Breathing For Energy

Ari Whitten, MS

Thank you so much, Dr. Kahn. Really a pleasure. It’s an honor to call you a friend, obviously. You know, you’re a very humble guy, but just letting everybody know this is one of the top cardiologists, holistic cardiologists in the world. So you’re a brilliant guy. I cherish our friendship and it’s an honor that I honor. Every few weeks. I get a little text from you listening to my podcast, and it’s pretty cool to call you a friend and colleague and a fan. I’m a mutual fan of your work, so thank you so much for the kind words. I really appreciate it.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Thank you. Take it away.

Ari Whitten, MS

All right. So everybody listening, I have a treat for you tonight. I’m going to get into a lot of really groundbreaking science. And this is an area that I think, you know, the word secret is really overused. There’s a lot of stuff out there that people are trying to marketers are trying to pawn off as this sort of secret or weird trick and that sort of thing. And there are very few actual secrets that are out there that still exist in the health realm. But I think the science around breathing is really one of them. I think it’s one of the biggest factors in our health and one of the least understood and appreciated by modern medical science factors in illness, in energy levels, in brain function and mood and so much more. And I’m going to build out the scientific case for that for you tonight, so and leave you with some really cool practical tools and practical science that you can start implementing in your life right away. So welcome, everyone. We’ve got a ton of people here. It looks like about 2000 people from all over the world. AC From Jerusalem, Ireland, British Columbia, Australia, London. Amazing. So I won’t waste too much time with fluff here on the intro. We will get straight into it. Let me. Joel, do you want to sign off here? Are you able to do that? Let’s see.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

I will sign this bandwidth.

Ari Whitten, MS

I think I might be able to control it here. If you want me to do it on my end.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

I’m registered for the summit, so I’m going to go over to that access to it. Okay. I trust you’re going to do great. I know.

Ari Whitten, MS

All right. All right. So here we go. And let me just get set up with a screen share if I can figure out how to do that. There we go. Turn screen share on. And we are going to go to the entire screen. And then I’m just going to come back here for a second and check in with the chat to make sure that you guys can see my screen. I just want to verify that. So let me know if you guys can see my screen here and there’s a little delay. So apologies for that. You’re going to see a long pause here as as you’re waiting. Just that’s how long it takes for my voice to enter the the electronics and then bounce off satellites to you and then all that sort of thing. Okay, awesome. I got some yeses. Let’s do it. So here we go. I click slide show and we are off to the races. So, okay, so the new science of breathing, how to supercharge your energy levels, hyper oxygenate your cells and rewire your brain to eliminate stress and anxiety. So, first of all, who am I? Joel just gave me an amazing intro. I’m the founder of the Energy Blueprint. I’m a three time bestselling author. I’ve got a Bachelor of Science degree in kinesiology, which is related to biomechanics and fitness and nutrition and exercise physiology and things of that nature.

I’ve got correct. I’ve got certifications as a corrective exercise specialist and performance enhancement special, a specialist from the National Academy of Sports Medicine. I’ve got extensive graduate level training and physiology and psychology, and I’ve got a masters of science degree in human nutrition and functional medicine. And more importantly than these degrees, I would say 95% of the knowledge that I have accumulated over the years really comes from the fact that since I was 12 years old, 13 years old, health science has been my passion and I’ve been obsessed with it. And I’ve been constantly experimenting with this obsession with health science for actually it’s getting closer to 30 years at this point. And I was recently voted the number one health influencer by a group of my peers in the Natural Health and Functional Medicine Space. And I’m widely regarded as one of the top experts in the world when it comes to human energy optimization and mitochondrial health in particular. So here’s what you’re going to learn in this webinar. I’m going to show you a simple one minute body vitality test to see how well you’re delivering oxygen to your cells. It’s also the best test I’ve ever found for measuring your energy levels. 

Why dysfunctional breathing is the single biggest hidden contributor to energy and anxiety problems and the three keys to fix it. The single fastest way to reduce anxiety in the brain within seconds. A huge myth about breathing that caused me personally anxiety for years. The specific breath training that is the single fastest and most powerful strategy for improving energy levels that I’ve discovered in 25 years of studying health science. The secret key to beating chronic anxiety. And it’s not a mind based technique like most of the anxiety solutions that are out there are, and a simple daily ten minute practice that can double your energy levels in just a few weeks. And I’m going to show you the science to back this stuff up. Now, let me start off by sharing one of the biggest health secrets. Again, there’s that word secret that currently exists. And it’s this, as I said in the intro, breathing is absolutely central to good health, to energy levels, to optimal mood and brain function, and to longevity. And most people, this is a really bold claim. Most people are breathing this functionally and this is a major cause of disease, anxiety and fatigue. Now, I want you to sit with this quote. Remember this quote throughout this presentation. This is an old quote from the textbook on medical physiology from an M.D. named Arthur Goiter. And he said, all chronic pain, suffering and diseases are caused by a lack of oxygen at the cell level, a lack of oxygen at the cell level. 

Okay. Sit with that. Remember this. Let this sink into you. And I want you to keep recalling this as I show you all the science throughout this presentation. Now, again, this bold claim, most people are breathing this functionally. How could this possibly be the case? Breathing is this thing that is not even consciously regulated. It’s not something we do voluntarily and where we can even have any sort of conscious control or effort over how well we’re doing it. You know, it’s not like brushing our teeth, for example, where we have total conscious control over how well we are doing. The job of brushing our teeth. Breathing is something that’s most of us can barely even think about throughout our whole life. It’s done automatically, non consciously by our brain. Now, how could it be that the human body would be breathing dysfunctional and that most people would be breathing this functionally? I mean, there’s some evolutionary logic that would sort of counteract this claim saying like, this sounds so absurd that millions of years of evolution could have arrived at a brain and human body that are not regulating this most basic function of staying alive properly. 

Okay. Well, those systems that evolved from evolution are doing the best they can, but there are some factors causing dysfunction. And I’m going to show you what those are. Now, here’s the evidence to back up this claim that most people in the modern world are breathing dysfunctional. This is something called minute ventilation. This is the amount of air in liters per minute that we breathe in and out of our lungs every minute. Now, what’s really amazing and utterly fascinating is to consider that over the last hundred years, the amount of air that a human being breathes in and out every minute has dramatically increased. Think about that. This is a really weird thing, if you think about it, right? Why would humans today as compared with 70 or 80 or 100 years ago, which is just a fraction of a second in terms of the hundreds of thousands of years the human species has existed on this planet just in the last hundred years. Why is it that the amount of air that’s being breathed by each individual is dramatically increasing, going from in the range of four sorry, 5 to 6 liters per minute you’d say let’s say 4.6 is on the low end of what some of the research has shown. 

But let’s say 5 to 6 liters per minute of air being read by the average human to upwards of 1011, 12 liters. We’re talking about a literally a literal doubling of the amount of air that’s being breathed per minute by each individual. I mean, this is actually insane if you really consider this. Now, some of the studies here, just to back this up in specific conditions so we know, again, normal breathing in healthy subjects in the range of five, six liters per minute, depending on the specific study and the time you know, whether we’re talking about 1990s or 1920s or 2020s when when that data is being taken. But let’s say roughly six liters per minute is normal and healthy. And what we see in all sorts of medical conditions is 15, 16, 12, 14, 12, you know, ten, 13 liters per minute. We’re talking about an average of basically double hairs, asthma, COPD. We saw heart disease, diabetes, cancer, right. Hypothyroidism, liver cirrhosis, cystic fibrosis, epilepsy, panic disorder, bipolar disorder, psychological disorders. 

We’re seeing basically double and all of these here are the specific reference. This is the actual study that determined this. So these are actual numbers, real data from real people with these medical conditions showing that they’re breathing on average about double or more the amount of air per minute that a normal, healthy person should be breathing. Now, here’s another study. This is a study from 2011 looking at people who are very overweight and what they found is that in four different studies, the mean respiratory rate, how many how many breaths per minute. So now we’re talking about something else. It’s not the volume of air in liters per minute. This is the actual number of breaths in and out, inhales and exhales. That one is taking per minute of very overweight persons. Went is about 15.3 to 21 breaths per minute. While that of normal subjects in 2011 is 10 to 12 breaths per minute. So we’re talking about a 50 to roughly 100% increase in the number of breaths an individual takes per minute. So again, that leads us to this situation where all of the sudden humans are breathing twice as much air per minute as we were several decades ago. Now, this is again one of the things that I would put into the category of a genuine and health secret or a secret of understanding our modern health problems, because almost no doctor and even natural health practitioners and functional medicine practitioners, almost no one, I’d say less than 1% are aware of this data and aware of the fact that most people are breathing dysfunctional. 

Okay. So how do you know if this applies to you? Well, odds are you’re modern, human, probably more most likely going to fall into this nine out of ten persons that are breathing dysfunction. But there’s a specific test. It’s called the body oxygen level test or the BOULT test that you can do right now. And we’re going to do it together. That will allow you to determine objectively whether or not you are breathing this functionally. And to the extent you have this dysfunction going on in your physiology that we’re going to talk about, we’re going to talk about all the science of why this dysfunction happens and how to fix it. So your bolt score tells you if your breathing is optimal or dysfunctional, it shows you your CO2, the carbon dioxide tolerance, something that we’re going to talk a lot about. It shows you your oxygen extraction and utilization efficiency. It’s a proxy for measuring your overall energy levels. This is actually the best test that I’ve found for measuring energy levels. We don’t have any particular blood test or hormone test or anything like that. That’s really accurate in assessing energy levels. This is actually the best thing that I found. 

And it’s free and it doesn’t. It doesn’t it? It takes a minute. Doesn’t cost you a dime. You don’t have to see a doctor to go do it. And it gives you an objective way to track your progress as you implement some of the tools that I’m going to teach you in this presentation. Now let’s measure our Volt score. So I’m going to guide you through this process, and I’m going to bring up an online timer to help us through this process. So what we’re going to do, I’ll describe it briefly. First, we’re going to take a few normal breaths in and out through our nose. Then what we’re going to do is pin Chanos with our fingers and hold after the end of a normal exhale. Not a full exhale, but a normal exhale. We’re going to pinch our nose and hold. Then we are going to wait until we have the first clear urge to breathe. Okay. Once you get that first clear urge to breathe, you let go of your nose. You start breathing. Normally, if you gasp for air, if you act like after a maximal breath hold. And to be clear, this is not a maximal breath hold. This is something else. It’s called the bolt test. 

Okay? If you gasp for air, that tells you you’re doing more of a maximal breath hold time rather than breathing at the first urge to breathe. Okay. So again, normal inhales and exhales. At the end of a normal exhale, you are going to pinch your nose and hold until the first urge to breathe and we’re going to count the second. So ready? Take a few normal breaths with me and then we will go. Okay, exhale and ready, set, go. All right. Okay. So in less than a minute, you just got some extremely valuable data. Now, let me show you what this means and let me actually quickly check in with you guys. I’m curious, what was your bolt score? How many seconds did you get before you had to take a breath? Okay. So just type it in and in the chat box and there’s no bonus points for scoring. Well, you can, you know, feel free to if you’ve got a bad score, feel free to post that. Okay. 14, 20, 46, ten, 1230 1014 okay. 21 okay. Excellent, great. Thank you, guys. Beautiful. Now let me show you what this means. Okay, so here’s how it works. When you hold your breath, you have no oxygen entering your lungs and no carbon dioxide can leave your lungs. So your oxygen levels in your bloodstream drop and your carbon dioxide levels rise. Your body’s efficiency at extract. 

Oh, sorry. How quick you feel. The urge to breathe is a reflection of your body’s efficiency at extracting and utilizing oxygen to produce energy. And actually much more than that, because, believe it or not, most people think that what their what that urge to breathe is a deficit of oxygen. It’s actually really not what it really is, is a function of your CO2 sensitivity, your carbon dioxide tolerance at the level of the brain, how sensitive your brain is to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. So in that short span of time, there was very, very little actual dip in the concentration of oxygen at the level of the blood or at the level of the cells. We didn’t get there. Okay. But what we did do is elevate CO2 levels in our blood enough to discern what our CO2 tolerance is at the level of the brain. Now, I’m going to explain what that means and why it’s really, really important to understand little in a little bit. But the first thing that you need to understand here about the Volt score is this has been established in actual medical textbooks through lots of experimentation that a and in athletes in normal healthy people who do exercise young healthy exercising people it’s basically 40 seconds or more is what’s considered healthy. 

Okay. So there is an objective marker for what it means to be healthy. This is just like, you know, you go to the doctor, they do lab tests, they tell you, here’s what your blood pressure should be. Here’s what your blood glucose should be, here’s what your cholesterol numbers should be, etc., etc., etc.. This is a key number and I would actually argue is way more important than a lot of those numbers. They’re focused on maybe not all of them, but certainly a lot of them. And this is a key marker that is giving you an enormous amount of insight into how your physiology is working. And if you have a score less than 40 seconds, especially if it’s less than 30 seconds, that is indicative of dysfunctional breathing and dysfunctional physiology and a deficit of oxygen delivery to the cells and a hypersensitivity to increases in CO2. Okay. Here’s what this says about you. Anything below 25 seconds is an indicator of dysfunctional breathing. Dysfunctional physiology. 40 or more is optimal and strongly correlates with high energy levels. Now, the big key is that this is dynamic. You can improve this. This is not something that you’re stuck with forever. You got a bold score of ten. That’s it. There’s nothing you can do about it. No, there’s a lot you can do about it. I’m going to show you what you can do about it. And if you go from a bold score in the 10 to 25 range and you start building it up to 30, 35, 40 and beyond, you are going to see huge improvements in your energy levels, in your mood, in your brain function, decreases in stress and anxiety and air ability. You’re going to see broad, sweeping improvements in your physiology and performance in brain and body as a result of doing these practices and retraining your brain, how to properly regulate your breathing so that you’re not in those 9 to 10 of people who are breathing twice as much air as they should be. So how do you improve it? We’re going to get to that. 

Here’s first how I want you to commit to actually using this Volt score. I want you to take it daily first thing in the morning. Take this so that you can track your progress, write down your volt score. So have a little journal right next to you that you can write down your Volt score and rate your energy level and your level of anxiety or tension. Okay. So you’re going to have three columns there. You’re going to have Volt score energy and anxiety, and you’re going to rank all of those. The Volt score will be in seconds. The other two, you can rank on a scale of 1 to 10 and you’re going to track the trend and how improve Volt scores leads to improved energy and mood. Okay, so make this commitment. This is an amazing test. It takes less than a minute. It’s free. It’s super easy to do. It doesn’t require any fancy equipment. You can do it at home first thing when you wake up, take your bolt score and it’s going to give you a good indication it’s a way to track your progress. And it’s also a way to track your day to day physiology. So, you know, you wake up after a bad night asleep, you’re going to see your bolt score is quite a bit lower than it should be. So it’s also a way to gain biofeedback into the state of your body and how well it’s functioning that day. 

Should you do hard workouts or take a rest day? Should you, you know, work hard or maybe take an easy day, that sort of thing. But more importantly, as you start implementing these practices that I’m going to teach you, this is a way to objectively track your progress. So you can see the results. You can see how your energy levels and your anxiety levels are improving in tandem as your volt score improves. Now, energy key number two optimize your breathing for deep oxygenation of your cells. Deep breaths for health is a myth. Hey, deep breathing as being healthy breathing is a myth. And the reason why is because of what I already showed you that most people are actually breathing way too much. So we have this idea that this misconception that taking in more air will help us be healthier, that taking in more air will increase the amount of oxygen in our blood that’s being delivered to our cells. Right. So we’re encouraged to take these deep breaths to bring in more oxygen to oxygenate our body. But the problem is deep, heavy breathing is actually not a sign of health. That’s not how healthy breathing, healthy people breathe. As I’ve already showed you. Breathing more also does not get more oxygen into your blood or your cells. Now, oxygen is, of course, the fuel that our muscles and our brain, our internal organs, need to work efficiently for our mitochondria, our cellular energy generators to take that oxygen and combine it with fuel like carbs and fats and use it to pump out ATP or cellular energy. 

Of course, we do need oxygen, but most people are already operating with full oxygen saturation, saturation of their red blood cells in their blood, meaning their blood is already carrying as much oxygen as it can carry. There is no deficit unless you’re just went from sea level to high altitude or something along those lines. There is no deficit in the amount of blood, the amount of oxygen that’s in your blood. So you don’t actually need to breathe more to bring in more oxygen to your blood because it’s already carrying as much as it can carry. All those hemoglobin molecules on your red blood cells are at capacity. There’s no room to carry more oxygen. So deep breathing doesn’t help because we don’t have a deficiency in oxygen. The human body actually, believe it or not, carries a surplus of oxygen in the blood. 75% of the oxygen we take in on each breath is exhaled. When we’re at rest. We don’t even use. We only use 25% of the oxygen that we’re taking in each breath. So the last thing we need to do is start breathing more. And even during heavy exercise, as much as 25% of the oxygen we take in on each breath is exhaled. The idea of taking bigger breaths to take in more oxygen is basically like telling an individual who’s already eating enough food to provide their daily calorie intake to provide their daily calorie needs that they need to eat more food, and that will make more energy. And of course, it doesn’t work like that. Now, if you want to understand this, consider this simple picture of these two people who is breathing the hardest. 

Let’s say these two people are on a walk together. Which one of them is breathing calmly in a way that’s barely detectable, and which one of them is breathing much more heavily? Right. Of course, you know, it’s the one on the right. And we know intuitively that heavy breathing is one of two scenarios. It’s either you’re doing very intense exercise or you’re not healthy. So breathing faster, breathing heavier, deeper breathing is a associated with illness, with poor health, not with good health. Now, the way this actually looks, if you were to create a visual of the breathing, a healthy fit person breathes something like this. The volume of air taken in on each breath is fairly low, and the time of each inhale and exhale is quite long. In contrast, somebody who is sick as I showed you before with all those studies is breathing much more frequently. They have many, many more breaths per minute. For example, in very overweight people, they’re breathing 15 to 20 to 21 or 22 breaths per minute. And they said normal, healthy people should be breathing 10 to 12. Now, I’m going to show you some more data on that, that’s important. 

But let’s just say 10 to 12 is what should be happening. So what you can see here is the difference between the same length of time. This person took four breaths, this person took two breaths. In addition, the volume being taken in on each breath is greater in this scenario as well. Now, chronic deep breathing is what happens in the case of, again, either intense physical exercise or if it’s not if it’s happening at rest. This is a sign of sympathetic nervous system dominance. The fight or flight branch of the autonomic nervous system is much more active and therefore is stimulating increased breathing frequency. Your breathing many more breaths per minute and you’re breathing deeper. Now what we want is actually light breathing. Light breathing is healthy breathing. If you watch a baby sleep, if you’ve had children, you know that. You know, I have a three year old and I have a six year old. And I remember when they were babies, sometimes as a paranoid dad, I would go check on them to make sure they’re still breathing. If they were taking a nap and maybe they were napping too long, I would go in there and check on him to make sure they’re still breathing. 

My, my, my baby. So live right. And sometimes you actually have to look for ten or 15 or 20 seconds to even detect the breathing, the belly moving up and down because the breathing is so light and so subtle. That is healthy breathing. That is a relaxed, nervous system of a healthy person, deep breathing, frequent breathing is not healthy breathing. It’s dysfunctional breathing. Okay. So what regulates breathing rate and breathing volume? Well, you might think again that it’s a deficit of oxygen. The body need more oxygen. It’s actually not because our oxygen saturation is always pretty much always at rest, very, very high at maximal saturation. So it’s not a deficit of oxygen that’s causing us to breathe more. It’s actually carbon dioxide that’s the primary regulator of our breathing rate. The rate and volume of breathing is determined by receptors in the brain that work in a similar way to a thermostat in your home, the brain receptors monitor the carbon, the concentration of carbon dioxide and oxygen in your blood along with the acidity or level. We’re going to talk about that more and why that’s important. And when levels of CO2 increase above a certain threshold, the CO2 receptors in the brain stimulate breathing to get rid of the excess CO2. So they’re trying to lower what it perceives to be excess CO2, and it does that by increasing your breathing rate. 

Now, here’s the big problem. CO2 is not just a waste gas that our body needs to get rid of. So we have these common ideas that CO2, you know, we inhale oxygen, we exhale. Carbon dioxide, oxygen is the good stuff. Carbon dioxide is the bad stuff, this waste product that our body is trying to get rid of and actually, this is totally wrong. CO2 is vitally important for our physiology for many different reasons. And I’m going to show you why here now, here’s what most people don’t know. Part of the CO2 that your body produces with each breath. Breath is retained when you exhale. And this is not a mistake. The body’s holding on to a portion of CO2 in the blood, in the lungs. It’s holding on to some CO2. We don’t inhale oxygen and then blow off all the CO2. We’re holding on to a big chunk of that CO2. Why? This is really important. Why would we be designed to hold on to this thing that people think is just a waste product, a waste gas that our bodies are supposed to get rid of? Optimal health and breathing relies upon retaining the proper amount of CO2. And this has to do with something called the BAU effect, which was discovered by physiologist named Christian Boer many, many decades ago. And basically it is critically important for oxygen delivery to your cells. So red blood cells have hemoglobin, which carries oxygen. How do they know when to drop the oxygen off? This is how and what I mean by that. 

They’re picking up oxygen at the level of the lungs floating around in your arteries. And then they’ve got to deliver that to your tissues, to your muscles, to your internal organs, to your brain, to your heart. They’ve got to deliver that oxygen from the blood to the cells of body in order for those cells to do their job, to produce energy and to function. Okay. How do they know? How does that oxygen know how to get from the blood into the cells where it’s supposed to be dropped off? And it has to do with the bore effect. And this is a visual of what the bore effect is. So all the magic. Well, first, let me explain what’s going on here. So this the vertical axis here is the hemoglobin oxygen saturation percent centage. Okay. So this is the percentage of total oxygen carrying capacity of the hemoglobin in your blood and what percentage of it is being occupied by oxygen versus what percentage is unoccupied, meaning that the oxygen is not on the red blood cells. Okay. So this determines this is basically the bonding affinity of oxygen to hemoglobin on your red blood cells. Okay. So if the binding affinity is very strong, the oxygen goes on, the red blood cells, it stays stuck on there. 

If the oxygen if the affinity is very weak, it dissociates and the oxygen gets dropped off out of the blood, off of the red blood cells into those target tissues. Now, all of this is orchestrated by different P.H. because the and this is the acidity or alkalinity of that environment. Now, basically, the primary thing that determines the P.H. is the amount of carbon dioxide. Okay? So in other words, the amount of carbon dioxide is going to determine whether oxygen is stuck to the red blood cells or oxygen is being dropped off and delivered to your cells and to your mitochondria so that those cells can produce energy. Now, all of the magic of this graph is basically happening in this area. Okay, this this middle ground and what we can see here. So let’s imagine we draw a vertical line from about 30 oxygen, partial pressure. And this is about what’s going on in our physiology. It differs depending on whether you’re looking at the lungs or other areas in the body. But this is our target zone. This is the magic of where human physiology is often operating. Now, hypokalemia means low CO2 levels. You’ve got low levels of carbon dioxide, your blood. What that means here is if you look at this curve from this vertical axis of about 30 here, you see that hemoglobin oxygen saturation is at a level of almost 90. 

That means that that oxygen is stuck very strongly to that hemoglobin, to it’s stuck to your red blood cells now in the same line, same oxygen, partial pressure, but with higher levels of carbon dioxide, you can see the situation changes dramatically. Now it’s about 30, 30% of the hemoglobin in your red blood cells is saturated with oxygen. The difference between here and here is basically that here all the oxygen is on the red blood cells here, all the oxygen has been dropped off from the red blood cells and delivered to the cells. Okay. That happens in the presence of higher levels of carbon dioxide. Now CO2 carbon dioxide is the doorway that lets oxygen reach our cells. If the door is only partially open, only some of the oxygen at our disposal passes through and we find ourselves gasping during exercise, often with our limbs cramping, we find ourselves anytime we do a little physical activity, our muscles are burning very quickly.  We’re out of breath very quickly. We find our energy levels are very poor. Now, if the door is wide open because of good carbon dioxide levels, then we are actually delivering oxygen very, very effectively. And that means energy. 

Now, this is counterintuitive, but taking big breaths does not lead to better oxygen delivery to your cells, actually reduces oxygen delivery to your cells even further. In contrast, when breathing volume remains at optimal levels, carbon dioxide levels are higher, which helps the delivery of oxygen to your cells. Let me repeat this. Breathing more to take in more oxygen does not help oxygen delivery to your cells. Actually, what it does is it lowers the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood and makes it hinders oxygen your delivery to yourself. So instead of the door being all the way open, it’s only partially open, breathing more lowers carbon dioxide levels and hinders it very paradoxically, very counterintuitively, hinders oxygen delivery to your cells. Okay, now over breathing, reduces the levels of CO2, resulting in decreased oxygenation to the tissues. Now here’s an actual fMRI imaging, functional MRI imaging of the brain in the context of either normal, slow breathing or hyperventilation breathing much faster. Again, people think hyperventilation breathing more is taking in more oxygen. Should oxygen actually oxygenate our tissues further? In fact, it does the exact opposite. It creates low perfusion, low blood perfusion and oxygen delivery to the cells because of lowering CO2 levels.

Now, the big question so basically what I showed you at the beginning is nine out of ten people are over breathing. They’re breathing too frequently, breathing, too much volume of air per minute. And they are, to some extent, chronically causing this not only at the level of the brain, but throughout the body, their their hormone producing glands, their internal organs, their liver, their intestines, their heart, their muscles, everything, their skin, everything is is is is this this state when you are chronically over breathing, breathing too frequently and breathing too much volume of air per minute, you are chronically hindering oxygen delivery to your cells. There are big, big consequences of this. So the question is, how did modern humans, nine out of ten modern humans get wired into chronically over breathing and the answer is a few things. Number one, chronic stress is a big factor. When you are chronically, psychologically and emotionally stress there is sympathetic nervous system fight or flight arousal that is very much intertwined with our that meaning. 

The nervous system is intertwined with our breathing rate. When you’re under stress, breathing rate, heart rate speeds up. And if you’re chronically under stress, you are going to chronically have a faster breathing rate. In addition, one of the other big factors is modern sedentary lifestyles. The human physiology basically does not. It is not very good at maintaining optimal levels of carbon dioxide if we are unfit, if we don’t do physical activity regularly. And the other thing that’s important to understand, but is a bit complex, relates to the border effect that I was talking about before with each of our blood and how carbon dioxide is affecting that. So carbon dioxide again is affecting the power of our blood. And of our blood is the big determinant of whether oxygen is attached to our red blood cells or is being delivered to the cells. And carbon dioxide is one of the main things that the body uses to regulate the blood. And that’s why I say the body is carbon dioxide is not just a waste gas. The body is designed to retain some carbon dioxide in the appropriate amounts in order to facilitate certain physiological functions. This being one of them, the acidity of the blood delivery of oxygen to your cells. Now, unfortunately, our diet, our nutrition alter also interplays with this and there’s a lot of research around something called P, r, l potential renal acid load of our diet of the foods we eat. And what this means is basically the acid load of the foods that we’re eating. And there’s a lot of mythology around this acid alkaline diets.  There’s a lot of stuff that’s out there that’s pseudoscience. But there is absolutely a relationship between the foods that we eat and the overall acid or alkaline load of those foods and how our internal buffering system has to respond in order to maintain proper of the bloodstream. 

And basically the way that this works is in very, very simple terms. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the very short version to not take this too lengthy is that when you eat a typical modern diet full of lots of processed food, you are dramatically increasing the amount of overall acid load, potential renal acid load of on your system. And you strain the buffering, buffering systems of your body in particular CO2. CO2 is something that makes your blood more acidic. Sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually a good thing because it helps oxygen delivery to your cells. Now, when you have a lot of acid load coming from your diet, what your body does is lowers CO2 levels and decreases your brain’s CO2 threshold, makes you more sensitive to increases in CO2 because it’s trying to keep CO2 very low in order to compensate for that dietary acid load. Okay. So the combination of these three factors is what wires modern humans into chronic over breathing. As I showed you, nine out of ten people are chronically breathing roughly twice as much air as they should, as healthy people do. So your breathing volume can be 200 to 300% greater than needed without you noticing. 

Anything is wrong with your breathing. And again, nine out of ten people are walking around in exactly that predicament. And once this pattern of over breathing is wired in mentally and physically, you will breathe in excess of what is required every minute, every hour and every day. And you’ll be chronically offloading too much CO2. Your CO2 levels in your blood will be chronically too low. So chronic over breathing is one of the biggest factors in chronic low levels of energy and high levels of anxiety. And this is, again, I would say, one of the biggest modern health secrets, because most doctors and health practitioners are simply unaware of all of this stuff that I’ve shown you so far. So people typically have no idea that their non-conscious breathing habits are playing a role in their energy problems, in their anxiety problems, or their mood problems. So the quick recap, deep breathing is stress breathing. Light breathing is optimal. Breathing CO2 is not just a waste gas. Harnessing the power of CO2 is the big key to supercharging oxygen delivery to your cells over breathing, decreases CO2 and sensitizes the body to CO2, which causes fatigue. Poor oxygen extraction, decreased energy production and anxiety. And one of the major keys to getting rid of anxiety and increasing energy being healthy is reducing breathing rate and increasing your body’s CO2 levels. And let that last one sink in. One of the big keys to improving your physiology and increasing your energy and decreasing your anxiety is reducing your breathing rate and increasing the level of CO2 that your blood has all the time. 

So how do we fix chronic over breathing and optimize our CO2 levels? There are three steps. One, eliminate excess CO2 loss by training the four keys to optimal breathing, which I’m going to show you in second. Number two, improve CO2 tolerance. And number three, reset your CO2 threshold. And I’m going to show you how to do that. The most powerful way to do that as well. So the second big energy key here, going along with everything that I just explained about this chronic over breathing is that we need train the four traits of optimal breathing. These are the four keys to optimal breathing. It’s light breathing, not deep breathing. It’s slow breathing. Not fast. Okay. Remember, healthy people are breathing. Or I should say people who are unhealthy are breathing literally twice as many breaths and twice as much or even more volume of air to 200 to 300% more air per minute than the then healthy people. Okay. So we want to reduce our breathing rate and our breathing volume, nasal breathing. This is critically important. And diaphragmatic breathing and diaphragmatic breathing. 

Belly breathing is the one piece of breathing advice that’s commonly out there. That’s actually good advice. So I’m not going to spend any time on that light and slow breathing we’ve already covered. So what I want to touch on here is the importance of nasal breathing in this. Now, before I get there, let me just show you kind of a visual of unhealthy breathing versus healthy breathing versus optimal breathing, and specifically the numbers of what this entails, unhealthy breathing, roughly 15 to 22 breaths per minute. And that’s exactly what the research shows that are that I showed you, for example, in very overweight persons, they are breathing 15 to 22 breaths per minute. You’re going to see typically 10 to 20 second bolt scores in those people. People who are healthy are going to have 10 to 12 breaths per minute, on average, based on a lot of modern research of modern humans. And this is going to correspond to 30 to 40 second bolt scores and optimal breathing is going to look like this. And you can see the visual of what this looks like. This is the amount of breaths per given length of time. And you can see the difference in how this is illustrated versus how this is illustrated. 

Optimal breathing where we ultimately want to get to the healthiest people are going to breathe somewhere in the realm of 4 to 9 breaths per minute, and they’re going to have greater than 40 seconds, ideally greater than 62nd bolt scores. Now, the no ads, okay, this is a source of a compound, very important compound called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is produced within the nasal cavity. And until the 1980s, there’s a very interesting history around this compound. Until the 1980s, nitric oxide was actually considered a toxic substance. It was associated with smog and harmful effects in the environment. And in 1992, it was proclaimed the molecule of the molecule of the year by the journal Science and was an important molecule that unites neuroscience, physiology and immunology and plays a critical role in how cells communicate and defend themselves. And in 1998, Robert F Ford, Scott Lewis, Jay Ignacio and Ferid Murad were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that nitric oxide plays a critical role in the cardiovascular system and blood vessel dilation in particular. Blood vessel dilation. The dilation of your blood vessels to facilitate blood and oxygen delivery to your cells. If your blood vessels are not dilated, you cannot deliver blood and oxygen to your cells. So nitric oxide boosts vascular and lung health. 

It promotes relaxation. It has a critically important role in immune health as an anti-inflammatory agent, antiviral and having antibacterial properties. And it works in harmony with carbon dioxide to facilitate oxygen delivery to your cells. So if we want adequate oxygen delivery to our cells, we’ve got to have proper levels of both carbon dioxide and nitric oxide. Now, to give you an idea of the importance of this and how much power it is here, I’m going to cite a random study on erectile dysfunction so this was a study on 33 men with nasal polyps. So this is kind of like these polyps, these growths in the nasal cavity that impair the ability to breathe through the nose. So a lot of these people end up as mouth breathers because their nasal breathing is impaired. And what they found is basically when these men went under, underwent surgery to remove these nasal polyps and then they restored proper the proper ability to breathe through the nose, most of their erectile dysfunction went away. So this really shows you how big of an impact nitric oxide is having on the ability of blood and oxygen to actually be delivered to your tissues. If if you are not producing enough nitric oxide and if you’re not nasal breathing all the time, what you are going to do is you are going to hinder the ability of oxygen to get to your cells, not just your penis, of course, or your clitoris, but your brain, your internal organs, your muscles. 

All of that blood flow and oxygen delivery is going to be chronically hindered as a result of not nasal breathing and not producing enough nitric oxide. And as an added bonus, this is just an interesting kind of aside, but this found not only nasal breathing dramatically increased, is it? But if you hum on the exhales while nasal breathing, it actually increases nitric oxide dramatically even more. Okay, now there’s an important role of nitric oxide in immune health. We know that people who breathe through their mouth are much more prone upper respiratory tract infections. We know when you breathe through the mouth that the particles have free access to go directly down into your lungs without being filtered properly. And when you breathe through the nose, the virus particles are much more likely to get filtered out. And you will have a larger quantity of nitric oxide produced in the nasal cavity to combat those particles before they reach the lungs. And in fact, there are even inventions. There was an Israeli company during COVID that manufactured a product called I think it’s called the end of Read or the company is called ANOVA. But they basically created a solution. You spray up the nose that basically creates a whole bunch of nitric oxide in the nose and they found that it kills SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID like 99.9% as a result of the nitric oxide. So the nitric that the human body produces all the time is toxic. It’s essential part of our immune defense. So this is playing a critical role in our immune defenses and again, in facilitating blood flow and oxygen delivery to our tissues. 

Now breathing through the mouth leads to almost zero nitric oxide production. Breathing through the nose increases nitric oxide by six fold. And then again, the bonus, if you want to hum on the exhales as a temporary thing, you can you. Maybe after flying on a plane and being exposed to a bunch of germs and things like that, you can dramatically increase the amount of nitric oxide produced in the nose. But basically this is what you want to focus on. The difference between no nitric oxide production and almost none versus lots as the difference between breathing through the mouth or the nose. So in addition, breathing through your nose facilitates increased efficiency of utilizing the oxygen you’re taking in on each breath and also facilitates you breathing in a more optimal way and not over breathing and taking it blowing off too much CO2. It takes longer to breathe through the nose. It’s smaller holes, there’s more resistance. Right. And we want that. We want that resistance to be present. And it increases the air pressure as a result, again, of it being smaller cavities that it’s got to go through and it increases nitric oxide production dramatically, which is, again, critical for oxygen delivery to your cells. 

Now, I’m going to circle back to this quote I shared with you at the beginning. All chronic pain, suffering and diseases are caused by a lack of oxygen at the cell level. Do you now understand a whole lot more about what is causing this problem with what is hindering the of oxygen at the cell level? Chronic over breathing and breathing? The wrong way is dramatic. And breathing too much, too much air per minute and breathing way too frequently is dramatically lowering our carbon dioxide levels and lowering our nitric oxide levels. And having adequate levels of those two compounds by breathing the right way is essential for getting the oxygen to your cells to allow them to produce the energy they need to function well. And again, this is one of the big secrets of health that very few people are aware of, very few people are talking about. Almost no one knows this science. It’s just it’s truly one of these areas that’s still kind of a secret that very few people are aware of, but it’s one of the biggest drivers of disease. So again, the four keys to healthy breathing, light, slow, nasal and diaphragmatic. We need to train these consciously using practices to train this pattern of breathing as our brain’s automatic non-conscious pattern of breathing all the time. 

And we really do have to train it in order for that to happen. This is a nice quote from Qigong master named Chris Pei that explains there’s three levels of breathing. Number one is you breathe so softly that the person next to you can’t hear you breathing. Number two is you breathe so softly that you can’t hear yourself breathing. And number three is you breathe so softly that you can’t feel yourself breathing. And so that this is getting at this light, slow, nasal, right, diaphragmatic light, slow, nasal, that’s optimal breathing. And that’s what’s going to lead to carbon dioxide in nitric oxide levels being where they need to be to facilitate oxygen delivery to your cells. Energy key number three, we’re going to talk about breathwork to rewire your brain and nervous system out of chronic stress and anxiety mode. Now we’ve got this problem. Nine out of ten people are wired into chronic over breathing. They’re chronically blowing off too much CO2. What this means this this is hard for some people to understand, but try to stick with me. So if you’re if you’re zoning out on me at all, if I’m overwhelming you, slap yourself in the face a couple of times lately, do a couple big stretches, take a few breaths. Aggressive breathing actually stimulates your nervous system, which will wake you up a little bit. And that relates to what I’m going to be telling you about here in the second. Now, here’s the concept. I want you to understand that’s hard for some people to understand. This chronic over breathing lowers CO2 levels at the same time it sensitizes our brain to CO2. So it makes it so our brain likes to keep its CO2 threshold where it’s regulating those CO2 levels lower and any elevations in CO2, the brain is very sensitive to those elevations and those elevations will trigger a state of anxiety. Many people aren’t aware of this, but CO2 levels are one of the absolute biggest factors in chronic anxiety. Yeah, CO2 levels. 

So I told you how it is. It relates to blood p h and relates to oxygen delivery of your cells. But now this other thing that CO2 is doing, which is it’s somehow relating to our brain function and our mood. So what’s going on there? Well, it’s a function of your brain CO2 threshold. And humans are designed such that CO2 levels in the blood and detected by the brain are, designed to interplay with our mood and our brains, perceive level of stress or need for anxiety, chronic over breathing and having a low CO2 threshold. The low CO2 tolerance as a result of chronic over breathing is the number one hidden cause of chronic anxiety. And it also contributes to chronic tension and pain syndromes, inflammation, disease, loss of resilience and of course, fatigue, lack of energy. Now, here’s some of the research to back this up. Back this up. We know that in people with breathing disorders, for example, there is a very high prevalence of anxiety and depression. Why would that be? It’s because breathing is very much related to the brain’s regulation of those mood states. We also know that if you give regular people who don’t have breathing disorders a gas to inhale that has a higher level of CO2 like 6% or 7% solution of CO2, it rapidly induces anxiety. So for example, here they use the 7.5% solution of CO2, gas and it rapidly increases anxiety levels. So again, we have this tie in between the brain’s sensing of carbon dioxide and it triggering some anxiety. 

We also know that this is not just correlation, confusing correlation with causation, but we know that if we do breath retraining, which I’m going to show you some of those techniques to do that, if we do that, this these techniques to retrain our breathing, that we will reduce our anxiety and reduce our breathing rate. So you do this breathwork training and you can actually retrain your brain to breathe less, to breathe less breaths per minute and less volume of air per minute. And that this actually translates into reduced anxiety. So linking together all of these pieces that I’ve explained to you thus far, again, here’s another one breathing therapy on complaints of anxiety and breathing pattern in patients with anxiety disorders and the favorable influence of breath, breathing, retraining on complaints. This appears to be a conflict and a consequence of its influence, primarily on breathing frequency. The Breathwork training resulted in people breathing fewer breaths per minute. This is another one self-regulation of breathing as a primary treatment for anxiety. And they said, we hypothesized that reversing homeostatic alterations with meditation and breathing techniques rather than targeting neurotransmitters with drugs may be a superior method to address the whole body changes that occur in stress, anxiety and depression and this is another one just to give you a sense of what is possible. 

This was a group of young high school students and they did six weeks of training where all they did was 5 minutes of breathwork done, what was it, three times a week? Three times a week. That’s it. So 15 minutes total per week, per seven days, 15 minutes, 5 minutes, three times a week. This is almost nothing. And in this tiny amount of breath training, they saw dramatic reductions in levels and they’re altering. What did I tell you about a minute ago? CO2 tolerance at the level of the brain. They showed that pre and post breathing CO2 tolerance scores improved by 44 and 37% respectively. Okay. So reductions in anxiety in tandem with improving increasing the brain CO2 tolerance as a result of just this tiny amount of breath, we’re training. This stuff works, folks. It’s very, very powerful. Okay. So again, if your brain has a low CO2 threshold or a high CO2 threshold, this is going to translate in a big way to how your nervous system is regulated, either in a chronic stress mode or in a relaxed mode. This is a huge factor in for people who are in a chronic state of stress, who feel a chronic state of overwhelm, who have nervous system dysregulation, who have chronic anxiety. 

This is nervous system dysregulation and the breathing component. Dysfunctional breathing is a huge contributor to it that almost no one is talking about now. Steps to rewire your brain and nervous system out of chronic stress and anxiety. Number one, retrain your automatic non-conscious breathing and CO2 threshold using those four keys to breathing that I’ve already showed you. So you’ve got to train nasal breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, slow breathing and light breathing. You have to train your brain to breathe in those ways as it’s non-conscious, automatic breathing pattern. And step two is something we’ll talk about in a second. Okay. But step step one is that step two is specific breath work practices during stress to rapidly take control of your nervous system and brain within seconds. So what I want to show you here is an amazing technique that will allow you during the actual stress itself, will allow you to rapidly calm your brain and reduce stress and anxiety in your brain. So how can we control like, for example, when your dogs are going crazy and you’re in the middle of a live webinar and your brain is super stressed out, you can use these techniques. Okay, so how can we control our level of stress in the brain in the moment of stress? Well, it doesn’t work to tell yourself or someone else, for that matter. 

Definitely don’t tell your wife to just calm down. It doesn’t work. Trust me. I’ve tried it. It will result in bad things. Then it’s very difficult and it’s usually ineffective to just try to use your mind to calm the mind. When we’re under stress, we often experience increased breathing, increased heart rate and a racing mind and. What most people do is they decide to work on the mind component and we have lots of apps and technologies and all sorts of things that people have created to mindfulness meditations that are trying to and CBT techniques and other psychotherapeutic techniques that are trying to get us to calm down when we when we feel this by using mind techniques. In fact, it works way better to work on the breath and the reason why is because the breath directly interfaces with the nervous system. And we know there’s a lot of modern research now coming out showing just how amazingly intertwined breathing is with our nervous system and with the regulation of basically everything in our body, including how our brain functions, how our limbic system in our brain perceives and senses and responds to fear and all sorts of things. It’s massively influenced by our breathing. 

Now, here’s an interesting fact most people are unaware of when you inhale, literally every time you take an inhale, which for many people is somewhere 15, 20 times per minute. Every time you inhale, you’re nervous. System is being stimulated. Okay, your sympathetic fighter flight nervous system turns on ever so slightly during the inhale and during the exhale your parasympathetic nervous system turns on ever so slightly. And this is happening literally all the time on every breath. This is how intertwined our breathing is with our nervous system. So when you inhale, your heart starts beating faster and you become more alert. And when you lengthen your exhales, your heart starts beating slower and you become more calm. And that’s happening all the time, though it’s imperceptible to most of us, especially because we’re breathing too much, too often, too fast. Now the system in the brain that controls breathing is very unique as it operates under both conscious and unconscious control. This is unlike virtually all of the other systems of our body, like our gut, for example, or our heartbeat or our brain function, where all of these things are happening automatically on their own. 

We don’t have the ability to consciously control them and change how they’re working. But with breathing we do. With breathing we do. It’s non consciously regulated for us all the time and it’s also something that we can consciously choose at any moment to change how we’re breathing right. Hold on 1/2. I need to get some airflow going on. Okay. So because this system is unique in this way, it gives an amazing potential. It allows us to use the breath consciously to control our brain and influence our nervous system and rapidly a state of calmness when we’re under stress or in a state of anxiety we use. So how do we do this? We use the mechanism that Mother Nature. For us, the fastest way to lower anxiety in your brain is the physiological side. There is a specific group of neurons that’s found in the brainstem of all mammals that controls a breathing pattern called the physiological side, physiological size, our pattern of breathing that we are wired to engage in spontaneously, automatically when CO2 levels get too high and our system is triggered to breathe. Now, a big aspect of the response in our brain and our nervous system is having too much CO2 buildup in our lungs and bloodstream. That’s why I showed you those those studies earlier that showed that it induces anxiety. 

That’s how our systems wired. Now, the physiological side is something that people do spontaneously during sleep. Sometimes that you’ll see babies do during crying and that you’ll see people do during extreme stress. You probably start to notice this after I show you what I’m about to teach you this technique. Now, Mother Nature built this powerful, calming technology into us a long time ago. Everyone has these neurons, and it was design tied into our biology for the purpose of calming us. Now everyone has these neurons. We do it unconsciously, but the great thing is we can also learn to do it consciously, to take conscious control of our brain and nervous system during stress. And here’s how to do it. It’s basically a double inhale through the nose and then a prolonged exhale. So the way that it works is we’re going to take it’s not a quick double inhale through the nose like this. It’s actually a deep, full inhale through the nose almost as long as you can go. And once you get to that point, then you’re going to add a little spurt of an extra powerful little quick spike of an inhale after that. Okay. So here’s how it looks. And then you’re going to exhale through the mouth with a prolonged length and exhale. So here’s how it looks. Okay. Practice that for one minute. I’ll be right back after I go. Shut up. My dog’s right. Excuse me. 

Give you an opportunity to practice a little built into the live webinar is a little too doggy is going crazy, which coincided with an opportunity for you to practice the physiological side. Now you should notice a particular if you were stressed like I was when I’m in the middle of a live webinar with dogs going crazy, that after doing the physiological sigh you feel much calmer now. If you were already calm, you probably were. But if you were already calm, you might not notice much. But if you were stressed, you will notice a rapid, rapid calming of stress and anxiety in the brain. Okay. And this is the single fastest and most powerful way, really, that has ever been discovered by science to rapidly lower anxiety and stress in the brain physiological side, very, very powerful. Now, how does this work? Why does it work physiologically? Basically, it’s because our lungs aren’t just too big balloons full of air. They’re actually of millions of little alveoli, little small sacs of of air, and basically not all of these sacs are fully expanded all of the time. A lot of them are partially open or even closed. 

And so what happens is when we do this full inhale and then the little spurt of a quick, forceful, little extra inhale, what happens is we blow open those sacs, those those alveoli, our lungs fully, and we allow that the trapped CO2 that’s that’s in there that’s not being exchanged efficiently. We allow our cells to blow it off. So we rapidly exit and we rapidly get rid of and blow off CO2, which cons our nervous system and our brain. And just as breathing the gases of high CO2 mixtures, rapidly induced anxiety when we rapidly blow off CO2, we can reduce anxiety now when and how to use the physiological side. One is, of course, during stress it can be used throughout the day with 1 to 4 physiological sighs. Any time you notice excessive tension, stress, agitation, anxiety could also set a mindfulness bell timer to go off every half an hour. For example, do a couple of physiological sighs, reset your system, and you’ll notice as a result of taking 20 seconds to do this every half an hour, you will rapidly probably cut in half the amount of anxiety you go through your days with. 

And this is that powerful, that profound of a technique. Another great place to do it is during exercise, in between intervals, in between sets during weight training. It will enhance recovery and allow your nervous system to rest during those intervals. Just as we want to take a break and give our body rest workouts, we also want to do that between sets and the more effectively we can drop into deeper states of calmness, of rest, the relaxation in those rest periods, the more effective, effective our workouts will be. And another great time to do this is before sleep, particularly if you have trouble falling asleep or if you are prone to waking up in the middle of the night. Try doing 10 to 15 physiological sighs and what you’ll notice, very likely if you’re prone, if you’re in one of those two categories, is you will start falling asleep much easier. And if you have nightly awakenings, you’ll be successful in falling back asleep. This technique is really that effective, and one of the reasons Breathwork is so powerful for tackling stress and anxiety is that it’s always available. At any moment, you can decide to take three physiological sides to rapidly your brain and nervous system. It’s always there, it’s free. It’s very quick and easy to do so. This is a tool we can use in real time to hack our physiology to hack our brain and calm our brain within seconds. This was a recent study that just came out at the beginning of 2023 from the Huberman lab. 

And basically they showed that a daily practice of just 5 minutes of rest breathwork and they compare different types of breathwork here showed when they compared in terms of positive affect the change in positive affect from baseline to about 30 days out, what they showed is that there were big improvements in many of these different things. But the biggest improvement, biggest change in positive affect in increasing positive emotional states and moods was associated with cyclic sign doing this sorts of sighing practices for just 5 minutes a day. So the quick summary the most powerful way to hack your nervous system to reduce stress and anxiety is the breath. Number two, we want to both retrain the automatic non-conscious breathing pattern to increase CO2 tolerance and reduce chronic tendencies to be in stress and anxiety and to consciously use breathing in the moment to rapidly reduce and eliminate stress and anxiety in the brain. And number three, physiological signs are the technology that Mother Nature endowed us with for exactly this purpose. And fortunately, she also blessed us with the ability to control it voluntarily and when to use it during stress, during workouts and before bed. And you can also do a five minute daily practice with this energy key number for intermittent hypoxic training to hyper oxygenate your cells, reset your CO2 tolerance and supercharge mitochondrial energy production. And this is the big guns. This is the super powerful way to reset your brain. CO2 tolerance, intermittent hypoxic training. 

Hypoxic means low oxygen states. Now intermittent hypoxic training is using breathing techniques to induce low oxygen levels in the blood and low oxygen levels at the level of the cell in the mitochondria. To stimulate beneficial adaptations in your body, there are numerous confirmed scientific benefits to this type of training. It induces beneficial changes in mitochondrial function are cellular energy generators. If you are familiar with my work at all, you know mitochondria are central and there’s a huge body of literature showing. Of course, they’re central to energy to whether we’re fatigued or we have abundant energy. But we now have a lot of research showing that mitochondrial dysfunction or poor mitochondrial health is linked with many, many different dozens of diseases and is linked with accelerated aging itself. Literally, the rate aging at the cellular level is heavily influenced by how healthy your mitochondria are. So this practice of intermittent hypoxic training, which I’m going to tell you about, is a massive influence on your mitochondrial health. It induces mitochondrial biogenesis to literally help create more mitochondria. It decreases inflammation. And if we have time, if somebody wants to ask me in the Q&A, I can take you through a bit more on mitochondria. But I removed some from this presentation for the sake of making it shorter because it was too long before. So I’m trying to. I have so much that I want to teach, but I end up having to cut out a lot of great stuff because it’s just I don’t want to people to stick around for 3 hours. So I’m to make this short and succinct and give you a lot of the essentials. 

But I always feel bad because there’s so much I end up having to leave out. It decreases inflammation, it boosts immune function, it increases exercise performance, improves your nervous system. Balance for reasons relating to the stuff I just explained, improves your sleep, improves mental calmness and toughness. We’re going to talk more about that, increases resistance to stress and increases energy levels in a big, big way. In fact, this is the single most powerful way that I’ve found in over 25 years of studying health science. This is the single fastest way I’ve found to help people increase their energy levels, particularly people who are suffering from chronic fatigue. Intermittent hypoxic training mimics altitude training, and it increases energy as a result of a lot of these things that are mimicking some of the physiological changes that occur, that adaptations that occur when we go to altitude, it increases our brains, tolerance to carbon dioxide. It reduces stress and fatigue of working muscles and improves psychological resilience and toughness. It improves recovery time. It reduces lactic acid production from your cells. It improves the production of EPO, erythropoietin, which is an important hormone we’re going to talk about that relates to red blood cells, and it increases red blood cell production from the spleen within minutes. And that relates to the hormone that I just mentioned EPO. 

Okay. Now, this training, intermittent hypoxic training is a type of what’s called hermetic stress. It’s a type of beneficial stressor that is a type of transient metabolic stress that stimulates your body to make adaptations that ultimately make it stronger, make it more resistant to stress, make it more resistant to disease, and make it make it make it more resilient and protect you against the negative effects of aging. And this has to do with a science of for me says this is actually something I’ve spent many, many years of my life writing about, making videos about. It’s the subject of my next book that’s going to be coming out with Hay House. And this is a big chunk that I had to take out of this presentation that this is actually my favorite topic. And I want to tell you just a bit about how this works. So some of the specific adaptations that are stimulated by intermittent hypoxic training are, number one, it teaches your blood to extract oxygen more efficiently from lungs and does this in part by actually altering the physical interface between the lungs, the alveoli, the little sacs bare in the lungs, and the capillaries your blood vessels so much in the same way that, you know, you lift weights and you can reshape the structure of your muscle cells. Well, when you do these intermittent hypoxic training practices, you are literally altering your changing the structural interface of your lungs and your blood in a way that enhances oxygen delivery to the blood. It also helps oxygen delivery to your cells and to your mitochondria. It also helps build resilience at the level of the mitochondria so they are protected from stress. It also helps build bigger and stronger in much the same way that lifting a weight build stronger muscles. Intermittent hypoxic training helps build stronger mitochondria. 

Again, these things that I told you are central to our energy levels, to our risk of disease, and to the rate of aging itself. We also have lots of research, particularly. Most of the research was done for decades in the old Soviet Union before any research was ever done in North America or the rest of Europe and the Soviet Union had done tons of research for decades using intermittent hypoxic training, various approaches, breath holding practices for all sorts of different diseases with amazing results for for neurological diseases, for mental illness, for all sorts of things. We also know that when we do these breath holding practices, that we get an increase in what’s called erythropoietin or EPO. You might you might have heard of this drug in the context of like the Tour de France and endurance racers using it for basically blood doping. Because what this hormone does, it’s a hormone that our body normally secretes when we go to altitude. And it’s part of how our body adapts to altitude. 

You secrete this hormone EPO, and it increases the amount of red blood cells you have floating around in your bloodstream and increases, therefore, the amount of oxygen carrying capacity in your bloodstream. And you can imagine, of course, how that might be very beneficial for elite endurance athletes. And of course, this was used for many, many years by not only Lance Armstrong, but basically all of those athletes were doing blood doping in various ways using EPO, which they, of course, test for and is illegal to use or were doing, you know, adding more blood into their system. They were taking blood out and then storing it in refrigerators and putting blood back in their system, all to increase the amount of red blood cells to increase their oxygen carrying capacity to help them perform better. Well, it turns out when you do breath holding practices in the right way, you actually secrete EPO. And it leads to increased red blood cell production from the spleen, which increases your blood oxygen carrying capacity, and that this effect happens in minutes and you can do it in a self-induced way without having to inject hormones into your system or do blood transfusions. 

We also know and this is a study where they showed that this hypoxic training actually changed the mitochondria. They said the phenomenon of micro mitochondria within mitochondria is an adaptive mechanism for intermittent hypoxia. And the most important effects we’re after here are the mitochondrial enhancements of our muscles and our various organs like the brain, the heart and the lungs. And this is a huge key to having an impact on your energy in particular. So basically what this is doing is taking small, weak, damaged and dysfunctional mitochondria, energy generators and building them into bigger, stronger energy generators, building up your cellular engine into a stronger cellular engine that can produce more energy, which allows those cells, whether it’s your muscle cells or your brain cells or internal organ cells or hormone producing glands, it allows those cells to function better and do their job better. This type of training, intermittent hypoxic training, breathwork training is also being used in the context of COVID and respiratory tract infection protection, protection from severe disease and severe outcomes from respiratory infections. 

And in the context of rehabilitation from when somebody has been damaged by respiratory infections, we also know from numerous studies that this type of training is greatly useful for improving exercise performance in athletes or people who are not necessarily athletes but just want to perform better physically. And we have lots of studies to back this up. And maybe most interesting for most people listening to this is that there is a study out of Russia that basically showed that intermittent hypoxic training is a bona fide anti-aging treatment and has induces specific mechanisms in the body, the cellular level that are anti-aging and longevity promoting rejuvenation of mitochondria. I’ve already explained that a decrease of reactive oxygen species or free radicals, these are the things that we’ve been told for many decades. We need to use antioxidants to combat the free radicals. There’s a whole lot to that story that’s not true. But we do want to decrease reactive oxygen species or oxidative stress at, the cellular level. And this is, in fact, one of the most powerful ways to do it via building up our internal antioxidant supply increased, oxygen absorption, transportation and utilization, improved glucose metabolism and enhanced accumulation of intracellular glycogen, increased accumulation of site of glob burns and increased erythropoietin and heat shock protein 70. 

These are a rich protein. Erythropoietin or EPO is what I already explained about increasing red blood cells and oxygen carrying capacity. Heat shock proteins is a way that our cells protect themselves against harm, and it facilitated stem cell dependent tissue repair and stem cell tissue. STEM cells are actually it turns out a whole bunch of research is emerging showing that stem cells are one of the most essential aspects of anti-aging and longevity. We need those stem cells to repair damaged cells. And this is one of the ways that is has been found, it is one of the most powerful ways to stimulate our own stem cell supply, to prevent the accumulation of damaged cells. So how do you actually implement this method and. Well, there’s a few different ways to do this. Give me 1/2 so I can try to get my dog to stop barking. Apologies come. Okay. So how do you actually do this? How do you implement? There are many different ways that we can we can do these intermittent hypoxic training practices. And this I want to give you a few kind of examples of how this can be done. 

So one is what’s called paired with what’s called fire breathing. And fire breathing is hyperventilation practice that is in and out rapidly through the nose. And it looks like this. So what you’ll typically do is something like 30 to 50, maybe even 100 breaths like that. And then once that’s done, you will exhale your air and hold your breath on the exhale. Maximal breath hold. Not a bold score, but a maximal breath. Hold. And once that’s done, then you go straight back into the fire breathing and then you go round two of breath hold and you can do you good. If you’re just beginning this, you can start with one or two breath holds. You can build up to five, you can build up to ten. Breath holds. That’s one way of doing it. Another way is what’s called to Mo breathing. Wim Hof has greatly popularized this two mo breathing, which actually comes out of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in the Himalayas. They have something called two MO or G2 MO, and now most people know it as Wim Hof breathing because he’s the main guy who popularize it. And there’s also a variation of it called DMT breathing. So this can be done. It’s a slower breathing pattern than the fire breathing, and it’s either through the nose and out through the mouth. So it’s a full, deep inhale and then kind of like a halfway exhale through the mouth, a full, deep, maximal inhale, and then a halfway kind of a relaxed exhale, not a forceful exhale, but a forceful inhale. And then kind of relaxing on the exhale, not not forcing it out very aggressively, but just relaxing. 

And the Wim Hof method is breathing in and out through the mouth is how he generally teaches it. And you typically do roughly 30 breaths, most commonly, and then after that, exhale out your air and hold your breath. And what the hyperventilation before the breath hold is doing is it’s blowing off lots of CO2. Okay. This is a bit counterintuitive, because what I told you before is that most people are breathing too much all the time. They’re hyperventilating to some degree breathing too many times per minute, breathing too much volume of air. And that this is bad, right? I’ve already explained to you why it’s bad, so it might seem odd that in this context I’m now saying, hey, go do this hyperventilation practice. Well, this is the difference between what is your normal breathing that you’re doing 23 hours and 30 minutes of the day? And what I’m now talking about is a specific training method that you would do for a few minutes, maybe up to 20 or 30 minutes per day if you really wanted to go all out with it. And there’s big difference between doing it in that context versus doing it all the time. The same way exercise is beneficial if you do it as a 20 or 60 long workout, but if you are exercising super intensely 20 hours a day or running ultramarathons every day now all of a sudden becomes very unhealthy. Right. And that’s that’s the distinction. What is something that is a short term transient practice versus what is your all the time automatic way of being? 

Okay. So we do these few rounds of breath holds preceded by to blow off lots of CO2 to lower our CO2 levels. What that does is prolongs the time that we can stay in the breathless state. And what that does is allows us to actually get into a truly hypoxic low oxygen state in our blood. So we do the hyperventilation to blow off lots of CO2 very rapidly so we can hold our breath longer, so that we can spend more time in low oxygen state. And it is that low oxygen state that is actually inducing the beneficial adaptations. All those things that I just told you about as far as improving mitochondrial health improving oxygen delivery to your cells and the efficiency of oxygen extraction from the lungs and all of those other amazing benefits that I just talked to you about, the secretion of red blood cells from your spleen as a result of the hormone EPO, stem cell tissue repair. All of these things are happening as a result of adaptations from your body spending time in a hypoxic low oxygen state. So that’s the critical piece of this. Now, you can also do this as a walking breath, hold practice. This is also something I do frequently. I do not recommend doing it swimming for for obvious reasons. If you pass out, you drown. If you don’t have somebody there to save your life, if you do it walking like walking on the grass. Worst case scenario, you pass out, you fall down on the grass. 

But I don’t want to scare you that the potential to pass out is extremely low. It’s extremely rare, but it does happen, especially in the pool with the elite athletes and three free divers who are pushing the limits of what’s possible and holding their breath for extreme length of time. If they hold too long, they can pass out. I’ve never heard a story of someone doing that that I know of personally or anybody using these methods, but it is possible. Hence my warning is don’t do it in the pool so you can it during doing, during walking or during light exercise. And don’t do it during heavy exercise because your breath hold times will be too low it to be meaningful but very light exercise, stretching, yoga type movement, other gentle mobility practices and things like that are low intensity. Exercise is great to pair with breath holding and you can also use what’s called a pulse oximeter. They’re very cheap. You can get them for 15 or 20 bucks on Amazon and they will show you your blood oxygen saturation. And so you can get in real time an analysis while you’re doing the breath holds, you can see how low in oxygen your blood is. So you can watch it go from 98, 99% down to 92% and down to 85%. And I’ve gotten down in the sixties and fifties with with my intermittent hypoxic training practice. So and that’s also like the Bolt score, a great way to track your progress objectively. 

Okay. So bonus layer is this you can combine this practice of breath holding with an internal attitude of relaxation, and this is what’s called top down training of the brain. You’re using your prefrontal cortex to tell your amygdala in the presence of stress physiology, you’ve got your stress hormone surging, your adrenaline surging in that state of physiology. You’re using your prefrontal cortex to tell your amygdala and your limbic system to calm down. And this training this in this way, not only are you getting of the physical benefits of doing this, this practice, but you’re also getting some amazing mental toughness benefits and resilience benefits psychologically and emotionally at the same time. So and this I found is really the single best way to train mental and emotional psychological resilience and mental toughness. By doing it in this way, we systematically train ourselves to go into stress physiology. And while we’re there, we teach ourselves using our brain, using our higher brain functions. As humans, we we interact with the more primitive brain centers and teach them how to be calm in the face of stress. And this translates into your life in absolutely incredible, powerful, magical ways where you will notice much more resilient you’ve become how much calmer in the face of stress you’ve become. 

And this is absolutely one of the greatest gifts I can possibly give someone is learn how to go through all of this. The stress of life and stress is inescapable and ubiquitous. How to go through that with calmness, with serenity. It’s really an amazing thing and this is the single best way to train it. So quick summary here. Mitochondrial health size and number are one of the big secrets to energy, anti-aging and longevity. And one of the key drivers of disease fatigue, loss of resilience and aging is poor mitochondrial health and loss of mitochondria. Intermittent hypoxic training is the single most powerful type of poor medic stress of this beneficial stress for rapidly increasing energy levels. And it induces many key adaptations that result in more energy, better performance, improved resilience and reduced anxiety. We’re improving mitochondrial size, building mitochondria bigger and stronger, and more of them altering the lung blood interface and blood cell interface. 

Building lung capacity, improving. My increasing the amount of red blood cells and oxygen carrying capacity and so much more. So this is an incredible technique and this is again the single fastest and most powerful way I found to rapidly increase energy levels. So if your energy levels or high levels of stress and anxiety and you’d like to really learn how to do all of this with step by step world class guidance, I have really good news. You I’ve partnered with world renowned breathing expert Patrick McCowan to bring you the most powerful and cutting edge breathing force ever created for enhancing energy levels and reducing anxiety. And it is the breathing for energy to tell you a bit about that right now, and I’m going to make it available for you to buy it. As I tell you about what it’s all about, basically, it’s a way for me to take you way deeper into the science of everything that I’ve shown you here in this presentation, and give you step by step guidance on the practices to rewire your brain into this state of physiology. Okay, so the first one is advanced breathing science with me, and I’ll give you a deep dove into the science and rewire your physiology and even deeper dove into what we’ve gone over here. We will go in depth guidance on the fourth use to optimal breathing, breathing and specific practices to train it. 

We’ll talk how to take control of your internal levels of CO2, nitric oxide and oxygen to optimize your moment to moment energy. Focus, relaxation. We’re going to talk about neurological hacks to instantly increase your energy levels, your relaxation or your focus, how to permanently rewire your brain for energy and focus. And the four steps to rewire your nervous system out of stressed stress mode with guided step by step practices. Now, here’s one of three tracks from Patrick McCowan. Again, one of the top experts in the world in breathing. And this is a track that he specifically developed for people with chronic fatigue fibromyalgia burnout. Here’s what you get tools to rewire your brain and nervous system, how to breathe properly and so and that will reset your CO2 threshold and super oxygenate your cells to have more energy than you’ve had in years. This is a seven week progressive and gentle program specifically designed for those with severe chronic fatigue. And the gentle is emphasized because some of the more aggressive practices doing the intermittent hypoxic training, breath, hold hyperventilation practices is actually not appropriate for people with severe chronic fatigue. If you’ve got debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, Max, you actually do not want to do those practices because in general, it’s too much for physiology to begin with. You need much gentler practices. 

And as you practice progressively these gentler practices, after seven weeks, you’ll be ready for the more advanced intermittent hypoxic training programs. So this is a progressive program to retrain your automatic habits and to get yourself out of this chronic hyperventilation, chronic over breathing, which, as we’ve talked about, nine out of ten people are in and you’ll get one new module every week to gently progress from the previous week, step by step training videos with fully guided practices to teach you through the exercises so you can overcome fatigue and get your energy back. There’s also another track from Patrick, specifically on PE people with sleep problems insomnia, snoring, obstructive sleep apnea. He’s got a whole set of practices. He’s done amazing research and worked with people for many, many years and developed a whole system to help people with these issues. So he’s got a specific training system with fully guided practices to open your airways and breathe deeply during sleep packs to help you eliminate snoring and dramatically improve your sleep quality. And there’s another track for people with anxiety issues and panic disorder issues. So again, developed by Patrick McCowan specifically for the Breathing for energy program. 

And he’s got specific training videos with step by step guidance and videos and audios to guide you through the exercises to rewire your brain and nervous system out of chronic stress and anxiety mode, to eliminate negative thinking and entrain the brain into relaxation as your new baseline state and practices and hacks to retrain your automatic breathing habits and reset your CO2 threshold to squash anxiety. In addition, there’s a track for already healthy people and people who are not necessarily athletes, but people who are already healthy, already relatively fit, who don’t necessarily have major sleep issues, don’t have debilitating chronic fatigue, but are looking to take their energy, their mood, their brain function, their physical performance to the next level and. This is advanced guided breath work practices for already healthy and fit people to take you to the next level of energy and physical performance. Endurance, strength, stamina, step by step, guidance, and a program builder to help you design the perfect program for your level. And this is very much central to the program. There are six levels of progressive, advanced guided, intermittent hypoxic training practices. 

And in this module, you’ll learn how to take your breathing to a whole new level with progressive, intermittent hypoxic training practices. It’s critically important that you do this in a progressive way. If you just do random practices that you can find online every day in a random, arbitrary way where you’re doing a different thing every day, it’s not going to do something. You have to do this in a progressive way. And here’s what you get fun, fully guided, follow along daily practices with video and music that are actually guiding you breath by breath through this practice. For specific lengths of breath, hold tight. And there are there’s a full progression of six levels of this practice from 15/2 breath holds up to three full minutes and beyond. So this is from severe chronic fatigue to healthy young fit athletes. That’s it takes you through the whole range. In addition, there are several bonuses that I’ve built into this program. Bonus number one is non-slip deep rest for training your brain into ultra deep relaxation. 

There’s two fully guided non-slip, deep breaths, deep rest practices that I specifically designed for those with anxiety and sleep issues. One is 20 minutes long, two full length, one, and the other one is 10 minutes. It’s a half length. And this practice, which is sometimes called it, comes out of the yogic tradition called yoga. Nedra It’s not a set of yoga postures, but it’s actually laying on your back, doing guided body scan meditation. This is the single most powerful practice for taking control of your nervous system and retraining the nervous system and brain how to consciously relax. So this is a wonderfully beneficial practice that pairs very well with teaching your brain nervous system how to breathe light and how to breathe slow and how to breathe in a calm way. So we’re learning how to retrain our brain and nervous system and how retrain its regulation of our breathing habits. By doing these practices, by doing Patrick McKellen’s air hunger practices, by doing the intermittent hypoxic training to reset our CO2 threshold, by practicing the four keys to optimal breathing, and by using these non sleep depressed practices as. Well, in addition, this practice also has been shown in research to recharge the serotonin and dopamine system of the brain. It’s also a very powerful practice for combating bonus. 

Number two, this is elite level 22, 30 minute guided, intermittent hypoxic training practices. And this is to take you to what I call Navy SEAL level. So this is this is if you’re already past 3 minutes, if you’re already past the level of, let’s say, young, fit, healthy athlete, and you’re ready to go even further, this is going to take you as far as you can go, maybe not all the way to the limits of world record levels of breath holding time, but these are specific practices to get up there to those elite world class levels of breath within time. So this program spans the full range from debilitated people with chronic fatigue syndrome who can’t hold their breath for more than ten or 15 seconds, all the way up to the level of elite world class in Navy SEALs and athletes. And the last bonus is these are hacks that you can pair with the hyper hypoxic training practices that are specific exercises, where you can do the intermittent hypoxic training practices combined with either yogic band does. These are energetic holds or postural holds where you hold your body in certain positions. And I found by combining the intermittent hypoxic training, the breath holds into that there are some amazing benefits with that and there’s a traditional yogic practice around this in pranayama traditions and there are specific practices that we can do. 

Like, for example, the one illustrated here in this picture where if you put your body in these positions, you’re stretching open certain fashion line, certain parts of the fascia of your body and opening certain joints in certain ways. And I found when you combine the breathing practices into that, it amplifies everything. So we can greatly improve our bodies, physical structure and function at the same time by by pairing these things together, by layering these together. And and it’s also very time efficient. At the same time, you know, this really came out of my own personal interest and just time efficiency of how can I combine some of my daily movement practices for keeping my body pain free with the breath holding techniques? Now, it doesn’t work when I do intense physical exercise because I can’t do the proper breath holding built into that because the breathable times are too short during intense physical exercise. But there is an intensity level of certain types of movements that fall more into the yoga mobility types of intensity where you can pair these things together in magical ways. I think I’ve been experimenting with this for years and I’ve developed a whole sort of methodology around it and take you through that in videos where I teach you exactly what I do. So that’s what’s included in the program. There’s also an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee, so you get to go through the whole program, try it out for yourself for 30 days. If you don’t see massive improvements in your energy levels, reductions in anxiety, improvements in your overall health and vitality and performance, you return it for a full refund. 

No questions asked. It’s that simple. So whether your goal is more energy, lower stress, anxiety, better improved athletic performance, more resilience to stress or general anti-aging and longevity, these methods, this program can change your life. And I’m giving you again a 30 day money back guarantee to try it out for yourself and experience that. And then you will know for certain whether what I’m telling you is true. But I’ve shown you a ton of research here, obviously. So, you know, there’s a lot of science to back up. The truth of what I’m saying here, that this methodology of this breathwork can absolutely and has been shown in lots of science to improve mood, to improve energy levels, to reduce anxiety, to improve CO2 tolerance, to improve resilience, to improve athletic performance, to create anti-aging and longevity. The research already exists. I’m just putting together all of the pieces and partnering with a world renowned breathing expert to create the best program in the world to help you achieve all of those specific effects. So here’s what you get. You get the Advanced Breathing Science module with me that three different tracks with Patrick Buchanan, the chronic fatigue fix tracks, the Sleep Fix Track and the rewire your brain out of chronic stress and anxiety track, the advanced energy training track and the six levels of guided intermittent hypoxic training. And you get four amazing bonuses. 

The total value of all of this is over 1300 dollars. And right now you get all of this for just $297. Now, after this launch, just to let you know the price is going up, back up to the normal price, which is for 97. But right now as a special offer, basically, I’m giving people this as a result of this promotion that we’re doing right now. We’re doing it for just 297. So, again, you know, this this is something that whether your your interest is improving energy levels and overcoming chronic fatigue or improving and brain function and reducing inside and and not being so irritable and so overwhelmed and so fragile where you’re you’re you’re so easily thrown off as a result of every little stressor but becoming more resilient if you want to improve your brain function, your physical performance, whatever it is, your sleep, there are tools here that are scientifically proven to massively improve your. And so I strongly urge you to try this program out again. There’s a ton of amazing stuff here. It’s me and presenting, you know, hopefully you’ve been wowed by all the science that I’ve shown you here. And if that’s not enough, I brought in one of the top experts in the world, the breathing experts in the world, to create a whole set of videos and specific progressive tracks for you to help you improve your health and fix these specific problems like fatigue, like sleep problems, like anxiety. 

And we’ve got the guided, intermittent hypoxic training practices, a whole system of progression from 15 seconds up to beyond 4 minutes. So this is an amazing program. I know it can change your life, and I strongly urge you to click the buy button and try this program out. So do that now. And I’m going to stick around for a little while in case anybody has any questions, which I suspect there will be. So let’s turn the chat back on and what questions do you guys have for me? I’m all ears. I’d love to know how you guys enjoyed this presentation and I’d love to know what questions you have for me before we end. Okay, awesome question. Jessica, how does this work for severe, anemic folks like me? I’m not aware of any specific research looking at anemia, but I don’t suspect that there’s any problems that would arise. Well, what I would suspect, based on the fact that intermittent hypoxic training helps produce EPO, which stimulates increased red blood cell production, the spleen is that it’s I don’t want to say it’s going to cure your anemia, because anemia can be caused for a number of different reasons. But it’s very likely that it would help you tremendously for sure. Mercedes asked a beautiful question at age 81. Will this be too hard for me? The short answer is to show you this. Okay. The track that Patrick McCowan designed for McFee, for people with chronic fatigue syndrome, it’s a seven week progressive and very gentle program. This is specifically designed for people with severe fatigue and like people who bedridden. 

So if you’re 81 years old and you’re even somewhat functional, this program is absolutely gentle enough for you and is absolutely appropriate for someone at that age. And there’s a proverb in in China, a Chinese proverb, I should say that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now, so it’s never too late. 81 is a great age to start doing these practices cars. And what’s the connection between yawning, sporadic pulse rates and blood pressure? What’s going on there is some degree of autonomic nervous system dysregulation, and the yawning is actually a way that we blow off excess CO2. So yawning happens oftentimes in response to stress. One of my good friends is Mark Waldman and neuroscience researcher and author, and he’s actually done a of work on yawning as a way to calm the brain. And the way that it calms the brain is in large part by blowing off CO2. So if someone’s yawning a lot if they have sporadic pulse rates and blood pressure, there’s some autonomic nervous system dysregulation going on. And this these practices are very likely to help improve autonomic nervous system function. Carol said, can you buy one track only the anxiety track? No, unfortunately you can’t because there’s a whole foundational set of practices. 

And then that the idea is if you have one of these specific issues like anxiety or like sleep problems or like chronic fatigue, you do that track first and then once you’re done with the track, you move on to the track that is designed for generally healthy and already people. So they actually are designed to go once they’re designed to go together. It’s just that if you have specific problems or specific needs, work on those first and then you go to the main track for everyone. Okay. Let’s see. Can you do these exercises during sauna sessions? It’s possible. I wouldn’t do the aggressive of intermittent hypoxic training practices in the sauna, just for the same reason that I wouldn’t do in a pool. If you pass out, it can be dangerous. And it is actually in a sauna. It’s much more likely, though, still rare. It’s much more likely that one might pass out due to the heat. And if you fall over and now your head’s like hitting the heater or something like that, or just being in a very hot room, it could be dangerous. So it’s not advisable for that reason. But of course you’re an adult and you’re free to experiment. There is no medical reason per say that like there’s no specific research that one could cite. It says, don’t do these breathing practices in the sauna. It’s more just my general warning to people don’t do stuff that’s potentially dangerous. Susan, is it appropriate for someone with cardiovascular disease and stent placement? This is unfortunately falls into the category. 

A medical question I have to legally say you need to consult your doctor if this is right for you. Having said that, your doctor is likely to know nothing about, any of these practices. So it’s it’s you know, it’s kind of something like I’m referring you to go ask someone. I have to say that legally that’s what you should do. Having said that, you’re not likely to get a whole lot of useful information from them. My my my answer in general, though, please don’t take this as medical advice is that the gentler practices for sure will be appropriate for you, whether or not the more aggressive, intermittent hypoxic training, breath holding practices are appropriate is something that only your doctor could answer for your specific issue. Kenneth said The difference between this and the energy Blueprint program. Yeah, the difference is the Energy Blueprint program doesn’t have any of this in it. It doesn’t have any of the breathing information science or any of the breathing practices in it. So it’s an entirely different program. And it’s its own program that basically there’s pretty much close to 0% overlap. The only overlap is in the education portion. Part of what I remove from this presentation is a lot of information on mitochondria and or medic stress and how hermetic stressors are causing adaptations at the mitochondrial level. 

And that’s something that is talked about in both the breathing for Energy Program and the Energy Blueprint program. But in terms of practical strategies, they’re completely different. There’s zero overlap. Christine I love the part about healing effects of COVID. Is is it the IHT or the earlier breathing? It’s yeah, the the intermittent hypoxic training. There’s a number of studies. There’s actually probably more now since I last looked at it, these came out in 2021 and they were already studying. So I would suspect there’s probably several more studies on this, on this topic. And also for like looking at long COVID recovery and that sort of thing. So yes. And the more resilience you can build and strength you can build in that system, in your respiratory system, the more you can build beneficial adaptations. Again, don’t take this as medical advice, but it is very, very, very likely that if you build a strong respiratory system by using these practices, you are going to be vastly more resistant and unlikely to have any sort of severe outcome with any respiratory infection, including COVID. You’re welcome. Just lots of thank you. Lots of kind words. Thank you guys so much. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Andrea. 

With a physiological side, you breathe out between the two deep breaths and the small inhale. No, you don’t. So It’s an inhale through the nose, almost a full inhale. You’re holding there for a brief second before you without letting any air out before you go and add one little extra spurt, an inhale. On top of that, Marlene said, thank you very much. Excellent presentation. Okay. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Merry email said, Can I take the course in another time? I need to make a budget for that. How do I contact you? You can you can always reach out to support at theenergyblueprint.com Caitlin said lots of great information so the practical resources unfortunately like it’s a function of time I’m trying to get rid a lot of the the guided lengthy guided practices but I tried to give us some examples of specifically how this intermittent hypoxic training can be done here and here. So with fire breathing or demonstrating, the other breathing and then exhaling in breath holds or pairing it with walking or other gentle activities. So that’s the basic idea of it. But of course we want to do it in a systematic way. Can you by only one track or the answer that, Beth, my life has been pure stress for years. It sounds beneficial for me as well as hypo hypothyroidism not severe symptoms of M.S. Yeah. In general what we saw from the beginning, if I go back here, we have lots and lots of research showing that virtually all diseases, at least the ones that have been tested, are associated with over ventilation, with breathing too much breathing too frequently. And that is very, very likely to also be true with hypothyroidism and M.S. and I’ve personally experienced many people where that is the case. So if you’re in this category and nine out of ten people who are and the more you have symptoms and illness, the more likely you are to be in that nine out of ten, as if 90% is in already a high enough probability.

But basically, if you are either overweight or you have lots of symptoms in illness, it’s virtually a guarantee that you are going to be over breathing and therefore, if you’re in that nine out of ten people, you are very, very likely to benefit tremendously from doing this program, John said. In the last three years, with focus, breathwork and Qigong, I have rid myself of severe mixed sleep apnea. Do you have further evidence that this happens? Yes, with the breath work. So there’s actually a paper from Patrick McCown of a research paper published in a peer reviewed journal talking exactly about this. So if you look up, I don’t want to spend the time right now, but if you if you go into a into your Internet browser and look up Patrick McAlpine sleep apnea research, you’ll probably be able to bring up that paper. And it talks about the mechanisms behind that. So awesome. Congratulations. John Carroll said. I’m wondering if you can do this tomorrow. This offer will be available for a few days. Yes. Eric, is the product online only? Does it include media that can be viewed offline? It is possible to download the content, download the videos and audio. 

Does Kate said Does Breathwork like this improve high blood pressure issues? It is very likely to help reduce blood pressure, yes. Particularly as a result of reducing increasing the CO2 threshold and reducing sympathetic nervous system dominance and increasing parasympathetic tone. The changing your breathing, increasing nitric oxide is a huge factor of that blood vessel. Dilation allows for blood pressure to reduce. So if you’re over breathing chronically and if you’re not nasal breathing, both your CO2 and nitric oxide levels are going to be off. And that absolutely has huge relationship with blood pressure. The the purchase can be made on this page and you should see a button just to the right of me with a buy now button with a picture like this and you should be able to purchase right there, Christine, can payment be made over time? I don’t believe there’s a multi pay option. I think it’s just a one time payment. Michael, if you have CFS but not bed ridden, is IHT okay. It’s basically a question of the individual. So you need to test it basically. And of course there is a way of titrating the dose in a, in a smart way where you’re not likely to overdo it. Meaning day one, you start with 110 second or 15/2 breath hold you rest. The next day. The next day you do 115 second breath or 22nd breath if you can do it, or you do 210 second breath holds, right? And then you get to a point where you do such a tiny amount of work that and in a slow progression that you’re unlikely to experience the consequences of overdoing it and experience negative symptoms. If you go into it and you start doing these practices very aggressively as somebody who is in very poor health currently, it’s very probable. Just the same with exercise that if you overdo it, you will have some negative symptoms. 

So you have to just titrate it to your body’s current state of resilience. If your body’s in a very weak state, do very, very tiny doses, take baby steps with increasing it to avoid overdoing it and experiencing the consequences of that. Kerry, will you rebroadcast this or have this webinar available to view again later? I’m not sure if there’s going to be a replay that goes out or if it’s just this one time. I, I actually don’t know the answer to that. I got to talk to my tech guy about it. Jenna Beth, is this session available okay? Same question. Tony, is four, seven, eight breathing still useful? There are. This is one of the things that I took out of this presentation, Darren. I know exactly the slide that I have that speaks to this, but basically it is possible to breathe in a certain rhythm where time is taken for the inhale, for the exhale, for hold, etc. and yet for one to still be, even if one is breathing at the right frequency, to still be twice as much air as one should be. So let me see if I can show a slide that will help illustrate what I’m talking about here. This one. Okay, so what we see on the vertical axis here is the amount of air that’s coming in and out of the lungs with each breath. So if you notice what it looks here versus here, these are much shorter spikes. These are maybe half the size of the spike. 

So what that means is the actual volume of air that was taken in and blown out with this breath is much smaller than the volume of air that was taken in and out this breath, even though this breath is much shorter in time, okay, this breath is much longer. There was less air that went in and out. So what I’m getting at here is that if you just have these sorts of prescriptions, which lots of these things exist, you know people say breathing in for 5.5 seconds and out for 5.5 is the optimal breathing rate or something like that. And so people will try to make their breathing in that exact timeframe. But what they will happen if your nervous system is wired in the way that I’ve described in this presentation, if you’re one of the nine out of ten people wired into over breathing, what will happen is you’ll be breathing at for the right amount of seconds on your inhale and exhale, but you’ll be still breathing twice as much air as you should be. Your your minute ventilation. The total amount of air breathed over a minute will still be too high, even if you adjust the length of each breath. So what we’re trying to do is actually we’re trying to get this down from a total volume of air around ten or 11 or 12 liters per minute, back down to in the realm of six liters per minute. And we don’t do that just by slowing down our breathing to a certain amount of seconds for the inhale and exhale. 

We do it also, much more importantly, by resetting our CO2 tolerance and rewiring the way that our brain non consciously regulates our breathing habits. Okay, Michael, if not in optimal health due to CFS, what contraindications can occur if the exercise is not gentle enough yet? Basically you can experience symptoms the same sorts of symptoms you might experience from overdoing exercise. Okay, so you will feel exhausted, rundown, sore, that sorts of things. So I’m not worried about you like having a heart attack or something like that. It’s, it’s really the same sorts of consequence as you experienced by overdoing physical activity or even overdoing mental activity, you know, in people who are bedridden with CFS doing, too much mental work can be exhausting too, but really it’s analogous to to physical exercise in that regard and the potential for side effects overdoing it. Alex, thank you so much. I appreciate the gratitude and the kind words. Beth My inhale and exhale are long and slow. Is this bad? No, it’s not, is the short answer. Yeah, we. We want. I can go back to that slide. I was just on. Where is. Here we go. So we want longer inhales and exhales in particular that the exhale in healthy breathing is emphasized. But in general, the whole process of breathing will be slowing down, slowed down in more optimal breathing. 

Thank you, Sandy. With the physiologic sigh, is the exhale through the mouth or the nose? Ideally through the mouth can also be done through the nose, but traditionally taught as being an exhale through the mouth. And you want it to be exaggerated and slow. Janice, could you go over to how to take the Bolt score again? Sure. The very quick version of it is this. Okay, so we’re taking normal breaths after the end of a normal exhale, not a full blowing all the air, but just at the end of a normal exhale. We’re pinching our nose and holding our breath until the first urge to breathe. And we’re counting seconds. The timer for how long? That that takes empty. Asked What is my score on the exercise we did at the start of the score? So my personal score this time was like 47 seconds or something like that, to be honest. Normally it’s like 60 or 65. It was a bit shorter. And the primary reason why is that I was a bit nervous with this presentation because I removed whole bunch of content trying to get it shorter and, and when I’m presenting, when I’m talking a lot proceeding that I’m not breathing normally in a relaxed way. So My nervous system is a bit ramped up right now as I’m doing this live webinar and talking constantly makes it so I’m not breathing properly. Then if I go into a breath hold from this state of talking all this time and not breathing properly, the bolt score is reduced by that. But yeah, basically if you notice it was about 47 seconds and it should be normally when I take it it’s well over 60, which I carry where you keep dogs practicing their breathing techniques. 

Earlier, my wife and kids all left the house and. They went out to dinner to give me time and space to do this webinar without having to worry about them being noisy. The problem is the dogs are here with nobody else to help manage them if they’re being noisy. So unfortunately, that was the case. Melanie, will this help atrophy? I have no idea. And I can’t make medical claims around that. Yeah, I really don’t know. But it’s certainly just speaking logically about the mechanisms. It’s certainly possible that optimizing your breathing can at least help with blood flow and oxygen delivery to those tissues, whether it would help with atrophy of those brain tissues, I don’t know. Beth, long and slow, long and slow breathing, but I can’t hold it long. Interesting. Yeah. Usually long and slow breathing is associated with more optimal breath hold times. But, you know, there might be exceptions to that. And you might it also might be a case of just your own subjective perception of things. What is long and slow like I would be curious to know your bolt score and if you took minute to actually measure how many breaths you take in a minute. Maybe it’s not as long as slow and long and slow as you realize, Robin is offloading CO2 just necessary until brain sensitivity lessens. It sounds like CO2 is a good thing to have. Yeah, this is a common source of confusion for most people. There’s something kind of paradoxical and it’s a bit difficult to understand for many, many people. So there is in the transient context of, let’s say, acute stress, you’re stressed out, you’re overwhelmed, you’ve got anxiety, you’ve got a panic attack. There is absolutely a huge benefit of in that context, doing, breathing, breathing, an aggressive way to blow off CO2 to rapidly in that moment reduce anxiety levels. 

On the other hand, if you were to breathe chronically all the time in a way where you’re breathing too much and blowing off too much CO2 that is actually harmful and chronically lower and hinder your oxygen delivery to your cells and lower your brain CO2 tolerance, which will actually, paradoxically make you more prone to anxiety and stress. Okay. So again, I’ll, I’ll invoke kind of exercise as an example here exercise is profoundly beneficial. It’s a stressor on our body. It’s profoundly beneficial if done in the proper dose, in the proper context if we do exercise, intense exercise all the time now, it actually becomes toxic to our body. Right. So we there are certain things which, if done in a small dose for a short period of time are very beneficial, but if done in a much longer dose all the time are now toxic. Okay, so there’s something going on here with that as well when it comes to CO2. Okay. So hyperventilation is a tool in this context of acute stress and anxiety to lower that rapidly by blowing off CO2. But we don’t want to be doing hyperventilation all the time as our normal automatic breathing habits that our brain is regulating, because that would actually become toxic. Okay, we want to do the opposite in that regard. Hopefully that makes sense now. And the other one context to be aware of with offloading CO2 where it’s beneficial is preceding breath holds in the context of intermittent hypoxic training. 

We offload lots of CO2 so that we get it out of our blood with the hyperventilation, then we hold our breath and that again allows us to stay in a low oxygen hypoxic state a longer period of time so that we can induce more beneficial adaptations, MT said. What is your top goalscorer? Probably 70 something seconds. MY you know, to be honest, I don’t take my volt score very often that much anymore. What I do now is I do maximal breath hold times because. I do that practice every day. So I’m doing my maximal breath hold times. I do it differently sometimes. Sometimes I do it paired with activity where my breath hold times might be. Sometimes I do it while surfing or walking on the beach after surfing in the morning. Sometimes I do it with mobility practices and my breath hold times during the activity might be 30 or 40 or 60 seconds if I’m doing it in a seated rest state. I’ve now just broken 4 minutes in my breath hold times. So that’s the one I’m really measuring. To be honest. I haven’t measured my Volt score in a while other than doing it here in the context of me talking incessantly or it’s not very accurate. But yeah, my, my maximal breath hold times. I just in the last six months got from 3 minutes to now. I’m beyond 4 minutes for the first time. Yeah, you’re right, Michael. The dog probably didn’t help your score either. Yeah, it’s probably true. Mary. Mel, thank you, Ari, for all the new learnings. What an eye opener this morning has been for me. Who is a health nut? More power to you and God bless you. Thank you so much. Mary Mille. I’m glad you enjoyed it. M.T Can you tell us more about the guy who is the legend of breathing who develops parts of this program? Yeah, his name is Patrick McCowan. He is the author of The Oxygen Advantage and other books. He’s widely regarded as one of the world’s top breath experts, for example. And James Nestor’s book Breathe. That was the New York Times bestseller. 

Patrick McKeown is heavily he’s one of the experts that James Nestor went to to learn from. You know, he’s been around for a long time and he’s is one of the of the best world class breathing experts with a lot of experience, with working with people with chronic fatigue, a lot of experience working with people with panic disorders and anxiety disorders and a lot of experience working with sleep issues as well. And he’s become a personal friend of mine and just a guy who I greatly respect. Miriam Weiss said, I definitely breathe through my mouth. Will the program train me to breathe through my nose? Yes, absolutely it will. That’s a big part of what this program is about. And it’s essential to breathe through your nose, not through your mouth. As Patrick McCowan says, noses are for breathing, mouths are for eating, and we need to keep it that way. And that’s essential for our carbon dioxide and especially our nitric oxide to be where it needs to be to facilitate oxygen delivery to ourselves. So our muscles, our brain, our sex organs, all of those cells of our body can have adequate energy and do their jobs well, Elizabeth said, will this help with the COVID vaccine? I assume you mean negative side effects from the COVID vaccine. Again, a medical question. I can’t can’t really answer it. But in general, the way that human physiology works is our body is a system right? All of the different parts of the system are very interconnected. 

And if we improve, if we increase positive inputs into one aspect of that system, it has tends have many different beneficial side effects on every other aspects of the system. For example, if we start improving our diet, improving our nutrition, it doesn’t just affect like fat loss, for example. It also affects our brain function or mood, our energy production, our liver detoxification, our gut health. All of these things are interconnected. So it’s all if you if you want to understand how to create health, it’s all about creating, learning about what are the key levers that help optimize human physiology and then gaining the knowledge of how we pull on those levers, whether it’s nutrition or whether it’s exercise or whether it’s circadian rhythm and sleep, or whether it’s stress management or breathing or you know, some of the other levers that exist out there, like what we’re trying to do is create the most optimal lifestyle with the most optimal inputs for this system of our brain and body so that it can regulate itself in its healthiest way and most optimal way possible. And this stuff that I’ve taught you here, the breathing piece, is one of the key levers to allow physiology to function optimally. Michael said I do about seven breaths per minute at rest, but Bolte was 25. That’s very interesting. That’s very unusual. Typically, if your Bolt score is 25, you would expect your breaths per minute to be more in the realm of, let’s say, 15 ish. But what the main reason that I do the Bolt score test of having somebody take their breaths per minute is that when if instruct people to take to count how many breaths they take per minute, what happens is a lot of times people alter the number, they alter their normal breathing habits. Now that they’re paying attention to it and counting it, they tend to slow it down, particularly once they know this information and how much they should be breathing, they tend to all of a sudden slow it down. 

So I don’t want to get too crazy with like quantum physics talks and all this sort of thing. But, you know, there’s the observer observer effect where you’re observing something, you’re changing it, right? You’re altering how it normally exists when it wasn’t observed compared to now when you are observing it, it’s behaving differently. And this is a good example, but it’s not quite quantum physics, but it’s an example of that same phenomenon, just this sort of the awareness that’s there and the knowledge of what should be happening is now altering what is happening. So it’s possible that your true number of deaths, breaths per minute are not actually seven, but that’s being altered by all of the information I just gave you. Elizabeth, will this help with mental exhaustion if physically exhausted? Absolutely. It’s going to help in many, many different ways because you’re facilitating blood flow and oxygen delivery to your tissues. And if you’re getting oxygen to your cells and your mitochondria, those cells, whether they are muscle cells or brain cells or whatever cells, are going to work better. And if I can go back here to this refinery somewhere around here. There we go. Okay. If you’re chronically over breathing, this is what’s happening in your brain. 

Your brain is not getting the blood and oxygen that it needs to function well. And mental exhaustion, of course, relates in huge to a huge degree to what’s going on at the level of the brain. So, yes, this is a big piece of the story for sure. And all of these practices relate greatly to both physical energy and mental energy and mood regulation. And if we’re spending lots of our days in sympathetic nervous system dominance, where we’re stressed, where we’re anxious, that also is a factor that heavily induces both physical and mental. So we want to increase our CO2 tolerance, bring our nervous system back into parasympathetic dominance, improve oxygen delivery to our cells. And all of those things are going to greatly enhance resilience and improve physical and mental energy. Okay, Beth, with which breath was it? If I wake up and calm back, get back to sleep? So if that’s the case, you want to think about doing 10 to 15 physiological sighs. That’s the double inhale through the nose and the long inhale through the mouth. Okay. So thank you, Elaine.

Thank you guys so much. If that’s all the questions I want to thank everybody for showing up. We had a great attendance. It was great feedback. It looks like a lot of you really enjoyed all of the information that I gave here. Thank You so much for all the kind words. I’m glad you guys loved it. And again, last thing I want to emphasize before we go, is this one more time. If you’re on the fence at, all I just want to encourage you actually two things. One, remember this. Most people, 90% of people in the modern world are breathing way too much, period. We have lots and lots of science showing that people are breathing. Their brain rate is too much. They’re breathing too many times per minute and they’re breathing way more air per minute than they should be. This is not a small thing for human physiology energy, for the physiology of the average person. To change this much in the last 100 years is a huge problem. And this is causing, as I’ve explained in this presentation, widespread physiological consequences with the delivery of oxygen to, our cells. Okay, if you’re in this category of nine out of ten people who have dysfunctional breathing, you have a deficit in oxygen delivery to your cells. And I will emphasize this quote one more time. All chronic pain, suffering and diseases are caused a lack of oxygen at the cell level. I think this is a bit of an exaggeration to say all chronic pain and suffering like there’s many sources of suffering and pain, we can smash our toll on something. I had an injury earlier with jujitsu. I don’t think it is caused by that. But you get my point right. Most illness and disease and lack of energy is caused by lack of oxygen at the cell level and the main driver of it is this. It’s chronic over breathing due to physiological dysfunction. We now know the causes of this and we have a system to correct it. 

So let me finish by emphasizing this one last time. Whether your goal is more energy, lower stress, anxiety, better sleep, improved athletic performance, more resilience, resistance to stress or general anti-aging on longevity. This is one of the key of the puzzle to all of those goals. So please hit the buy button. Go try this program again. There’s a 30 day unconditional money back guarantee, no questions asked. Try it out for a full 30 days. If you don’t love it, if you don’t experience tremendous benefits in your life, you get a full refund and you got to a whole bunch of really cool tools and science to improve your life. Okay, so there is no potential for loss here. Please do yourself a huge favor. Do your family a huge favor. Go get this program and get it for your loved ones and enjoy the benefits and the longer life and the more serenity and the more resilience and the better mood. And all of these benefits that I’ve shown you the science on, I’ve shown you actual scientific proof that it does of these things. So there’s you don’t have to take my word for it. I actually showed you the scientific evidence that it does these things. So enjoy all of these benefits. And I hope you guys enjoy this presentation and I will hope to see you in the Breathing for Energy Program. So thank you so much and I hope to see you there.