How To Hold Your Breath For Four Minutes, Training Mask Myths, Performance Breathing & More With Brian Mackenzie

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, you may not only be able to hold your breath for 45 seconds to a minute, but because the work you're doing, you're developing that tolerance with the CO2 at the higher levels so that you can actually absorb the oxygen a little bit better. You're getting your oxygen levels high and then you're going into a breath hold. And most people don't breathe enough consciously to calm themselves down. You're teaching yourself. You actually have more control over your performance and what's happening than you typically ever thought you did. But the problem with that is that it actually does require work. He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people.

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The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here, and I got a tell you. From things like power breathing to underwater workouts, to Wim Hof style cold water immersion, to these super sexy training masks and free diving and spearfishing and beyond, it seems that this concept of breath, work and performance breathing is kind of taking the world by storm. So I figured it was high time that we actually addressed all things breathing in a podcast. So today we're going to take a deep dive with a guy who is an expert in performance breathing. And he's been on the show before, a long, long time ago. I interviewed this guy way back in podcast episode number 47 about CrossFit Endurance because he is the creator of CrossFit Endurance, Brian McKenzie. Brian is with us today. He's a strength and conditioning expert. He wrote a bunch of good books. One that I recently read called Unbreakable Runner. Fantastic book. You should check it out if you get a chance. I'll link to it over in the show notes for today's episode, which you can grab@BenGreenfieldFitness.com PerformanceBreathing. So Brian works with runners, cyclists, rowers, MMA, surfing, paddling, swimming, CrossFit, Olympic gold medalists, world champions, you name it. So, Brian, welcome to the show, man.

Ben, thanks for having me.

Are you wearing a training mask right now?

No, I am not.

Okay, just checking.

I prepped with one this morning. Before we did some breathing, we had, we had a couple people over to do a little breathing this morning and we kind of like to prep by using the training mask to trigger some things.

So what do you mean we had like for breakfast with your family or.

Oh, no. A couple days a week. Since we've gotten into this stuff with the WIM HOF and just a lot of the breathing stuff that we do, we've really. There's been a lot of people who've reached out, especially locally. And I just did a breathing performance camp that I actually had whim kind of come in at. But we. I've taken a lot of the stuff and the concepts that he's. He's had and kind of. I've been messing with it for, you know, the last couple of years. That said, local people have kind of caught on and it's. And it's always a better environment for people. Well, typically it's a better environment for people to do it in a group setting. So we offer up a mild group setting at our private facility here in Orange County.

Okay. So you've got like a, like a studio in Orange county in la where you train people how to do things like this performance breathing. Is it a gym?

Yeah, it is. It's an office, it's a gym. It's a thousand square foot gym. We're probably gonna move, but it's a private place. It's somewhere where I've been able to kind of bring a lot of the professional athletes that I work with so that they're not being bugged. Yeah, because some of them can be pretty high level and it gets a little weird. And you know, with that said, it's also a place that we can work out. We're not being bothered, or I'm not working out in a garage and the cops aren't being called.

Gotcha. Gotcha. The cops get called when you work out?

Yeah, yeah, we've. My wife and I have had. The entertaining thing here is that every time we've moved, we've worked out in our garage. And the police are typically called within the first few months, which is very typical of a gym anyway. At least a CrossFit style.

Why did they get called? Because I think you're running like a business.

The noise and the, you know, the bouncing of the plates and whatever. And so the police show up.

It's got to be more stealthy, man. Got to listen to audiobooks and lift light and soft things.

Yes.

If that worked. Yeah. So anyways, I want to ask you A little bit about the kind of stuff that you teach in the performance breathing workshops that you do. But first, elephant in the room, get a bunch of questions about the training mask. And I talked recently on a podcast, and I linked to this study where it seemed to show that a big part of the mask is you rebreathing the carbon dioxide that you exhale into that space inside the mask. And that's where a lot of the effect comes is from you just recycling your own carbon dioxide or something like that. I'm curious, when you get the question, is that training mask thing just a craze, a fad? Does it actually work? What do you say?

Well, I. I say, yes, it does work. Maybe some of the original marketing on it might have not been as spot on, but that doesn't mean that, you know, it doesn't work. That said, I. I scoffed at this thing the first time I was handed one. Well, I did, too, you know, and. And that's my. I've created a trigger in. In me that. That I've created over the last 15 years that if I'm gonna scoff at something or I'm gonna badmouth it, that if that's my reaction to it, then I. Then I. I've got a mechanism where I can stop before I actually, you know, allow myself to speak about that. And. And I'll. And I'll be like, all right, it's time to learn. And. And so I'll set myself in motion with trying to understand something. So I. I put the mask on and I played around with it, and immediately, the first thing I noticed was that I actually engaged my diaphragm in a deeper manner. And so I handed it to a few athletes, and we had the exact same reaction. And I changed. And we saw changed breathing patterns.

So you mean you were doing, like, deeper belly breathing?

100%, yes.

Do you think if you didn't know how to do deep belly breathing before you put it on, that you would have done that?

If I had had the. No. Well, so here's. Here's the interesting thing is I have actually worked with people who actually do know how to belly breathe and use the diaphragm correctly. Yet the moment we put them into intensity, regardless of what that is, even if it's a 10k run, that breathing pattern changes. And. And there has been no athlete that I have really run into that actually knows how to breathe correctly. And the irony in that is that when we do breathe correctly, we're in a better position. And my career catapulted because I was a movement guy first. And I honed in on running and got popular with running mechanics, albeit I work with just about everything. The fact is, is that, you know, you breathe in a poor position, you're out of position and you're creating bad patterns. And so that was the biggest eye opener for me with this thing. So had I even known that, I don't know that I necessarily would. Had I gone and tried to start working out. But I did start to figure out ways to utilize it in order to create changes that were lasting.

So. So it's just the diaphragm. Anything else? Or is it, is it all just muscle?

No, you're. I mean, you set the diet. I mean, what we want to ultimately see is the diaphragm works first, then we start to lift through the chest, the rib cage opens up and we have this, this big, you know, these balloons called lung correctly versus. Every athlete I run into is basically just breathing with their chest and you can see their chest move immediately when they breathe. And it was just a, it was a very big eye opening experience for me.

Okay, now what about what's happening physiologically? Like this whole carbon dioxide thing I was talking about. Do you, or have you seen evidence that you get increased red blood cells or EPO or, you know, hematocrit or anything like that when you use a training mask?

I have not seen that. I don't know that it necessarily happens or it doesn't. And I don't necessarily talk about things that I don't quite know yet. I don't have the system to draw the blood work. But the fact is, is the. What we do know is that you are actually collecting CO2 inside the mask. And as negative as that may sound, that's actually not a negative thing.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about was about whether it creates like metabolic acidity or rebreathing your own carbon dioxide. The health of that.

Yes, it can. But the interesting thing here is that as asthmatics start by being very CO2 intolerant and that then creates an acidity and literally a autoimmune response that can go into a lot of other things. But the fact is, is they are very CO2 intolerant. And what we do with breath hold work is we're trying to make somebody more CO2 tolerant so that they can last longer on breath hold stuff. And there's a process. Being a competitive swimmer when I was younger, we would do breath hold work where we would not literally we would not breathe for three strokes, then it would be five strokes and then we work out to seven strokes, then we work out to like nine, whatever. And so you were, you were developing this ability to adapt to the CO2 so that you could actually utilize oxygen more efficiently. That's what CO2s. If you don't use, utilize CO2 correctly, you actually don't absorb oxygen very well.

So, so you can actually increase your breath hold time by rebreathing CO2 100%.

Now if you're doing it all day long, that's probably going to present a problem. Or if you're doing it for a long, long periods of time, it'd be.

Like doing hypoxia all day long.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. So, so like small amounts are good for you, but you wouldn't want to do it all the time kind of like exercise.

And we can see a change even with inside of a week with people where if we put them on a training mask and have them do a 10 minute warm up and that's what they're, you know, we can see a change in a week of like, hey, there's some sort of physiological adaptation happening where they're not getting as claustrophobic. And that's what that feeling is. Yeah, claustrophobic feeling that people get when they wear the training mask. That's the CO2. So that also happens when you go to hold your breath and when your body says hey, hey, hey, dude, you need to breathe that, that's, you know, that's that claustrophobic feeling. Like I gotta breathe that CO2 levels rising.

Yeah, that makes sense. Have you ever taken one of these inside a sauna? Like a training mask inside a sauna?

Yes.

Yeah. And done like a hardcore workout. So you've got double claustrophobia because you want to claw your way out of the heat and you. And you are also wearing the mask.

Yes.

It's an incredible workout. Like if you go jump in a cold pool after something like that.

Well, yeah, that's probably the quickest way to kind of get back to normal.

Yeah. So what about when we're talking about this concept of holding on to CO2 and it increasing breath hold time. I'm studying for a free diving course right now. So in two weeks I'm going down to Fort Lauderdale for a week to dive. And one of the things that my instructor sent me was a static apnea table. One for oxygen and one for CO2. Have you seen these? No. Okay, so the CO2 one, you'll do like six rounds of holding your breath for a minute and then in between each round you have decreasing rest intervals. So after the first time you hold your breath a minute, you'll rest 90 seconds and then the next time you'll rest 60 seconds and then the next time youll rest 45 seconds. So apparently what it's doing is training your body how to get used Toto holding onto CO2 or being exposed to higher amounts of CO2. Yeah, and they've got the other one that he sent me is an oxygen table where you'll hold your breath for an increasingly long period of time. Like you'll hold your breath for a minute, then a minute 30, then a minute 45, then two minutes. And in between each of those, you just breathe for two minutes. So rather than decreasing the rest intervals, you're just keeping the rest intervals constant and increasing the breath hold time.

Yes, very aware of, of stuff like that. I've done, I've done a lot of work with that. You know, it's interesting because I work with a lot of big wave surfers, like heavy duty guys that are, you know, needing to hold their breath for longer periods of time. And the interesting thing is, is that Laird Hamilton came up with with some stuff 15 or so years ago on underwater training. And what he started to recognize was everybody was literally like trying to run a rock across the bottom of the ocean. And that was, that was great. But then everybody started to gravitate towards the free diving thing where it's like, hey, I'm going to learn how to hold my breath. And it's statically, like barely moving, not moving at all. And I'm going to increase my ability to hold my breath. And what we see are there are a ton of people in the freediving world that are dying all the time.

The top people in the dying.

Dying from what? From shallow water blackout.

Oh, yeah.

Reason is what we've correlated this to is in the freediving world, what's happening, or spearfishing world is you're coming down, you're getting to a deep depth, you're holding your breath and you're very, very quiet. You're not doing anything. So low CO2 levels and low oxygen levels. So when you're static and you're not moving around, it's really, really easy to get yourself to blackout, which is shallow water blackout. So these guys are coming, they're three feet from the surface and they're passing out and dying. And what we've noticed is that whenever any work is being done in the water that the CO2 levels raise so quickly, so high that your body is signaling, hey, I gotta breathe, I gotta breathe. So you go to get a breath and you're taking yourself, you're not taking yourself that limit where the oxygen levels are dipping too low. Because if CO2 levels are low and oxygen levels are low and you're in the water, you're gonna go out. That's what lights out is. So once that, that oxygen saturation level gets to a certain point, it you just, you go out. And if you've ever done any of the WIM HOF stuff, this is exactly the type of stuff you're doing. But you're not in the water.

You're loading with CO2 outside of the water. So your body gets used to that CO2, O2 imbalance.

Yes.

Okay, got it.

And so it's very difficult as you rise, you know, and this is why shallow water blackouts are happening. There was two Navy SEALs that just died recently, you know, and it's just, it's people doing breath work and not understanding how it works. And so what these people should be.

Doing is more CO2 work outside of the water.

Yes, absolutely. And, or in the water. And so that's what we've seen actually with a lot of the training that we've done, like Laird and I have been doing, and Laird started this stuff. But we've, we've come together in developing some program stuff that we're going to launch that, you know, big wave surfers aren't ever in an environment where it's a calm, static place. You know, a 50 foot wave drops on your head, that's not a calm place. That's like nature at its greatest and you're having to make some serious decisions. And although you're being tossed around, it's not like a free dive moment. So this is where we're, we're really starting to see a lot of the work that we're doing in the pool, where we have dumbbells and we're having working sets, is you may not only be able to hold your breath for 45 seconds to a minute, but because of the work you're doing, you're developing that tolerance with the CO2 at the higher levels so that you can actually absorb the oxygen a little bit better.

I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and Neil Strauss was there. I guess he's done some workouts with you guys. And he brought me into the pool and was showing me how to put a dumbbell between my legs and swim underwater using just My hands on my back and then I'd switch to my stomach to go back the other way and then clutch it to my chest and go back the other way.

Yeah.

Is that the type of workout that you sort of.

Yeah, yeah. Those are called seahorses or, you know, whatever we call them. But yes, it's very similar. But, you know, I could take a competitive swimmer and hand them a dumbbell and let them use one arm, and they're quickly going to become much more efficient at swimming. And I don't care how competitive they are. Getting a 50 pound dumbbell across a 50 foot pool is going to be a challenge in staying on the surface, and it's going to teach you about position as well. But holding that breath is going to teach you how to, you know, absorb that CO2 a little better as well.

Interesting. How often do you do these kind of workouts where you're getting in a pool with dumbbells and holding your breath?

Two to three days a week. I'm typically around the two Laird's about three, three in the off season. And then, then we have a, a, another, you know, like, gym type program and, you know, other stuff that he does as well. But a lot of these guys that we know, they, they're on the kind of the same program.

Interesting. Have you ever used one of these snorkels that you put on and it's like a front mounted snorkel?

Yes.

That you swim with, but it's made by Finis and it has what's called a cardio cap on top of it that restricts your airflow while you're swimming.

Same concept as a training mask, except it's in the pool.

Have you ever used one of those?

Yeah.

Yeah. They're very interesting. I kind of like it for that same type of effect that you're talking about when you just want to get a swim in. What other kind of devices do you use? Do you use like one of these power lungs or anything like that?

No, I've had one. I've had a power lung for years and it can help develop a lot of this stuff. But there's nothing that the training mask is not developing with. Just taking the levels higher and higher and forcing you to get like, everybody after this performance camp that I've been in touch with, this breathing performance camp has literally said, dude, my abs are so sore right now. I'm like, yeah, you're using, you're using your abdominals and your diaphragm.

Now, is that just from doing the workouts with the training mask, I think.

It'S primarily doing the stuff with the training mask, but what we're also doing is we're triggering. So we'll do a few sets with the training mask to trigger prior to doing even breathing sets with a lot of the whim stuff.

Okay, gotcha. So what would a typical workout wearing a training mask look like? Because when you get like the manual that comes with the mask, you're just kind of like lying on your back, bridging your hips up to the sky and then coming back down and just kind of doing like really passive stuff. Are you guys doing full on, like squats and rowing and swings, or are you just kind of doing like the more passive core work?

No. Well, to start with the training mask.

Or the breathing with the training mask on.

So with the training mask, what we'll do is I'll, you know, typically I'll set somebody up on like an assault bike, which is like the old Airdyne and it's just a better version of it.

And I was, I was on one of those a couple of days ago. I went down to the, the seal fit thing that Mark Divine does in Encinitas and they had a bunch of those bikes out in the grinder. It's been a while since I've been on an assault bike. And those things are, those are tough.

They're very tough. And. But it's a great thing that anybody can really do. And you know, it's a full body deal. So we will typically set somebody up on that and have them start really easy with the training mask on. And then they'll go into sets of like 10 or 20 seconds hard and then 50 to 40 seconds easy.

And do you keep the mask on during the easy part throughout this process?

And we do about 10, 10 minutes, some people 15. But it literally starts to, you see them breathing differently and then we can take them off of that and then it's, hey, we get into movement stuff. And if I see somebody who has some positional faults with things, I can easily hand them back the mask, have them hold and let's just say a plank or the top of a pushup and put the mask on. And all of a sudden they automatically will change a position and they'll find a solid hollow position that they can breathe in. And it's just an eye opening experience for a coach because as a coach you're constantly trying to get on people about their movement patterns. And somebody who's looked at CrossFit as this amazing tool to screen athletic movement or any movement whatsoever. And seeing that, it's allowed me to make a lot of changes in people without having to literally be on them and allowing them to see it themselves, the differences of what's happening.

Got it. Interesting. So these performance breathing clinics that you do, they start off learning to breathe with the training mask, but aside from that, what other type of things are. Are people learning when they go to. To a clinic like this?

So we're te. We're. So we will show them best practices we've found with the training mask. We also show them the differences between what they naturally will do before we ever do anything. And we. I just say, hey, fill your lungs and empty your lungs. And I just want you to understand that process right now, not doing anything differently than you would. Then we show them the training mask, and, you know, it's like, hey, can you replicate that without the mask on now? And they do, and they see the difference of how much more air they're actually drawing in. Then we will introduce a lot of. We'll introduce some of the whim stuff, because the whim stuff from a performance standpoint is when we're breathing, what typically happens when we're starting to get exhausted is we start to expel all this air that we have, and so we try and dump it all.

Okay, so we're like breathing out longer or more forcefully than we're breathing in.

Exactly.

Okay. And that would be a bad thing?

Well, that's a CO2 accumulation process. So you're going to accumulate more CO2 in that manner.

How would you accumulate more CO2 if you're breathing out more because you're not.

Taking in enough oxygen.

Okay. So when you say take all that.

Bad air is kind of just sitting in there, and even though you're dumping it out, you're. You're not only taking in very little oxygen, and so this will make sense in a second, but so we will take people and have them and teach them how to reverse that process. And by. By using the training mask to trigger the effect. Then we can use. Then we can start to implement the breathing patterns, and we can show people during recoveries. Okay. Breathe how you normally would. Don't do anything different. Now I'm going to trigger you how to breathe by forcing a big exhale or big inhale and not allow a full exhale to happen. So we only want to go about one atmosphere down, which is a half breath out. Right. And then you're already drawing in another full breath again. And the recovery process in. Everybody Tends to be almost double time, if not triple, with what they did prior.

Is that similar to the kind of breath protocol you'd go through prior to practicing, say, like a long breath hold?

Yes.

For example, you would breathe in pretty deeply and then breathe out not quite so deeply, and do that for one or two minutes, and then finish by breathing in as much as you can, holding and then holding your breath for as long as possible.

Pretty similar, except we're more or less. We're focused on the inhale and not so much the exhale. And it's just a constant. It's almost like you're going into this whim breathing pattern as you are recovering between intervals. And so it's a forced, large inhale and just a let go of the exhale, but you're trying to catch it about halfway out, and you just continue this process. Then we then take them into a steady state where we're gonna have them learn how to just draw the breath in versus letting it out. So now that they've worked out a little bit and they're already kind of a little fatigued, then we can have them start to work out at a steady state that they know they can do right before they start to get acidic, you know where. Right where it starts to get a little uncomfortable. And we have pulled that. And then we have them implement the breathing protocol where they would draw in and. And not. And not allow the exhale to happen as much. And we can trigger that as well with the training mask. So that the training mask can set up the pattern again, because you will automatically draw in more air on that training mask.

Yeah, that makes sense. Because when you're wearing that mask and you're exercising, because, honestly, it's almost every day that I'll put it on at some point during a workout or a sauna session, you don't exhale quite as much because it's almost a little bit uncomfortable. It's more difficult to exhale than it is to inhale.

Correct.

Interesting. I never really thought about what was going on there, but it makes sense now. So when you're doing these kind of breath protocols, are you focusing on any difference in breathing through the nose versus breathing through the mouth?

Well, there's always going to be a transition that transitions like right about at your aerobic threshold, where you can no longer use your nose and you have to turn over to mouth breathing. Then it just stays mouth breathing the entire time. But the fact is, is we can get people to go from literally feeling acidic or the accumulation of Acidity, where that's, that, that limiting factor in how much harder they're gonna go to starting the breathing, and it literally just starts to disappear. So they, they literally raise the alkalinity of the body as they're working. Yeah, there's, there's performance change immediately.

There's this concept that when you, when you're breathing through your mouth, and especially when it's shallow chest breathing, that you get more of a cortisol release. So you get more of these baroreceptors in the chest apparently become activated and cause cortisol to get released. And you get more of a sympathetic nervous system stimulation versus, like, if you're breathing through your nose and getting more of like a parasympathetic nervous system stimulation. And I've tried that before during say, like a strength training workout to just breathe through the nose. I don't know if you've ever tried this just to like do a whole workout breathing through the nose. And then I was talking to a guy, he's a guy who works for Spartans, so he's always studying what the Spartans do. This guy named Joe distefano. And he was telling me how these young Spartan athletes, these kids, they used to have them go for runs and they'd have to swallow or not swallow, but put a certain amount of measured water in their mouth. And at the end of the run, at the end of a three mile run, they had to hold the water in their mouth the whole time. They had to spit the water out at the very end and show that they had that same amount of water in their mouth. So the whole time they had to breathe through their nose. Have you ever tried something like that? Like just a run where you're just breathing through your nose or a weightlifting session where you're just breathing through your nose?

Yes. And one of the better moments of that was Kelly Starrett and I had to retake our level ones for CrossFit. And we did it over a course of a weekend about six or nine months ago. And the work, one of the workouts they had us do was like this thruster burpee workout. And he and I, we had, we, we'd been toying with all out of this stuff for a while. And he quickly said, okay, you can only work when you're breathing through your nose. If you have to breathe through your mouth, you have to stop. And so the whole workout and the irony of this is I went the first round and I was only breathing through my nose, and I only went hard enough to Breathe to keep that, you know, so that I didn't go over that. And I finished third in a workout that I should not have finished third at. I was definitely not the fittest anywhere near that fitness level in that group. You know, there were definitely fitter people. But the, the, the, the interesting thing is, is that it gets you to control things that you typically will not control.

Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. You, you almost go into like this meditative state.

100 and, and that's what the breathing's doing as well. Even like with the whim stuff or even the stuff we're actually teaching people how to use them for performance. And the fact is, is you're getting into the, into, you know, the autonomic nervous system, whether, where, where you're starting to control things, where you're starting not letting the subconscious ride everything, you're consciously overriding it. So teaching yourself that you actually have more control over your performance and what's happening than you typically ever thought you did. But the problem with that is that it actually does require work. It actually does require a learning pattern. But the fastest way to that that I have found is using the training mask.

Yeah, it requires a ton of focus too. Like you'll catch yourself. It's almost like a leash, right? Like for example, if I've got an easy recovery day and I'm gonna go on a bike ride, I'll tell myself, alright, keep your mouth closed. Frigging. Only breathe through your nose. And it keeps you, it's very hard to go past that threshold. You were just talking about that threshold of acidity. It's hard to do that unless you're breathing through your mouth because your body just wants to take in all this oxygen. And when you tell yourself, okay, nose breathe only, pal, it holds you back in kind of a cool way.

Yes, 100%.

So have you seen this thing that. There was a guy who wrote a book, John Duyard, he's a coach out of Boulder, Colorado. And in his book, which is all based on ayurvedic medicine and deep nasal breathing while you're exercising, he recommends these breath. Right. Strips that you wear around your nose to keep your nasal cavities open when you're doing nasal breathing. But now there's this thing called the turbine. Have you seen this?

Yes, I've used the turbine.

What do you think of that?

Love it.

Really?

Yeah. For somebody that has like a deviated septum. I mean, I broke my nose a few times. You know, I, I was, I, I was I played water polo for quite some time and had my nose busted. And so I've been a mouth breather for a lot of my life.

Really? You played water polo?

Yeah.

What position did you play?

I guarded two meters and I was a. A driver.

Okay, cool. I played whole set.

Yeah. So I literally was just like, I was just this mouth breather for a lot. A lot of my life. And then in getting in, using the first nasal strips that everybody used to wear, I thought it was a brilliant move. But, you know, you got this sticky crap on your nose. You've got to take them off in the morning or whenever you take them off. Sometimes when you're working out, the sweat gets in the way because the. The sweat changes everything and this sticky thing comes off. And then I was at this. I was at some convention with Laird and Gabby Reese and this guy came over and said, hey, you want to try these out? And so we look, I looked at it and I was like, this is kind of a smart idea. And so I put it in, went for a ride, and I was like, I just literally worked. I did the same ride I did last week and I felt like I worked so much less and I was actually like two minutes faster on the ride.

Yeah, it's really. Well, the winner of the Tour de France used one. Chris Froome used one of these turbines. I'll put a link to these in the show notes. Just TheTurbine.com, but yeah, it's this thing that you put in your nose. I wanted to ask you, Brian, kind of going in a different direction from nasal breathing and hypoxia to hyperoxia, these hyperbaric chambers or the. It's an intermittent style of breathing where you'll use like a mask connected to an oxygen tank and you'll breathe and oxygenated air for a certain period of time and then take a break and then go back to the oxygenated air with exercise. It's called like intermittent. I forget the name. Intermittent hyperoxic training with exercise or something like that? Or exercise. I don't remember what it's called. Exercise with oxygen therapy. Exercise with oxygen therapy. Ewat. Have you ever. Have you ever done that? Do you use these type of things in your performance breathing courses or what's your take on hyperoxia?

I don't use it in my breathing courses. We have an oxygen concentrator we've been playing. We have been working with a guy who runs the exercise phys department out of Florida, A&M. His name is Dr. Brian Hickey and he is a pioneer in hyperoxia training. And we have found that proper hyperoxia training will help develop mitochondria and type 2Amuscle fibers. Really?

Yeah. So, so, so for the folks listening, what exactly would that mean? What would the implications of that be?

So think about it like this. I can take, take you up to your, you know, 90% of your max heart rate and you're going to feel like you're working pretty damn hard for most people. Right. If I put you on an oxygen concentrator, that's going to probably feel like your, your like aerobic threshold. It's not going to feel like what you're doing. And so I can have you there for about 30 minutes and then we can get you to recover off of that. And we, once we use a heart rate recovery system with it, which helps the process. I've had a number of athletes doing it and it's a pretty interesting process, but it takes about 16 workouts or so of doing it. And there's various ways of doing it. You could do it with even 1 minute max effort intervals, things like that. But what we're trying to do is get you to a maximum, just submaximal to maximal effort on a higher level, higher dosage of oxygen, typically around 90%. So that will allow the body to start to convert those mitochondria. It'll start to grow the mitochondria on with the type 2Amuscle fibers.

Interesting. So it's almost like you have more oxygen available. So your body wants to build new mitochondria to do something with all that extra oxygen.

You got it.

Interesting. See what I've always seen in the past, because I know there was a study last year in the Journal of Strength Conditioning research on hyperoxia, but it was all just recovery, right. They'd like get exposed to hyperoxia and they'd recover faster.

And it makes sense. And it does, and you will. But if you don't have that with you, you know, you're not gonna, it's gonna be a little bit more difficult. But the fact is, is if we get you working on stuff like that, then we can actually work for that change. We can actually work for that change sometimes without the oxygen. But this is also where the WIM breathing comes into effect because with WIM stuff you're alkalining the system and getting high, high levels of O2 and low, low levels of CO2, which is allowing for you to get deep into the nervous system and do a lot of this stuff, and a lot of it right now is speculative, but he is convinced and he's having a ton of, of university work being done, including at Harvard right now. But I mean, we've got. I've got a guy by the name of Dr. Andy Galpin out at Cal State Fullerton who I turned on to this stuff, and he's going, he's going apeshit over it. And so he's starting to launch, launch into some study work and some research work that is going to just spearhead a lot of the stuff that we've kind of figured out.

So there's this concept of power breathing, you know, like Tony Robbins does. And I think it's also called warrior breathing or fire breathing, where it's like. And I've heard some people say it increases CO2, which vasodilates and drives more blood into capillaries. I've heard some people say, no, it increases oxygen. Have you experimented with that style of breathing at all or know exactly what's going on?

Yeah, I don't know exactly what's going on.

It's.

It's similar, you know, a lot of people, like I had a meeting with Steven Kotler about a week, week and a half ago, and we had discussed a lot of this stuff as he's tried to figure out breathing methods for himself. And he's like, oh, so this stuff is kind of like fire breathing? I'm like, yeah, a little bit. Not. But, but not really. And so I, I've played around with the fire breathing stuff and, and warrior breath. And I think any route you go that's going to allow you to become more conscious of what's going on is a great route. But I don't know that it's necessarily doing all the things that they think it's doing. But, you know, I don't know that all the stuff I'm doing is doing the things that we think it's doing.

Yeah, I tell you what, man, I've used that before when I've been stuck in a corral before a race when you can't warm up and you're waiting for the race to start, like a spot spartan race or a 5K. And it's a great way to actually keep, you know, when, when you, the first two minutes or so of any race just sucks, right? Yeah, you're, you're sucking air and everything's burning and, and you, you feel almost like stale for those first couple of minutes. This seems to make a lot of that go away. But, yeah, I'll Just do that deep, deep. And there's a, there's a professional Ironman triathlete, you could probably find the video on YouTube somewhere named Andy Potts. And the first time I started thinking about doing this was he was talking about how when all the other athletes are warming up in the water, he'll be off to the side in his wetsuit doing this deep, deep power breathing and then he'll end with like a full on exhale and a full on inhale and go through like three cycles of that just to warm up for.

A race and he's onto something.

Yeah.

The irony here is that you figured out my wife before she would do, she would start a race, she would do this breathing to calm herself down so that she just didn't like she wasn't being overtaken by, you know, hey, I'm in an Olympic gold medal match right now, whatever that she was calm. I've talked, I've, I've done some work with some special forces units and they have protocols for doing some breathing prior to, you know, if something starts to get a little, you know, a lot of people are catching on to little facets of this thing. But you know, I think it really gets into, if you can really start to understand the stuff that, where we're going, that this is going to be a. Almost. Not almost. This is a very big performance enhancing product.

Yeah.

It's just breathing and standing. All this stuff is paramount.

I keep, the other thing I'll do before races is I keep one of these power lungs in the, in the glove box of the car or in my travel bag and I'll just do reps on that as I'm driving to the race to warm up my lungs. Just because frankly training mask makes you look silly when you're driving.

Yes.

But these power lung devices that you just hold up and wrap your mouth around and do, resisted out, resisted in, seem to work pretty well also just for warming up the muscles prior to a race. Now let's say that folks wanted to increase their breath hold, increase their breath hold time. As far as like low hanging fruit in addition to some of the stuff you've talked about already. Right. Like using a training mask, focusing on the inhale more than the exhale, etc. What are some other techniques that you would use for someone to increase their, their breath hold time?

The simplest is something like repeating a 2 minute breathing pattern of like a 3 second breath hold up top, a 10 second let out, a 3 second breath hold on the bottom and then a large Draw. Inhale. And you don't have to worry about how long the inhale is. Just take in a nice big inhale and repeat that process for two minutes. And start with like maybe a one minute breath hold for five or six rounds of doing that.

That sounds almost like box breathing.

It's very similar and you can use and. And these are like. So it's just setting a pattern. And what you're doing is calming yourself down. You're getting your oxygen levels high and then you're going into a breath hold. And most people don't breathe enough consciously to calm themselves down. Anybody who has really done any like where, where they've studied them, like, my God, this guy can drop his heart rate and raise it, you know, in the blink of an eye. It's all breath work. It's literally being able to control your breathing and slow yourself down. And the close to the connection you have with like that vagus nerve, the easier it is for you to calm yourself down and then take in a large breath and begin that breath hold process. It doesn't matter what the pattern really is other than a controlled exhale because we just don't want to dump all that air out quite yet and get the body ready to draw in a big inhale. So it's just a control out and you can do things. You could change that up. I think. Outside magazine did something not too long ago that was with a free diver guy that was like a seal or something and he did some very similar stuff. And it's all doable things. And from there it's like, hey, spend a couple weeks doing that, then do that same pattern for two minutes and then walk and hold your breath. And now you're going to start to know what it's like to work a little bit more and hold your breath.

Walking breath holds. Those are actually really. I'll do those sometimes when I'm walking through the airport or I'm just doing something and I want to double up. Walking breath holds where you'll just hold your breath for as long as you can and then recover. And you can do this on a walk. It's crazy.

Yes.

Yeah. You know, you've talked a lot about Wim Hof. His name has come up a couple times. Do you do this? Do you do the cold soaks and things like that?

Oh yeah. 100. I've been doing this stuff for quite some time. I actually reached out to his camp about a year ago. We've connected. He came out and spent a week with us up Between Laird's, Laird's place and my place, it looks like we're going to probably do a lot of stuff together as he's really going to spearhead a lot of the disease and the work that he's really, really passionate about in helping kids and things like that. So it's, he's. I would not have ever reached meditation or anything close to it had I not actually found what he does. And I, I think that's a big, big thing, especially for people who are kind of performance junkies or type A personalities who don't really find a 20 minute, you know, or 30 minute or whatever, sit down, try and find Zen process attractive. I think his method allows people to find that place, you know, and I've heard it time and time again from people. But the fact is, is I know people who've been meditating 20 years and they've never reached the stages of meditation that we can get them to in less than, you know, in less than three minutes.

Interesting stuff. Yeah, Yeah, I like his stuff. I was just curious if you do much of the, much of the cold therapy.

Yes.

Sounds like you're, you're very on board with that.

Maybe had four or five warm showers in the last year. You know, I, I, we cold shower. I do ice at least, you know, at least twice, if not three times a week. It's, it's a, you know, it, that's actually a performance changer as well. And contrary to popular belief or pop culture, you know, you want a quick performance enhancement, do an ice bath before you can actually compete. It's something.

Yeah, man, after my heart. I like it. That was actually my workout this morning was infrared sauna and cold soak. So I'm curious. I've got another question for you here. I know we're getting towards the end of our interview, but I wanted to ask you about quantifying some of this stuff.

Yeah.

There are obviously fingertip pulse oximeters that you can use to track your blood oxygenation. There's heart rate variability measurements. The track parasympathetic nervous system action activation. Do you, in your clinics or for yourself use any type of self quantification to see what's working?

I do from time to time. My, my game is, you know, I. There's a great book out there and you probably read it, it's called Deep Survival.

Yeah.

And you know, Lawrence Gonzalez, I think this is one of the most important books of our time because it nails what human beings are in the fact that we think we know what we Believe. But the fact is, is we only know what we feel. And if you can't feel it, then you don't know it. And we would love to believe, like, you know, that we know so much more than we do. But we're just like, we look at things from a surface area. And a lot of the research that we do has been, you know, a lot of it gets tainted because it's funded or, you know, and a certain person's paying for it. And if it didn't work out, it's not coming to light. And, you know, not all of us or not everybody knows how to read the research. But the fact is, is, you know, you can even talk to a lot of the guys I work with who are PhDs. Like, they're like, look, we're 10 years behind where you're at, dude. Like, literally. I mean, I've. I've listened. I work with people at NASA, you know, and one of. One of my colleagues is a kid who's a robotics engineer out of NASA. And it's like they are eons behind where we've been and what most, most of us are doing. People who are listening this podcast, like, they are ahead of where the big money is and where everything's at. And yet we look at things like this and we look to things like NASA and, and the government or even, you know, big money that, oh, they're going to have the solution for a lot of this stuff, and they don't. You know, there's a book that took me about 20 years to read called A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking wrote it, and I'm sure you're aware of it. Yeah, but, you know, there's a couple of pieces in there, and this has been part of a lot of conversations that I've had, especially with the. My colleague from NASA, you know, Hawking laid out, simply put it, ever since the dawn of civilization, people have. Have not been content to see events unconnected or inexplicable. You know, if everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation. And this is the problem with what we do because we try to isolate things and think of them like that. Now, we certainly have catapulted ourselves very far by isolating certain things and looking at them and trying to understand them. But I think that the fact is, is from a natural standpoint, we just don't look at things and the way nature kind of does them I mean, why do we look at, like a cheetah, you know, running 60 miles an hour, like this unbelievable thing, you know, And a cheetah, from my, from my understanding, literally only sprints every three days.

Yeah.

Yet we're training how hard to do what? You know, what is it a cheetah's doing that we're not doing? What is it a lion's doing we're not doing? What is an elephant's doing that we're not doing? Like, what? Why, why don't we start to look at things from. From a bigger universal standpoint and how a lot of things are already working.

And it's a human factor. I mean, a big part of it is the human factor. Right. Like, I don't, I don't know about you, but, like, after a day of, of computer work and blogging and being inside, like, I want to go and fricking, like, lay down a hardcore workout out on the trails, and in some cases it's just escape. Right. It's running from something. And, yeah, you don't see animals doing that a lot, but it's like that book about why zebras don't have ulcers, right. They don't put themselves in situations where they necessarily feel compelled to go and use exercise and breath, work and things like this to manage stress.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Yet one of the ironies about the working out and all that stuff, and this is, you know, back when I was doing ultramarathons, you know, I had these massive, massive, like, spiritual moments that I would have when I was ultra running and I was like, God, it's just. It's gotta be the pain and the suffering that I'm going through. And yet you talk to enough people and, you know, I've had my wife and I get pretty deep and she has these epiphanies as well when she's training. And. And I'm sure you've had these things and people talk about runners high and all that. Well, you know, one of the questions that I'm asking now is, it's like, well, is there any irony in the fact that you've been huffing oxygen at a level that you never have, that you were not doing before, and you've been out there long enough that you're finally getting to this place where you're almost like alkaline to a large degree, to where the body can enter into this, you know, the pineal gland, or even this place where you typically can't get to unless you're in REM cycle. Sleep or, you know, all this stuff, which inevitably involves a lot of different breathing patterns.

Yeah, interesting. Well, I've been taking a lot of notes as you're talking, Brian, and I've put them all for those of you listening in over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com PerformanceBreathing you can go check out Brian's website. If you're down around his area, check out his performance clinic. I'll link to his books as well. And some of these things like the turbine and the training mask and some of these other little toys that you can check out. So, Brian, thanks for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us, man.

No problem. Thanks for having me.

It's fascinating. I'll let you go strap your training mask on and go run around naked in your ice bath or whatever it is I'm going to.

I can last about a half day in the office before I have to get out.

Yeah, seriously. All right, man. Well, enjoy the rest of your day. And for those of you listening in again, you can visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com PerformanceBreathing and until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and Brian McKenzie signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Go to BenGreenfield WorldFitness.com for even more.

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