How To Breathe Properly | Brian Mackenzie | Modern Wisdom Podcast 121

Brian is the Creative Director at Power Speed Endurance. We all breathe, but are we doing it right? The breath controls much more than we might realise and today Brian takes us through just how crucial proper breathing technique is to our health, performance, cognition and mood. Extra Stuff: Check out PSE - https://powerspeedendurance.com/ Check out The State App - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/state-breathing/id1449322496 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today, 500 million years ago, aerobic metabolism sits at the forefront of the most efficient way to use energy. And so, anything outside of aerobic metabolism becomes anaerobic. So if I don't have that process, that conversion of energy, I'll default, very simply, and we should, to this higher stress situation of using energy. So anaerobic doesn't necessarily become a training process. It's more or less the byproduct of I'm no longer able to handle aerobically what's going on. So how quickly I can come back to that aerobic is literally how well I can. So having a very high aerobic capacity means I function high aerobically. So when we look at

• 0:44Speaker 00

  people like a guy smashing the two-hour marathon, what does he look like physiologically? And although there's like, look, to be totally on, like, look, I support and I'm very happy for the man and everything, but realistically, if he were in the same setup as they were in 1950 or even 1980, he wouldn't have run a sub-two-hour marathon.

• 1:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Brian Mackenzie, the man behind PowerSpeed Endurance. And today, we are talking about something that you will all be familiar with, but are probably doing a little bit wrong: breathing. Brian, welcome to the show.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna be awesome. I'm really excited to speak about this sort of stuff today. We've been talking about endurance a lot recently. Had Alex Hutchinson, writer for Runners World, on analyzing Elliot Kipchoge's recent performance. We've had the Brian Carroll from PowerX Strength on, talking about squatting over 1,000 pounds. And all of this is enabled by a lot of different things, but I guess principally, one of those is breath work, right?

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, physiology and all's chemistry is regulated through our breath. So, anything and everything, I mean, I'm a, I've known Alex for quite some time. We've kind of gone, we've gone back and forth over the years. He's a great.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  He fucking kid, man. I like him a lot. I don't know your other, the other guy, but to squat a thousand pounds is to understand some things.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  He really does. He really does understand some things. I mean, Kelly Starrett, we just released an episode with him today. We've had Dr. Stu McGill on. So, you know, we've had a lot of these guys. And when they, when they talk about this, even, you know, Kelly and, and Stu, people that are really, really kind of at the, the, the top of their game, very well respected in their fields. It's rare that I hear someone bring up breath work. Why do you think that is?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Kelly?

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  Kelly didn't. Kelly didn't. No, we were talking a bit about the game changes. We're talking about the game changes documentary and veganism. We went off on a rabbit hole down that.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that was fun. That was fun.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  No, I know Kelly's very much into the breath work at this point. I mean, I introduced it to him. So, you know, and I know he, he uses it inside of his one on ones and one on two courses now. So, you know, from his work, but, you know, at any rate, Kelly's been a very close compadre of mine for a very long time. So we've kind of grown up. You know, it's interesting how I stumbled onto the breath work and why, even though I was introduced to it quite some time ago. And it just didn't take. And, and I understand why it didn't take because it was never explained in a

• 3:36Speaker 00

  way that made sense to especially a guy who was participating in strength and conditioning was all about performance.

• 3:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  So I, I, I entered into this world of yoga many years ago and had a yoga practice because I was a triathlete who was getting tight. And when you get tight, you need to loosen up. And so I went to yoga and I ended up enjoying yoga real. Like a ton and I chased around a yogi in Ostanga um that was really good at what she was doing. But I just never paid attention to the fact that we were in, we were utilizing a breath practice at the foundation of this practice. Like we were controlling our breathing. We were told to control our breathing. We were told to control our breathing in specific patterns.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  You know, this went on and on. And I was like, you know, I, I just remember it blowing over to a large degree. And that in and of itself is kind of how we all behave to a large degree. And I'm, I'll connect all this through this talk. So like, so that it makes sense for everybody else. Um, you know, but I largely just paid attention to the fact that I needed to get more flexible or more mobile at the time. And then I drifted away from yoga for a little bit, really got hardcore into endurance training, obviously wrote a couple of books on that. Came to a pretty good understanding of some ways to tweak things for people who were busy um and who were injured.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, and that, that was a big part of my career for about 10 or 12 years. And then um, somebody handed me a training mask and I laughed. And I was like, this doesn't change altitude. I know how pressure works. I've actually worked on altitude training for quite some time. And this can't change pressure, pressure. So we're not talking about altitude with this thing. And but nonetheless, you know, when you, you, you make fun of something and if you're in, you know, done enough work in your life to understand that, that you haven't. If you're making fun of things or you're criticizing things that you've never done, that's called ignorance.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  And I didn't want to remain ignorant to something, so I put the damn thing on. And I instantly went from like, I'm seated now to.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  I sat up and I gauged my diaphragm and I felt my ribs expand out and like my back light up and like I was like whoa like you know it was it was just I I tend to feel a lot. And because of my background in teaching movement and getting people fixed or helping people to fix themselves. I um, you know, I I was just like, whoa, here, whoa, what happened like? Maybe we've got something that I could put on my athletes when they're warming up so that we can get them moving properly and using their, you know, their core correctly. Organizing their spine in a way that it should be because oh shit like it just so happens that. We organize the spine based on our diaphragm.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  We have to at the at the root of who we are and what we do. Is a system. That is dependent upon one thing. And that is life. And that life is predicated on a deal that was made 500 million years ago in order to use aerobic metabolism. So suffocation sits at the heart of that. So we could remove our amygdala, our panic, our freak out, or not our panic center, our fear center. And you will still have chemoreceptors that will set you off in a panic. When carbon dioxide levels raise. So if I'm not organized correctly around my spine. I don't use my diaphragm correctly, so I default into poor breathing patterns.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  So this is a rabbit hole of movement that really made more sense to something about organization of the spine. Right? And there's a, there's a lot of minutia around the spine and organization and core stability and everything we want to do, but by and large, we have figured out and theorized that. The only reason you need to organize that spine correctly is to actually take a breath and or understand that breath because the lungs don't do that work on their own. The diaphragm is the primary in that and then we follow up to the intercostals and several other muscles that end up getting involved. But poor breathing pattern patterns elicit poor responses, including that of the sympathetic nervous system or. I default into some poor breathing patterns that have me using my anaerobic system. More than necessary.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  And is that in and out of exercise?

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Yes, that is without exercise, my friend.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  You are constantly using anaerobic systems and aerobic systems at all times. We all, we're like, this is, we know this. What we started seeing was, like, look, man, we took a look back. So thi- this started with a training mask. It inevitably became like, oh shit, you've got your own training mask on your face. It's called a nose.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  And holy crap, it like, it has this filter system. It's got these, this humidification system. It's got, oh my gosh, this thing mucus. Oh, it releases like immune cells. Um, so it helps my immune system function better. I, I spin the air differently. It forces my diaphragm to actually pull more because it's, it's not allowing for fast air to happen. It doesn't mean we can't breathe through our mouth or shouldn't. It's just, when is it necessary? And we can get into that in a bit if you want, but um, you know, it, it's interesting, but we, we started understanding, we started looking at the physiology behind all of this stuff and the framework behind physiology.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  And we've missed some big, big things. And it's all there. It's just the way we've taught it and the way we've looked at it has not been real. Um, I would say it, it's not a very creative process. Thus, why it's eluded us. And even in the world of yoga today, they've missed it. And they've misunderstood what it is that pranayama actually means. And pranayama is a word that is basically, it's a Sanskrit word. It's probably about 5,000 years old. And there's other languages that use this, these very similar terminology, including um, Hebrew.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  That it means energy control at its root. It also means breath control. Odd that they're the same. Odd that we use a cardiometabolic device in order to measure our breath.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Which tells us what's happening from a cellular level. So cellular respiration, we understand. The only way we can, we measure that is through the gas exchange of what's going on here. So we said, let's look at this realistically and see what happens. And so we started measuring things and we were measuring things in many different ways, including just a simple breath practice. Or hey, I'm gonna go for a walk. I'm gonna walk my dog. And Rob Wilson, who's my counterpart in the art of breath, who's our lead on education, he's our director of education.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Went for a walk with his dogs with his mouth open. And then he came back, reset his device, and we have portable metabolic carts, and he shut his mouth and went for a walk with his dogs, the exact same route. Turns out, those are two different, totally, totally different metabolic profiles. Weird. And it's not weird. It's, it's, this has been said for thousands of years. We're not actually bringing, we're not actually saying things that, you know, are, are that crazy, but unfortunately, they are crazy in our world because there's so many really, really, really smart, scientific people who we look to who've missed the boat on a lot of this stuff. And the simplicity of it, and it's not that they're dumb or that they, you know, whatever, it's just, we weren't really looking at this.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And so we started really going after not only the movement and, and, and, and how the mechanics work around this, but then the physiology. Right? And then starting to see that, oh, wow, it's all chemistry in the body is regulated through our breath. All of it. So how we shift from alkaline to acidic is literally governed through how I breathe. And how I absorb oxygen is dependent upon how well my body actually plays with this molecule, this, this thing called carbon dioxide. And the body, in, in the blood, it's carbonic acid, and as we exhale, as it gas exchanges, it becomes carbon dioxide.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  But I am largely dependent upon how well I actually react to that. And that can, you know, that, that has other facets to it. I'll go here in a second, but. My relationship to carbon dioxide is actually how well I play with oxygen. And how well I'm efficient, how efficient I am at using oxygen. So I may be a freediver who can actually sit here and do breath work and be very, very, very oxygen efficient because I can hold my breath for long periods of time, which also requires a very high level to CO2 tolerance. This is static CO2 tolerance. This is non-working CO2 tolerance.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  When we look at training or we look at human performance, and I use quotes because performance, I think, is, we're about to kind of shift the paradigm on what human performance is. But the idea that if I work, like when I start to work out, that shifts. There's a different response or there's a very different play that happens within CO2 tolerance. And so I've been, I've been able to observe and take people who are freedivers, who are highly specialized or big wave surfers, who are also, you know, freedivers in essence to some degree, but they're highly specialized. And when we apply work to them, we see a very different story happen.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  So we see the specialist kind of come apart, right? Meaning there's a very different, like that CO2 tolerance that was really high when I'm static and not a lot of stressors going on or a big wave, things like that I'm very accustomed to. When I start working out, my respiration rate goes up considerably higher than it would with somebody, let's say, let's call it, you know, Eliot, right? His respiration rate isn't going to go up so high, right? But the interesting thing here is I would bet if Eliot's never really participated in any sort of static breathing or see carbon dioxide tolerance training, he's probably shit statically, right?

• 14:33Speaker 00

  And so there's this weird world that we started to see. Now. My fascination is in connection with the brain. And so the neurobiology of it and the physiology. I'm, I'm, I've, I'm now considering what. Physiology is more or less our mind. Our ability, that, that's what our mind is. And our ability to connect to the mind. And understand the feelings and the processes and the things that are going on. And so the brain is where the circuitry and the information is being sent out. The brain works perfectly fine as long as we're connected to the physiology and understand the physiology. If we don't understand the physiology, the brain will get away from us and start overthinking. Right?

• 15:19Speaker 00

  And so as kids, when we come into this world, we have this thing where we're attached to a parent and we learn, this is, it's unavoidable, right? And, and so from a neurobiological perspective, at the top layer, the most evolved part of the brain is our neocortex. And this is where the stories, this is where some of the emotional things like start to trigger. But this is where the storytelling, motor control, a lot, there's a lot of dedicated area to motor control in the brain. To where we can do different tasks, like I can talk, or like I can talk and drink water at the same time, or think and drink. You know, you know, I mean, I mean, just simple, basic shit that we go throughout our day, that some of us confuse ourselves in thinking it's multitasking of which it's not.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  So that's the storytelling side of things below that becomes the limbic system. This is where emotions are now concrete and set up in the system. And where I will have a reaction emotionally to something and then the storytelling gets played into there. Right? And so it can get exacerbated. Then down below that, we have the brain stem where, or we could call it the reptilian brain, the oldest part of the brain. And this is where the kind of evolution of everything takes place. It just so happens that our respiration centers are set up in that brain stem. So, meaning they are on autopilot with my system and they can respond to every emotion and every thought that I have.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  It also can respond to the work that I have because I have dedicated chemo receptors set up in the carotid and the aortic valves, which are headed out to the periphery. So that means we're on a prediction system that carbon dioxide levels that are set up in my brain stem react to a prediction of what's occurring in the system through chemo receptors and barrel receptors that are in my arteries. And it's triggering me to breathe.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  So my heart rate responds to that, right? So the heart rate's late to the game. And so, you know, th- there's a whole plethora of things in there, but how I decide to grow up and how I go through my experiences in life inevitably have a rolodex of things on how I actually respond to breath. So when I actually am working out, I can tell with many people where the potential trauma or problems can set up, or we can see metabolic issues even from somebody who doesn't work out as they sit and are doing things.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  I get you, yeah. And one thing that's just come to me there as you were talking, do you think it's strange that we don't have control over our heartbeat as humans, as evolved creatures?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Well, the only way you're going to control your heart rate is how?

• 18:05Chris Williamson?

  Output movement?

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  Breath?

• 18:10Speaker 00

  You got it.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm just thinking because I can-

• 18:15Speaker 00

  So if I just said, "Hey, Chris, check it out. Control your heart rate for me right now." And if we put you on a heart rate monitor, because that's what you, we, most people would do, they go, "All right, let me get on a heart rate monitor." Like, "Well, no, no, no. Can you feel your heartbeat? Right now, without doing anything? Can you feel it?"

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  A tiny, I'd have to be very tuned into my body.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Took me about, about three years ago, I was able to, like, I can just sit there and I could pick it up anywhere in my body I really want to. Or I want to do it in a toe or a finger or my neck or whatever, right? But it's like, all right, how do I lower that? And I literally will go-

• 18:56Speaker 00

  And my heart rate will just start to drop. I control my breathing.

• 19:02Chris Williamson?

  I understand. I think that that obviously shows that the heart rate is at the mercy of the breath to a large degree. I was just thinking about whether it's it's I can control my breath. I can consciously hold it, breathe quicker, breathe slower. But that's not something that we have with our digestive system. That's not something that we have with our heart. You know, that that it would appear that from our the things that are inside of us, the lungs are kind of the only thing that we have that kind of control over. Is that fair to say? Or am I missing something?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Your your breath is so check this out. This and this might flip your lid.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

  I'm ready.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Your breath, your breath controls all of that.

• 19:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, rest and digest is controlled by the breath.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  BKS I anger has a quote.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  He is responsible for bringing yoga to the Western world. He's one of the last great yogis. What now? He also taught things in a way that was fairly brutal. I would not have gone by where real well today. Nonetheless, I I'm of that school like I like that. I don't need to be coddled. I I want work. I want real work. Nonetheless,

• 20:24Speaker 00

  the mind is the king of the senses, but the breath is the king of the mind.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  I like that.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Okay, so that was his. It's not mine.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  My breathing affects how I digest things. How so? Well, my diaphragm pushes down into my organs. I have regulation of my parent. I have regulation of my sympathetic activity due to how I control my breathing. And the inhale is known as the sympathetic. And for a long time, people have said the exhale is known as parasympathetic. Well, it's not parasympathetic. It's inhibition of sympathetic.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting, because that's where HRV, a lot of HRV stuff gets, wrist monitors and stuff would come from, right? The variation within heartbeats.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yeah. And so, we started figuring out a long time ago that you could manipulate heart rate variability through breath control. Easy. So you could change a profile of an athlete who, who might not have the score or the readiness state that we want. Right? And we'd apply breath work to that person and we could manipulate and then they'd have a green light.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  What's readiness states? What's the characteristics that contribute to that?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  You fit into a specific profile. So like, think of a spectrum, like, think, think of an arc, right?

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Of sympathetic and parasympathetic, right? There's a specific arc with inside parasympathetic and slightly into sympathetic that you can be in order to be ready to train at, let's call it, eighty percent and above, right? So we would have, if an athlete fell too parasympathetic, that meant that they were literally, you know, you're dissociative, you're shutting down, type of thing. You need more up regulatory things like cold plunge, like some, you know, things to kind of bring you up out of that. But, from the, and there's, there's a lot more to that. But, from a more sympathetic side, this is where most of us tend to fall, is where we just aren't coming down.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Enough. We're not coming out of that high sympathetic activity. That's by and large, most of the people I deal with and I see. This is the people who are probably listening to here.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  The over trainers, the people that are decaffeinated, overworked.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like coffee. I like to work out hard. I like to work hard. I'm very passionate about what I do. I'm type A. You know, maybe not so type A, but I do like to train hard and do things hard and do all this. And by and large, what we end up getting with those people is an inability to understand actually what they're training for. Like they, you know.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  And this is why breathing is so important is because I can actually get you to understand a lot more through that process of training and understanding your breath. It's also why we created a gear system around training and how you can actually manipulate the one variable that is actually responsible for the rest of the variables that you're training for.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that is, that is right. And it does make sense that you have this direct control over one of the internal processes that's going on. We have a, I suppose, a quite diluted control over the thoughts that go through our mind, but I have a lot better control over my breath than I do the thoughts in my mind. And that's after three years of pretty consistent meditation. So, you know, I think, I think focusing on the breath seems like a good place to start. So if we were to do a breath MOT, Brian, where would you, where would you start? If you lay someone down, you're going to look under the hood, you're going to look at the way that they breathe either in or out of a training situation? Where do you start? Is it the cycle?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  I start with CO2 tolerance test. I get a CO2 tolerance test done when I'm a max exhale test. That tells me literally what's going on. Like, I mean, look, so Rob, who I work with, he's in Virginia Beach, which is the largest hub of special forces, so special warfare in the world. It's where they house SEAL Team Dev Group, SEAL Team Six. You know, there's another team over there, too, but there's a lot of high level dudes over there.

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  A lot of badasses.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, but these dudes like to train a certain way, too. Right? And so, you know, like you get these guys and they've got problems going on. And it's like, all right, you know, Rob got called in yesterday for, no, this morning. We were on the phone this morning. It was his afternoon and he, it's like, yeah, I couldn't finish training. I got called in to go over to this, this place to go meet this guy who seems to be pretty problematic and he's got a lot of issues and can't recover. He's got these injuries going on and blah, blah, blah, blah. Just there's a host of shit and he's a team guy. And, you know, he, Rob went over and he's like, guess what his CO2 tolerance level was?

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And I was like, under 20 seconds, and he said 17 seconds. And I was like, yep. Get it. And, uh, you know, he is cooked. And most of us are cooked. If I've got somebody who's training like that, if I've got an operator, especially an operator, who's got anything under a minute of a CO2 tolerance test, I've got somebody who's reactive. I've got somebody who their system is reactive. They might, may not be emotionally reactive, but there's suppression of things. I know that. The tissue isn't responding well, meaning they're tight. They're probably got painful tissue. Like, these things start to, like, compound,

• 26:19Speaker 00

  right? And, and they're all signs, like, so, so carbon dioxide is the metabolic stress messenger of the body, of the system. Don't even need an amygdala, man. You know, so it, it tells me what's going on with the person. So if, uh, it's like, when I have too much going on upstairs, I push that CO2 tolerance down. Right? If I'm overtrained, if I've been training too much and I haven't let my body recover enough, I'm pushing that CO2 tolerance level down. When I think, when I do too much, I'm pushing that CO2 tolerance level down.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Meaning, when CO2 raises, it doesn't have to raise as much in order for me to react to it, respond to it. And the first respondent of that is your breath, because I have to offload that CO2 in order to feel better. So my aerobic efficiency, capacity, threshold, whatever, switches based on how much, how, how well I tolerate CO2. It's also telling you what basically is going to be happening cognitively. So if I get a person, the first thing I'm doing with them most likely is a CO2 tolerance test to tell me exactly where they're at. It's a three-fold test. So, I, we, you sit down for a couple of minutes, or you lay down for a couple of minutes,

• 27:42Speaker 00

  and you just do some slow, controlled breathing that you're comfortable with. Not fast, you can't hyperventilate.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Then we go into a four breath pattern to where we breathe up for like three, three or four seconds and then you relax, let it go for about five to seven, you know, five seconds or so. So it's a little bit longer of an exhale, but let's relax, let it go, then inhale. Fourth breath, you pull it in, start the timer the moment it hits the top of the breath and you start exhaling as long and as slow as you possibly can. So you have to control it. So there's a three-part test and it tells me how much control you have of your diaphragm. On the negative, how well I have control of that. So there's the mechanical aspect of it, right? Then from a physiological perspective, it tells me how well you, how

• 28:32Speaker 00

  well your physiology is responding to carbon dioxide. So how aerobically efficient you're going to be just calm. Okay. Remember the dog, walking the dog story? How, how well do you respond in a very simple fashion to carbon dioxide? Cognitively, so from a state perspective, an arousal state perspective, how, what you, how, how you react to carbon dioxide. So the panic switch, so when you're going to be reactive, how you're going to be reactive. Anybody below 20 seconds and we have a very reactive, volatile environment that we need to actually start working to clean up. And that's usually done fairly

• 29:16Speaker 00

  quickly with most people if and only if they're willing to actually back off a bit and learn. That allows for a gap to start to occur, an improvement to start to occur in the CO2 tolerance. So then we start to administer some breathing protocols. Hey, let's figure out, and this is why we built the state app, was so that we could actually get people some protocols to use to actually work on breath control to increase their CO2 tolerance, but also allow them to kind of get into this more focused or calm, clear state, or downshift them prior to, after training or prior to bed. That was the whole point of that. And

• 30:01Speaker 00

  so we'll set protocols up for people based on where they need the most help.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  How much of the breath control that we're talking about there is simple ability to avoid discomfort? Because someone who is in a good place, who might feel like I can control this gas reflex for longer, that will contribute a little bit. But as you've mentioned as well, the CO2, the CO2 tolerance appears to be like the master of this. Is that right?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what's the question? Mind rephrase it or bringing that back again?

• 30:35Chris Williamson?

  So how much can be trained in terms of someone's ability to breathe that is separate to the way that their physiology is put together at that time? So is there someone who's very good at controlling their breath, but still might be in this?

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's, that's the interesting thing. And this is why, this is where my work really diverted because I was running around with guys like Wim Hof. I was literally pretty close with Wim Hof. And there's nothing, like Wim's got a great thing. He's doing great work. You know, there's other, like I've gone and participated and learned about Tummo, many of the, you know, yogic practices, et cetera, et cetera. Holotropic, like the butakeo, like there's a lot of methods out there, right? And unfortunately, each and one, each and every one of these methods is making claims that it doesn't do in some fashion. In some fashions, they do, in other fashions.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  And this is the problem with, you know, getting caught up in, and understanding our attachments to things and, you know, thinking that, you know, we've got an answer and the answer is you, you're the answer, you're the only answer there is. It's not your breathing, your breathing's not an answer either. It's just an indicator of something. Right? And so our ability biologically is, is, is not even close to being tapped. And I, I think that'd be true even with something like, you know, what happened with Elioid. But going back to this is it's, I started seeing that not everybody reacts to the same protocols in the same way.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  And so it became a, there is not a one size fit all, fits all. There's a, you know, there's a, a more or less kind of a fingerprint to some degree. And although we can bucket people and categorize them in specific ways or, you know, things that are going on, like, hey, this guy is angry about stuff and that guy's angry about stuff and she's angry about stuff and, you know, she's more emotional and he's more emotional about things like, like, meaning, depending on how you emotionally handle things, there are going to be certain patterns that are going to set certain things off and connect you to certain things. So, we had to, I had to start, I was literally running around fingerprinting people with breath, breath protocols because not everybody was responding the same way. And that wasn't a very,

• 32:55Speaker 00

  you know, viable thing for helping people. I was sure I was helping specific people, but I was burning myself out and there's no way I was ever going to be able to do this by myself. So, build an app and build an algorithm that worked with that. We understood how to do that. So, we, we, we literally customize things to people, but then it's like, okay, well, a lot of these people like to engage in performance and they should because you should have a movement practice. Any human being that does not have a movement practice is not being a human being. Uh, we, we are designed to move. Now, getting neurotic about that to the degree that like, I have to be this specific thing or whatever, that, that's where it gets crazy. But nonetheless,

• 33:37Speaker 00

  applying this inside of movement, the framework of movement becomes the next catalyst in how we do things. And the base layer of that is, hey, for the first few weeks, we're going to just be nasal breathing. You can't go anything past nasal breathing. And for most people, that's such a kick in the balls that it's like, I don't want to do it. Like my ego is not ready for that check. And, you know, you take a powerlifter that squats a thousand pounds, I can tell you right now, if they've not done any breath work, their CO2 tolerance is shit. That's a massive, massive carbon print. You're carrying so much lean muscle, so much muscle, but you don't do, you know, most of these people don't do enough of the kind of

• 34:18Speaker 00

  aerobic efficiency work. And, and that's a scary word to guys like that and gals because they think that they, they're scared of and it's like, that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the thing that actually makes you survive. Like aerobic metabolism is what makes you survive. So when you're resting, you should be High level aerobic and yet you see these guys and gals on oxygen tanks and like breathing like

• 34:46Speaker 00

  And that's that's not necessary. It's not. And and it's not healthy.

• 34:51Chris Williamson?

  What's that due to?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Indication.

• 34:52Chris Williamson?

  What's that due to?

• 34:54Speaker 00

  See, poor CO2 tolerance.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay, and that is exacerbated by people who are high mass, high muscle mass, heavy weight.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  It's a car. Look, look, look, what's the demand for oxygen with more muscle mass?

• 35:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  It's up higher. So I need more oxygen or because like, look, like, you know, so I've got all this tissue. Well, when I don't have enough oxygen or I'm not efficient enough.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  About four or five breaths in, you're going to start dipping that needle more towards those anaerobic, like more towards the the the demand for the tissues demand for more glucose, more glycogen.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Okay, the nervous system and brain are are stuck with glucose and glycogen. There's no, there's no if and buts about that, right? But fat is what the muscles like can use. So the more fat we're using with with tissue, the better, right? And so the better we get the mitochondria functioning, the better off we are. And there's no reason why an NFL lineman and a gymnast or an endurance athlete can't all be aerobically efficient. It's just different thresholds at which point like, sure, the lineman is going to be much more of an anaerobic athlete, like much more high levels, you know, you know, sprinter type explosive, you know, and so is the gymnast to some degree is, you know, pulling it back a little bit more.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  And then it's like we got the endurance athlete where you're like, you know, all slow twitch, right? And it's all the same thing in terms of efficiency aerobically. It's like, so if I got an if I've got an endurance athlete who's going out on a high level aerobic ride, but they got to open their mouth, I can tell you right now, they're not as aerobic as they could be. They might be somewhat aerobic, but they are not as aerobic as they could be. And they are not utilizing the system in a way that they could with it. This is literally. factual things we have tested that are now going into read that have raised some eyebrows enough to go wow we didn't really look at it like this we should really be testing this so this is what's happening

• 37:06Chris Williamson?

  I get it so let's take it from the top with regards to Brian's advice for good breath why do we begin with that what are the what are the principles for good breath

• 37:19Speaker 00

  the state app was created for this like look starting to do one one breath protocol exercise in the morning do one in the evening for sleep play with that for a few weeks see where it improves what you feel how you what you like what you don't if you want to play with more go for it right that's probably going to be in the vicinity of five minutes each right that's not hard for people who like to train

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  morning and evening

• 37:44Speaker 00

  secondarily morning and evening right simple if you want to do all four go for it do it like you're you're getting an A plus now um

• 37:55Speaker 00

  the second part of this is if you're not going to the world championships or you're not competing for you know an Olympic medal or you're not like going to an a priority race within the next two months you do not or event you do like there's no reason why you can't go dedicate three to four weeks to strictly nasal only breathing and take enough step back to actually get your physiology rewired

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  across all across all training methodologies whether you're doing

• 38:28Speaker 00

  across all training methodologies I don't care if you're an MMA athlete powerlifter CrossFit whatever I've done it with the CrossFit athletes I did it with Tia like I've done it with like I've done done it with several fucking athletes that people would never consider would do would be able to do something like this and it rearranged what was going on and gave them an ability to do things that they didn't think they could they could manage to do

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  and four weeks

• 38:59Speaker 00

  so it just empowered them in a level yeah yeah well I mean how long does it take to create adaptation to something right around three weeks

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  I like it. I like that. Of course, everyone who is listening to State App will be linked in the show notes below Brian's app, which I'm pretty certain. Is this the first iteration or is it on to kind of a 1.5 now?

• 39:23Speaker 00

  What's the app?

• 39:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Uh, this is the first version. There's been a couple of updates on it.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  But this is the first version of it. We're, there's a lot more that's gonna come into the pipeline and once we get through the first investor stuff that we're going through, there will be some serious, serious things that are coming down that pipeline. Um, yeah, I mean, it's already, it's been way more successful than we ever thought it was gonna be. Um, but we also know, like, there's a lot more that we do than just doing some simple breath protocols. Like, there's high level things you can do in order to change your physiology that could, you know, that are game changing things.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So what happens when you breathe through your nose? Tell me. Someone's training, they're just breathing through their nose. What's happening? Why? What's, what's the, we've talked about the, the different workout of the walk with the dog, with the nose open and closed. What, how, how's that characterized?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  It, it's your biological way of staying aerobic.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  You, 500 million years ago, cells, single cell organisms figured out how to become multi cellular organisms. They said, hey, let's you and I communicate like you and I are right now. Let's talk about some things. Let's share some information so that we can pass this shit on and see, see that oxygen rich environment now. It used to be hostile. It used to be mostly carbon, like, and it was, we had to be anaerobic and we changed the energy other ways. And this is where, like, we're headed right now.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Is, this is all about energy. There's nothing else. There's nothing other, else other than energy. All energy that's ever existed has existed. It's how we're can, the conversion of energy is happening. We don't, it's not, we burn, we don't burn calories. Okay? That, that's us. We're converting.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Calories. We're literally taking energy, converting that energy, and then putting energy back out. Like, it's literally this cycle of, and we forget about all of this thing. And so that energy deal got made when cells learned to communicate. And said, hey, let's take this oxygen and let's use this, and it's much more complex than this, but this is just the story that I like, you know, like. But it's like, hey, 500 million years ago, multicellular organisms figured out how to use oxygen after algae, and algae literally figured out how to convert sunlight into energy itself, and the byproduct of that was oxygen. So the earth became engulfed in this algae. All of a sudden, there's all this oxygen in the environment.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Then cells were like, yo, there's gotta be an efficient process to this, and here's that process. Today, 500 million years ago. Aerobic metabolism sits at the forefront of the most efficient way to use energy. And so, anything outside of aerobic metabolism becomes anaerobic. So if I don't have that process, that conversion of energy, I'll default, very simply, and we should, to this higher stress situation of using energy. So anaerobic doesn't necessarily become a training process. It's more or less the byproduct of I'm no longer able to handle aerobically what's going on. So how quickly I can come back to that aerobic is literally how well I can.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  So, having a very high aerobic capacity means I function high aerobically. So when we look at people like a guy smashing the two-hour marathon, what does he look like physiologically? And although there's, like, look, to be totally on, like, look, I support and I'm very happy for the man and everything, but realistically, if he were in the same setup as they were in 1950 or even 1980, he wouldn't have run a sub-two-hour marathon. That, that wouldn't have, it's not the same marathon. It's a different marathon, even though the distances are the same. The shoes, the pacers, the, the, the, the, all of these things exist, but I don't deny the fact that this man's physiology is off the hook.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  And the only reason I really know that is not only have I studied how he moves, but I've watched how he breathes. What's your analysis of that? He primarily. What's your analysis of his breathing? He primarily breathes through his nose. Okay. Most of his marathon is done nose only breathing. You can find pictures all over the internet with salt marks that come down. His nose and you'll see when he's running. That most of the pictures are of him with his mouth shut.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, I didn't notice that.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  So I've watched video, yeah. Yeah, well, I've I've done video, I've. I videoed the video so that I could go and slow it down and look at it and watch it and you know, it painted and there it is. And you know, I mean, he comes from African culture, right? And and what what is of the African nose like they've got larger nostrils? Well, they've. Like genetically, they are set up to do something like. If you've ever watched a horse race, so I I watched I watch animals like it like it. It's like big passion like I'm I'm almost neurotic about it, you know? You watch animals who don't sweat. And they don't actually, the only time their mouth breathing is when they're overheating.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Okay, you watch animals who do sweat a horse, a racing horse. They will not breathe out of their mouth. They just have a bit in their mouth, they breathe through their nostrils. They literally will not breathe out of their mouth.

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  Why do we then?

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Because. We, uh, you know, it's interesting. We have um, done real well. At progressing ourselves culturally. Through comfort and convenience. And in that process, we've. More or less stressed ourselves more than we actually needed to. So by that I mean this. Uh, there was a book written in eighteen sixty seven, I believe, I forget the date. Um, but George Caitlin wrote a book called Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life. And he wrote this book as a historian who was a lawyer from England.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Who came over to the States, which was basically North America and South America at the time. Studied about a million and a half indigenous cultures and civilized world. He was, uh, the biggest thing he picked up on was the fact that in an indigenous culture. They.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Did not breathe through their mouth, rarely. When, and when they taught, when they spoke, they spoke with intent. They did not speak too much. They meant what they said, they said what they meant. When they slept, they slept with their mouths shut. When they hunted, they hunted with their mouths shut. They did everything they could, including when children came off of the nipple. Mothers would shut the mouth of the child for fear of the black mouth. Because not only was the white eye called the white eye or round eye, he was called the black mouth.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  And the reason he was called the black mouth is because his mouth looked disgusting. And why would that be? Well, look at what we started doing, culture, look at what we started doing. I mean, we're drinking more alcohol, we were, sugar started to become agriculture, started to kick in. All of these things of convenience started to happen, right? And here's a culture of people who play attention to nature. What is nature? Physiology?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  That is literally one of the definitions of nature, of physiology is nature, origin. And thus paying attention to the feelings of nature and what's going on. So what happens when I feel, when I breathe through my mouth? Right, well, I get ramped up. I turn on, I speak. If I go speak somewhere and I talk just for an hour, I'm on, like I feel like I'm on. If I speak for an entire day, I'm exhausted. I don't go work out. I try not to go to dinner with people afterwards. Why am I so exhausted? I'm blowing off a ton of carbon dioxide, I'm more sympathetic dominant, I'm actually using less of the fat, so I'm use, I'm not as aerobic a, as, as I could be. Even though I'm still slightly aerobic, I'm not as aerobic as I could be, right?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  So it's learning those waves, they felt that shit, man. They felt it. We don't feel, we, how, we have these things in front of us and we're getting stimulated and we've got all these kids that are going batshit crazy because they don't have recess anymore, they're told from playing, they're told what to do, they're told how they're gonna learn, then they're given infinite possibilities on a machine to play games and keep them occupied because mom and dad don't wanna deal with them. And then they've got anxiety because of this. They don't have anxiety. They've got proper stimulation from being overstimulated. They've got physiology that's run amok and they don't understand it. And this is by and large what's going on with us,

• 48:47Speaker 00

  even those of us that like to train a lot. Like, I mean, I'm on, I'm talking to you, I'm on, I need to shit, when I'm done here, I mean, I'm feeling this, I feel it. So I've gotten to the point where I feel all this stuff and I'm paying attention. If my mouth opens when I'm asleep at night, I wake up.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Why would I wake up if my mouth opens? Based on everything I've just kind of gone over.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  Because you become more stressed?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Bingo. I'm now slipping more into sympathetic and I'm turning myself on.

• 49:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, okay, I understand.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  How many of us are trying to sleep in this high sympathetic activity state, right? And I'm also not as aerobic. And then, oh shit, I've got sleep apnea. So now I'm holding my breath in an awkward fashion and like I've got all like weird, like what are you paying attention, like you need medication and a fucking, you need a mask to wear at night? I've got friends who do this. And they refuse to do breath work. And I'm like, dude, it's your choice. I've got more DMs and P, I don't even talk about this. I don't write about this stuff publicly. Like, I don't go out and go, I'm gonna solve your problems. No, here, start with some breathing protocols, start rearranging your training, then start feeling what's going on in your body. You're

• 50:09Speaker 00

  gonna default to places that you can. Is it weird that George Caitlin was also in a book that I've read, and the, I'm the only person who's caught this so far, right? Only because I've read this other book. It's a book called Empire of the Summer Moon, and it is about the Comanche Indians who are arguably the most war-driven tribe of people that have almost existed. They're, they're in comparison to the Bongos and like, um, you know, a lot of the stuff that happened then, but they were very, very gnarly. They were so gnarly that had the Colt revolver not ended up in the hands of a few young white boys from Texas called Texas Rangers.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  They would have, this world, th- this country would be a very different place right now. They knew how to fight off of horseback in a way that no other culture had understood. And they couldn't combat it. So shooting a rifle with one shot was no good, right? And so, this book was written, and there was a guy around, there was a number of historians that were there, that were interviewed. And one of those historians throughout this book that was written about was George Caitlin. And so there's this guy that's there, and the biggest thing he picked up on was that the people who were of the, of the earth, that were literally living on the earth,

• 51:35Speaker 00

  that were living in plains that everybody feared to cross because they had no idea how to navigate. They had no idea how to do things. And there was this murderous culture of people who did not want them near anything, including other tribes. Like, other tribes feared the Comanche, right? Like, they were feared. And i- it's a fantastic read, but the fact of the matter is, is I'm able to now connect through reading physiology and then reading about, literally, "Hey, George Caitlin wrote this book in the six- in 1800s about this." Holy crap, there it is. What is history? It's literally telling us what's going on, like, there's lessons to be learned about all this stuff and what people were doing.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  You think, you think a Comanche Indian who knew how to navigate the land could get on his horse and ride for three or four days straight with no food, basically, or limited food supply and water supply? Um, what do you think the physiology of a human being like that is? Like, literally, could survive in freezing cold temperatures, navigate land in storms? Like, where do you think we're at culturally right now? We're worried about squatting a thousand pounds and running a two hour marathon. I don't think we're anywhere close to what our biological potential is. I think we missed the boat. I think we're confused. I think we think that technology is this great thing that's going to get us into the future and it's not.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  It's gonna, it's just gonna lead us right back to our own biology and going shit. We're mimicking all this technology after stuff we internally are able to do. It's why I asked you, what would you, how, what, what, what's your heart? How do you control your heart rate? And how do you feel that? Well, I'd have to be calm for a minute and then I could really pick up on it. Yeah. Well, guess what? You can feel that at any moment you want. Just got to spend the time to get back to that.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Yeah, it's interesting what you said there about when you spend a whole day talking. Right? So I do coaching calls. I, I coach a, a

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Sales company in Germany. And every time I'm done, let's say it's maybe three hours and I've been talking to these guys and it's a conversation. It's at least fifty fifty between me and them. It's not all me. But once I'm finished, let's say I've done three hours, four hours of, of talking, a little bit of water in between, a little bit of chill or whatever. After I've done that, I'm absolutely gassed. Like, once I'm done, I'm like, I'm really tired and I, I wasn't really too sure. I thought, well, maybe it's because cognitively it's quite demanding. I'm trying to link these things together. It's because I'm really putting myself into the person I'm speaking to or whatever it might be. And your suggestion here is that one of the principal reasons for this is going to be that I'm just inhaling and exhaling quite a bit of air, quite a lot.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Well, you're breathing, yeah. Yeah, you're on, right? And so you're getting stimulated, but you're getting a stimulation that you're automatically, like you're falling into autopilot on because you're talking. I'm talking, right? So where I'm, I'm ramping myself up. Not only am I ramping myself up and getting into what I'm doing, I'm getting focused and I'm being engaged with you. But the byproduct of that becomes my breath. My breath is the instant reaction to that. It, it, it's, it's the first respondent. There's only two, two things we can do in order to regulate or, or stimulate autonomic control consciously. That is our breath and our vision.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  So I can choose not to look at you right now and I can look at the end of the room and I can go into peripheral vision. I can downshift myself. I can go outside and look at the fucking, look at nature, look at trees, right? How many people freak out looking at a sunset? None of them. Why? Cause it's math? No, it's beautiful. Yeah, beautiful's there, but that's not math. Math is the algorithm that enters the light waves that enter your eyes and open you up to go whomp. And it drops you into parasympathetic.

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  We've got so many tools and things going on that we don't know about. Like, literally, man, I was just at Cleveland Clinic. I was in open heart surgery with them, with a team there, and they were like, what do you think you could help with? And it's like, simple, man. Control your breathing and control your vision when you need to. When you need to make a better decision or something fucking, the shit hits the fan. Like, it's time to do that. That's human performance. That's human performance at its finest, and trying to help somebody's life be saved. You know, and like, why'd that person get there is another fuck, another story that we could be dovetailing back towards, hey, why we move and what we love about human performance. But that's human performance for me. Like, human performance is literally getting to the core of why, you know, people doing everyday stuff.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Right? Like, that's human performance. And I think we're eluding ourselves into thinking that we understand something by, you know, like, what's a 500-pound deadlift do for me? These were things I had to ask myself, right? Like, this isn't, I'm not asking this of you. I had to ask this of myself. What's a 500-pound deadlift? Cause I've had a 500-pound deadlift. Right? And it's like,

• 56:42Speaker 00

  I, I, I was not able to connect the dots on what that meant.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  I don't know that that made it better for me to survive. Getting up off the couch or picking shit up off the floor.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  I, I don't know that the 500 pounds is necessary for that. Like, what's running 100 miles doing for me? It was a fucking amazing spiritual experience. But what was it doing for me, right? And like, where was I at? And so what, why, you know, do I need to actually run 100 miles? No. But will I? I mean, sure, I did a couple of times, but, you know, like, it's just, like, I've done these things, and I'm like, so what's the point of this? Is this, oh, I'm now clinging to this thing, thinking it's the thing? And there we go. Now the mind, now, now, let's look at the, let's look at the neuroscience. Let's, let's, let's really start looking at the down. The up, the, how everything's compiling and what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  So when I ask people like, what do you want? Cause they'll come to me, I literally have a call after this with our mentorship program and I've already had two today. And it's, what do you want? And I'm pretty quick to, to understand that they don't know what they want, even though they're telling me what they want. And so it's usually like, you tell me what you want, I'll show you a liar.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Because we're, we're just not ready, really ready to let, let go of all these ideas that we have. And it's not that you can't go deadlift a thousand pounds or, you know, whatever. You can't squat a thousand, deadlift 500, go run a hundred miles. Like, these are just extreme versions of them, right? I don't need to go dive with great white sharks, but I did. And I got that experience and it taught me some profound lessons, man. Profound. But if I'm actually in the moment and understanding what's going on in this very moment and how I'm operating and what I feel, then I'm moving back more towards what that Comanche was doing. And I'm actually getting in tune with the vibration of how everything works and why, when I go, why, you know, I went on a run earlier.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  What I'm trying to accomplish with that run and understand about that run, where is it that on this hill that I'm climbing right now that I have to, that I feel like I need to make this switch? And how, like, how cooked do I feel and where is that at? And what can I do in order to improve that so that like, hey, this, this improves my day and it doesn't ruin my day? Right? That's what I'm taught, you know, this is where we start to, my reactions to what I'm doing in training, my reactions to what I'm doing throughout my day are the same thing. But I'm just getting people closer to what that actually is. And that's what we've been doing with the art of breath is really just, you know, like people come in there and like, you know, this gal this weekend who showed up at Rob's seminar, she was like, she's a CrossFit Games athlete.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  And, you know, she identified as a CrossFit Games athlete. I love that. Like, I, I just love somebody comes in, I'm, I'm like a professional athlete, I'm a professional CrossFitter. It's like, wow, okay. I get it. I know where you're at. Uh, you know, we're doing all this work and stuff and there's a hypoxic set where you do farmer carries with with kettlebells, right? So like you'll do some burpees and then you go and you we have people grab the kettlebells and then they dump their air and they have to walk as far as they can down and back.

• 59:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yep, yep. Just farmers walk.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so everybody like this chick just takes off running, man. Like she's trying to win it, you know? And one of our coaches, Danny Jaeger, who's phenomenal, and he runs Cross at Kingfield out in Minnesota, and he's like, he watches this and then he sees a bunch of guys. So there's a lot of people there in the warfare community. So there's a lot of, you know, dudes and people who are like, want to win, right? It's like, what are you trying to win? So Danny stopped and he goes, hey,

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  if you think we brought you here to actually see how long you could hold your breath while farmer walking, kettlebells, you don't understand why you're here.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  You don't understand what we're doing. What is it you're feeling when you're holding your breath and walking these things? What's, if you're trying to win the farmer carry, holding your breath, what is it you're winning? Here, there is no reward.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  It's, we're here to experience something and understand what this thing can do and teach us. Well, I thought I was going to be able to carry those kettlebells a lot further, or I thought I was only going to be able to carry them a few steps and I went further than I did. Awesome. Now we're starting to get somewhere.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Versus, oh, I gotta win this. Like, win what? What are we winning? That's called ego. And and you just removed yourself from understanding all purposes of training.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  All training at the foundation of training is to make better decisions under stress. Carbon dioxide is the metabolic stress messenger of the human body.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Done deal.

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I love it. Brian, today's been fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on. Anyone who wants to check out some more of your work, where should they head? We've talked about Art of Breath. How does that relate to the State app? Is the State app a part of that?

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  No, it doesn't. Separate. No, State app's a bit different. The State app's separate. You know, a lot of the stuff with the business is going to change real soon. In fact, the whole name, everything's going to change. We're changing that so it all kind of fit and be seamless, so it makes more sense to the world.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  That being said, the Art of Breath is a component of what we teach with Inside of Power Speed Endurance. It's a performance-based seminar. There's a 101 that we teach around the world, but we also have it online, so that can be found on Power Speed Endurance. The State app is, you can find each app, whether it's Android or iOS, on shiftstate.io. Anything about me, or if you want to get in contact with me, or, you know, whatever can be found on bryannmackenzie.com, or you can go through Power Speed Endurance.

• 1:02:54Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. I have to say, it was a listener who recommended that I check out the State app and get in touch with yourself. And I think I've found the new thing that I'm going to add into my morning and evening routine. I've been looking for what it's going to be. I've stopped doing Romwad for the time being, and I do miss some of the breath control. I miss that parasympathetic activation. I'm still doing my meditation on a morning. I'm reading. I'm doing other bits and pieces. Stu McGill's Big Three, but I'm not, I'm not feeling myself in the body quite so much with that. It's very, it's very visceral. It's very kind of transactional, that I'm doing it for the, for the return on, on what I know it needs to do to my spine health. And I think, I think the next, I think the, between now

• 1:03:38Chris Williamson?

  and Christmas, it'll be, it'll be me doing that. So I'll report back. I'll keep you updated.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Please do, please do.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, look at like I would do the either feel alert or be present protocol if you're if you're doing your meditation in the morning, do the breathing beforehand. There's a reason why breathing is at the foundation of every meditative practice.

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So you'd say for a lot of people that are listening, maybe we'll have a meditative practice in their morning routine. You'd say do the breath work before that. And then how how do you program that in an evening?

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  If you have an active sitting, yeah, if you have an active sitting meditative practice, just be clear that if you want that brought up to the next level, add breathing before that. If you want it really brought up to the next level, use the state app so that you can fingerprint your the rhythms that work with you like so your app's different going to be different than mine. Based on to you know how you actually handle carbon dioxide cognitive and how you handle emotional stress. So that can give you an a ramp in I can't tell you how many people who come to me who are like, I can't meditate. It's just I don't have the patience. I don't have this. I don't have that. You're already there.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  But it's like, I show them breathing. And the fact is is breathing is controlled breathing is meditation. Literally, you'll get there. It just give it some time, right? So you use that beforehand. In the evening, anything less than two hours before you go to bed.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Okay. Using the fall asleep protocol. That'll downshift you and change the sleep. You should probably see some increases definitely in deep sleep, but also potentially in the REM cycle.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. I've also got my new whoop band coming as the last one is has lapsed. So we'll I'll actually be able to track that and see if that's making any difference as well, which would be which would be interesting. But Brian, today's been absolutely awesome. To the people that are listening, you already know what to do. The links to everything that we've spoken about the state app, shiftstate.io, power speed endurance and Brian's website will be linked in the show notes below. Go hassle him online if if you need to get some more info out of him. But Brian, it's been it's been fantastic, man. I'm really looking forward to getting into my breath work.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Right on, Chris. Thanks for having me, man.