Transcription
The goal is that your reflexive breathing pattern—that which you use the most, that which you always revert to when you don't pay attention—that's the one that matters. Because that's 99% of the time, and if during that 99% of the time, those thousands upon thousands of breaths you take a day, it's not nasal, you don't process the air, don't prepare it before it goes into your lungs, it's not diaphragmatic, so it's shallow and then it's too fast, so it's actually going to impair your cellular oxygenation. If you don't have that right, it doesn't matter if you're 10 or 15 or 20 minutes of breath work you do a day, because your reflexive breathing has not changed; it's not improved, so it keeps impacting negatively your day-to-day life, your levels of energy, your health.
Thank you, Foreign Telligence podcast. I'm your host, Beverly Coles. Key today is a returning guest. Absolutely mind-blowing conversation. The creator of the Business Move, Not to Irwin Lacroix, joins me today to talk about his new adventure in life, ultimately into diving more deeply into his truest nature, which he finds through his breath. He had a very specific modality that he loves to implement; he's actually teaching it now around the world to really start to understand your physiology, your mentality, and your emotions. You want to ultimately effectively be able to regulate ourselves. I think this is an incredible conversation. If you don't know, I'm a massive fan of breathing and the implications built within performance, longevity, and just ultimately being able to control your state of arousal. So I really love this conversation with everyone. He's always had such great unique insights. He was on the podcast in the past, and we spoke about his business when we moved in, that which is really just like how to connect deeply with your body, how to feel the way your body's meant to move, how to get back to your natural ancestral desire and path of movement. Incredible conversation. We talk about efficient and inefficient breath patterns; we talk about the three pillars of efficient breathing, type of the problems with hyperventilation, which is so common in our society now, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, right? So conscious hyperventilation would be things like Wim Hof style breathing, and number one has an opinion why maybe that isn't the best approach, and um, it's interesting to hear his approach, how to build a dedicated breath practice for you, but also focus on your reflexive breathing patterns. We also speak about the practice of breath holding as a way to learn or relearn proper breathing. Incredible conversation, and don't sleep on breathing; it's a really, really valuable, massively impactful practice, and understanding its different implications could be just truly an incredible tool to dive into your best life.
So some of the ways you may use breathing to dive into your best life or optimize your best life: I use breathing every single day during my training. He's obviously breathing every single day to start my day, to improve my spinal mobility, to improve my ability to relax, to improve my ability to be more excited, more amplified, more aroused. I also use breathing every day I'm going to go to sleep. Um, so many different ways and implications and breath work, even during meditation. So just a truly unique and valuable conversation in your lover one as far as his ability to deliver a compelling explanation. Today's podcast is brought to you by Bioptimizers. So throughout the last, gosh, 15 years, I really think my brain is continually getting better. So if you're someone's noticing the podcast for a long time, since 2013, we've been doing this podcast; we're the OGs of the podcasting space, and uh, you know, I really feel as though every year that passes my brain gets better. As a professional bodybuilder, and even before that, I found my memory to be very, very bad; I found my verbal recall very, very bad. I could literally read something three minutes later; I forgot what I read, and now I find as though even though I'm 42, my brain continues to get better, my memory continues to get better, my verbal fluency continues to get better, and I honestly attribute it to my practice around brain optimization, my practices around brain optimization, and a big part of that, overcoming that huge problem that I had—it was a really a big problem; I really felt very insecure about it; it felt it was a big problem for me—I was mushrooms. You guys know I've been a long-time fan of lion's mane mushrooms. I also take Chaga, Reishi, Cordyceps, so they're a very, very common in mushrooms, um, and but they're common, but they're incredibly powerful. The vast implications of these mushrooms is just truly tremendous, and our friends at Bioptimizers have put a product together that I absolutely love; it's called—call it Genius. So it's collagen mixed together with mushroom; it's just an incredibly powerful and delicious, mind you, snack that I usually consume either post-workout, sometimes before bed, and I like taking collagen and often pre-workout, post-workout, or before bed will be three difficult times consuming my collagen protein. Collagen has been shown pre-workout to really support in the regeneration of joints. So if you read the research, the research will suggest taking collagen pre-workout if your objective is maximizing for joint health. Anyways, without further ado for me, enjoy this amazing podcast from Erwan Lacroix and our amazing friends at Bioptimizers who's in the College Genius. You can head over to bioptimizers.com and check out the product colleges, or you can go to newtopia.com—that's n-o-o-t-o-p-i-a.com—and go to Muscle Genius. Do it now; get hooked up 10% off Muscle 10 and check out; have an amazing day; enjoy the show. [Music]
Erwan, welcome to the show, my friends. Last time I had you on was one of the most in-depth, valuable conversations I've had in a long time, and I'm incredibly grateful to welcome you back to have another amazing conversation. I'm sure.
Thank you, Ben. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend.
Yes. Someone who is as in tune as connected to their body as you are, I believe has incredible insights into every aspect of life. I believe the body holds the—it is the gateway or holds the key to understanding many, many things, and I know you—you will say—mastered your previous endeavor of MoveNat. Now you're on to this concept of breath work and having people access new states or access this new method of breathing. And breathing has taken on a whole new meaning for me and probably for millions and millions of people around the world, and I'd love to have you share what breathing is to you.
Life. It's life. Just like it's what it is to me is what it is for everyone. Everyone knows, you know, when we're kids, it's our intuitive—kids know when they stop breathing they'll die. So connection, conscious or unconscious, with the vital nature of breathing—it's a no-brainer in all of us. For sure.
Yeah. Someone recently said to me that there's only one thing this organism is here to do, and it's breathe, and I was like, that's really interesting. And breathing with nature, breathing in harmony with nature and harmony with yourself, is a really interesting, you know, mental exploration or maybe physical exploration to sit with, and that was a really interesting space for me, going through some stresses and and just realizing that there's so much beauty and there's so much brilliance and so many miracles in every breath, in every breath that we take, and I thought that was a really wonderful, just thing to sit with. For me, it's at the root of it all: just breathe. And it really simplifies things, and I really learned to enjoy the simplicity in in the breath and the just the life, right? Literally life in in every single breath, in the absence of life, in the absence of breath. And so I think this returning that seems to be happening in the world up to, you know, our most true nature through the breath, it's just such a beautiful thing, and I hope this message gets shared with more people. So I love to share—I love for you to share this new, new directions, new path you're taking through the breath. Let's talk about who we are. Who we are every day. We meet people: "Hey, hi, how are you? I'm okay. I'm good. Thank you. I'm good. Great, thanks." All right. It's very, very surfaced like that. And then if we think about who we are, like, okay, this is my name, she's my age, this is what I look like, this is my job, this is my citizenship, this is my my race, or all elements of identity, identity, but all those are surface—also deep down, deep down we're so—who would deny that? Who doesn't want to be a soul where we are immaterial or intangible? Breath reminds us that we are embodied, for that spiritual consciousness that is embedded in this body, flesh and bone and blood. With breath, we remember that reality, in that that body matters so much. It's very evident that let's say if we ask everyone right now listening, just close your eyes and for a moment pause your what's called ventilation—it's the biomechanical aspect of your breathing—disposite—stop breathing for a moment and keep holding it, and what happens? What is happening within everything now is within—you're not thinking of what you got to do; you're not thinking of responsibilities, chores, tasks; you're not even thinking about your identity. All of a sudden you become a feeling, reconnected—the feeling that you are pure experience. But typically the response—that, by the way, you can all can breathe again—it's very likely that you felt good for a moment and then you did not feel so good quickly because you got alarmed. You got alarmed because when you stop breathing your nervous system is triggered into thinking—which, by the way, your nervous system does not think, it feels—the nervous system all of a sudden feels like, what's going on here? Is this going to—if you could think, it would think like that: what's going on? Is this going to last? We do not get information from like the, you know, peripheral cortex, from the consciousness, by the way. We have real hard time communicating with that guy or girl there, and I were like, is this getting too loud? That's because if it lasts, it's gonna kill us all inside, right? So we remember, hey, my breath is my life; give my breath back. So it's profound; it's very profound, and there are a lot of implications with that relationship between ventilation, how we breathe, emails, excels, what it does at a cellular level, especially in terms of cellular oxygenation, keeping all our cells healthy and nourished in our life because they need oxygen to combust energy, because that's what we are: we are energy, we are energy of a spirit, and we're energy of the body. And all day what we do is to regulate ourselves, or try to regulate ourselves. We eat because we regulate; we drink because we regulate; we are active because we regulate; we sleep because we regulate; we put a shirt on because we regulate; we take off a shirt because we regulate if it's too hot, etc., etc., etc. We change position because our butt starts to get numb, and then we go back to a seat because we filter it on our feet. It's a whole exercise day by day, night after night, of regulation at the biology that is in our body and at a mental level, emotional level, spiritual level; we also do the same: we regulate. We think about—we think about things because we feel unsure or insecure or anxious about what's next, or we think about the past and how it still impacts us, and we try to make sense, and we try to regulate our minds, our consciousness. So that's what we are. So breathing is a master tool to help us regulate the body, regulate the nervous system, which means also regulating our consciousness, which is what—which is the experience that we all are, a unique experience that we all are in the moment, in the here and in the now.
Beautiful description, and you've created a course around helping people tap into this. So when you're teaching people in your course, is it a matter of explaining the opportunity within the breath?
Yeah, so so I teach—I teach breath work because the way we breathe reflexively is the most important, so that's what I teach first. So the point of breath work—because there's a lot of—it's—it's very trendy at the moment—this is something, by the way, which I've been teaching for a long time. Back in the days, 2009, I started—I came to the United States and started to teach MoveNat, you know, natural movement, climbing, running, jumping, landing, lifting, carrying—all these things in nature—natural movement in nature. Let's move that. The first thing that I always thought was breathing, and I told people, if you don't know how to control your breath, you're not going to really learn how to control your movements. You want the first technique—because we teach techniques—there's a technique for everyone, this technique for lifting, and technique for carrying; there's a technique for running, in technique for jumping and landing, depending on the environment; there's obviously a technique for breathing as well. So we all breathe; we don't all breathe the same. Some patterns are inefficient: breathing too fast, not breathing nasally, so breathing through the mouth, even intermittently, and not breathing that fragment equally—that's not optimal breathing. So three pillars of efficient breathing—that's where it starts—is diaphragmatic, it's driven from the depth, from nasal, because only the nostrils and the nasal cavities can process the air that we inhale several times a minute, thousands, thousands of times a day and night. And then slow, because the respiratory rate is going to impact positively or negatively cellular respiration, which is how you actually oxygenate your tissues. And just because we breathe and have access to a huge amount of oxygen any time, we could even breathe more to get more oxygen; we would increase the oxygen intake, but that does not mean that we—that we're going to increase the oxygen uptake in our cells, which is how much oxygen we can actually use, we can actually deliver to our cells for metabolism. So if we don't have that right, because we don't breathe right—breathing is natural to all of us, but efficient breathing is not. So the first thing that we need to take care of, and also when we do that, when we bring our reflexive pattern—we're not talking about those 10, 15 minutes a day where you do breath work and you do all kind of different drills—that's not what I teach. The goal is that your reflexive breathing pattern—that which you use the most, that which that you always revert to when you don't pay attention—that's the one that matters, because that's 99% of the time. And if during that 99% of the time, those thousands of thousands of breaths you take a day, it's not nasal, you don't process the air, don't prepare it before it goes into your lungs, it's not diaphragmatic, so it's shallow, and then it's too fast, so it's actually going to impair your cellular oxygenation. If you don't have that right, it doesn't matter if you're 10 or 15 or 20 minutes of breath work you do a day, because your reflexive breathing has not changed; it's not improved, so it keeps impacting negatively your day-to-day life, your levels of energy, your health.
Okay. First, that's the first thing when I teach breath work—which is how you hold your breath—because there are benefits to—valuability—physiological benefits, and I'm almost finished, but beyond the physiological benefits, you learn to down-regulate your nervous system, which is a neurophysiological impact and benefit; it's at the, you know, the fusion between or the junction between physiology and neurology, which neurologists physiology at the cerebral level. It's the body—to do that, you need to learn how to operate your mind, because the universal, by default, response to interrupting ventilation is negative, for a reason—to protect us. So about—we agitate—it's perceived as a threat; that is going to agitate us physically, emotionally, and mentally. Can we meditate through that? Yes, but it takes a certain approach, certain principles, certain understanding, and certain techniques—that's what I teach. If you can learn to do that while you're under stress—a neurophysiological stress which is triggered by your self-induced breath work, self-induced stress—you stop breathing; you decide—so you decide that you do that to yourself. Now you are also in charge of defining what's going to be a response to that experience, which is stressful. And if you learn to regulate your inner experience during that stress, well, guess what? It's going to benefit; it's going to carry over to other experiences of life that are stressful when you interact with the world—people, colleagues, neighbors, family, complete strangers. But first, need to have that space where there's no interaction with the outside world; therefore, the stress you're dealing with belongs to you; it's caused by you, and your response to it is decided and managed and regulated by you. If you don't have that ability already, it's going to be difficult to efficiently, properly regulate your response with others in the world if it's not already something that you have an ability for within self.
So much brilliance! This is something that—it's funny because I talk to a lot of people who are exceptional athletes or exceptional teachers and exceptional spiritual leaders, and everyone seems to converge on the same lessons, the same—the same awarenesses—and time we all realize that when you—when you aim to do something well, or when you do something hard, or when you do something stressful, the inability to connect with and control your breath will always limit progress, so we'll always inhibit your ability to perform at the highest level. And anyone who's training who's—who's thinking at a high level at some point butts up against their—their own cognitive challenge, their own neurological challenge and starts to realize that if they're committed to going through those challenges, then the only way through is to learn to regulate—self-regulate, as you say—through—through the breath. And I think the opera, I said, is often the greatest opportunity that exists right now in performance, and and performance can be anything, is—I think breathing is, you know, performance-enhancing substance—no substance, obviously—but I think it's the greatest—it is because you will uh produce natural EPO. Okay, so it's not just—so all right, when I talk about breath holding, I'm not talking about box breathing, where you hold your breath for three to ten seconds at the end of an inhale, then at the end of an exhale. Okay, I'm talking about prolonged breath holding—minutes at a time. So I'm talking about extreme hypercapnic levels and extreme hypoxic levels, and this is not where beginners start, by the way, okay, but at the level I practice—so my ability to hold my breath is beyond eight minutes. Here where I live, it—I'm at uh 2015 meters of altitude—that's 6600 feet of altitude—I can hold my breath for seven minutes theoretically—that's 25% more at sea level—so we're talking about eight minutes, and it's 30-plus breath-hold ability. When I do that, and because of a level at which I practice, I reach SpO2, which is oxygen saturation, very, very low. So at the end of a breath hold, it's in the low 70s or in the high 60s. When that happens, means your oximetry, your oxygen saturation peripheral level—we're not talking about the brain—it's very low, but then you—even after you—you breathe again, you resume breathing, it keeps going down; it can go down below 50%. The lowest I've seen in my case is 38%.
Wow! You want to understand people because you know these things, Ben, because you—you are well-versed into all things physiology—50% blood oxygen level, you pass out. Anyone passes out except if you're trying—you would be a rush to the ER. Okay, but things that oxygen comes in regular or normal—what's called normalcy—at normal levels of oxygen come back very, very quickly right after you breathe. So I never actually passed out. The point is—the point for me talking about that because this is extreme adaptation—not just physiological, and that's what's very important to understand—the adaptation is not just physiological, and I can talk about all the physiological adaptation, by the way, in the spleen, erythropoiesis, production of red blood cells, etc., etc., um, cerebral blood flow, um, there's many physiological implications that are very fascinating to learn about, but how do you do that? How do you hold your breath that long? This is not just about pure willpower. Yes, I can't do it, you know—mind over matter.
Mind over matter? No, because what's the mind? Your mind? What's the matter? Your body. Where does your mind emerge from? From your brain, which is the body. So it's not actually mind over matter, but let's talk about the mind and say my willpower is my mind of the body. Promise that anyone who tried to hold their breath knows that even if they tell themselves, "I will hold my breath no matter what, to all the way to three minutes," and then after not even one minute you're rebreathing again, and you already quit. So clearly it's more matter of a mind. So willpower alone—we all will—only take you that far. The only way to be able to practice this breath-holding meditation, breath work meditation, or to go that far is precisely that it is a meditation, because otherwise your natural response, spontaneous response—everyone, anyone—it was mine, by the way, also in the beginning—is all over the place; it's confused; it's negative; it gets—get me out of here; get me out of here; I want to breathe again. Yes, but I said I wouldn't. Yes, but I'm going to. So your mind goes in all those directions and goes in all through those negative thoughts and also negative emotions. How do you make it a different experience physically, mentally, emotionally? You must have a buff; you must have an understanding; you must have a method, and this is what I teach. And even regular meditators, like people who are veterans, people who've meditated for a long time, it may help to a degree, but only to a degree, because—well, let me—let me keep that for a little later. And even people who are athletic—uh—great marathon runners or things like that, they have great oxygenation, all right? They have great energy systems—super optimized. Do you think that just because of that they're gonna hold their breath for 40 or 5 minutes right away? No. So it is a specific adaptation, but at the same time it's also a universal adaptation, because what is it that we're dealing with? We're literally dealing with the threat—a life threat—we put ourselves in, and the longer we hold our breath, the more it becomes a life-threatening situation, basically, because we all know what would be the outcome of that. And this is exactly what's going to bring life in you and bring a—a new awareness and a new gratitude for what is it that we have—life—and what it is that we are—life—to, and what is life at a spiritual level—is to be in the game; it's to be alive.
I just want to finish with meditation—traditional meditation—you don't bring any stress with you, okay? You are going to actually want to get rid of stress, so you're going to try to avoid negative thinking, even any thinking at all, in their better way. There are many ways of meditation, but the one thing is that you will be taught to regulate your breath, to slow down your breath, and to use your slow breathing as one way to focus your mind on the simplicity of its activity, which is going to slow down; it's going to down-regulate your nervous system, and all of a sudden you're like, "Wow, yeah, I feel better; I feel more peaceful; I feel—it's good." Okay, so imagine a meditation where not only if you trigger a stress—your holy breath is stressful neurophysiologically; it's a stress—so number one, and number two, you obviously cannot use slow breathing to regulate yourself and to prevent stress. So how do you down-regulate? How do you manage the experience within? How can you even possibly meditate through that? Well, that's exactly what I teach, and it's actually—even though it's counterintuitive—it's actually extremely effective, and I've taught a lot of people to meditate in a way that they never believe was possible.
And I don't want you to ask to reveal your methods, but to what extent would you be willing to share what the progression looks like to get there? So if you're getting to six to eight minutes of this ability to ultimately override your physiological response and your ability to just be in the moment, how much can you share of that process?
Oh, I'm happy to—I'm happy to share that. Yes, you do need to override your by default autonomic nervous system response. The response of your autonomic nervous system is what agitation. Why is that? Well, notice—one is it that you breathe a faster compared to when is it that you breathe a slower? You breathe the slower when you are physically fresh, rested, healthy, relaxed, mentally relaxed; you have no problems to deal with; maybe you just had a massage, you just had a hot bath, you just had a nap, and your brief—slow—slower. If you're anxious, if you have an illness, if you're upset, if you have all kind of any kind of negative thoughts and feelings, you breathe faster. Anyone can breathe faster, right? You up-regulate—that's a given; like anybody can do that. That's another challenge—the challenge is the other way around. The challenge is to establish calm and peace and trust in your mind so that your mind is not all around, all over the place, confused, erratic, negative, anxious, and therefore your emotional self also is not also experiencing the same, because typically it just goes hand in hand, and physically, too—all negativity will have, you know, there's that famous stay, I think, by uh Bessel—then call—if I—if I am not sure of his name, but he says, "The body keeps the score."
Yeah, Bessel van der Kolk. It's—yeah, I want to give him credit for that one; it's a very nice way to put it: "The body keeps the score." So every negative emotion or thought that we basically entertain—but we think it's just if or not that it is justify or not—but it's going to impact us at a cellular and energetic level. This is not like some more science; it's just facts—like science shows that today science can really explain that and how it works. So obviously we do have a uh a benefit and an advantage in learning how to regulate our minds so that we don't become addicted to negativity, all right? So where do we start? We start with slowing down the breath, because slowing down the breath, lowering our respiratory rate—how many breath cycles we take a minute—it's already a form of breath retention; it's already a form of positively impacting our physiology and our nervous system. Then we start to introduce gentle breath holding—gentle. So why is this important? If you try to right away hold your breath for as long as you can, you will suffer; it will be an ordeal; you'll be like, "Yes, but I can't do it." Okay, self-validation issue here; you need to prove yourself; you don't need to prove yourself; this is not about proving yourself; it's about understanding yourself and doing something good for yourself, not about punishing yourself; it's not about suffering. So there's a gentle way to approach this. Now let's understand the nervous system. Why do we agitate when we're anxious and upset? We agitate for the same reason that we run away when we perceive a threat—somebody's coming after us; some—I don't know—cars swerving, and we're like, "Whoa, I need to move." Why? Because when there is a perceived threat, what is it that we do? We need to agitate—the nervous system's response—survival responses—to agitate, to create a distance with a threat, to not be harmed or worse. That principle applies to how we deal with perceived threats in our social life, in our professional life, and even in our relationship with ourselves. So the response to breath holding will be that same agitation, because obviously a real sense of threat is being perceived—so agitation. So we learn to—we need to learn to regulate that. The problem is that we keep holding our breath a long time; we will only increase the perceived threat. So instead of looking at the experience of breath holding as an opportunity for self-growth and for them regulation, we'll see it even more as a reason to agitate and to have a very negative response, which is exactly the opposite of what we want. So progressions are very important. First off, understanding—even including understanding and a physiological level—the reason why we want to hold—not to hold, but to breathe fast—fast—has nothing to do with lack of oxygen; it has to do with too much CO2, or CO2 buildup in our blood, which in itself is completely harmless—and now it's harmless; it's actually beneficial. I don't want to talk too much, Ben, because you may have—no—this is perfect, man. I'm just—I'm enjoying here—this is—you're walking us down the path. I'm trying—I'm trying to focus on the key points that I do believe that uh you know your audience will—will be interested in and appreciate. You're painting a beautiful picture. Why is it that uh breathing too much is a problem? Well, because there's a difference between oxygen intake and oxygen uptake. Oxygen intake is how much oxygen you breathe in through your air, how much—how much oxygen circulates in your bloodstream, and then how much oxygen is going to be surrounding your cells at a cellular level, at a tissue level. But having a lot of oxygen does not mean that you absorb more oxygen because your metabolism has specific needs; it's not going to burn more oxygen than it needs because it's not going to burn more calories than it needs to burn at a given moment, depending on its activity. So bringing in more oxygen is not—does not equate—I oxygenate better, and breathing more does not mean our oxygen—it better—actually, it means the opposite. So why is that so? First, let's understand with every breath we take, there's 21% of oxygen in the air we breathe—is going to be 21 in whatever volume of oxygen we have in our lungs as we inhale. When we exhale, how much of that oxygen is left? 30%, I think it is—could be more—it's—so that would be 30% of 21%, right? Right. So that would be something around 16% to 18%, correct? About 25% to 30%. So, of course, depending on, you know, basal metabolism, depending on your activity at a given time uh of course if you're running or physically active you may have less oxygen left per inhale, but still you still have some inefficiencies, and most—most of the time we're not exercising, right? We're just resting—whereas rest, sitting, standing, but not physically active. So when you know that with every inhale there's 21%, and with every exhale there's still 15% to 18% of our oxygen, so we—we burn around, you know, a—a small third of the oxygen that we breathe—we very inhale. What does that say? It says that we are—we have much more oxygen available outside of us and inside of us that we can possibly use—basically, we could absolutely afford to breathe much less, yeah, without any implication for our oxygenation. Now there is a problem with breathing too much; it's not just that we are breathing extra oxygen that we can't possibly use; it's basically—it's useless to breathe more, except when we naturally hyperventilate—why? Because we're physically active. So now it's a natural and necessary hyperventilation; it's only temporary. When we breathe too much by habits or for other reasons—that, by the way, I explained in detail in my E-chord—it's not just a matter of CO2 tolerance at all. Every—with every extra inhale—means superfluous inhale—we take, there's also a superfluous exhale—is that exhale neutral—neutral—far as oxygen exchange—as far as its potential impact on cellular respiration and their foreign cellular oxygenation? I think it would depend on the duration and the amount of CO2 excreted, right?
Yeah, well, so it would depend on rate and volume uh of the respiration—means, you know, how fast you exhale and how much volume of air you exhale—but what's very likely is that if you over-breathe—so you—you have a habit—it's ingrained in your nervous system—of breathing too shallow, but also too fast, so overall per minute—even if your breathing is shallow—the volume of air between inhale and exhale per inhale and exhale is not high, but because you're taking too many of these breaths, overall the volume of air that goes in and out of your body is higher than it should be—so inhaling more oxygen than you can possibly use, but the problem is that your exhales are also not neutral; they contain CO2, and that's CO2—we have actually a lot of—of carbon in our body—carbon dioxide, you know, bicarbonate—in the form of literally of baking soda, just like the same we have in our kitchen—there's all forms of—forms of carbon that surround our cells; all of our tissues are different pH—different pH for different tissues, but they need to be at the correct value, and the pH is determined by the levels of carbon dioxide and bicarbonate that surround the cells and surrounds the tissue. If you exhale too much, you deplete those levels, so you change the—the pH; it becomes more alkaline, and the problem is that when red blood cells show up to deliver oxygen—you know, hemoglobin—they can't, because they don't have a currency to pay for that oxygen, and the currency is CO2. So therefore you diminish the delivery of oxygen to your cells, so you're not oxygenating optimally—not because you don't breathe enough, but because you breathe too much. That's the thing; that's the—it's completely counterintuitive, and yet that's the truth. So you could be fit; you could exercise; you could—I mean, you're still wondering why is it that you have those breathing issues or that you have lack of energy? There could be so many reasons, by the way, for that, but one of those could be very well that your respiratory rate—the reflexive one—the one that you have all the time, day and at night, or including when you exercise—the respiratory rate is too high, so the respiratory volume is too high, therefore you're chronically deficient in proper levels of carbon dioxide, therefore chronically deficient in oxygenation. You don't have a supply issue; you have a delivery issue; there's no shortage of oxygen in your body; there's a deficiency in your ability for oxygen uptake; you can't absorb it because your pH is—is off; it's not optimal. So how do you change that? You learn to breathe less, and you learn to breathe less by being aware that you need to breathe less, by training your nervous system to accept a—a lower, slower respiration, you know, breathing pattern as safe, because you have to reverse habits, and
Mouth and you breathe shallow, and you breathe fast. If your breath work, whatever it is that you're doing, does not teach you, does not modify your flexing breathing pattern, it's not effective. Period. There's no way to put it in any different way. It was a beautiful summary of really everything that people need to understand, from the perspective of breathing optimization, and I'd love for you to maybe give us some examples.
It sounds like it has to be a very individualized process of graded exposure to slightly more comfortable amounts of breath holds over time. Is that the simple approach? Is it just commit to doing it consistently and just introduce some slight breath holds till eventually it just, it just kind of catches and you can override your physiology?
Yes, I think that's a great way. Um, it's actually the way I teach it in the beginning, and I call it the Timeless approach. Timeless means you do not need to time anything; you just need to feel. Um, I do suspect, you know, a lot of people catch themselves holding their breath from time to time, and they're like, "Oh, that's bad." It's not great; in fact, it's good and bad, so let me explain to you why.
Efficient breathing should be smooth; it should be consistent, continuous, near silent, slow, regular. So why would you find yourself holding your breath sometimes? I think that's a, it's an attempt at the nervous system to restore higher levels of CO2 at the cellular level and higher-level CO2, which simply means normal levels of CO2. If you're chronically over-breathing, and you may not realize that you are—and most people do, and they don't know—so you are chronically deficient in CO2, so your pH is off, and your oxygenation is off optimum. So when you're going to hold your breath, you, if it's not something that you do consciously, but I suspect the nervous system, the respiratory center, are doing that in order to try to restore optimum oxygenation because when you hold your breath, even for a few seconds, you're going to not exhale that CO2, so it's gonna, you're going to keep it inside.
Um, now what would you do? Deliberate breath holds of that kind for the exact same reason, and I think people need to just kind of, we need to reiterate that many people are eating alkaline foods in the attempt of, of, you know, having this thought of, "I want to alkalize my body," when in reality, food doesn't alkalize your body through your stomach. That's the only single way to change your alkalinity or acid-base, your pH, is through the breath and through manipulation of retention of CO2.
Yes, exactly. So, uh, so hey, all night you breathe too fast, or you breathe from your mouth—bad deal. Yeah. Um, if all day you do the same, bad deal. So they say we take 23,000 breaths a day. That's one of the things that you hear all the time because people like to paraphrase information without actually doing any investigation. Let me uh clarify this: I don't take 23,000 breaths a day. I take much less than that. Some people think more on that, so that's an average. It means that depending on your respiratory rate, you'll take less than 20,000, more like 15,000, and some people will take more than 30,000 breaths a day. When we say, "Oh, David includes the night," so that's thousands of breath cycles a day of difference between one individual to the next. A person that on average would breathe 10 times a minute, we're talking about 10 breath cycles; that's 10 breaths per minute.
And a person who would breathe 20 breath cycles a day, okay, that's twice as much—360, um, you know, five days, um, in a year, 10 years of that, two decades of that, 50 years of that—you don't think it makes a difference? We're talking about hundreds of millions of superfluous breaths taken by the over-breather who never knew he or she was an over-breather. Millions of, like hundreds of millions of extra breaths that are not inconsequential; they have an impact on your well-being, on your energy levels, on your emotional states, on your health, since it's directly impacting your cellular respiration; it's impacting your metabolism; it's impacting the energy that you are because we all, basically, life is the regulation of energy at every level, and breath is the one thing that you do all the time. You don't move all the time; you don't eat and digest all the time, but certainly a metabolic metabolism never stops, and your breathing never stops. And even when you stop your ventilation for a moment, which is breath holding, cellular respiration never stops because in a metabolism never stops. So anything is going to impact your breathing long term; we're talking about years and decades. I mean, it's undeniable.
Yeah, and by the way, in in the in the living world, in the in the world of mammals, there's a strong correlation—in it's not possible to say causation, but there's a very strong correlation between respiratory rate and longevity.
Gosh, you read my mind with that, and so I was literally about to say that I was like, so many people are going down this path of like, they want to find molecules and they want to find supplements, all these things to take, yet nobody's going, "Hey, the number one thing probably you can do for your breath is, or sorry for your longevity, is optimize your respiration rate." And so my team's created, my team's created 20 longevity metrics, 20 things that are most highly correlated with longevity that we can ultimately control the outcomes of, objective outcomes, and I think at the top of the list is like, breathes six times a minute, right? Five to six times a minute. Find your resonant breathing rate, and that's like, even that, I mean, I'm sure I'm gonna guess you probably read that at rest or less.
Oh, sorry, uh, six minutes—you're asking if six minutes is six breaths per minute is um is what we what we advocate as being an average? Yes, so um that or less, by the way. It depends on level of training, but in healthy individuals, because that's the thing is like, people love to be like, "Oh, it's all, you know, there's no," um, it's something natural to people breathing, and so find what works for you. And like, okay, well, does a person who breathes like that all the time, did they find what worked for them? No, they're harming themselves out of their ignorance. There's no way to, don't beat around the bush and don't be like, "Oh yeah, you know, we're all unique," and if, no, we're not. We're all unique, but we also have the same body, the same physiology, the same lungs and hearts and nervous system; it's all regulated by the exact same principles. You can't tell that you cannot possibly say that somebody who's completely morbidly overweight is healthy in the same way you cannot say that somebody who breathes like 20 to 30 breath cycles a minute is healthy or breathes healthily because that's their unique way of breathing in a world different—cut the crap. Period. And that's the spiritual statement, by the way, because you're harming people by spreading this kind of like, they, it's so, "Breathing slow, that's how you are healthy." That's obviously not the only important factor that is going to make you healthy: sun exposure, grounding, rest, sleep, quality sleep, quality, and then relationship with others, relationship with yourself, the way you think, oh, everything, what you eat, obviously, and what you don't eat—everything plays a part. It's all part of the way that you are efficient and healthy at regulating the energy, energy system that you are, with all the energy system made of systems within the system, and everything is interconnected. So but breathing is that one thing because it's about oxygen. You can talk about mind over matter all you want and the unlimitedness of consciousness, but do this: stop breathing, and you lose consciousness; you lose your mind. Literally means you, there's no more oxygen to fuel your brain; it shuts off. Where's consciousness? Where'd it go? What is your spirituality? Well, clearly we're embedded and embodied in that interface, which is the body, and without it, that consciousness could not exist anymore, at least not on this plane, not in this reality. And that's oxygen, and oxygen, that's breathing. Only breathing is going to give us that oxygen. Breathing, oxygen is a no-brainer; that's not what's the issue—absorbing oxygen; that's what you want. And in that absorption of oxygen, respiratory rate is number one, nasal breathing, because processing the air, saturating it with nitric oxide for vasodilation, but also for, it's a neurotransmitter; it tells the oxygen where it needs to go. And it's very simple in the end; it's not like, "Well, there's different ways." No, there's not different ways. Um, I can breathe less than six um if I'm really completely, completely, completely, completely relaxed yet aware and and and awake, I'll breathe less, but anywhere below 10, when you're like, for instance, right here at rest, sitting, your respiratory rate should be less than 10 breaths for sure, and it's easy to measure. Take a stopwatch. You observe your breathing without judging and without trying to alter it, and you calculate if it's an effort for you to breathe less than 10 breath cycles per minute. Again, one breath cycle is one inhale, one exhale. Do that simple test. If you have to force yourself to breathe less to get to less than 10 and you're just at rest, okay, you know that it needs to be addressed.
How much time do you suggest people spend doing this every day? 24/7, as far as practicing, sorry, because we're not always conscious. How much, how much conscious practice are we doing? Practicing. So it's very easy to do that a lot; it's more like, um, I would tell people like a simple way to do it, you may have a dedicated session; give yourself five minutes every day, maybe every morning, every evening, it's possibility if you have that time, do it. Otherwise, there's so many times during the day where you're not actually working or even you're working, but you could do that; just pay attention to your breath. So that just takes a second; all you have to do is to remember, and once you remember, you ask yourself those three questions because those are three pillars of efficient, healthy breathing: Am I breathing through my nose? I don't know if you've noticed, but most of the time, not all the time, most of the time as I speak, I'm breathing through my nose, and you wouldn't know how many breath or teachers or experts are breathing all the way through their mouth when they teach. Okay, so am I breathing through them, through my mouth, through my nose? Am I breathing through my diaphragm, or am I breathing more like this shallow through upper respiratory muscles, intercostals, apex in the neck? There's so many uh upper respiratory muscles that can be involved in shallow breathing.
Yeah, that's why everyone has sore necks. This, yes, yes, yes, exactly, on top of having their head like this because they're always looking at their phone, or just, it's a posture. Everything is reflexive. We have to understand as much as we want everything to be natural, and everything in us is in fact natural. The question of naturalness is not the right question; the question of efficiency is the right question. You breathe; everyone does; that's natural. How well do you breathe efficiently? Do you believe that's the question? You move; everybody moves. How well do you move is the question, not the naturalness of the movement, but the efficiency of your movement. You think everybody has a brain; everybody has a mind; everybody thinks it's natural; that's not the question. The question is how constructive, positive, effective that thinking is. Do you know how to operate your own thinking, your own thoughts, or is it all over the place and working against you? So the three pillars: nasal, diaphragmatic, and slow. It's not an order of importance; they're all three important. It doesn't matter which one you think about first, but first think about your breathing. Pay attention, "Oh, I'm breathing." Yeah, fortunately you don't have to think about it to be breathing all the time. So the moment you pay attention is when you shift from the mindless to the mindful, and every mindful moment is a moment of paying attention; it's a moment of self-examination. All growth is in that self-examination; no growth can happen without that self-examination. It does not mean that you're a control freak of controlling yourself; it just means that you know that there's always room for growth, room for improvement in that. Right attention, if well used, well-placed, well-directed, will serve you, serve your quality of life, serve the quality and the enjoyment of the experience that you are. Breathing is one of those things, very simple and yet so powerful. So just remind yourself as often as possible: you're opening a door, closing a door, you're sitting, you're standing, you're driving a car; at any moment you can remember, "Oh, I'm breathing now," okay, obviously and thankfully. Let's examine that: How am I breathing? Oh, I caught myself breathing through my mouth, actually. I went like this, and that's what triggered me to remember. So you set your mind, everything what we forget in mindset. A mindset is that we set the mind. How do we set it? How do we choose to intentionally set it? You know, uh, taping before um sleeping, very effective, but there's something more effective in that is to set your mind before you sleep and then even to tell yourself that when you will be sleeping, if you catch yourself breathing through the mouth or breathing too fast, breathing too heavy, you will adjust that as you are sleeping, which is supposed to be unconscious. You're still conscious when you breathe; anyone knows that. How many times it happens that you set an alarm to, let's say, 6:30, and you wake up exactly 30 seconds before, exactly, excuse me, you are asleep, right? Deep asleep, actually. You wish you could sleep longer than that, and yet you wake up like that. You don't even look; you don't even, you can't possibly know what time is it. So what part of your psyche is aware exactly or of where you're at time-wise and not only knows that, keeps tracks of that, but then makes a conscious decision or an unconscious decision to wake you up back into consciousness? So who operates that? What operates that? That's your brain, brother or sister, and you can set your brain to a lot of things, including to readjust any behavior that you know you have reflexively, automatically, that you've never questioned, and now you question them, and now you pay attention, and a little by little you start to modify and improve. Uh, Bruce Lee was great. I was, uh, what he did, he said, at first he's just a punch, or was it a kid? I don't remember. Then it's not a punch; it's not just a puncher; not just a kick. And then once again, it's just a punch; it's just a kick. What did that mean? At first, you don't know what you're doing; you don't know if you're efficient or not efficient; just do things reflexively, but you may have unconscious incompetence; you don't know that you're doing something wrong or that you're just doing something that could be significantly optimized if you were to learn how to do it better, and if you're to pay attention, then you become conscious of your incompetency, and you learn how to be consciously competent, to learn to do it right, and ultimately, after many, many repetitions, mindful repetitions, you substitute the old pattern, reflexive pattern, that a new, fresh, efficient reflexive pattern. You don't need to think about it and to pay attention to do something right. It's the same thing: it's breathing, it's posture, it's the way we respond to things, the way you think; it can be anything. It's a new version of you that you can enjoy better. Who doesn't want that? But it takes self-examination and self-awareness, and it takes practice; it takes intention, not just one intention, as in, it's generally you have an intention, you know, New Year's resolution. I make one intention; that's going to be for the rest of the year? No, but intention is constantly renewed and renewed and renewed and renewed, and you only will keep benefiting and keep progressing as long as you renew your intention. So you need to pay attention and pay attention and pay attention. Attention, intentions—two sides of the same coin. What do you want? Where is the question? It's on you. What do you want to pay attention to? What matters to you?
That's a beautiful master class into self-exploration, self-examination, understanding the breath, and I think many, many people are going to benefit from your teachings, from your wisdom. I definitely want to direct people to your course. I definitely would love to attend if you're teaching live sometime. I'm there. Please share your website with us.
And yeah, you're my guest, and I know that a lot of your uh followers, they, they love everything strength, all right, because strength matters and matters for good reasons, uh, and not just strength, okay, so health, functional, functional movement, um, a lot of things that you share about many things I try, and strength too, because, well, you need bone density; you need bone density; it's very strong, healthy bone marrow to generate blood quantity, you know, large amounts of healthy red blood cells when they go through the spleen; that's for blood quality; it's the regulation of the quality of your red blood cells. Those were not good; they should be, you know, done and recycled. And so um physiology matters a lot in all things oxygenation; there's a relation to all other patterns of a healthy lifestyle, including movement and strength, strength training, um, because of every four praises, the the production of red blood cells, that's in the bones. Resistance training is the most important for generating that kind of of benefit, but then you have uh sun, essential for oxygenation, you know, it's so, and some uh, you know, foods, choice of food—all things are related. So um it's not just some thing that have to do with, you know, like the the the consciousness and spiritual con or a psychological considerations; they do matter immensely. The tangible part of us, you know, flesh and bone, that you know, grip strength, strength, meat, food—it matters enormously. So for my performance, I have to also do all kind of trainings, uh, specific stretching, specific uh cardiovascularly, cardiovascular efforts; it's not just a a meditation, but it can be just the life of the body, and it also cannot just leave a life—not the mind and the spirit and the heart. You, you want to create a a real community there, real cooperation and connection; it's very important to be balanced.
Beautifully said, sir. Everyone, thank you very much. Thank you for being here. I'm incredibly grateful for you making the time, and uh, can you share where our audience can learn more from you? Right, so there is breathholdwork.com, breathholdwork—it's one word—breathforward.com. Um, there is also and always what I've been known for, which is move, not moving at, which is natural movement, that is teaching people, I like to put it as a school, an education system, a school of physical competency or physical capability for the real world. How do you jump over obstacles? How do you climb? How do you run? How do you do all these movements with efficiency? A little like a martial art that would be extended not just to, you know, self-defense, would be extended to all practical movements of the real life. So let's move—that's movenet.com—moving. But for the the breath hold meditation, um, it's on breathlord.com. Right now, the e-course that I'm working on that I'm delivering is I call it the Breath Hold Work Meditation Master Class. It will be followed by the Breath Hold Work Performance Master Class. Perfect. The performance master class, I will share all things detailed programming, you know, strength and conditioning specific to physiological adaptations to holding your breath for a long, long, long, long time. So we're talking plus five, plus six, you know, plus seven, plus eight, like uh times you would not believe you're able to do. I would love to experience that and be part of that and understand that. So thank you everyone. Thank you so much. Incredible guest as always, and I strongly encourage everyone in my audience to visit what you do, and and as I'm sure they've heard, you definitely are a master of your craft. Thank you. Appreciate your kind words, and so are you. Thank you for everyone for uh listening, and I hope that there were some some valuable insights that you found in our conversation with Ben today. Be well, everyone. So much for tuning in to Muscle Intelligence. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to share it with at least one person you know. Make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Ben Bakulski and the producers, disclaimed responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements or advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.