The Renegade Breathing Mastermind Behind The Crazy Holotropic Breathing Protocol I Do In My Sauna (& Biohacking Breathwork, Best Foods For Breathhold Time, Dangers Of Wim Hof & Much More!).

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, Oxygen is very powerful stuff. We have to treat it with a lot of respect. Hypnotic suggestion, with music and with rhythm of breath, you quickly have a very powerful transformative tool. If you do yoga the mainstream way, which is very flowy, where you move from one pose to the next, it's like riding a bike with stabilizers on, that alone can actually stop autoimmune conditions. We've been under an illusion. We've been told we need lots of oxygen and deep breathing is the way to get oxygen. It's absolutely not the truth.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, folks, you asked for him. Here he is, the renegade breathwork practitioner who has taught me, gosh, like 80% of what I know about my breath and my body. Niraj Naik. He's coming on the show. All right, so if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, then you have heard my podcast guest before, or if you've read any of my articles, particularly those on Breathwork, of which I have many, which I'll link to in the shownotes, and I'll give you a link to that momentarily. Anyways, this guy has been on my podcast before talking about breathwork. I have adopted his specific flavor, so to speak, of breathwork as one of my primary go to's, because there's, I mean, there's tons of stuff out there. There's Buteco breathing and there's Wim Hof breathwork, and there's holotropic breathwork. And this is kind of a really nice mashup of all of them, I find. And for me, as a creature of efficiency and the 8020 approach and seeking for ease in the path of least resistance to most of my personal practices, his program just works for me. And so I've learned a lot from his videos. His name is Neeraj Naik and I first met him. You can correct me if I'm wrong, Niraj, but I think it was inside a sauna in Estonia, Finland. I think you and me and Thomas Kinoshenko, we all met up because we were at an event. Was it the Mind Valley event? Yeah, it was the Mind Valley University that, that another podcast guest of mine, Vishal Lakhani, put on, where a bunch of people come from all over the globe and kind of like train and learn and go and conference and party for like two solid weeks. Even though you can show up for a few days of it. If you want to. And I think you and I kind of like overlapped in our time there, but there were a couple days where we were both in Estonia. We met in the sauna. And I remember like I walk in there and there you are, you know, like the skinny dude with the beard looks like a yok yogi sitting cross legged on the wooden benches in there. And you led us through I believe like some kind of oming breathwork protocol, which is pretty cool. And then we, we connected. We did a podcast. I went through your, your longer program. What was that program I did called the, the long one.

The 21 day.

Yeah, the 21 day, which was amazing. And then a couple years later I brought my kids through the whole 21 day, which was great. And, and by the way, the three times a week they still do the 20 minute breathwork session from that course. And then once a week we go into the sauna and do 40 to 60 minutes using kind of like your pre recorded tracks with music and the beat, the breath to beat instruction from you. And so we've stuck with it. Man, you'd be proud of us.

That's amazing. That's so good to hear that actually.

Oh, it's transformative because now they're just equipped, I think. You know, I don't know how you feel about this, but I feel like breath work should be like a foundational practice or foundational component of every child's curriculum because it's such an integral part of physiology that so many people are disconnected from. And we can talk about that a little bit today. But anyway, so for those of you listening in, I'll put all the shownotes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Niraj the number two. So BenGreenfulFitness.com N I R A J2 and I'll link to his new Selma fit course which we'll talk about which, which my boys and I also just did, which inspired me to get Niraj back on the podcast and then also that 21 week course that we did. So anyways, I'll let you tell a little bit of your backstory, Niraj, but for those of you who want the full meal. Deal. I'll have him give you the abbreviated version today. But go listen to the first podcast that I did with him because we get into his fascinating story of where he came from starting off as a pharmacist. But I guess that's kind of my question for you and maybe you can answer this question as you give a little bit of Your background, Niraj. But your programs are kind of unique because you combine like music with breath work with, you know, the, the verbal instruction. But it's almost a little bit hypnotic as you go through it because you're just the. The music alone and the beats alone kind of drive you into this altered state of consciousness as you're doing the breath work. By, by the way, the bedtime one, the 11 minute bedtime one is another one we do. And that, that one's really good. That the four in eight out of ten. Eight. Eight Hold. But were you like a DJ or something at some point? Because it seems like you mix up these tracks pretty efficiently.

That's a great question because actually I began running music events like raves back in the UK when I was in university. And so music was a huge passion of mine. And actually I always thought I was going to become a DJ or a producer and run big events around the world. And actually I did for a while until I had to go back and become a pharmacist because I lost everything. It was such a hedonistic, crazy lifestyle. So I went into the profession as a pharmacist. Not really like wanting to be there, but actually it was the best thing that ever happened to me. That was literally the best, best training for life you could possibly get. Because you're going into a career that you may not know that much about and not be that passionate about, but that pressure that, that, you know, that prison, like sentence, when you're like, you have everything and then it's all taken away from you actually can. It can either make or break you. And for me, it really made me because it really conditioned me towards where I really want to be in my life, you know, where I really want to go. And I was a little bit different as a dj, as a musician back in the day. I used to hang out with lots of ravers, lots of people from different backgrounds, you know, like gangster types and, you know, hippie types, all sorts of different types of people. It was crazy. But I was always the one that had a spiritual mindset. I was always like wanting. I. To me, the whole thing was a church celebration. Yeah, there was loads of drugs coming in and out of events and things and. But it, to me, it was all about a celebration of life. And the music scene got too druggie and way too like, it lost its original values as well. It got more and more hedonistic in it, you know, so going into pharmacy, I went in, in there with a spiritual mindset and I straight Away saw that there's such a void in the healthcare system. Like, it's so cold and clinical and sterile. And I didn't feel like we were really doing the best service to our patients. And you'd literally get like 30 seconds, you know, to be with a patient because you're in and out like a factory machine, just dishing out pills all day long. And every month you just see people going away with more shopping bags full of drugs. And I'm like, something doesn't seem right at all. And anyway, I was trying to actually try a million ways of trying to get out of my job, like, different business ideas and trying to make in the music industry. And I did get quite deep into the music business, actually. One of my mentors, dear friend unfortunately died. He was the manager of Muse, one of the big rock bands.

Oh, oh, I thought you were talking about Muse, the meditation headband. Okay.

No, no, the. The Muse, Yeah. And he took me into the whole music scene and. And he was. I do really want to be a part of this. This isn't. You just don't seem to fit into this culture. He took me once to meet him, and it's his most sleazy, slimy industry. And I was like, actually, this. This isn't what I'm about either. And in the end, he kept pushing me to do something with pharmacy because I'd come back ranting about all the problems, and then I'd be going to do my own little bit of research and realizing that, you know, there's no focus on. On diet, there's no focus on lifestyle. The things that you would expect, you know, to make somebody healthy. It was just completely missing. And actually, I had a bit of a breakdown and I ended up going to Tony Robbins event. That's the first time I ever heard anybody talk about diet, nutrition, breathing, even meditation back then.

With some really excellent clapping thrown in.

Oh, amazing. I mean, I was a convert.

Yeah, he's the best clapper ever.

The best. And I actually didn't expect it to be that good like that, because I was like, what is all this guru nonsense? But it actually was super profound. And I was, I've got the best place to test out this stuff. You know, I'm going to put Tony Robbins to test. If he's full of shit, I'll find out pretty quick. But in the pharmacy, you have constant sick people coming in. So I came up with a system just to change people's diets based on writing shopping lists for them. And those who took my advice had amazing results and got better in the end. I ended up getting promoted to the head office of one of the big corporations in the uk. That's where I got a taste of my own medicine, where I actually tried to put a big project together that could have helped so many people. But in the end it got shelved. I cut long story short, but I just lost connection with God, spirit, my faith in humanity, everything. When, When I. I thought that project that could help so many people with changing their diet, something really simple wasn't allowed to go through. And boom, that's when I got hit with autoimmune condition called ulcerative colitis, which I've learned so much since. Why people get things are autoimmune and especially such an epidemic right now. You know, we can go into that a little bit more because the breathing has a big influence of this as well.

Yeah, absolutely. The gut brain connection. I remember from our last podcast, that's what got you onto the frequent use of colostrum as well. Right. When you were facing you're gonna get your colon removed, right?

Yeah, I mean, I was gonna be a guinea pig as well for drug that hadn't even been tested and they wanted to take out my colon. I was like, screw that, there has to be another way. And they say God stands for gift of desperation. And literally I went super deep praying for like some kind of redemption. And luckily somebody came to our rescue. Who's. She runs a yoga school in the UK called Swami Ambikananda. And she basically said, look, you got gift. If you can heal yourself from this, with your passion and your interests and your background, you could probably help a lot of people, inspire a lot of people. And she said, look, you can test out this stuff from Pranayama Yoga. She does a traditional form of yoga, which we can talk a bit about yoga as well, and why mainstream yoga has gone off a lot of what the original wisdom was all about. And so I, I just like surrendered to what she said and just gave it a go. Very quickly I started to get relief especially from the breathing techniques. This basic Pranayama techniques, they're designed to switch off the stress response. And then I discovered actually a book called the Power of the Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. It's actually my uncle who said like, you should check this out. And he's a pharmacist who was a Christian Science. He was really a devout Christian, but he also was studied Eastern medicine and Chinese medicine better. Dr. Joseph Murphy. Amazing, amazing book. Never heard of your subconscious mind. Yeah, Actually, Tony Robbins gets a lot of his material from. From his work.

No kidding.

And it's a very, very good book. You should check it out. And in there he talks all about the process of scientific prayers. He basically combines guided meditation techniques and breathing techniques to change your state. And then using prayers, you know, forms of affirmations and mantras to reprogram the unconscious mind, which is where disease arises from the. The autonomic nervous system. And he talks all about how you can reprogram it from a pharmacist point of view. Because he was a pharmacist. I was like, wow, this is like a miracle. There's a guy who. Similar background to me, but this was back in the 1940s, long time ago. So I gave that stuff a go. And in the end what happened was I combined my passion for making music to get into these guided, hypnotic, altered states, consciousness. Then I started to use these mantras. Some of the mantras he put in the book, which comes from basic Christian prayers of gratitude and things like that. And it worked. Like I went in the sauna is where I really started to actually get a lot of benefit as well. I instinctively was drawn to the sauna. Like Wim Hof was drawn to the ice. I was drawn to the heat. I just found a lot of like, peace, tranquility going into, like a church that I'd created in the sauna from the local spa where hardly anyone used to go, because in the UK hardly anyone was into this stuff back then. And I would go in there and it was like a. Just a place, a sanctuary, healing sanctuary that I created going into cold water, hot, that whole rotation, doing these scientific prayers, using toning and breathing techniques to alter consciousness states. And literally just life just transformed after that. Like, I started to really find all these amazing other resources, like colostrum. I discovered it just opened my whole mind to the world of Ayurveda and learning that not all diets work for everybody, you know. So Ayurveda is a lot about customizing your lifestyle based on your personality types, your energy types.

Yeah.

So Ayurveda is like a very traditional, ancient form of medicine from India. And it's so profound. And so I was trying to do like raw vegan diets back then because I thought that's. That was what was in the media quite heavily. That was the worst thing and a.

Big part of the scene that you were involved in, in terms of like yoga and big time.

Yeah. And it was completely the wrong thing. In fact, I switched completely. I Went to bone broths. Oh really eating beef, which is actually goes totally against the Hindu Veda, you know, the Hindu belief system.

You rebel.

Me. It was, I was a total rebel and colostrum and all that. So there was a lot of undogmatizing. I had to do a lot of going into a different kind of mindset of understanding the mind body connection. And in the end it, it just worked. And I created my first business using therapeutic breathing techniques with music, meditation and, and I helped started helping people with ulcerative colitis. Created a protocol for people with, with what I had. And then that grew into my own music therapy business. I started to work with people like Marissa Pierre. I even became like best buddies with Wim Hof and we went around on tour together. I was like his right hand man on stage. And I produced the soundtrack to the Wim Hof method. That's a whole nother story in itself. And then. But people kept egging me on to do my own thing with Soma Breath because I developed this experience which was so powerful based on these techniques that I was doing. But with the music combined and rhythmic breathing to the music. Because rhythmic breathing is the way to very quickly change your physiology. You know like you really like the 11 minute track. Yeah, 11 minute track has a different rhythm to the other tracks that you've done because it's all about extending exhalation. And when you extend your exhalation and breathe in a rhythm where you're breathing out twice the length of time as you breathe in and you do it in a certain way in a certain protocol, you can switch on the parasympathetics nervous system very quickly get into this altered state consciousness where you're like in an alpha theta brainwave state which hypnotherapists would take their subjects into. And that's where the best subconscious reprogramming can happen. So when you combine visualization techniques, guided imagery, you know, so basic like hypnotic suggestion with music and with rhythm of breath, you quickly have a very powerful transformative tool. Which is what we've developed with Soma Breath. That's just like one of our focuses. We actually have different types of breathing techniques from Pranayama, different lifestyle recommendations from Ayurveda and developed a system that is actually just a whole way of life. It's not just around one little magic trick.

Yeah, that's what I liked about Soma Fit. The eight day course that we just finished was it incorporated breath holds during fitness, it incorporated sleep routines, it incorporated nutrition and eating breath Work it incorporated manifestation and meditation, included some of the more rigorous forms of breath work that you introduce in the 21 week course. And then also had like the control pause time which I want to ask you about a little bit later on as we progress. But a couple of things. Do you think that what drew you just what from a unibody you said Wim Hof kind of chose the cold, you chose the heat. What is the vada type in Ayurveda? It's naturally cool. Is. Do you, do you tend towards that type that would dictate that you kind of like seeked out the heat?

Very, very good observation. Yeah, because I am more of a vata pitta type. You know, whims of full power, pitta fire energy. So he, he likes to cool himself down because he's, he's super fiery. I'm like in the middle of it, but more of a vata. And so we are more drawn to warmer climates and less extreme temperatures. Actually we prefer more of a balance.

That's interesting too because definitely not cold. Yeah, because, because like cooling foods would be, you know, like, like sweet fruits like banana and watermelon and strawberries and raw foods and vegetables and dark leafy greens like peppermint tea and bitter herbs. And it sounds like that definitely did not kind of strike your fancy. And then you look at warming foods and it's like not only like onion and garlic and ginger and pepper, but then meat and many of the more protein and fat rich compounds we're familiar with or oily foods and more pungent spices. So it sounds like you kind of not only tackle things from a nutrition standpoint, but also from a heating and a sauna standpoint. So that's interesting that you kind of, you kind of delved into that.

Yeah, I like going from the heat to the cold like that. Doing the, the Russian style, the banya. Yeah, you know, that's what I'm really into.

Yeah, I love that. I'm actually a little bit more vada pitta personally as well. So that's super interesting. Also you mentioned that that yoga today, you know, is almost like a bastardization of the original yoga. What do you mean by that?

This is controversial because there's so many people doing mainstream yoga right now, but basically the original teachings. And I could talk a little bit about the history of the breathwork styles that have emerged and people like Buteyko, who was a yogi by the way. Buteyko was an adept yogi. He probably understood yoga better than most people.

No Kidding.

So basically, traditional yoga, if you look at it, it seems to be a system design. I mean, there's different, different, different uses for it, but primarily for the, for the body, for their health. It's a system of reduced breathing techniques and different exercises designed to train your body to become extremely efficient using oxygen. So the less you need to breathe. And that seems counterintuitive because we've been so pushed about deep breathing. You know, benefits of deep breathing, which there are very few. And we've also been told, you know, the yoga is all about deep breathing as a deep breathing system. It's not, it's not true at all. Original yoga, which I had to. The way I learned this, actually, firstly, my swami gave me a bit of a taste of it, but the way I really learned it was actually I met a guy called Prakash Marsh. He's a doctor in the Himalayas who's written a very good book called the Medical Understanding of Yoga, which I highly recommend. Everybody reads. He's a medical doctor. He has a clinic near the Himalayas where he actually helps people with a lot of yoga and pranayama techniques. But from the traditional lineage. If you look at traditional yoga, you're meant to go into every asana. Let's look at the asanas, the poses. You're meant to go into it. This is direct translation of the Yoga Sutra. To prepare your mind as though you have to hold this pose forever. Okay? Forever. Yeah. You're meant to put that into your mindset. So you're meant to. Basically what that means is hold each pose to maximum effort. Okay. And you're meant to control your breath during that so that you reduce as much oxygen supply to your muscles as possible. What this makes yoga is a functionality isometric training. Okay. If you, I don't know if you heard of like Bob Hoffman.

Yeah, what was he the, Was he the active stretching guy?

He wrote a book called Functional Isometric Contraction. It's a very, very good book. Basically, he was a power champion, power lifter and he wanted to find out why the Russians winning all the competitions. So he kind of got a backdoor entry and observed what the Russians were doing to train. And they would do functional isometric contraction where you'd do every exercise to maximum effort. Okay. But it will be like you're pushing an immovable object, so you get weights. Let's say you do a deadlift. You do the deadlift, but you'd hold the deadlift position so you can't hold it any longer. What that does is it causes you to exercise but whilst contracting your muscles, and that closes the blood vessels, okay. And it stops blood flow, extra blood flow going to your muscles. And this actually forces your body, your muscle group in that area, to go into hypoxia state of lower than normal oxygen. And this triggers a whole cascade of different hormones being released. You. You produce more growth factors. And that intermittent hypoxia state also wakes up stem cells out circulation. You improve the circulation to that area, to that muscle, and you also improve the supply of myoglobin, which is the oxygen kind of store reservoir in that area.

Yeah, it's kind of similar to blood flow restriction training. And you get the same thing. You get the accumulation of lactic acid, the hypoxia, the increase in vascular endothelial growth factor to the brain, the brain drive, neurotrophic factor, the growth factors. You're talking about surge in testosterone, growth hormone, et cetera. And it's kind of funny because a long time ago, I interviewed this guy who had developed a program called Man Flow Yoga. And I'll hunt that one down and link to it in the show notes. But basically, it's kind of similar to what you're talking about. It's yoga with really long holds in a deep position. His name is Dean Polman. And I remember that I got interested in his program and the legitimacy of it when I was down at this health conference called Paleo fx. And they had like a fitness competition down there. And I did pretty well, but this one dude smoked me. And it was Dean. And I'm like, dude, what's your training program look like? He's like, well, I mostly just do yoga, but I do like really long isometric holds for everything. And I've tried his program out and sometimes still do it in the sauna. All my yoga books are like, on top of my sauna. Sometimes I just want to bring it in there with me and jam out on a new routine. And his routine, it sounds very much like what you're describing. You're holding for a much longer period of time, like, you know, two minutes plus compared to what you normally hold in a typical, say, yoga flow routine.

Yeah, exactly. You got it. And so when you do that, it's actually that type of yoga is just like wearing resistance bands. You know, it's like you're stretching and moving your body into positions where you're reducing the blood flow to those muscle groups naturally. So it's like literally like wearing resistance bands. The same, same concept, but they were doing it thousands of years ago. It's Incredible. Like, the difference it makes if you do yoga, like the mainstream way, which is like very flowy, where you move from one pose to the next. What it's like is like riding a bike with stabilizers on. If you really want to get good at riding the bike, take the stabilizers off, which means hold each pose to maximum effort, and then you really build strength and stamina and resilience. In fact, Bruce Lee did this type of exercise. That's why he was super strong and ripped. He did functional isometric training a lot. So going back to that like, and understanding that, it just blew my mind. And I started to read more into Pranayama. And if you look at Pranayama as well, it's a system of reduced breathing exercises. And it explained a lot why I was able to. To get better. Because when you have an autoimmune condition, quite often there's something that's happened or is happening in your environment that has caused you to have an overactive immune system.

Right. Almost like the cells are stuck in cell danger response mode due to. Due to spinning subconsciously in almost a sympathetic state, thus reducing everything from cellular metabolism to causing an influx of calcium into the cell, which. Which kind of affects the electrochemical balance across the membrane. Like, it's interesting how subconscious trauma or even subconscious negative thoughts or negative energy affect cellular function so dramatically.

And when you're in that sort of fight or flight mode, which I was in for a long time, I was so frustrated. I mean, I don't know if you've ever worked in a corporate head office, but it is just not a pleasant place to be horrible. You know, I'm always on flight. I'm triggered fight or flight mode. And what happens is you are actually hyperventilating and you start to breathe deeper and faster because your body is. Is actually trying to prepare for battle. And it therefore it thinks that you need more oxygen than you actually do because you're not doing any of that physical activity that demands that oxygen. So you get excess oxygen in the body. And what that does is it actually. It's weird, it's counterintuitive because it doesn't make sense really. But when you actually breathe deeper and harder, you actually prevent oxygen from going to where it needs to go, which is the tissue, the body tissue cells like the muscles, you mean, because you're.

Because you're breathing off carbon dioxide.

Yeah. So you're messing up the bore effect, which is what gets oxygen from the red blood cells and into the tissue cells where it needs to go so you need carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the healer. It's the prana. It is what gets oxygen to where it needs to go in the first place. And in Pranayama, if you look, the whole system, if you do it properly, is all about reducing your blood, your airflow and slowing your breathing right down. And that alone can actually stop autoimmune conditions. Just that alone can stop hypertension, type 2 diabetes and other like, chronic diseases.

Pharmaceutical companies don't want to hear that, Niraj. But you know, it is interesting because I didn't know that about Buteco, who of course is, you know, the inspiration for guys like say, Patrick McCown, who, you know, or what's the other guy's name? Doug Anders Olson, and a few of these other practitioners, including yourself, who really teach this idea of reduced frequency and reduce depth breathing. And I'm curious, have you ever messed around with any of the, like the carbon dioxide devices like the carbogen or. I don't know, there's even like a paper bag tactic, you know, that, that you can use. Proceed with caution to, to increase your CO2 tolerance. Or even like, you know that old school elevation training mask, you know, the one that makes you look like Bane from Batman, that, you know, it doesn't actually simulate altitude because it's not reducing the partial pressure of oxygen in the air, but it, it kind of creates almost like a dead space in front of you where you're breathing some of the carbon dioxide you exhale. Or I suppose you probably want a Covid mask. That's the one hidden benefit of the COVID mask. Everybody's like, you're breathing CO2, you're breathing CO2. I'm like, well, technically that might not be a bad thing.

And actually it could be beneficial for some people who are over breathers who naturally breathe too much. But there is a lot of other problems with mask mandates and they're not safe. And I mean, you're breathing in a.

Lot of your own germs coated with Teflon. Yeah, there's, there's some issues, I mean, well, depending on the type of mask you have.

So, yeah, so the going back to the roots. And if you look at Buteyko, he, he did a lecture. He did, actually did a lecture. And it's worth reading the first lecture that he gave where he proclaims to the world his, his method, his system. He talks to about yoga about 20 times in it and talks about how traditional yoga was a science of becoming extremely efficient using oxygen. And he talks then about how he observed, like in, in clinics, when you force somebody to hyperventilate, they. Their disease symptoms get worse and then as soon as you switch them to slow, reduced breathing, the symptoms reverse and, and they. And they get better. So he would sometimes do this like, it's called a hyperventilation provocation test, where you would like, force somebody to hyperventilate. So basically, deep breathing just for even a few minutes can actually raise somebody's high blood pressure up significantly. And it can also make them feel lightheaded. I mean, we just do it now, just a few minutes, you're gonna feel lightheaded and all weird. And it does make symptoms worse of disease. So. So why would high deep breathing be propagated by the media as being important is because we, we've been under an illusion. We've been told we need lots of oxygen and deep breathing is the way to get oxygen into the cells. It's absolutely not the truth because we need carbon dioxide. And this is. I'm so glad that you've got Patrick McEwen and all these people coming out there explaining all of this, because Buteyko, unfortunately, he got buried under a lot of controversy. A lot of people tried to silence him. And he went through a hell trying to get his message out there, even though he had so many research papers, studies backing him up. But what happened now recently, which is really interesting is, you know, Wim Hof came along and he blew open the whole, you know, world to power of breathing techniques. But Wim get something very wrong as well. And when I was on stage and I was going around talking with him.

Careful, man, he's gonna come at you with a beer bottle.

No, no, Wim and me are good buddies. He'll be cool with this. But what he gets wrong is to.

Well, you're like, you're like a Wim HOF certified instructor, aren't you?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm good as I did a lot of work with him in the early days, so. But what is. Is the mantra of breathe more motherf cker is there's a problem with that, actually. It's not about breathing more, it's about breathing less. And if you look at the Wim Hof method.

Yeah, what it, what it.

The way it works is it actually makes you more efficient if you do it properly and you don't. And if you don't, just focus on the hyperventilation part. Because the most important part of the Wim Hof method is the breath retention. The hyperventilation part is Just to allow you to trick you into being able to hold your breath for longer periods of time. When you do that, you exercise the mitochondria, okay. And you actually train them to be more efficient using oxygen. Also, when you hold your breath for that long period of time, you create this intermittent hypoxic state. What you're doing is you're creating a lower than normal oxygen level, which makes your body kind of freak out a bit and go, oh, I need to prepare for having less oxygen. Right. So what it does, it produces more red blood cells, you get better vascularization, you get capillaries forming and blood vessels go around to make you more efficient at using less oxygen.

Yeah.

So you adapt to low oxygen now.

Theoretically. By the way, though, sorry to interrupt, but couldn't you. Couldn't you kind of like do, let's say like a typical Wim Hof breath up? And instead of like a fully in letting go. Fully in letting go, couldn't you do a little bit more of like a fully in letting go, Fully in letting go? If you did a breath up like that, you would be reducing or blowing off. Well, I guess you'd still be blowing off CO2.

Yeah, that is the goal. The goal is to get rid of temporarily to get rid of CO2 because then it allows you to hold your breath for longer. And people should not mistake that for normal breathing. This is another big problem that people make with breath work is they. So you got Rebirth, you got Holotropic, and you got Wim Hof where you're doing a lot of hyperventilation. Right. For a part of it. Now, the big mistake is when you say that that's normal breathing. And this is what Buteyko Buteyko is all about. Normal breathing. Yoga and Pranayama is a sequence of different techniques, but in Pranayama, there's also a technique for normal breathing. Okay, there's advice for that. And you should not mistake hyperventilation breathwork as normal breathing. And that's where the problem has happened and the misconceptions happened in the whole breathwork world is when people are going around saying deep breathing is going to make you immortal or whatnot, right? When it's not true. The technique is there, designed for a short period of time. So 20, 30 fast breaths like that are not going to do any, any harm, permanent damage to your, your nervous system. If you do it for say two hours or an hour, or if it becomes a chronic habit where you're constantly breathing a faster rate than you normally should, you're going to cause nervous system damage. You're going to look, you're going to cause low body tissue oxygenation. You're going to have. You're going to literally go nuts. You're going to go mad because you're not getting oxygen to the brain. And you'll see very anxious, jittery, panicky people. They tend to hyperventilate a lot as well.

Arguably, you know, similar to exercise that that brief stimulus to the sympathetic nervous system can be effective. You know, for example, right before you're going to go jump in an ice bath to warm the body and to kind of like activate yourself to be ready for that or, you know, pre workout or something where you want to hype yourself up and almost activate yourself sympathetically, there's some benefit to it, right?

So what hyperventilation can do when you breathe in twice the length of time as you breathe out, so you double your inhale time, right? What happens is, so you're forced in the inhale, you actually produce adrenaline, okay? You produce adrenaline and heat. You create thermogenesis. So in pranayama. So the WIM HOF method in pranayama is a combination of bhastrika, which is this fast, rhythmic breathing, followed by nishesha richaka, which is the breath retention beyond the comfort zone, all right, where you're holding your breath till maximum effort. And that's basically what the WIM HOF method is. And it's just an ancient pranayama technique. Tummo was another technique similar in the way it works, but ultimately it's about thermogenesis producing heat in the body. Okay. And the way you do the WIM HOF method, actually you breathe in twice the length of time as you breathe out. And you can use your mouth as well. Because when you, if you're in like very cold temperatures, like 20 degree minus 20 degrees, it's really hard to breathe through your nose. Okay? The correct way is actually to breathe through your nose, but for generating heat, you actually, if you breathe through your mouth, you're going to produce more heat, more fire. Because when you breathe through your mouth, you also stimulate sympathetic receptors. When you breathe through your nose, you stimulate the parasympathetic in the lower lungs. So the WIM HOF method is really good for generating heat in the body and preparing yourself for ice baths. But it can in some people, make them more anxious, more jittery, especially the fiery types, the Pitta types.

Now help me wrap my head around this real quick because, you know, when I was Demonstrating what theoretically might be a better form of WIM hof. You didn't want to amp yourself up so much. Those long breath outs. If you're saying that with WIM Hof you're breathing in for twice as long as you breathe out, wouldn't that theoretically cause you to retain CO2?

You're still breathing at a much faster rate. Right. So you're expelling a lot more CO2 than you normally would.

It's the breath rate and the breath depth that matter. Whereas I know for something like Buteyko breathing, if I want to do it and I'm going for a walk, for example, I breathe in as light as I can for about two, plug my nose, hold briefly, breathe out for about two. And it's almost like I'm on the fringe of really wanting to take a breath because I'm not quite breathing deeply enough and my exhales are longer than my inhales. And so that's a little bit more like a. In pinch the nose, hold out, 2, 3, 4. But it's very kind of like light and thus that's allowing me to retain some amount of CO2 and get the parasympathetic response because my breath is not just quite as deep and frequent as something like a WIM hof.

So when you do the Buteyko style breathing, you actually slowing the breathing rate right down to the point where you would also do complete reduced breathing, where you actually would do anaerobic exercise, you'd hold your nose, walk around the room. You know, anaerobic exercise is a big part of Buteyko method, which is basically yoga. Traditional yoga is an anaerobic exercise, you know, and a lot of the yoga techniques were done, were supposed to be done or the asanas where you produce a brief period of hypoxia in the body, which is basically anaerobic exercise, you know, so there's a lot of benefits.

Right, which, which when paired with that isometric tactic you talked about, really amplifies the, the hypoxic aspect of it.

Yeah. So that's why like I think going back to the traditional wisdom and looking at the system and also seeing in Ayurveda, you know, where you, you don't just put one size fits all approaches to, to techniques, so there's a place for everything. But you have to know when's the right place. As a pharmacist, I'm all about compliance. Get to making sure people do the things, but also making sure it's the right indication for the, for the issue. So you know, like people who are already very adrenalized, very high energy, you know, fiery, they don't always do that well. And we see this in our 7 Breath community from doing things like the Wim Hof method or rebirthing or holotropic. It's too intense for them and they prefer the slower techniques that we have. In fact what we've done in Soma breath is much more like.

That sounds, that sounds like my wife. I, I actually like your, your holotropic routines because, because honestly like the coolest thing about them, especially the 60 minute routine, you know, because I have, I have you know inhaled DMT before and you know, you use the DMT vape pen and done the full DMT experience and I can get extremely close to how I feel with that experience by simply get. Well, it's about the last 10 minutes or so. Like I think the final two breath holds of that 60 minute routine I get pretty dang deep and I, I did it once in the, in the hyperbaric chamber and the breath holds were just out of sight. I mean like seven, eight minutes long on the exhale towards the end. Not that I recommend this to. There's, there's some clotting risk, et cetera. Proceed at your own risk. I'm not a doctor but I have done a little bit of breathwork practice in the hyperbaric and once did that one hour routine and it is nuts how long your breath lasts. I prefer to do it in the sauna. But that actually it's interesting. Well, for a couple of reasons. I wanted to ask you if you've ever done any breath work in the hyperbaric. I'll ask you what else I wanted to ask you briefly but have you ever used a hyperbaric much or combined it with breath work?

I have done hyperbaric before and I never did breath work in it because you're breathing in pure oxygen and that's a. There's a problem with that. So you actually want to slow your breathing down during that time in my opinion. But there is a very interesting study that came out about hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

This is actually the other thing I wanted to ask you about. If we were talking about the same study you talk about the telomere one. Yeah, yeah.

Tell people what that was really, really profound. Again this backs up this Nishesha Richaka technique Wim HOF method. Also what we do with our Soma Awakening technique which is basically Nishaa chakra with music but basically this is one of the most profound new studies to emerge because it's misleading. They're saying hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length and decreases immunescence in isolated blood cells. Basically what that means is it increases telomere lengths, which is to do with your. It's like your bio clock. It tells you, you know, your. Your biological age, basically.

Right. Not, Not. Not the gold standard, but still a pretty decent. Decent metric. Yeah, it's a decent biomarker. I mean, granted, there's. There's some issues just because it's. It's simply a measurement of, I believe, the white blood cell telomere length and not necessarily a full body analysis, but. But gives you. It gives you some clues.

So it's something we can go by. And then there's a decrease in dying cells, aging cells being created. So what's misleading about it is because they followed a specific protocol, which means they give very high oxygen followed by low oxygen. Okay. So several minutes of very high oxygen followed by low oxygen. What they said was that the best way to affect the telomere length and. And even activate stem cells. They talked about activating stem cells is when you give low, basically normal or higher than normal oxygen followed by very low oxygen, which is actually ihht, intimate hyperoxic hypoxic training. And there's machines that do this as well. And what it does is it confuses the body a little bit because that fluctuation in oxygen concentration makes your body think that you're running out of oxygen. So we must prepare. Okay. So it creates a temporary feeling of going into a very low oxygen environment. But with this study, what they did was they were like, oh, it's dangerous to. To reduce oxygen that much systemically, which I don't agree with. But so what they were saying was what we should do is give very high oxygen through hyperbaric oxygen therapy followed by normal oxygen. So that's what they did.

Yeah. Did you. Did you read the paper? Because they did. They were doing 90 minutes in the HBOT, but every five minutes they were doing hypoxic. So it was. So you would actually, if you own a hyperbaric chamber, and I actually haven't really done this yet, but you could theoretically get, like. You can either have like a. Like a CO2 tank, or I also have this unit that I turn on called a live O2. And it allows you to, with the flip of a switch, go from hyperoxia to hypoxia. I have it out by my exercise bike in the Garage. And so I can do that. That's called exercise with oxygen therapy. But I could theoretically like talk to that company and have them ship me an extra unit, use that next to my hyperbaric chamber. And so I can literally have a switch inside the chamber that allows me to go hypoxic and then also hyperoxic.

Wow.

You could theoretically simulate this study. But yeah, most people sit in a hyperbaric and just do full oxygen the whole time, including myself. Admittedly I haven't pulled the trigger yet on kind of changing out the oxygen tank next to my hyperbaric session. And part of it is I'm getting the hyperoxic hypoxic training with that unit that I have in my gym also. But yeah, it's super interesting that a lot of people see that study. It's like hyperbaric oxygen makes you live longer and really, no, it's like hyperoxic hypoxic intermittent training could make you live longer or at least decrease immunosenescence in isolated blood cells.

And the thing with that machine as well, it costs like 50 to 100 grand just for a three month course. So hardly anybody can afford it.

You mean the hyperbaric.

The hyperbaric. The machines that these guys tested in.

Israel, yeah, they had like the hard shell, high atmospheric pressure. Like I have a home soft unit. I think it was 6 or 7k. I want to say it only goes to 1.4 atmospheres. And the nicer ones go to like about I think almost two and a half. But yeah, it is interesting. I'm glad you commented on that study. I think that'll get a lot of people thinking. I know we have a lot of hyperbaric practitioners who listen in. So if you guys have some ideas or some contributions regarding this thought pattern that we're on, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Niraj2 that's N I R A J, the number two. And I'd love to hear Yalls thoughts on this. Niraj, you talked about the sauna, which is how we met. So I know you do breath work in the sauna. We talked a bit about hyperbaric. But do you, you know, we have an audience who sometimes likes to know a little bit about the, you know, the ancient wisdom and then also the, some of the modern science. Do you ever combine anything else, whether quantification or you know, photobiomodulation, like red light therapy or anything else like that with your, with your breath work?

I think all of those things are great additions for sure. You know, especially the red light has so much compelling evidence. I'm pretty simple. I, I just go for what's available in, in the area. I live on an island in the middle of Thailand, so we don't have, don't have too much available here. But it's getting better. We got some amazing like extremely hot Russian banya style sauna with very, very cold ice bath. You know, like goes down pretty, pretty cold. So we do that. I'm not really, I haven't gone too deep into gadgets. I'm. I've just realized that actually for me to be compliant and to stick to things, just simplicity is, is key. Keep things simple. And you know, like these machines, they cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Right? So yeah, what, what's really interesting is that we, from our, our courses and just anecdotally right now, right now we're actually in talks with the University of Copenhagen, super potentially do a whole study on this. But I believe with our breathing technique based on Nishesha Richaka, we're mimicking already this IHT training which already has, you know, clinical studies done. And I believe that we are because I'll give you one example. We had this one guy who has the very rare form of Ms. Where he couldn't even pick up his grandson who was like six months old.

Oh geez.

Yeah, he couldn't even throw his a ball over his head. And he literally just did our 21 days. And he for six months did our 22 minute session every day. You know, the one that you like as well. And he came back and he was picking up his grandson for the first time and he was throwing balls over his head to his dog. And then he went to get studies done because his doctors didn't believe him. And they said your muscle tissue is growing back. So he was just blown away. And this was just from doing that one breathing technique. So I believe we're mimicking what they're doing these, this hyperbaric oxygen therapy and this IHT just with the breath retention and it makes, it makes perfect sense because you're breathing at a faster rate than normal for a few minutes. That's the hyperbaric part. And what happens when you do that is also you raise your blood pressure. Okay. So your blood vessels contract, oxygen causes contraction, vasocontraction. So naturally you actually create like a hyperbaric state in the body because you increase the pressure of oxygen. Then you followed by a period of very low oxygen. By holding your breath, oxygen levels go right down and that creates the intermittent.

Hypoxic part, especially the breath hold on the exhale.

Exactly. And so that whole system is already doing what this machines are doing. And that probably explains why we're getting so many amazing transformations. Anecdotal transformations.

Yeah, I love that. You know. You know, one of the reasons I asked about the red light therapy was because, you know, red and near infrared light, to a certain extent that gets absorbed by, by cytochrome C oxidase, which is one of the units in your, your mitochondrial respiratory chain and then it produces nitric oxide. And so you can get some nitric oxide produced and sometimes I can actually like displace oxygen and can create almost like something that simulates a little bit of a hypoxic effect as well. And yeah, there's some interesting, interesting corollaries. That's actually why I like to do the breath work in the sauna because I use an infrared and I flip on the red near infrared light that I have in the sauna, then I can lay under that while I'm doing the breath work. So I'm getting my cytochrome C oxidase triggered at the same time doing my breath work, getting the surgeon nitric oxide. And you know, it's kind of a cool way to do the breath work. Come out the light and of course the heat. So not that you can't do it laying in your living room, you don't need a bunch of these fancy toys. But I just want to comment on that for the people who like to geek out.

But you see some people, I would say in the sauna, they're going to get too hot because you generate a lot of heat. You can handle it.

You can, yeah, proceed it, you do it a few times outside the sauna first. It's, see what it's like. Actually, you know, it's kind of funny when I do it now outside of the sauna, it, it, it's super duper enjoyable because there's a lot less of the, the kind of the suck factor, you know, because as you get towards the end of that hour long one, like you're, you're working if, if you're doing it right, like you're working when you're, when you, when you really get.

Going in the one in Thailand, they, their temperatures go over 100 degree. Remember in Estonia how hot it was? It was like 100 degrees. It was insane. So it's really hard to do any kind of breathing. But what I love is the hummingbird. So a big part of our training is all about humming and using the humming as part of our routine as well. When you hum, basically when you chant aum and you put the emphasis on the mmm sound and you feel that vibration in between your eyes, what happens is you stimulate the paras, nasal sinuses, and these is this is the area where nitric oxide is produced. Right. And you produce seven times the amount from normal nasal breathing, because nasal breathing is the only way really to produce the nitric oxide. So when you hum and you stimulate that area so it's like when you're stimulating your third eye, basically, if you put your attention to the. To the middle of the eyes, that feels incredible. In the sauna, I highly recommend, like, just go into sauna and just do humming.

I've done that, but I haven't really focused on the third eye when I've done it. But that. That's just. You have your eyes closed.

Yeah. Keep your eyes closed and just imagine you're vibrating the center between your eyes. Right. And just. For as long as you can. Just really long hums and just do that over and over again.

All right, cool. I'm in the sauna tomorrow. I'm going to try this.

I know you like your CBD gummies and stuff as well. Right. You could even take that to expand the consciousness even more and just go into a trip of your own creation in the sauna with humming is so good. And you produce so much of the nitric oxide.

Yeah. CBD makes me tired, probably because I use it before sleep. So I think my body almost associates it with going to bed. So I don't do much cbd, but I use lately when I do breath work probably. I don't want to throw too many things out there because we could talk about niacin and beets and all sorts of things that could be helpful for breath work, but particularly when it comes to altered states of consciousness and really getting into that state during breath work in a much deeper fashion. Aside from just the essential oils that I use in the sauna, and I typically use a few of the heart openers or the sacral plexus or the kind of like the chakra ones from what's it called? Essential oil wizardry. Dr. Nick, who's been on my show before, he has some really, really nice blends that go well with breath work or with plant medicine. But then the two things I've been using lately are. I got these. These things called Sananga eye drops. They're using the Amazon for things like clarity and vision and lucid Dreaming and heightened sensory perception and they burn like hell. But you put them in your eyes and, and they burn, burn, burn for like two minutes. And I'll do that about five minutes before and then I'll snort either hoppe or the, the zen spray from Dr. John Laurence, who I've interviewed on the podcast before. It's basically like peppermint rosemary, a bunch of essential oils that you spray up your nose, but it has hoppe and oxytocin in it as well.

So. Glad you mentioned happy.

Yeah, and that's, that's amazing pre breath work. I mean it also really heats you up so the sonic gets even more warm. But I, I really like that the eye drops and the nasal spray and then drop in and, and it's, it's, it's pretty, pretty epic.

Wow. Amazing. Well, for, I mean I, I love happy. Like, you know, it's the, the little bit of nicotine, low dose nicotine. Have you seen the studies on low dose nicotine for ulcerative colitis, for Alzheimer's, dementia?

Oh yeah.

Fascinating.

Yeah, even, even mitochondria, the, the P450UP regulation. So there's there's kind of a weight loss effect, you know, so there's something to the skinny cigarette smoker, obviously heavily addictive. There's a little bit of a dopaminergic response as well where you get a little bit dopamine desensitized. So you gotta be super careful because when you combine addiction with a need for something to actually feel good or a decreased enjoyment of activities like sex or food or something like that, unless you're actually on said compound, you need to be careful with it. But I mean, if, you know, some people want all these fancy routines to whatever, get them off nicotine or whatever. But I, I, I, I personally, even though I think a lot of that stuff works, sometimes you just got to use the jocko approach and tell yourself, hey, I, I only do this before breath work. I don't do it at any other times. And just not.

Good point.

Take it. A couple other quick questions that, that I had for you. The, the control pause time, you know, we briefly went over that, but it was, it was such a big part of this somafit program, this new program that you have. And my time went from 27 seconds at the beginning and I got up to 54 by the end of the eighth day and that was my morning measurement. And we pretty strictly followed the whole course. And then this hold time indicates that I would have increased carbon dioxide tolerance.

Right, yes, you got it. That's a big part. And better efficiency.

But it's not like a deep breath in and a deep breath out. This control pause tactic at your. Well, what can you explain the importance of it and, and how to do it real quick?

Okay. Yeah, so I, I always love to go back to the original, like, as much as possible, the original voice of the person who came up with the, the method. So Buteyko, again, he's the one who developed this control pause as a measurement. In fact, it was used medically by other people as well. But he really pushed it as a, as a quick way to judge somebody's state of health. And in, in yoga, the original traditional yoga, you know, breath retention time, your ability to hold your breath is really part of, you know, the whole system as well. And I'll explain to you the science why that makes sense as well in a moment. But Buteyko was all about low body tissue oxygenation being the cause of most diseases. So this is where if you don't have proper oxygenation of your muscles, your organs, your, you know, your body tissue, that's when disease creeps in, you know, and we know scientifically through the studies that cancers definitely exacerbated by low tissue oxygenation and, you know, so is dementia, all these, like, degenerative diseases. The cells die basically if they're not getting oxygen. So if you can hold your breath for a certain length of time, and for Tokyo said between 20 and 40 seconds, is that kind of average? It's kind of satisfactory below 20 seconds and less. What he observed was that people who are like on their deathbed, they will have pause time of like five seconds. What that pause time means is when you just take a normal inhale and exhale, full exhale, and you hold your nose and hold your breath. It's that length of time before the first signs of stress. So where you get that first urge, big urge to breathe, that's when you, you inhale and you count your time up until that point. So, you know, most average people going to be between 20 and 40 seconds. Okay. But if you train yourself to become very efficient using oxygen, you will dramatically and pretty quickly increase that time.

Oh yeah, it's super quick.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mine was like a few seconds every day. It would go up occasionally a couple times during the course. We did it while we were walking just to kind of see based on number of steps, you could take on the exhale, which is kind of a cool practice too, to do it while you're moving Obviously the hold time is going to be a lot shorter. But yeah, I love how you start off the actual course, teach people how to do that because it gave us a cool metric. We would just wake up in the morning and we did it first thing so we didn't want to forget. So I'd literally just go into my boys room at 6:30. You know, usually I get up around 5 or so. So I'd do my morning routine then come in and grab them and we'd just sit on the floor and do it right away. I think they, well they're 13. They were doing, I think they were kind of like in the low 20s and got up to the, like the low 40s over, over the eight days. So. Which is great. You know, I love that I can see my children learning the importance of carbon dioxide tolerance. And they use that, they use it when they're, you know, the, the type of breathwork routines they've learned. They use it in the cold pool. They use it when they're shooting their bows. They use it if they get hurt. So there's, there's so many, so many benefits. No, I, I'm, I'm super intrigued by this because I see during the course that some of the videos from it are coming from clinics. Like I've never been to one. But what happens at those live clinics that you do, like in, in Thailand for example?

Yeah, we have, we do, we were doing until the, this crazy situation in the world happened. We were doing like retreats and we were actually having, even in Bali right now we have a whole SOMA resort center being developed by one of our instructors. Should be ready in November. But we have a place here, a center here where we do our retreats. These are like some of the most for me is the most fun thing to do. But super profound transformations happen here. So, so we teach people all of the stuff that you, you'd learn in the, you know, from our online courses. But we, what we do is we train people to become instructors of these techniques themselves. So that's generally what we've been doing with our retreats. And then those instructors go out and then they go out into the world and they will have their own clinics and centers where they would use our techniques to help people. But we would take people through some very profound breath work experiences, you know, like, and, but you have to prepare people to go that deep with breathwork where you're using a lot of fast rhythmic breathing, a lot of body activation where you're engaging the entire body with the breath. In order to take people into these very profound auto states, you have to prepare the person first. So we start very slow and we build people's breath hold times up to the point they can handle very intense breathing techniques. And then we go super deep. You know, some people can do it already, you know, they're fine, but others need a bit more conditioning. That's why we have the breath fit course. It's Soma Breath fit, by the way we call it. And the reason why we have that course is.

I was calling it Soma fit, wasn't I? Yeah, somewhat breath fit. Yeah.

So breath fit. And the reason why we call it that is why we created this course is because so many people have bad breathing habits. And what that means is that they cannot handle even a few minutes of hyperventilation. And in order to do the higher yogic rituals, the higher, the stuff that takes you into a whole other dimension, you know, which you've done yourself in the sauna of all places, you need to be prepared first. So, so that's, that's why we've done it in a step by step fashion. One of the problems that you get is when you're thrown into these very intense breathing practices without proper preparation, people can go off feeling very ungrounded and, you know, can actually destroy the nervous system. Oxygen is very powerful stuff. We have to treat it with a lot of respect. That's one of the main things like we really put into our instructors is being very mindful about the breath and oxygen and how beneficial carbon monoxide really is. Actually what we also talk about a lot is the wisdom from Pranayama. And if you look at Pranayama, it was developed by studying animals in nature. You know, part of it was developed by studying animals in nature. And animals that have very, very slow breathing rates tend to live longer and have less diseases as well. So like elephants and turtles, they have very slow breathing rates, like two to four breaths a minute. Whales, they actually have less than one breath per minute breath rates. And they can hold their breath for like two hours at a time. Animals that don't live a long time, like rats and mice, they have very, very fast breathing rates, up to 150 breaths per minute. Okay. And they only live like one year.

Yeah, except a few of them, interestingly, that do have high carbon dioxide tolerance. Like, like there's that naked mole rat. You know, it's not a size thing because, because the bowhead whale is the same way. But yeah, they're, they're, they're Known for, for their long lived, I guess, time compared to, you know, relative to many other rodents. And, you know, they have really high carbon dioxide tolerance. They've got relatively low body temperature. And then there's one other thing. I think it's their, their protein repair mechanisms. Like, like, they have really good protein folding mechanisms that allow for enhanced DNA repair. Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating how, how there's a few species that have kind of cracked the code on living a long time despite having what might be a high metabolism.

Yeah. And very slow breathing. They. They slow, really, they breathe very slowly and they can hold their breath for like 18 minutes at a time. These naked mole. And they live primarily underground in a hypoxic environment where it's rich in CO2. Humans, we have the conscious ability to control the rate of our breath, and we can adapt to a lower oxygen environment where we can handle high amounts of carbon dioxide. This improves body tissue oxygenation. And therefore the net result of this is you prevent oxidation, you know, this rusting effect in the body from not being adapted to oxygen properly, and therefore you then improve your lifespans. That's. That's the theory behind all of this. And it's backed up by, like, what Buteyko has done. All this new evidence coming out from Israel is backing this up with the hyperbaric, you know, and the IHT studies that are out there. So what I've done with Soma breath and what we teach in our retreats and our events is we teach people a fun way to enjoy all of these techniques and this wisdom of the past with the music, the music adds a huge dimension to it. And then there's the therapeutic approach to this as well, because when you can hold your breath for a certain period of time, it also acts like a defrag switch for the mind. And when you hold your breath after the exhale, it's like pressing pause on your life itself. Okay. Because life is just a series of inhales and exhales. And when you press pause on the breath after the exo, you basically expire. It's like pressing stop on life for a moment, a pause. And when you can expand that pause and that ability to go deep into that pause, you go into the most profound meditative states.

Oh, yeah.

That there are.

Yeah.

It's just incredible.

You know, it's kind of one of those times still type of phenomenons I've experienced that many times. And it's just, it's so special. And, you know, I think we're seeing a big surge of interest in breathwork practices. I think many people have, during COVID for example, adopted that as a form of stress control. I think that many people, though, still resist truly adopting breathwork as something they do daily because they can, you know, supplement or pop a pill or figure out how to get themselves into that state in some other way. You know, I'm stressed. I'll have a glass of wine or take a hit on this vape pen, because sitting on the floor doing four, eight for two minutes sounds pretty laborious. But, man, once you adopt it like this stuff, this is why I wanted to get you on the show. Just because it's so, so special when you are able to introduce that into your physical, your mental, and your spiritual practice. And again, Niraj, I love your flavor, like the style of breathwork that you do, which is why I've had you on the show a couple of times. And I know, I know we're running short on time, but I just, you know, I want to tell people that the 21 day course is obviously a little hefty, some heavy lifting there, but it's doable. You know, it's. It's totally doable. You know, what I do is just make sure I've got a good three weeks where I'm at home and, you know, have an extra few minutes each day to practice it, you know, for example, with my boys. The second time I did it, and it works just fine. Honestly, the way that I do it in the Raj is when I do one of your breathwork courses, because a lot of times I'll work out twice a day. I'll do kind of like a walk or yoga or sauna or something like that in the morning and then hit the kettlebells or lift some weights or something like that in the afternoon or the early evening. All I do is I'll just take one of those times. I'd normally work out and do the breathwork session instead. And it works just fine.

And actually, exercise is so important to this. So you can do all the reduced breathing techniques in the world, right? But if you're not exercising, you're not going to build calm doxos tolerance. And it needs to be that high intensity exercise where you're pushing yourself intensely for short period. What that does is it creates a lot of carbon dioxide and it basically makes you adapt to more carbon dioxide. That's the key to all of this, carbon dioxide tolerance. So intense exercise is super important and all the stuff you talk about with diet, nutrition, super important. Because when you got Your diet in check, you don't over breathe. Over breathing is actually quite often triggered by too much heavy processed foods. And actually protein based foods can also make you breathe faster than you normally need to. So you got it. And that's why knowing who you are, what's your right body type according to Vedic system Ayurvedic system is really important because then you know that you shouldn't overeat in certain types of foods or you can eat these foods.

It's like free diving. You know I took a freediving course and pretty much like I would say the top three things you could do to increase your breath hold when free diving is no coffee. Right so or anything stimulant wise so that your respiratory rate or your metabolic rate is not faster. B dairy which thickens the mucus like no dairy. And you could say some of the same things for many so called acidic foods like alcohol or red meat. But dairy was a biggie. And then three have a high blood level of ketones. So some amount of starch and sugar mitigation simply because ketones are very, very useful as an energy source in a hypoxic state. And so all those same strategies could have crossover to breath work. Although I got to admit I'm still going to have a rib eye steak after I do my breath work in the sauna and take a cold shower.

That's, that's completely fine. It's just not overeating. If you, if you overeat that's when you start to hyperventilate, start breathing too fast. But if you eat like till you're not full like 20% full. Yeah then, then you're less likely to get into that hyperventilation zone. So enjoying a steak. And I know that you probably do intermittent fasting and fasting so beneficial like.

The holotropic routine, best time that 60 minute routine. Do not do it like in the evening after dinner before you go to bed. For me that Sunday morning fasted that I do that one.

Oh and yeah any type of intense breath retention type stuff like you know, if you're doing WIM HOF or even our stuff. Do not do it after eating food because when you hold your breath after a certain point you start to stimulate the peristaltic movement. Actually it's a way to cure constipation. If you hold, if you're feeling constipated, you haven't got full belly but you're feeling constipated. If you hold your nose and walk around the room, breathe out Fully hold your nose, walk around the room till you start to feel flush. You need to breathe. Do that a few times. A few reps of that, not only will you unblock your nose, but you also move the peristalsis and contractions and you'll start to actually move the bowels and be able to go to the toilet. It's crazy way of curing constipation, but it works. That's why you never do any intense breath work after a heavy meal. It really messes up the system.

That other one you show, then we got to go pretty soon. But that other one that you show in the Sum of breath program, it's like the crow where you kind of like bent over, sucking down and swallowing air. It's so funny because my boys just laugh like crazy when we were practicing it because I always toot because the air just goes right through you and it's. It's super weird. But that, that one also works well, like if you're, if you're going to the bathroom, like if you do that right over the toilet, it's like the air just pushes everything out.

It's true.

Crazy. Yeah.

And actually, have you done ozone therapy?

Yeah, I actually just had a glass of ozone water before this podcast.

Oh, really? So have you tried the rectal ozone therapy?

Yeah, I have a whole ozone generator. I like to drink it better, but yeah, I have. I do have the ozone bags and I've done the rectal ozone. Why, why do you ask it, sir?

So ozone. Okay. When you administer it rectally, that's going to be one of the best ways of administering. And I've been doing sessions actually here. But the ozone is a very powerful antioxidant. Oxygen itself is a very powerful antioxidant. And when you put the ozone tube up your bum rectally, firstly, anaerobic bacteria are wiped out. The ozone just kills anaerobic bacteria. And that's usually the bad bacteria in the gut is the anaerobic bacteria. Right. So they hate oxygen. But also the lining of the gut is very poorly oxygenated. So when you get a little bit of oxygen in there, it can actually be beneficial to healing, repairing the gut. If you look at our kaki mudra technique, what you're doing, and it's not mine at all, it comes from pranayama. I just have revived it because people didn't really understand why you do this technique. But what you're doing is you're drinking air into the bowels and getting that oxygen into the stomach first. And Then if you do these certain yogic postures and even sun salutations, arguably is just a system of getting air into the bowels. What happens is you're getting that oxygen into the small intestines and colon and you're killing bad bacteria and actually oxygenate in the bowels. So it helps it to become healthy, kills disease. And in ayurvedic system, most diseases emerge from the gut and having a healthy microbiome is, is essential. That's why there's so many fermented foods in, in the ayurvedic system.

Yeah. Well, you're inspiring. Maybe I'll have to get back on the, on the rectal insufflation of ozone bandwagon. There's, there's also a guy, one of my other former podcast guests, Ian Mitchell, just developed like ozonated soft gel capsules. You could probably just use that almost like a suppository if you didn't have an ozone generator.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So, yeah, so ozone's got so many good, you know, results from it. So. But you can do it naturally with just swallowing air, drinking air, which is what we teach you in the breath fit course.

Yeah, that's a fun one. That's called the Crow, right? I think.

Yeah, the Crow Mudra.

Well, this is just fascinating. I'm going to link to all your courses, Niraj. So for those of you listening in, it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Niraj2n I R A J the number two. And I'll link to his eight day course and his 21 day course, my original podcast with him. So many other breathwork podcasts that I've done that study on hyperbaric oxygen therapy if anyone wants to go geek out on that. So check out the show notes and leave your comments, your questions and your feedback or your own breathwork tips or conundrums as well. And I'll be happy to review those. I love to read the comments. So, so leave me some comments and, and Niraj and I will go check out what you guys have to say. In the meantime, Niraj, thanks so much for coming on the show. I gotta, I gotta just fly to Thailand sometime and, you know, take a nap on the plane and wake up and do a course with you guys that'll be a ton of fun.

Oh, I want to give you a big props as well because we are now working with a Canadian psychedelic therapy company called I Stream. Kelsey. Do you know Kelsey? Okay, she, she's a, she came from some mastermind group that you're a part of that you recommended me to.

Okay, I. I know who you're talking about. It was Kelsey Ramsden.

That's it.

Yeah. Yeah. David Rabin, the guy who developed the Apollo Neuro like, wearable device that. That makes that. That. That audio frequency that shifts you into different states, which actually, that's another cool thing to combine with breathwork. That's a rabbit hole. But, yeah, I think I connected her to David Rabin and I think you as well. I think there was a connection there regarding her study with mindcare. So anyways, we're probably boring people now.

Yeah, I know. But it's amazing.

That's cool you guys are doing that.

Can be used for therapy. Yeah. And there's so many different use. So versatile, from your health to your mind and spirit as well. So it's been. It's an honor working on these things. Thank you so much.

Dude, keep doing what you're doing. And, you know, I'll always, always try any of the new courses you come out with. And yeah, I absolutely feel like discovering you is a real gift for me and my family and a lot of my audience members as well. So keep doing what you're doing, and I'll put all the show notes again@bengridge fitness.com 2. That's bengreedful fitness.com N I R A J2 Niraj. I'll catch you on the flip side, man.

Awesome, brother. Cheers.

All right, folks, well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfield Fitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.