience, if I can slow it down somewhat was, Hey, start the first thought was, Hey, this is interesting to, Hey, this is uncomfortable to, Hey, what the?
And you know, I'm freaking out and I couldn't move because he's a big guy. He's got my feet off the ground. And then at the last moment, there was when it was just felt like inevitable. There was nothing I could do.
I can't remember ever feeling more relaxed in my entire life. And then I pass out for a second, maybe. And when I came back to the second later, the first thing I said was, Oh, now I get why people do drugs. It was just such a, because I'd never done anything.
It was such a out of normal experience. But the part that was so fascinating was how much my entire body had just relaxed from that whole phenomenon and stayed relaxed like that for a long time. It was fascinating. I don't recommend this, obviously, but it was really interesting.
Just, um, we have retro exercises. And you could do them at various intensities. And I remember working with some Notre Dame athletes. They were sprinters, 400 meters, track and field sprinters, going back about six, seven years ago.
And they would do their 400 meters sprints with them out to open normally during training. And what we did was I switched some of their sprints to breathing only in the nose. And it's pretty tough. And I did it to add an extra load onto them.
And then we did some of the sprints for my, I would stand up to 360 meter line, 40 meters from the finish. That's where, for people who've never run a 400, that's the spark where, what they refer to in the track world. That's where they, where they drop the piano on your shoulders. So, but that's where we had the load.
Yeah. And this is just an idea. I had the guys sprint for 360 meters with their my clothes. And when they see me, they had to hold their breath.
And they had to sprint the last 40 meters on their breath, hold. So, and we did it to cause the body to make adaptations. And this is where you can make a difference. We're lowering the blood oxygen saturation.
It wouldn't cause them to pass out by the way. And the blood oxygen saturation, we were tracking it as well with blood oxygen symmetry. But the whole purpose was to disturb the body and to disturb blood acid based plants, but basically lower blood oxygen saturation, increase carbon dioxide, and use that to cause the body to make adaptations, to increase the buffer and capacity. But also, when you do a long breath, it causes your spleen to release more red blood cells into circulation.
Your kidneys also become hypoxic, they liver to a lesser extent, and they synthesize the hormone called ritual pointy. And this is a hormone that, say, for example, lanceramstrang and individuals would be familiar with, not saying that allegations or whatever. But a hormone that an individual would often take into third of France to provoke their bone marrow to mature red blood cells. So we produce that hormone naturally, and we can do it with breath holding.
So I'm going to give you a couple of easy breath holds, and then I'll give you a couple of stronger ones, and you can test it. Well, I want to do that, but I also want to make a bookmark, because I interrupted you when we did the thing around your nose, you said the second thing, and then I interrupted you with a bunch of stories. So I want to make sure we come back to the second thing if that's not going to be part of the breath holds, but let's do breath holds because what the hell. So with this, we're just going to go easy, a couple of easy ones.
And we're just going to say, please, for anybody listening, don't do this if you're pregnant, don't do them if you have any serious medical conditions. You have to be relatively, I was going to say, young, which normally is the case, but if you're a master sprinter, I'd be fine with that. And healthy. And that's the way it is.
Where are you defining what's they cut off for young? Well, that's what we don't know because we have 40 rows that are barely able to get up with flight to stairs. Yeah, that's right. So that's the way it's a combination of boats.
Now, in advance, I'm going to say, of course, that I am also, what's the word, disadvantaged by being outside of Denver, Colorado, so I'm over a mile a year. So there's no oxygen up here to begin with. When I moved here from sea level for the first month, I thought my bicycle was broken because I just couldn't get it to move. That was all me.
So anyway, let's have some more fun. We're going to go easy anyways, just at your own intensity. But this also was an exercise just to give the body a little bit of stress and also to increase blood flow to the right. Take a normal breath in and out through your nose and pinch your nose and hold your nose.
And just gently start jogging on your spot, jogging on the splash. And hopefully you have zero shoes on. So you're doing it for about 15 paces or so. And now let go and breathe in through your nose.
That's fine. And I just breathe as normal now for a moment, just breathing as normal for about a minute or so. Now you might also notice that this exercise will have open up your nose. I noticed that I also noticed a very entertaining head rush.
It can be. And sometimes the legs go gently as well. So there's different kind of... They do get something for the head rush that I could feel.
Not quite tingling. It's like cool on the outside in my lungs. And by the way, I'm not wearing zero shoes right now. I'm wearing zero ZER shoes.
I'm barefoot in the office. All right, zero shoes. That's great. And again, whenever you're ready to take a normal breath in through your nose and out through your nose and pinch your nose and hold your nose.
And then you're just doing a jog again, holding your breath until you feel kind of a moderate air hunger. So it's just gently doing a few easy ones and then we do a couple of strong ones. And you're just relaxing into the body and it's about relaxing into a feeling of discomfort as well. And even though you were just doing kind of a moderate exercise there, that would have a stronger effect in terms of the anaerobic capacity and then sprinting.
If you were to use pulse oximeter and measure your blood oxygen saturation during that exercise, and then go for a sprint and measure your blood oxygen saturation, you will lower your blood oxygen saturation more during the breath hose than you will during the sprint. So that's why we used them to have training effects. But now I'm going to push you a little bit more. So whenever you're ready, take a normal breath, into your nose and out through your nose and pinch your nose and hold your nose and start jogging, holding the breath.
And out faster, keep jogging, keep pushing, keep going, keep going, keep pushing, keep going, keep pushing, keep holding the breath, relax into the body. When it gets pretty tough like going into your nose, that's it. And then get your breathing under control, into your nose and you're going to have your hands either side of your lower ribs. So now your hands either side of your lower ribs as you breathe in, your ribs should move out of your mouth and as you breathe out your ribs should move in.
And as you breathe in your ribs are moving out and as you breathe out your ribs are moving in. And then just to do that for a recovery for about a minute or so, we do it one more. And that would kind of give you an idea. Now there's another aspect of it as well, just to even for people to do their physical exercise with their mouth closed.
And you know, you feel an increased air hunger. But if you keep on doing your physical exercise with the body of Daphstanash and your breathing becomes lighter. So I just do one more if that's all right or you have to do one. So whenever, take a normal breath, whenever you're ready, take a normal breath, entry your nose and out through your nose and pinch your nose and hold your nose and start jogging.
And up faster and keep going and keep pushing keep going and keep pushing and keep going and keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing and keep going until the air hunger gets fairly strong. Now let go and entry your nose and recover your breathing and hands on your sides. So the best way to recover breathing even after a sprint is always to breathe low and slow. Okay, I get it.
It could be too tax that you have to breathe through the mouth. But if we breathe fast and shallow, we waste so much air to dead space that that air actually doesn't get really down into the greatest blood flow in the lungs. So yeah, so that's kind of just a couple of ideas there. So two questions then.
One, how there's two things that there's two kind of conflicting things that happen when you're doing something like this over time. One is that if you're putting yourself under some deliberate mild stress, there's a temptation to try to avoid doing it in the future because it was experienced as mildly stressful. The flip side of that is when you see progress, that's the thing that motivates you to keep going. So what do you recommend for the sort of balance of making it so that you're not adding more stress than is necessary when you're stressing yourself.
In other words, like how often should something, something practice like this. And what are the signs to look for for progress, which will give you that incentive to keep going. So as opposed to listening to your body, if it's something that's helping, it's going to make a difference. You're going to feel a difference in terms of energy levels, in terms of your nose opening up.
In terms of your breathing becoming lighter during physical exercise. And the real thing is that the best way to do this is to bring it into your normal physical routine. Everybody warms up pre physical exercise. All warmups should be done in an extra than those.
And during the warmup, bring in some breath holds. When you're nice and warmed up, breathe in, breathe out and hold your nose. And just do a simple maneuver. You could be even doing it on a bike.
You could be doing it. You know, I'm talking about a stationary bike as opposed to one on the road. And just bring it into your way of life. But recover within a couple of breaths.
That's the key. Now, there isn't a risk of passing out because your black-skinned saturation is not going to drop down into the 60s or 50s. So we've used those exercises with movement for 20 years. And to give you an example, some of the guys I work with could be, okay, we had professional footballers today, an amount of bike in the morning.
But at a team of snipers about six weeks ago, and the whole aspect was using breathing techniques of when to pull the trigger of a gun. And using different states because, of course, and it's from a safety point of view because if you have an individual and they're stressed out, and it's their job, you know, that's their job, but if they're stressed, they're more likely to make a mistake. It's very important that we as human beings can control dates. And we're using the autonomic nervous system, having a really relaxed and slow gentle breath out and having total focus of the mind on the target.
And, you know, I brought these guys to all of the exercises. I had them do repeated sprint ability, which is the exercise, one of them. Breathe in, breathe out through your nose, breathe in and out through your nose, pinch your nose and hold, and sprint for 40 meters with your breath out. And once you get to the 40-meter line, then you have a recovery for 30 seconds.
And after 30 seconds recovery, you breathe in and out through your nose and you sprint again, 40 meters, 30 seconds recovery. And we do that five times. And we kind of, we start off with exercises to gently up-regalage and influence the autonomic nervous system and then stress to autonomic nervous system, but then to relax the autonomic nervous system. Like, there is often sometimes that I feel that we need to look at breathing, that it's much more broader than just holding in on.
Well, now what I want you to do is take these full big breaths. So now what I want you to do is I want you to take full big breaths with 30 breaths and then exhale and hold your breath. And all that's fine. Well, what about the recovery?
What about the person's breathing post-dash and how are you breathing during sleep? And how are you breathing if you get stressed? And that's what the breath should be. And that's what we should be doing.
Again, it's so interesting. The idea, you know, whether I'm breathing through my mouth or my nose, if I'm going all out for 40 seconds or 40 meters, I've got three of those in me before. A 30 second recovery just isn't going to have them. That's a whole other story.
Again, people who are, this is just for the fun of saying it. Like people who use the word sprinting, those of us who are actual sprinters do a very different thing metabolically than people who are just trying to run as fast as they can. I finally figured out how to codify this in a way. Someone who was saying, you know, sprint for 30 seconds, rest for 30 seconds and repeat.
I said, any real sprinter, if they're going all out for 30 seconds, that's it. They're not going to rest for 30 seconds and repeat. Maybe, you know, they said, what's not about going all out the same speed that next one is just doing the best you can. Oh, no, I don't think you get it, man.
After 30 seconds, all out, we're done. And, you know, maybe halfway through the next one. And finally, I said, wait, this is a young guy using his 20s. I said, when you go all out for 30 seconds, how far are you going?
He was like 150 meters. He was very impressed for himself. I said, yeah, I'm twice your age. And when I go all out for 30 seconds, I'm doing 250 meters.
It's a slightly different amount of energy production. It's happening. And therefore, the oxygen man is very different. But that said, I mean, I'm already adapting what you're describing into what would work for me to make a certain amount of stress.
It's not going to be overwhelming. It may be 20 meters, or maybe I'm doing whatever. But you also give me a flashback yet another. When I went to the world, Master's Track and Field Championships in Finland about 13 years ago, it's at sea level.
And what shocked me, again, as a sprinter, whereas anaerobic, I was still amazed to discover that while it didn't change my running, it changed my recovery like I'd never, I couldn't even imagine. I finished 100 meters and 10 seconds later, I felt fine. Whole different game. I mean, I have the theory.
I've been living at altitude for 28 years. I have the idea that I still may not have adapted. So, or maybe it's just the way it is with the air is like up here. But suffice to say that idea of those little stressors and playing with that is super interesting.
It would be very interesting to get your humatic rate measured. I've had it measured. I just don't know. I'd have to look it up and see what the numbers look like.
I don't know if the time I had that would be the obvious thing to do to see if I've adapted at all. And the other thing is that I would say is that because you're already living at altitude is just going a little bit easier with the brettoles. And a few we did today find the way. But you know yourself, because you don't want to have too much of a high-apoxy stress either.
Like, nobody when we're working with somebody, we have them do kind of moderate to strong brettoles, maybe five reps twice daily at most. But if they're doing, instead of using the word sprint, but running as hard as they can with a brettoles, we have them do five reps every second day. Got it. So, we switched the reps based on the dose of the air hunger.
Do you think in the same way that learning happens during the rest periods after about attempting something and muscle growth and other physical changes happen again during those rest periods after the stress? Do you think the same thing is happening with working on the breath that the real adaptations are happening after you're doing the exercises, for example, during the rest periods between sessions? Because we haven't really focused on it. We focus on breathing for recovery.
Absolutely. But that's more just for recovery. And what we're doing there is we're looking to optimize hard to weight-free biology. So, you know, when an athlete really pushes themselves hard during physical training, it's very important that they're able to down-regulate very quickly.
And we show them ways to do that via the brett. But I'm not sure if the advantage is from the sprinting is happening post-exercise or during the exercise. And then you get another flashback. I had a friend who developed one of the first real-time biometric sensors that allowed them to measure heart rate breathing everything in real time for up to 24 hours.
And so they were looking at heart rate variability, which for people who don't know when you breathe out your heart rate should slow down a little bit compared to when you're breathing in. And if you get really stressed, your heart rate will basically stay the same no matter what you're doing, which is not a good sign. And they put this device that they had developed on one of the guys that they were working with. And they were just curious about heart rate variability.
And he had none. And they said, we think you probably need to get to the hospital now. And he gets to the hospital and they check him in. And he immediately goes in for a quadruple bypass.
Wow. They caught it accidentally just in the nick of time. And again, this is one of those things that is relatively well known in the literature, but not very well utilized in the field. So anyway, backing up to the finger on your nose, and you said there's number two.
Do you remember what number two was? Is that still in your brain? Number two might be just with lots of different exercises. Normally we would start off with small brettoles and that's breathing and breathe out a whole of the nose for five seconds.
Like for example, box breathing might be an exercise that's interesting to people. This is used by it's called tactical breathing and also going into an operation. The individual is going in needs to be absolutely focused. They want to be that flow state whereby you're alert and you're relaxed at the same time.
And they would do this exercise. It's breathing in for four seconds, holding for four breathing out for four seconds, holding for four and continuing to do it. We're going to bring it for two to four or five minutes. So this exercise here, Steven, is breathing in two, three, four, hold two, three, four, huh?
IN 2, 3, 4, hold 2, 3, 4, out 2, 3, 4, hold 2, 3, 4, in 2, 3, 4, hold 2, 3, 4, out 2, 3, 4, hold 2, 3, 4. Well, guys, there's two ways to help some of you more, but, in terms of the breadth, we kind of focus on a couple of ways to help some of you like the vegs now. First of all, the vagus nerve for people who might be a rubbish. It's a nerve that is wandering pretty much throughout the human body and it's innovating most of, if not all, of the major organs and 80 to 90% of the nerve fibers are from the body up to the brain.
So you have a communication going from the body to the brain via the vagus nerve. And if we can stimulate the vagus nerve, it's a critical neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which causes the heart rate to slow down. And when the heart rate slows down, the brain is interpreting that the body is safe. And it's a great way to help bring a better balance, to dampen a stress response.
So if you're feeling stressed and you're breathing is hard and fast, and to activate the body's relaxation, you can do it two ways. We can breathe in through the nose and out through the nose and pitch to nose and hold the back for one, two, three, four, five and let go. And just breathe normal for 10 seconds and then do it again, normal breath entry, your nose and out through your nose and pitch and hold. One, two, three, four, five.
That could be one way of doing it. The box breathing earlier on is similar enough, not too dissimilar from it. The finger underneath the nose, taking it very soft breath in and really relaxed and slow gently breath out, can stimulate the vagus nerve. And also breathing in for five seconds and out for five seconds or breathing in for four seconds and out for six seconds.
And all of these are, you know, any of us, I suppose it's all about building up resilience and what's resilience for the human being, better than that. We are able to switch and after a situation presenting itself, we can deal with the situation better, as opposed to think of two people going to do a job interview and you interview the first candidate and the first candidate is sighing and over chest breathing and breathing is a little bit faster. It's going to put the interviewer on edge. And the second person comes in and has got calm, nice, collected breathing.
And even though both might be ideally suitable, they both may have the same qualifications. What's going to happen is that the interviewer is going to choose the person with the camera demeanor because if you have, you have to be very careful not to let your breathing let you down. So, and that's one aspect of just an example of where breathing can play a role. Love it.
It occurs me, I need to ask you a potentially politically insensitive question. Oh, yes. And you can answer it however you want. Of course.
I don't know why I said that. Of course you can answer it. The, the instant politically insensitive question is the person on the planet right now who is most well known for breathing related things is Philip Wymhoff. Do you have any thoughts or comments about what he's doing?
Yeah, it's primarily a stressor. You know, it's a stressor breathing exercise forcing the body to make adaptations. I think it's a useful exercise. I work with thousands of people over the years.
Many of them I would not teach them such an exercise. I think it's very important people to realize that this isn't an exercise to increase oxygen delivery to the brain. This isn't an exercise that we should be practicing one of the time. This is like going for a sprint, you know, just times that you might want to go for a sprint, but you shouldn't be sprinting all the time because it's soon going to where you are.
And not everybody should be going for a sprint. So sprinting is not going to suit people with different health conditions. So the Wymhoff method is a sprint. Interesting.
And I mean that in terms of not just fast running, we go for the sprint that you said. That's what it is. Yeah. Yeah.
My favorite, my favorite thing about Wimhoff is that there's some interesting conflation between what he's doing with the breathing method and other things. So his cold adaptation, my favorite thing about that is he has a twin brother who apparently can handle the cold just as well without ever doing any of the other stuff. So there's apparently a big genetic component in what he's doing that many people don't know about because they don't even know he has a twin brother, which again, I always like to get underneath and find out what's really going on. And when I heard that, I went, no, fascinating.
It's part of this idea that anyone can become anything and we're all basically the same, which is so patently false. I always like to see, all right, what's going on where maybe this person's just a freak and or is this reliably teachable and if so to whom and for whom is it not reliable? That's a whole other thing. So Patrick, this has been a total, total pleasure.
And I can only imagine and more than being a pleasure, I think out of all of the chats that I've had with human beings, we've given people more stuff to play with and experiment with and do than anybody else that I've talked with, which is not too surprising since your breath is always available and we rarely pay attention and we've just given a lot of ways to pay attention. But of course, I would be remiss if I didn't say in addition to thanks, if people want to find out more, whether it's just getting your book, which we didn't talk about at all, or anything else that you that they might want to do to dive into this more deeply, how can they get in touch with you and what else would you recommend? Yeah, it's a few different books depending on what you kind of want to read about. I've got a really recent book called Atomic Focus and that's Self-explanatory.
I have a book called The Breathing Cure, which was released in the United States in World Wide in August of this year. And then I've got a book called The Oxygen Advantage, which is 2015, which is still very popular, thankfully it's great to see it. What's the difference between those three things if someone's going to have to see it? Yeah, the Oxygen Advantage was kind of geared a little bit towards sports performance and bringing breathing techniques into sports.
And the breathing cure is geared very much towards health and children and sleep apnea, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma, cranial facials about women's breathing, which doesn't get touched upon, but should be talked about. And then Atomic Focus is about improving your concentration and attention span and the tools to achieving flow states, because I don't think people are going to achieve flow state if they have sleep apnea. And I don't either go to achieve flow states if they have dysfunctional breathing, because if your physiology is in that increased sympathetic drive, how can you achieve flow states? Yeah.
So it's just kind of using the breadth and going a little bit deeper into it. And we have social media channels as well, of course, and you'll find different videos and different things on oxygen advantage and also butteco clinic. You'll spell butteco clinic for people who want to be able to spell things. It's a tricky one.
BUTYKO clinic. And I know the answer to this, but you're going to have to tell people why butteco clinic. But you take a clinic? Yeah, it was the name is after a Saviat doctor called Dr.
Constantine Butteco and he kind of made a very profound discovery, even though it's a very simple one. And he's seen that people who were sick, breathe in hard and faster. And he asked the question, he said, is it their sickness which causes them to breathe harder and faster? Or could their hard and faster breathing feed into their sickness?
And he started teaching them to breathe light and slow and nose. And even though the science back then, he's put it a lot on carbon dioxide. Yeah carbon dioxide pays some route. But now the science is really looking at the bar of reflex and basically the autonomic nervous system that we can influence the autonomic nervous system.
And people who have depression, people who have anxiety and practice order and a host of different conditions, they have reduced heart rate very badly. And the Butteco method is very geared towards improving HRV. And even with long COVID, Steven, we're seeing some terrible situations with individuals, mainly women, age between 20 and 50 years of age. And a lot of them are really healthy and fit individuals.
And we have some of them that they're better all time. They can't hold their breath for more than four seconds. They can't even talk. They can't stand up because their heart rate goes through the roof.
So they have parts, postural, orthostatic, tachycardia syndrome. And the whole autonomic nervous system is in total state of dysregulation. So we are using breathing and gentle breathing exercises to help influence the autonomic nervous system. That's the one thing about the breath.
You can kind of tap into your breathing. You have something that you can always use for yourself. And it's a nice thing to know. Beautiful.
Patrick, once again, total, total pleasure. Thank you so much. Continue to good luck with everything you're doing back and forth on the new books coming out, having something coming out during COVID, I'm sure poses a number of interesting challenges. But anyway, and I hope everyone does take advantage of finding your books and going to the websites you mentioned and checking out those resources, obviously, from what we've already just played with in the last hour, there's a lot to dive into and more to experience.
And I hope you'll take advantage of it. So a thanks and be let me do a quick sign off. Actually, anything last words before I forget or anything that I forgot? No, it's pretty much it.
Pleasure. Thanks very much, Dan. Yeah. So everyone else, thank you so much.
Once again, just a quick reminder that you can go to www.jointhemovementmovementmovement.com to find free episodes, all the places you can get to podcast, all the places you can interact with us on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram, et cetera. If you have any questions or comments or people you want to recommend for being on the podcast, drop me an email. Move, M O V E at jointhemovementmovement.com. And most importantly, go out and have fun and live life feet first.