Niraj Naik explains how pranayama manipulates oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitric oxide to boost mitochondrial efficiency and tissue oxygenation. He frames mitochondria as combustion engines and claims the practice can increase them from roughly 1,000 to 4,000 per cell while raising CO2 tolerance to reduce unnecessary tension.
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Now we're going to go through the. The science, like, from the basics, to really understand the why behind all of this. But I'm going to try. And what I'm going to do is like, really drill it down to the core. Things that you need to know so that, you know, if people ask you questions, you have good answers for them. All right? So key thing, right, the medicine for the body is what we're really manipulating with the breath is your level of oxygen, CO2 and nitric oxide. They're the three fundamental things we're changing with the breath. Okay? The oxygen obviously is needed to produce energy in the body, right? Everything is energy. So if you think about your cells, inside every cell of your body, there are little tiny furnaces or combustion engines. I like to look at the mitochondria like combustion engines. That's really what it is. You have about a thousand of them, okay, in every cell. If you do soma breath techniques, thousand is going to turn to 4,000. All right? If you have more combustion engines, you basically become more efficient at using energy. You need less oxygen produced energy, right? And if the mitochondria run more efficiently, you also become more efficient. There's a reason why we want to be really efficient. So the oxygen comes in, it burns like a fire, creates an inner fire, all right? Which the net result of that is producing ATP energy, which is the biophotonic energy that drives all of life. Okay? So we're really all light beings powered by photonic energy created by the combustion of oxygen with sugar, all right? And that's. That's basically life. And what we're doing, Pranayama, is controlling, manipulating that energy in the body, how we produce that energy. All right? And the breath is obviously foundational to producing energy because we breathe in oxygen. Now, the goal of what we do is to, as I said, make you very efficient and using oxygen. And this relates to this tension thing, okay? So oxygen causes vasoconstriction, it constricts blood vessels, and it also causes contraction, muscle contraction. Oxygen, right? So oxygen in the process of combustion produces free radicals and oxidative stress, which can also damage the cells in the body. So the guy who really studied this a lot was Dr. Helmut Sees and he says it's very difficult to live with oxygen. It's also very difficult to live without oxygen because of oxidative stress. But what causes this problem of too much oxygen is when we let go of too much CO2. And by too much oxygen, we mean too much oxygen in your red blood. Cells, all right, so the goal of your body is to get oxygen into your red blood cells and then those red blood cells to drop off the oxygen around your body. All right? That's basically the function of respiration. That's how we're, we're designed. But your body is very, very clever, very intelligent, because it doesn't just drop off all the oxygen, it only drops oxygen to where it needs to go. Otherwise it also wouldn't be very efficient. You'd need to be breathing really heavily all the time because you'll just be getting rid of all the oxygen otherwise. So it only goes to where it's needed. And the measure, the thing that actually signals where to drop off the oxygen is actually carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide gas. So imagine every cell in your body, right, is breathing as well. And the cells we really need to get the oxygen to is your organs, your muscles, your tissues, your joints. We call that body tissue cells, right? Body tissue cells. And disease is often the result of poor body tissue oxygenation, which is a result of your body not efficiently being able to drop that oxygen off. What causes that lack of CO2? CO2 is what tells where to drop off the oxygen, because the cells that are burning the most oxygen, they're working the hardest. So, for example, if I was to do dumbbells right now, instead of me breathing really heavily to get the oxygen there, it only needs what it needs because the CO2 levels there raise and then it signals the red blood cells to drop off the oxygen in those areas rather than everywhere. However, if you hyperventilate, if you breathe too hard, because when you breathe in, you breathe in oxygen, you breathe out, you breathe out CO2, right? If you breathe out too much CO2. And what causes that? Mouth breathing, over breathing, stressful breathing, chest breathing, that will mean you actually cause constriction because you have more oxygen in your bloodstream and less oxygenation of your body tissue cells. So that too much oxygen causes tension, right? And that makes you stiff. So the people who you'll see or observe them, who don't breathe very efficiently because they're mouth breathing, they also, what causes issue of inefficiency is just bad health in general. Low exercise levels in their lifestyle, unfit being unfit, that affects it as well. But stress and other causes of stress is also overeating, consuming too much food. When you eat loads of food, all the energy is going to digest that food, right? And it's actually, if you eat way too much than what your body needs, you actually end up overloading the system it requires a lot more energy. You start breathing in a bad way usually or too heavy breaths, that leads to more letting go of CO2. All right, so actually, if you look at Pranayama, the goal of it is to try and raise your internal CO2 levels so you can handle more. And we have a thermometer or thermostat of how much CO2 we can handle. It's called our CO2 tolerance. But with practice, you raise this CO2 tolerance. Now, if you hyperventilate and you breathe out too much CO2, you actually mess this tolerance up and you reduce your tolerance. And CO2 is what tells your brain as well, you need to breathe again. So if you have bad CO2 tolerance, you end up breathing much faster than you need to. So actually, what we want to achieve with all of our techniques is the default state of a person. They look like they're not breathing at all. That's the sign of a very efficient person at, you know, using oxygen. Lao Tzu was the person who said that famous quote, a perfect human breathes like they don't breathe at all. So the breath should be silent, subtle, rhythmic and diaphragmatic. Silent, subtle meaning, not big volumes. Hardly look like. This is for your default state, which is when you're not doing any techniques. Silent, subtle, rhythmic, diaphragmatic. So this is key and this is what you want to observe in your clients when, after they've done your course, your sessions, the net result of all of your coaching and training should leave them feeling like that, right? They're hardly need to breathe, and then that becomes their default state. And that means that their breathing efficiency, oxygen efficiency, has gone up.
