Breathing Hacks, Supercharge Your Running Performance | Kasper Van Der Meulen

Sometimes it's like a hybrid of one step in through the nose, one step in through the mouth, two steps in through the mouth. Sounds complicated, but if you train, it's like, and it's in line with your step count. So now you can get into almost like a trance-like state where all of your mental bandwidth goes to simply coordinating your legs with your breath. Athletes, especially runners, the most important thing I think is to use breath to gain a deeper body awareness and a higher ability to gauge where you are at in relation to your maximum, to your minimum, like to all these different levels. Your breath is immediately linked to the state of your nervous system. Out of breath means out of control of breath, which means that you're heaving on the inhale. So real out of breathness. So this is kind of like you still have this clear cycle and real out of breath like that, which you generally only see over the finish line because it Whoever is already there before the finish line generally doesn't make it to the finish line, right?

Hello there, I'm recording this podcast right after running the Berlin Marathon. If you haven't seen the recap video of that yet, take a look at the YouTube channel. Absolutely had a blast running over there. It was a roller coaster of an event, several highs and lows. Had a lot of fun meeting several community members from the Personal Best Program, the Extra Mileage Community, and The PATH Projects group out there. So for anyone who came out, thank you, and looking forward to meeting many more of you in some of the upcoming events over here. My name is Floris Geerman. On this podcast, The Extra Mile Show, I host conversations with different experts on ways to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete. Today's guest is a breathwork biohacker. He's a fellow Dutchman, and his name is Casper van der Meulen. He really is an expert in the breath. He has been teaching individuals on this topic, and also different breathwork instructors, uh, will take a deep dive into ways to optimize your breathing in training, in racing, and in daily life. And I learned several different things as well that I'm going to be applying in my own training and daily life as well. I thought this was super fascinating, and I hope you enjoyed this conversation too. This episode was brought to you by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink mix that has everything that you need and nothing that you don't. So there's plenty of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and no sugar. I typically start my day drinking a large glass of water of about 500 milliliters, so half a liter, and I add one package of LMNT. It helps me rehydrate, it helps me with my focus and with my physical performance. Increasing my electrolyte intake has made a noticeable difference in my energy levels. No more brain fog and improved quality of sleep. Sometimes after harder or longer workouts, I would get a brain fog or like a headache in the morning, and this no longer happens either. Element has a no BS, no questions asked return policy, so you can try it for an unlimited amount of time, and if you don't like it, you can ask for your money back. You can even keep the box. That's how confident they are that you will love it. Go to drinkelement.com/flow to get a free sample pack of 8 flavors with any order. This offer can be used multiple times. That is drinkelementi.com/flow. F-L-O. See also the link in the description. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Casper. The breath is so powerful. I've been looking at your work for many years already, and I see you really as an expert on the topic of the breath. And so I think there's quite some people who might not have the full understanding of what your focus of expertise is. Like, you're— you guide people through breathwork sessions. You help people improve significantly in various areas of their life through the breath. Can you tell a little bit more, like, how did you get into this field and what is it that you do on a daily basis here?

On a daily basis, it's fairly boring, but, um, no, I spend a lot of time teaching breath to all kinds of people. So what I like about it is that it doesn't require me to necessarily have an expertise, except for that breath is the expertise. But one day I might be coaching, you know, a high-end athlete to perform better in a very specific aspect of their field. And then the next day I might be, you know, teaching to a group of yoga people who are interested in more energetic perspective. And then the next day I might be speaking to a corporate and 500 gray suits. And yeah, sometimes it's geared towards general life improvement or towards topics around trauma. And I really love how breath is interlinked with all of the topics of life, all of the areas of life. Of course, you're always breathing and there's always a, there's always a functional and a less functional way to breathe. And my background is I was a science teacher for many years, just a schoolteacher. And so looking at things from a biological perspective, and I was just very interested in how can I, first of all, switch my own state because I was rather depressed and I had some, some weight issues and I slowly started to look for ways to improve my well-being. The first thing, by the way, that actually did something for me was running. Endurance running was my therapy for many years. And then I got into, into breathwork and I started to see how some very simple changes in the way you breathe create very simple changes in the way that you feel and how you can regulate your state. And I started to apply this also in my classes and my biology classes towards my students, do a little breathing techniques with them, which is kind of cool because there's whole states in the US. I think even in New York, there's people, there's schools where daily mindful breathing is almost mandatory, I believe, which I think is so cool because a little under 10 years ago when I started this, I was really trying to get the word out and it was all very kind of like new and almost like edgy to get people closing their eyes in the classroom and lowering their heart rate and things like this with breath. And now it's almost become commonplace, which is really, really awesome. So yeah, that was my start to it and everything took off and spent some time traveling and teaching just wherever I could get, get the word out basically. So yeah, and especially around the time when, when we met in the US, that was a time when I was touring a lot before COVID and I noticed that in that particular area in California, people were very open-minded and I got a lot of exposure to some high-end athletes to, yeah, some kind of high performance in all, walks of life, did some work with special operations units and things like this. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun to see how the same principles apply to all kinds of different people in all kinds of different walks of life.

Yeah, no, it must have been like about 5 years ago, I think, that you did a breathwork class in Dana Point with a mutual friend, Troy Eckert. He was out there and And it was really cool, like just being able to see how you can shift someone's state of mind with just a breath alone, being able to change someone's stress levels, someone's like overall feel in their body. I'm just curious, like you have guided so many people through breathwork classes over the years. What are some high-level things that you have noticed from how certain people at the beginning of their journey when they might be quite unaware of, of the power of the breath through like more self-discovery and what, what they, how they end up changing over time there?

Well, this is, of course, there's, there's so many different stories from people because I have a very strong, like a few principles that I work with. First of all is principles over methods. So if you understand the core foundation, the physiology, for example, the anatomy, the biomechanics of breathing, then you don't need to necessarily work on one specific method for one specific outcome. So that kind of frees your hands to apply those principles to all kinds of different topics. And then, of course, the question is, what does somebody want to get better at, you know, and how can we find a mode of breathing or a breathing intervention that might help people towards the direction that they want to go. So it's very practical. I'm also not trying to convince anybody. It's like, hey, you feel this way now, you breathe in that way. How do you feel? And people are like, oh, I feel way more like how I want to feel. Okay, that's great. So what's really nice is that I don't make anybody feel anything. I don't need to convince anybody. It's just always a little experiment. And whether I work with, you know, a 15-year-old kid on the autistic spectrum who needs to kind of have their emotional reactivity a little bit more in tune, or like a high-level athlete, it's basically the same thing. It is how do you feel now, how would you like to feel, and what can we do to move you towards that direction. So the kind of— and what I also love about breathwork is that it gives what they call kind of compound benefits, so ever-increasing benefits without necessarily ever-increasing effort. So if you have a 10 or 15-minute breathing practice that gives you a certain benefit and you keep doing it and you know, on all kinds of levels, you will usually see adaptations if you practice well. So the main thing that I would see, kind of the common thread between a lot of my students and people that I've worked with, is a general increased ability to regulate state, which simply means, okay, it's the end of the day, I want to go to bed, my head is racing, let me scroll on my phone. Oh wait, actually 'Let's see if I can shift out of this state.' Do 3 minutes of breathwork, 3 conscious breaths, whatever it is, and then check like, 'Oh yeah, actually I feel a bit calmer now. Let me just go to bed.' Simple stuff like that, right? Or people wake up in the morning and they go, 'Man, worried, and my head is racing, my thoughts, and I have this.' Okay, let's do, you know, what's— what— and another principle I work with is minimal effective dose. How can you do the least amount of work towards your desired result. So this is an overall thing is I call it state regulation. How can you be more ready for the life that you want to live? So yeah, of course there's, there's lots of great stories, but that's the common thread.

I love that. There's so many directions that we can take this and even about the minimum effective dose. It's not like you have to do half an hour of breathing or an hour of breathing to notice significant changes already in your state of being. I've had Dr. Phil Maffetone on our podcast a few times, and he talks about the 5-minute power break where it's purely laying down for 5 minutes and conscious taking, taking some breath and just turning off everything else and just getting in tune with your body again. How even doing that once, twice, 3 times during the day can already make a significant impact in how we feel.

Yeah. And the thing is, with lifestyle changes, what's funny is that often when you, when you see a coach or you see an expert and you want to change certain things about your lifestyle, then you end up with another to-do list, you know, like do these movements or eat these things and don't eat this. You have to change so much about your life. But if you can just feel slightly better after 1 minute of a conscious decision, even just 1 conscious decision, not even having to take the conscious breaths anymore, great, do that, you know. And this is actually, you know, also to bridge it more towards your audience and athletes or people who want to move better. I love working with athletes because it is so specific. It is basically, hey, what is it that you would like to improve on? And then they go, well, it's this thing. And it's usually very tangible and quantifiable with athletes. Like, I want to run faster, I want to sleep better, recover better, I want to be able to lift heavier, or very sports-specific things. Sometimes even sports that I know nothing about. Like, I'm not a good swimmer and I've coached an Olympic swimmer, you know, and I'm not— I don't know anything about rugby and I've coached professional rugby players. And it's really a lot of fun. Like, hey, show me whatever you want to get better at and let's see if we can find a way to improve towards that direction. And yeah, that's, that's what I like about that. Yeah, like you said, it's so simple and I think it shouldn't add a lot of extra pressure on your system if you want to change. I'm more actually interested in how can we remove any obstacles and do less but do the right things better. And breathing is typically one of those super fundamental things that you can just do on autopilot your entire life and you never consciously look at it. And if you never have looked at it, but it is something you do 20,000 times per day, especially, you know, professional athletes are basically paid to be out of breath for 20 hours a week is kind of like the way I say it. But they've never sat down and go like, hey, but here's this whole area I've never looked at. What if we tweak one little thing there and let's see if we can get a domino effect going of, of some improvements in performance, for example?

Yes, absolutely. So when we are sticking with— all right, we're looking for ways that athletes can improve and become a stronger, healthier, happier athlete. Before we started recording this call, we talked about it's not just about the running component or the cycling or the swimming component. It's about a lot of other things that you can do during the day that make an impact in your overall state of being. And when you can run relaxed, you generally perform better versus you being super tight and tense and have your fat burning like all compromised and whatnot. So if, if you have something that you could recommend to our listeners over here, like something tangible that they could implement? Is there anything specific? Like, I know there's a million different breathing techniques, but is there anything high level that you would say that they can start implementing on a day-to-day basis that's, that's not so time consuming?

Well, yeah, I think the highest leverage thing for any athlete to do is whatever improves CO2 tolerance. And the most effective thing to do is hyperventilation. So underbreathing. And there's different methods that have different protocols for this, but it's super basic. You just tune in with your breath and you go, okay, now I'm breathing exactly the amount that I need. This is a funny thing, actually, because whenever you tune in with your breath, whatever you're doing in that moment, you're breathing the exact right amount, which means that millions and billions of cells inside your body are regulating the internal environment with millions and billions of particles outside your body. And it's an absolutely miraculous balancing act that your body is always doing. So that's something that I, first of all, blows my mind every time I think about it. And especially for athletes who go like, I should be better, my body isn't recovering well. Like, you're like a cellular colony of billions of cells that manages to balance out an internal environment with an external environment despite everything, all the challenges that life throws you. That's incredible, right? And whenever you tune in with that level of, oh yeah, right, I am breathing exactly enough right now. And then you take a few breaths to slowly drop yourself down to not quite enough. And not quite enough is a sensation of, in some methods they call it air hunger, for example, or like a mild dyspnea. I like to call it the alarm bell. So you find a level of breathing that is not quite enough, at which you know, because somewhere in your system there is an alarm bell going off and almost like you get— you're getting an itch kind of like that and your body is like, hey, let's scratch this itch. But then for 2 minutes you're going to be like, no, no, no, just next 2 minutes, just going to stay at this level of not quite enough. And I'm going to calm my mind. I'm going to relax my muscles. I'm going to find a way to somewhere budget out things that I don't need, like unnecessary thoughts or worries, and relax into that discomfort. And then you slowly bring yourself back to exactly enough. And you try to suppress the urge to do those kinds of regulating breaths with everybody watching this now wants to take a yawn. And then you, you do that 3 or 4 times. So basically what you're doing is you are posing your body with a little bit of a challenge where the specific challenge is there's less breath coming, being vented, there's less ventilation. So there's an increase in carbon dioxide in your body. And there's a decrease in availability of oxygen in that moment. Now we can get into the nuts and bolts of this if you like, but just to keep it very simple, the more— so carbon dioxide actually allows oxygen to be delivered into the cell. So the amount that you ventilate, that you breathe on a lung level, can influence the amount that you respirate, which means what your cells can breathe. And especially for long endurance, you want to have cellular respiration as effective as possible. And in general, the less you ventilate, the more you respirate. Interestingly, because if you start breathing more and more and faster and faster, you're going to actually expend quite a bit of energy on relatively ineffective breathing strategies because you're going to use more muscles and you're going to mouth breathe and increase your heart rate with your breathing. So that's generally a less effective way to breathe, especially for long endurance. So there's a few amazing benefits to learning how to breathe less, one of which is that your CO2 tolerance goes up, which means that you're capable of carrying relatively more CO2 in your body without having to go like that or having to suddenly start to breathe more, which allows you to be more efficient. Basically do the same with less breaths or do more with the same amount of breathing.. And that's, that's of course, as an athlete, the name of the game. That's, that's all you want in the end. If you're actually training for performance, if you're just starting out running, don't bother with any of it. Yeah. Run and enjoy yourself. Get miles in your legs, focus on your posture, make sure you don't get injured. That's the, that's the most important thing in the first year or two of running, you know, unless somebody has really dysfunctional breathing, then this can really make a difference. But so One kind of way that I sell this to athletes, which I always make the joke, I sell raw air. I don't even sell hot air. All right. You can just do this. This is probably the most effective thing. And not a lot of people do this because this is actually, despite being one of the most effective breathing techniques, it's also one of the most annoying ones to do because most breathing techniques give you an instant like, oh, I feel a little bit better now. And this one, yeah, you're giving yourself an itch that you want to scratch and you're teaching yourself to not scratch it the whole time. Right. But for athletes, a little bit of controlled suffering is, of course, also what they love doing. So, but the selling point on this is if especially with endurance running, the amount of hours you can do on the road or on the trails is very limited. So the specific training of actually doing the specific sport you want to do, which is, for example, trail running, there's a limit to how much you can do. And at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to add more load to your system. There's a certain amount of load that you can process. And then we're talking about tendons, we're talking about muscles, we're talking about being able for your fascia to be able to hold proper running form because you might be able to— sometimes people's lungs outrun their, their legs, their connective tissue, and you're pushing yourself, but you're leg becomes floppy and, you know, like a slightly floppy leg over, you know, 50 miles, it's going to be a massive problem. So there's always this give or take of like, am I going to invest more training hours and risk injuries or I'm going to train less and risk being undertrained? And that's always the balance point, which I love. I love this riding the line type of thing where everything starts to matter at that level. So what if you could add 10, 20, 30 minutes of super relevant training time without having to even be on your feet. And that's what breathwork does, especially for endurance athletes. Like, I've worked with some, with some of the best cyclists in the world, like Tour de France cyclists. And, yeah, they're just looking for ways to make relevant training hours without destroying their knees, their tendons, or like, for cyclists, it's usually like other potential injuries. But for runners, you know, there's so many— your tendons, your joints, whatever. Like, all of these things are already so loaded, and now you can to actually sit down in the comfort of your home next to your running training and pose yourself with, like, probably the most relevant training stimulus you can have, which is literally at a cellular level, um, training the ability for your cells to take up oxygen. And as an added benefit, because you are sounding an alarm inside yourself, you're also practicing with leaning into the discomfort and not having anxious or worried thoughts and expending energy on these thoughts because you're training to calm yourself in relation to discomfort. So you're also training to keep your mind calm.

This really goes hand in hand with a conversation that I had with Killian Jornet. He is the greatest mountain—

he is the runner. When I saw he was on your podcast, I was like, I want to get on this podcast. I want to be in that lineup.

Yeah, no, it was— he basically talked about, yes, there's different types of purposes for workout, and sometimes it's the workout of now you're getting the run in, now you might get the focus on heat adaptation. But he even says like, yeah, sometimes there's the adaptation towards altitude, or sometimes there's the alt— like the, the adaptation towards running on through the night or on tired legs. And so specifically focusing on that part, the breathing, or actually like you describe it, even, even not necessarily breathing in enough air. So you basically start seeing your blood oxygen levels drop a little bit, correct?

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And this kind of goes hand in hand too with a conversation with Patrick McCowan who talked about nasal breathing at some point. And initially I thought, ah, nasal breathing, that's only when you're running at a low intensity. Until I realized, oh, you can actually do it at a higher intensity too and build up those adaptations rather quickly. But I've also tested it where I do some longer periods of nasal breathing, a little bit at a higher intensity, and notice the blood oxygen levels drop pretty significantly. Like initially it might be like 98 or 99%,. And after, let's say, half an hour, 45 minutes, I started seeing that come down like to 95, 90, 85. And at some point you start to feel quite uncomfortable and you don't want to push that too hard either. But yeah, there's so much that you can learn through this process with, with the breathing indeed.

Yeah, for sure. And there's, it's a fun way to, if you want to think about altitude training, there's many different ways to do that. And like if you wear an oximeter, and you just go hike up a steep mountain and you breathe, you lower your amount of breath until you're at like maybe 90% or the upper 80s of, of saturation. And then, yeah, you're giving yourself that oxygen stimulus. And that's also what I love about extreme endurance runners is that they, they start to pick apart, okay, so which area of suffering can I indulge in today? Oh, let me run in the sauna or let me run all night or let me fast. I used to do this too. I would really love to get back into running. I only just dipped into ultra running for a little bit. I ran 2 ultras, like, nice, very simple, like only like 50K or 56K. Oh, that's like shit, man. I mean, it's something. Yeah, it's something. Yeah. And but yeah, I've been dealing with some injuries and also kids and not having— being able to make a lot of time. But yeah, I think it is so amazing that you can build a relationship with an activity that has both the light and the dark so strongly in there. And this is really what ultrarunning is. It is like meeting yourself in the difficult, most difficult moments so that you can have the benefits of, you know, the Scott Jurek book. He just goes about how can I crack myself open? I can at my lowest point, how can I crack myself open and whatever is in there comes out and it feels amazing. And it's that, that thing. And you can have a miniature version of that through practicing breathwork. And I like a very intuitive approach, like wearing an oxygen saturation monitor and really focusing on the numbers. This is a very kind of professional way of doing things. Like, I think for professional athletes is super relevant to have these metrics the whole time. But I think for for the general athlete, especially runners, the most important thing I think is to use breath to gain a deeper body awareness and a higher ability to gauge where you are at in relation to your maximum, to your minimum, like to all these different levels and to put you more in touch with your body. And I actually meet quite a few people who use quantification and numbers and their heart rate levels and all these things to actually be in their head and to force from their head, force their body into, into stress or over their boundaries. And that's what I love about doing a breathing practice for things like endurance running beyond the biochemical aspect, which is fun. But if you're sitting there and you're going like, oh, I am optimizing the ability for my cells to respirate, okay, cool. Like, it's great to know that, to have this knowledge. But once you have this knowledge and you know that it's working for you, then the question becomes, who am I when things become difficult? And without any stimuli, without any of the views, without like the runner's high, all of these things, and just sitting and going, who am I and how do I breathe? And how does who I am reflect in the way that I breathe? How can every breath be a conscious choice? To be in line with what I find important, how I treat myself. And this way, like a lot of people ask me, how do I recover better, improve my recovery with breathwork? Well, you can, you can. There's of course another huge area that we can work on through with breath on for athletes. It's very relevant because in the end it's a recovery game, you know, and because the more you can recover, the more you can train, the better you'll get. So this is also something I work on with a lot of athletes. And then I can say, well, here's the breathing protocol that allows you to maybe get to sleep a little bit faster. Let's test it. Hey, It's easier to get to sleep. You'll recover better. We win something, right? We get some performance gain, which is great. But there's also the route of, of tuning in with your body deeply enough to go to close your eyes and to go, hey, what's my heart rate doing after my run? 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours after my run, can I sense my own level of exhaustion or of recovery in this moment? And that when you wake up and you tune in with your breath and you realize Hey, my breathing is faster than normal. Not because you measured it, but because you have awareness of it. My heart rate is up more than normal. Maybe today is not the day for intense interval training or my LSD run or, you know, so, but maybe today is a recovery day. And that's really what breath has done for me. It has allowed me to create a level of inner awareness. And there's a word for this actually, which is interoception. Interoception is the ability to feel the state of your internal organs, basically, or of your internal general internal state and to, based on that, determine what is the right thing for me to do right now. And also even to be able to test with, for example, simple breath holds or with your ability to breathe into the lower areas of your body. So for example, when you're at rest, so you're just sitting on the couch, you're not running at all. Can you like— which factors do you have available to check whether you are actually at rest? And the more you are in thoughts and in analysis, the more difficult it becomes to feel your body because there are certain signs that, for example, if your parasympathetic nervous system is active, then you have— this is your rest and recovery nervous system. Well, at least in relation to this work, it means your body feels safe and it feels like it has adequate amounts of everything that it needs to recover and to be well. So your breath is immediately linked to the state of your nervous system. So if you're sitting or even if you wake up in the morning and you lay down and let's say every morning you do a little breath hold, maybe on the exhale, you test whether you can breathe low into your body. And so, so deep into your body where you can breathe horizontal, so your ribs flare out. If you have all of those things, it's a pretty good sign that you're recovered. But if your breath refuses to move down into your body and you're basically using, you know, your upper chest to breathe, Sometimes you wake up slightly out of breath, but in a miniature version that's difficult to catch, but slightly raised breathing, sympathetic breathing, as I call it, which is a sign that you're not recovered. All right. So there's all these little, these, all these little things that you can learn to read inside your system. And this is, of course, what, what yogis are legendary for. Well, maybe not everybody who practices yoga in the West, but one of the things is not necessarily to go, how do I breathe for this? So how do You know, everybody's always like, I want to get to X. What is the fastest method to get from where I am to this point X? Well, sometimes instead of trying to go there, you have to look inside and ask your— learn to ask yourself that question. And breath is like a great way to gauge it. Sometimes it's like a canary in the coal mine which tells you whether you're ready to train or not. So that's another great way to look at it.

And the more we do that, the more awareness we get from our body and mind over there too. I've found journaling to be quite helpful in this process as well. Sometimes when I'm writing down my thoughts, like, all right, I'm super busy right now, and I realize I have so many thoughts racing, like maybe it is really time to sit down a little bit more. And whether that is through meditation or whether that is through breathwork or just going for lower intensity runs. What do you feel are some mistakes that people make when it comes to the topic of breathwork and breathing? Do you see something that is common among endurance athletes?

Well, the question is always— so there's no good or bad in breathing. The question is, is it functional or is it dysfunctional? And whenever there is a strong signal inside of the body of danger, so to say, so there's a strong alarm signal. So you don't get enough oxygen, for example, and it becomes this trigger to overbreathe. Well, I wouldn't say— yeah, there's a lot of like in the world of breathwork, there's a lot of big pitfalls, but they're mainly found in the hyperventilation techniques and like the really intense work. Work. Like, for example, some people, they get really infatuated by deep breathing techniques, and there's all kinds of popular methods where you basically hyperventilate and then hold your breath, or just hyperventilate the whole time. There's all these different styles and methods that teach this. And then you go, well, for example, you have intermittent hypoxia training where you take, for example, 3 minutes of deep breathing or 4 minutes of deep breathing, or even just 10 deep breaths and then you have a phase of not breathing. And then as you have this deep breathing, the hyperventilation, you overbreathe so that you can have a longer breath hold, which is kind of like cheating yourself into thinking you can hold your breath, right? So this is not a freediving technique. This is kind of like to do on land in a safe environment. But you hold your breath and then your oxygen levels actually drop quite steeply and you create this short moment of hypoxia. And this type of intermittent hypoxia is believed to be very effective for kind of altitude training at sea level or even below sea level in our, in our home country, if you want. So, so, however, what you practice is what you get better at. So there's people who go, yeah, I practice 30 minutes of breathwork every day because it will help me be a better athlete because I train hypoxia. But then the way they breathe looks like, like that. So basically you're training you're telling all your muscles, hey, listen, this is how we breathe when we get out of breath. So now you're training yourself to have a function of using— because when you're out of breath. So the idea about functionality is that every state of breathing has a functional way to do it. So being proper out of breath, like if you're doing interval training, the whole point is to be fully out of breath, breathing through your mouth into your chest, like using all these secondary muscles like your traps, for example, or your throat muscles to suck in the air. Can be super functional if that's what you're trying to get. But what the problem is with some of these hyperventilation techniques is that people don't learn, don't practice good mechanics in hyperventilation because hyperventilation, conscious hyperventilation is purely about increasing ventilation. So exchanging more air, which you can also do in a pattern that is functional for breathing, for example. So now you're making yourself out of breath and breathing very deeply, but you're always sending that breath deep into your body and finding an expansion on the horizontal plane instead of just moving air in and out of your chest in this very forced way. Because there's a few problems with that. One of them is you're training suboptimal muscle function because now you're, you're basically training yourself to be like, oh, if I'm breathing faster, I am going to use all of these non-breathing muscles for breathing or secondary breathing muscles for breathing, which to me makes it likely that if you actually get out of breath on the trail or as soon as there is a signal in your body that you need to start breathing more, that you would use that function that you practice for 20 or 30 minutes a day with your hyperventilation. And so you're basically training a muscle for a suboptimal function. And there's a lot of people who practice hyperventilative breath every day because but they like the way it makes them feel. And they have ideas about, oh, maybe the hypoxia might help my performance. But then actually at rest, they tend to show relatively dysfunctional breathing patterns. Or when I say, hey, take a nice deep breath into your body, they go like that. And so, yeah, runners who are using these hyperventilation techniques and they want that to have a very positive effect on their endurance, it's a good idea to do the hyperventilation parts in a much conscious way, which means that you send it down into your body. You move a lot of air, but not by exchanging all this in your, in your ribs.

I'm so glad you brought this up because my, my thoughts around this topic have changed quite a bit over the years too. I've actually seen more and more shit breathing classes or like these these group classes with like 10, 20, 30 people, and I've been to a few over the last several years. Recently I was at one and it was so exceptionally intense. It went way deeper than I wanted and felt good by, and it was also like done to some German rave music. It was really like, and meanwhile you have like 30 people just going absolutely bonkers in one of those. And afterwards I said to myself, all right, I'm glad I experienced that, but I never have to do that again because it just didn't bring me the sense of calm or connection with my body that I was looking for.

Yeah, I mean, imagine when I came to LA for the first time 6 or 7 years ago and I was going around, it was almost like, wait, there's a guy teaching a breathing session? I gotta sign up for that. And everything was always sold out. Now there's a guy teaching a breathing session on every corner, you know. And with that popularity, it's much more likely, of course, that there are all kinds of misconceptions and all kinds of practices that aren't ideal. And exactly what you're saying right now, I'm almost kind of— so 8 years ago, I was kind of going like, everybody should breathe and have intense breathing sessions, which I kind of still agree with. But it's as soon as somebody is at that thing where they go like, yes, this is an amazing thing to do, you need to immediately start to, okay, hold your like, cool your engines, you know, like, there's also, there's some things you need to understand about this. First of all, is that there's really these really intense hyperventilative breathing sessions, they can be amazing. But generally, very common issue, I've made a bunch of videos about this on my YouTube channel. But a very common issue is that people want to chase the high, and especially the facilitators, they go, wow, I have this breathing modality that can, that blew my mind, and now I can blow other people's minds. So let me make a make it as intense as possible so that as many people as possible have this really heavy experience. And it makes them feel good about giving somebody this heavy experience. But for a lot of people in the room, it can actually cross a boundary. And a lot of these facilitators are not really trauma-informed, and they don't realize how the nervous system responds to the dysregulation of strong breathing. And that's the thing. People don't see it as a, as dysregulation. Because it makes you feel awesome, so surely I'm not dysregulated. But actually, the whole point, the reason that it makes you feel the way it makes you feel, and the reason that it can be so intense and it can be so psychedelic, is specifically because you are dysregulating your body to the point where you're getting all of these trippy effects. Which, again, I work with these kinds of methods a lot, and I've developed my own system for being able to do these really intense breathing techniques, but always staying within certain boundaries. So there's definitely a point to it, but there's also a lot of pitfalls. So people, they just start breathing more and more heavy just to get more and more of that high. And especially if you, if you're doing it with the idea that it makes you a better athlete, that's generally counterproductive. And one issue with that is, for example, also in runners, what you need to understand is that it costs energy to breathe. So one of the reasons you don't want to get out of breath and you want to breathe as slow as possible is because breathing itself costs energy. So the heavier you breathe, the more expensive the breathing itself becomes and the less energy that is created by breathing is actually allocated towards the activity you want to do. So there's a point where it kind of like cancels itself out if you breathe more. And this really heavy and intense breathing moves a lot of air into the dead space. So if you breathe like that, you can imagine that basically the higher lobes of the lungs are being used, but you don't reach the full depth of the entire lung, which means that a lot of the air that you're that you're breathing in and out, that you're ventilating, is moving what's called the dead space. And the dead space is basically your windpipe and a part of your bronchial system is a bone structure, basically. So there's no gas exchange there. So you're moving air in a chamber where there is no oxygen being taken out. So in all kinds of ways, it is inefficient. And that inefficiency and that dysregulation is also what causes these sometimes very desirable intense effects. But if you create these intense effects, you need to know what you're doing because it can be extremely powerful for healing or working with certain types of trauma. But it can also be traumatizing or retraumatizing in itself. If you're in a room with like 50 people breathing their brains out and there's German techno playing and somebody screaming at you, go deeper like that, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's really every— that's the thing. Like, Like every way of breathing can be incredibly powerful and it can also be incredibly dysfunctional. You just need to know what to use for which scenario.

The posture of an athlete can be quite important and can make a difference in the intake of breath too. When I started working with Laurens van Lingen, he's a movement specialist. He's also a physical therapist, works with some of the really elite world-class athletes. Also a Dutch guy? No, he's actually South African. Okay, okay. Yeah. Anyways, when I would go over to him and I wanted to, like, I had a few tense areas in my body, like for example, on my lower legs or my hips, he would actually start working on my neck. He would start working on my pec muscles. He would start working on my shoulders and he and he was trying to get me to open my chest more, to be able to run with an open heart, to be able to run more relaxed. And that made more of a difference than anything else. It was so fascinating to me that being able to run relaxed, being able to run with an open chest, it just seemed like I was able to get in oxygen more easily, and it just seemed to flow much better. I was able to run at a lower heart rate at a higher intensity, intensity. And yeah, it was, it was pretty fascinating to see that connection too.

Absolutely. And the thing is that breath is the most foundational movement pattern you have because it's the only movement that you're always doing. And that means that if you, you know, if you do 20,000 repetitions of a movement, you want to make sure that that's a, you know, a good repetition. And that's exactly with endurance running. That's what I love about running also is that you have something that is so basic and so foundational. But your entire life you can spend chipping away at this particular, like this minute movement placement of your foot, for example, or alignment of your knee in relation to your, to your gait pattern or whatever it is like being able to swivel your hips and all of these things. And so one thing that I work on a lot with athletes is the breathing pattern. So where can you breathe? And for example, if your hips are misaligned and your spine isn't fully aligned and your ribs can't move freely, and sometimes you might miss out on a whole area of breathing that you can do in your body. And I also mainly the athletes I work with are, of course, broken athletes who are like, okay, I can't do anything else. Let's see what I can do or can work on while I'm trying to recover. Like when they're injured or for some reason can't train or perform. And then they're like, well, okay, let's give this breathing thing a try. And then I look at their, at their breathing, biochemistry, biomechanics, their their ability to control their breath, but especially also their posture. So show me the posture that you want to be in while you train or while you perform, and show me how you breathe in that posture. And very often there are some things that we can improve about that. But of course, it influences your entire body position because if your shoulders are hunched, then it's much more likely and your head is dropped forward, then your spine is misaligned and you have far less space to breathe. And one thing that of course also relates to that, even if you do maybe 10 hours of running per week, which is like a nice, like a solid amount of running, but you also spend 40 hours behind a desk in a slouched position, then of course your running is going to really suffer from sitting in that poor posture. And the problem is that sitting in that poor posture really messes with your breathing because if you have that slouch posture and your head comes forward, like the forward head posture basically misaligns the spine. So you get this and it's much easier to open your mouth and to breathe through your mouth. And because your ribs— what you want is your ribs to be able to move freely. And as soon as you slouch, you can feel that in your own body is that your ribs kind of get sticky and they stick together. So we think if you think about like a rib cage and my fingers are the ribs, is that we want the ribs for— first of all, the rib cage, we want to be able to move it to the sides because if we— then we have horizontal breathing and you have a lot of your rib space in the back of your body. So for many people who do office work or who live generally stressed lives, their rib cage moves, but it moves as one block and it moves up and down on a vertical plane. So then the next thing we want to be— which means that you're not using the back of your body, which most of your lungs, if you would do a full section through the middle with a chainsaw like this, you would see that most of the lungs are more towards the back of your body. And of course, your ribs, the joints of which your ribs move, are on the spine. So now if your spine is in a suboptimal position and your ribs are getting all sticky and you can basically only move air by doing that, then that is also going to reflect in your breathing pattern as you run. So the first thing that we want to do is teach people to breathe in a more horizontal way. And actually, Dr. Belisa, she has a great— she wrote a book called Breathing for Warriors. She really popularized this idea also of horizontal breathing. It's also a great thing to look at for athletes. So you want to have a horizontal movement. And then we want to look at, can these ribs actually, instead of just moving as a block, can they also move in relation to each other? And then you get these really wonderful, free-flowing ribs. Where even if you do change your posture a little bit, you can still breathe in all directions. And this— I find this specifically interesting in less controllable environments. Like, this is also what I loved about trail running, is that once you go downhill, you know, my favorite thing about the downhill is you basically throw yourself off the mountain where it becomes a controlled fall, right? And then totally you're like, Jesus, take the wheel, or like you expect— you hope your legs will somehow figure out how to go over all these rocks. And sometimes You kind of maybe through a misstep or through just a leap of faith and you land with your heel hard and the shock goes through your body. Right. And then you will respond to all of those variables in a certain way. And so keeping your body very soft and keeping your posture very open and relaxed and breathing in the calmest way that you can will, in my experience, generally make you more capable of moving with all of those different types of variables that are constantly going. So you can literally gear yourself with your breathing. And if you know how your body most optimally breathes in different scenarios, you can also use different strategies whenever they are necessary. So for example, if you are hunched over working up a mountain with your hands on your knees and pushing yourself up, sometimes that's just what you have to do. So then it also makes sense to know like, yeah, now my body really wants to use these upper registers and the vertical breathing, but if I do it for too long, it's going to cost me me. So then it can also use the mechanics of breathing to gear yourself up and down depending on what you need. But for that, of course, you need to have them available. And having them available means, yeah, a good physiotherapist or an osteopath or even a chiropractor can really help with opening up these things. And if you do that from a perspective of improving your ability to breathe in all registers, that's basically what we're looking for. So can you breathe Can you breathe down and make— and where your belly goes out? Can you breathe horizontal? Can you breathe towards the back of your body? Can you feel your ribs move separate from each other in a soft way? And generally, all of this stuff in a lot of athletes is just stuck. Totally.

And I've, I've personally experienced that. I've also experienced what the feeling can be like once you go from a stuck state to an unstuck state.. And after I come back from a deep massage and I go for a low-intensity run, or even a higher-intensity run, but run with an open chest, all of a sudden it really feels like a whole, a whole different level of running, a whole different level of relaxation, almost like an emotional unblock. It's, it's quite powerful actually when, when you can notice that runs like that.

Yeah, for sure, man. This conversation is really making me want to get back into running. Totally. You should. Yeah. And I've been dealing with some interesting injuries and I've been— I've had a few years of quite a bit of piriformis syndrome, which also led me to learn a lot about the position of the hips and the position of the hips and the tightness in the glutes. And also in the hip flexors determines the extent to which you can use your glutes. And this is also a problem with the sitting posture, is, is that if you sit 40 hours or 60 hours a week, then your glutes are basically canceled out and your pelvic alignment is compromised in lots of different ways. So people feel a lot of tightness in all kinds of places in their legs, which is due to sitting and then actually releasing some of those tensions in the glutes and in the hip flexors and then also learning to re-engage the function of the glutes in the gait pattern, because of course the, you know, the opening of the hip is done by the contracting of the glute, which is something that you're going to learn if you start hill running, of course, you know, which to me is very difficult around here to find a proper hill to work on. Then, and that's the funny thing, sometimes you fix the breathing movement and then the running posture and running movement improves, but sometimes you fix, for example, the position of the hip, the ability of the hip to move freely and the glutes to activate properly, and breathing starts to suddenly— you can have somebody who looks like they're in stress, their breathing looks completely like they're in stress even though they're just standing still and they're completely fine. And then they open up or they work with the connective tissue and the muscle tension around their hips, around their legs, even in their stomach. And then suddenly their breathing is just perfect, like a baby sleeping or a cat purring, you know, like that kind of like perfect, effortless, beautiful breathing. So it's also always just about like which—

what is the kind of the lever, you know, we're looking for a leverage effect. Absolutely. I got to really connect you with Lawrence to talk more about posterior chain running and the whole way of more activating the glutes. And yeah, a few more questions. I want to be respectful of your time over here. At the later stages of the Berlin Marathon that I just ran, I noticed myself it was getting challenging towards the end. But even when I looked around to me, I saw quite some people who were in distress. It's tough at the end of a long race. Do you have any advice as far as for how can people still keep their breathing controlled? Is there anything in particular, any cues that people could give themselves? Is there anything that— like, it's one thing when you start at the beginning of a race, everyone is excited and everyone is feeling good, but when the wheels start coming off towards the end of a race, like, is there— do you have any thoughts, recommendations there?

Well, first of all, it's of course important to mention that that's inevitable, you know, that at the end it's, as we in Dutch we say, "Drijen met de granaam open," you know, mopping while the— mopping the floor while the tap is still running. Love that. Because it's trying to get whatever you can get. So there's certain things kind of like little cheat codes that you can experiment with. And of course, the interesting thing about marathon running, which to me is like what I liked about endurance, like about ultra running, it's that it's just like, hey, it sucks for everybody. Let's just see how far we get. Take it easy. Let's have a good time on the road. You know, you have conversations, you chill at the aid station, you just have a great day basically. And also you suffer miserably through endless miles of hills and stuff like this. And with marathoning, it's really about that specific length and that specific time. And people want to improve that specific time every year. And this, of course, also causes a lot of injuries because it's exactly that thing of I want to have that moment when things start to get really tricky as late as possible. But if you don't have that moment, it means that you haven't gone all out. So that's a very tricky thing. So you can think about kind of gears. So you could go, for example, like, what if I can have 30, the first 30K in a certain heart rate zone? So how long can I stay aerobic? And when is it worth basically going anaerobic? Because if you go anaerobic too soon, you're going to gas out before the end of the race. And if you go too late, you're going to cross the finish line with, you know, too much left in the tank, so to say.. And breathing can be a great way to do this. So for example, if you're in that last part, if you already know, okay, so I can basically keep my heart rate relatively low and I know that I can stay in the aerobic zone if I can still breathe relatively effortlessly and I can still nose breathe. Now I have a deviated septum, so for me to nose breathe, I would need like a nasal dilator, which can be great, can be very powerful. And then at some point you just know that you're— that you've made the switch. And if you then start to try to keep your breathing as low as possible, it's going to be very frustrating because your heart rate is just going to say, nope, we're just going to have to exchange more, more gas. The worst thing you can get, like out of breath means out of control of breath, which means that you're heaving on the inhale and there's a massive difference. So let's say you're at the— you're at the finish line of a marathon and you see two runners come in. They have the same shape, the same size, the same age. The same everything, and they're both fully out of breath, they're both exchanging a lot of air, but one of them is going, and the other one's going. So they're also exchanging the same amount of air. You could still guess who's going to win. So the person who can still control their exhale is clearly in more control of their breath and clearly has more control of their their body and can actually still decide how they breathe. So the moment when your inhale starts to pull and your breathing becomes relatively erratic, this is another thing we see. So real out of breathness. So this is kind of like you still have this clear cycle, and real out of breath is like that, which you generally only see over the finish line because whoever is already there before the finish line generally doesn't make it to the finish line, right? So you know, I'm gonna have to breathe more. Stop forcing yourself to breathe less, but then start to control the exhale because at that point you want to get rid get rid of as much CO2 as you can. Well, not as much as you can, but you want to get rid of more CO2. So you start to focus on your exhale. So it kind of goes like nose in, nose out, practically effortless. Then it's nose in, nose out, but with more of a cycle. Nose in, mouth out, and it becomes more forced. Then you have mouth in, mouth out. You're fully anaerobic now, um, so you're— yeah, things are starting to get messed up. And then you have mouth in, mouth out with a focus on the inhale. And that's when you really start to lose it. So if you want to have kind of that last moment of still, you know, getting everything out of it, but also having some kind of a control, I would say to very consciously focus on your exhale and to align your breathing pattern with your step pattern, because now your whole body is in sync with one rhythm, which makes it more easy to control. Because if your step count is still going at a nice like 180 BPM and that's still going, but your breathing is kind of all all over the place, right, and you're not aligned, then you have to coordinate those two things separately, which is way too much bandwidth for the state that you're in. So for example, if you go two steps in, two steps out, focus on the exhale, or even still try to get the nose involved. Sometimes it's like a hybrid of one step in through the nose, one step in through the mouth, two steps in through the mouth. Sounds complicated, but if you train, it's like So you're breathing against resistance and you're still landing the breath on your inhale, which you can't do a full inhale through your nose anymore, but at least you can get a little bit of the benefits of nasal breathing on your inhale, which I can go on about, but you already interviewed Patrick McKeown about this, so you probably have all those benefits listed already on the podcast. So you still have the benefit of that, then you suck in the air to get all the air movement and you focus out on your exhale and it's in line with your step count. So now you can get into almost like a trance-like state where all of your mental bandwidth goes to simply coordinating your legs with your breath. And you'll also find that it really gives this— it enhances the runner's high because you don't have time to worry about making it or not or to have thoughts or whatever. You just— and this is just one example, of course. I generally help athletes find the specific gears that work well for them depending on their level of exhaustion. But you find a strategy that works. And instead of just going like, I'll have my breath do whatever it needs to do and I'm just going to focus on running. If you can align those two, that's generally— it's— I mean, it's not foolproof, but it's at least one way to kind of keep your hands on the steering wheel in that last phase.

That was such a great example because I have tried to double inhale, hard exhale, like that one. I found that one to be quite relaxing towards the end of higher intensity sessions or towards the end. Like if I, I can really get in a flow state of like double inhale, hard exhale on like that step 1, step 2 is both inhale and then hard exhale like for 2 steps and then in it. I've never considered doing nasal breathing on the first one, mouth breathing on the second one and hard exhale. The exhale is on the mouth as well, correct? Correct.

Yeah, I'm going to have to try that. Yeah. And then you can experiment with, with blowing through pursed lips like that. And then there's another thing that I used to do which helped really well, especially going uphill, but also if you want to kind of gear yourself up and down is I would, for example, do one step inhale, one step exhale for 10 counts and then go back to a slower breathing pattern. So it's basically you slightly overbreathe. So you don't want to make yourself dizzy as you're running. And then you can see if you can build up a buffer that you can use to slow your breath. So for example, you go, Right. So then now you're creating a buffer and Then you're lowering. So after using having the buffer you can use to nasal breathe again. One issue that is often overlooked with mouth breathing is that you're drying out your lungs because every single time you take in this dry air, you humidify it with your lungs and you exhale the water that you're trying to keep in your body. At the same time, if you only nasal breathe, because on every exhale you're also losing body heat. So especially last week in Berlin, I imagine it was a good autumn there that was warm, right? Yeah. Either way, at the end of a marathon, you're going to be hot. Yeah, towards the end, definitely. Exactly. So then you're going to be overheated. So if you focus too much— the first time I learned about nasal breathing is like 7 years ago. Oh my God, such a dumb story. I was like, nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing. The science checks out. It's amazing. And it was like a really hot day on a heat wave here. And I went outside and I was like, I'm going to nasal breathe no matter what it costs. I'm going to learn it today. So I did that. And then I was sick for a day and a half with heatstroke because I had forced nasal breathing. And on the exhale, you lose so much heat. So it locked up all this heat inside my body. So it's like, oh man, it's one of those, one of those silly stories where you're like you have a concept and you chase it no matter what. So, but it's about understanding how to gear up and down. And the funny thing was, even though I wasn't able to do altitude training, I wasn't able to do proper hill training because I live in the Netherlands, right? When I did the Eiger Ultramarathon, as soon as we started to like get towards the second half and the climbing got intense and we were at a slight altitude, that was the only time where I'm always, I'm always a solid mid packer, of course. And just an average dude. But that was the only time where I would consistently overtake people because I would use these types of gears of breathing to get myself in the right state for going up this hill. And then I would use my breath to calm myself so that I could pace myself again after reaching the top of the hill. So this is just where it gets really interesting from a strategic perspective. Yeah.

So there's the racing breathing, there's the training breathing, there's the everyday life breathing. There's even— I see people taping their mouth and like at night while sleeping. There's so much over here. We can only cover so much in this conversation. I know you have a breathwork masterclass as well. Yeah. Is that breathwork masterclass for individuals who want to use it in their own life? Or I think you also have classes towards people to guide attempt to become an instructor, correct?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a bit of both. I have like a mini masterclass that teaches the foundations of, of state regulation. And then I have basically 3 levels in my certification course. And the first one is geared towards people who are just kind of breath nerds or want to know everything about it. So it has a lot of the physiology lectures and we actually get quite a few people who just want to improve their breathing or their performance in there. And so that's, yeah, Yeah, respiratory, like physiology, function, nervous system. I have a lecture in there also about a lot of this athletic stuff. And then we have level 2 and 3. They're live, they're in person, and level 1 is all online. And that's really for people who want to use it professionally. So we get— we actually get some, some people who do, yeah, like fitness coaches, personal trainers, even people who work for the military, the police. But we also get yoga teachers and spiritual people and doctors, psychologists. That's a really, really cool thing. So Again, I try to have like these core principles that can lead towards all of these different areas of life, which is super fun because it's like, yeah, last week I had like somebody works at the military. I have a yoga teacher, a spiritual teacher. I have a lifestyle coach and we have, you know, just a business guy who wants to figure everything out, you know, and for himself.

And yeah, so it's a lot of fun. Must be so rewarding for you. Like I literally see people like I've read a bunch of different reviews. I've actually have a few people that I know personally that have gone through some of your classes who spoke very highly of it. But just that part of seeing the breakthroughs that people are experiencing and walking out of it, yeah, with an enhanced level of understanding, that must be very fulfilling for you as well.

Yeah, the fun thing is, is I'm in a constant state of I can't believe how well this works. Like, I'm also like, wow, it works again. You know, it's kind of just like how every springtime you see the first flower come up. Of course, you're in perpetual summer maybe, but you know, like every springtime you see the first flowering, you're like, I can't believe how amazing this is. Like, I feel like that a lot. And it's really due to, of course, many incredible people who've done this work and the incredible people that I've been allowed to work with. And it's really special to see how something that simple that you always carry with you, which is your own breath, breath, and that it only really takes a very simple reminder that it's something you can work with and a few simple instructions. And yeah, I just like— it's not me doing it, you know, it's like really cool to see people take charge over different areas of their life with their own breath.

And yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah.

Awesome. Where can people find more about the Breathwork Masterclass? breathworkmasterclass.com. Yeah, perfect. Nailed it. And then actually several years ago, I I did read your Mind Lift book as well, and that, like, I think the breathwork is only one of the topics that you cover in there, but you talk about, like, optimizing the mind, enhancing mental fitness, developing laser focus. How is that for you to write that book? Because it looks like you have learned a lot over the years, and then you actually applied quite a bit of that during the writing process over here as well, right?

Well, that book basically a manual for how I function best that I also shared with the world. It's like a reminder to self, which of course is every book that every author wrote in this area, of course. But I wrote this when I was very— I was still working as a science teacher and I was doing a lot of education innovation. And this is really about how you can improve your mental state through all kinds of conscious choices. And it's been amazing. I still get— I mean, almost 8 years ago since it came out and it's in 3 languages now and I still get emails from people who go like, wow, I have ADHD and this is the first book I've ever finished. And I'm like, oh, that's so cool, you know? And so it's also really written to be able to read easily. And yeah, so, but after that book came out, I started to get asked to speak on all kinds of topics relating to this book. And interestingly, breath was one that just kept popping up and it was just, so I started following that trail. I'm still, yeah, my next book is in the works finally.

So hopefully next year it'll be out and it'll be mainly geared towards towards breath.

Yeah. Awesome.

Can't wait to read that one. Last question over here. Do you have any closing thoughts for athletes looking to improve to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete?

Yeah, I think it's a good idea to focus on, on having fun and really training and, and working in a way that allows you to feel joy and peace and meaning in the moment. Because you can be running to get to your ultimate marathon time and get eaten by a mountain lion or get hit by a bus or whatever. Life is short, you're going to die. And yeah, instead of thinking about working to— it's nice to work towards something as long as you still have your enjoyment in the moment. And yeah, I see a common thread in athletes where they have this idea of I need to be better. But no, you want to perform better. And you can do that from the acknowledgment that you have this incredible molecular biological machine that you get to live in for a very short amount of time, and it can experience all of these amazing things. So yeah, why not choose to have fun with it, you know? So, so not to take the performance too seriously, but how can you treat yourself so well that your body will naturally give you performance?

Spot on. So well said. Actually, one more observation just when you were talking in the earlier stages, you mentioned exercising and not always taking in enough oxygen and kind of teaching your body almost in an oxygen-deprived state to optimize and to become more efficient. About a year ago, I started swimming, going from absolute zero to like learning how I had to swim laps in the pools and sometimes being in the pool for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour. And I, like, at the beginning, the breath was one of the most challenging parts for me to get under control, even not realizing, like, how frequent to breathe and how to do the whole breathing. But over time, I definitely think that improving that part has helped on the running front as well, like that, that a lot of things are connected there too.

So yeah. For sure. And it's the cool thing about swimming is that it's basically the only sport that are only very common sport that has a breathing instruction built into the movement. So you have to pay attention to breathing because you're in water, you know, and yeah, and it's, it's just so much fun to have this incredible body, you know, like let's just use it in all the ways that makes it feel awesome. Totally. And this is coming from— I might sound enlightened here, but this is after running myself into multiple walls and having— I'm still dealing with all these injuries. So I'm really having to ask myself the question, like, how can I make decisions now that will allow me to move better when I'm 80? You know, my parents are both approaching 70, and my mom does 4 CrossFit workouts a week. My dad is a national record holder for Olympic lifting in his age group, of course, which is not a very big age group, but still, you know, and the other guys are younger than him.. So I see these examples of people who have gotten better and better and better over time and who've had multiple injuries and health challenges, and they continually kept learning, learning better ways to respect their bodies and all of these things. And they are in so much better shape than they were when they were 30, or at least movement-wise and everything. And that's, to me, it's like, that's incredible. So now I'm thinking about the long, long term instead of going, how can I run the next 10K faster but still risk not being able to pick my kid up for 2 days because I'm so sore?

Absolutely. Absolutely. To anyone listening over here, I can highly recommend following Casper's Focus on Instagram. I love— sometimes I catch myself doom scrolling and there you are actually sitting with your music instrument and you're actually doing a 1-minute breathwork, stop the scrolling and just breathe with me kind of session. So I think absolutely keep doing more of those because you're work is making a positive difference in a lot of people's lives. So thank you for coming.

Thank you for coming on here, Casper.

I appreciate you. Thanks.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

Next time you're in LA, we'll go for a run or we'll do it in Holland.

Yeah, I have better chances keeping up with you here. Thank you for listening. What was your favorite lesson, takeaway, or quote from this episode? Please let me know in the comments on YouTube. I'm really looking forward to trying some of these different things that Casper described over here, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on some of those too. If you would like to receive a weekly newsletter from me, I send out an email once a week with different running strategies, different running tips. You can sign up at extramilest.com/subscribe. That is extramilest.com/subscribe. Subscribe, and I'll make sure to link to that as well in the show notes. Have fun out there on your runs. Many more podcasts in the works, and I can't wait to share them with you.

All right, bye now.