"I came from strength and conditioning. I needed a system I could measure."
June 20, 2026 | 9:15 AM GMT | Sponsored by Oxygen Advantage®
I have spent my life in movement. Martial arts, professional rugby, strength and conditioning — I have always been drawn to systems that are rigorous, trackable, and grounded in how the body actually works.
So when I first found the Oxygen Advantage, what struck me wasn't the philosophy. It was the numbers.
Here was a system I could measure. A score I could track. A framework that told me not just what to do, but why — and whether it was working. After years in the fitness industry, where a lot of breathwork felt more like tradition than science, that mattered to me.
I became obsessed.
I started watching my students closely. My athletes at the gym. I was looking at their breathing the way I had always looked at their movement — as data, as information, as something to be assessed and improved. And what I found changed how I understood everything I thought I already knew about the body.
Because breathing isn't something you do separately from movement. It isn't a practice you set aside 20 minutes for and then forget about. It is everywhere. It is happening in every rep, every set, every sprint, every moment of stillness. And once I understood that, I couldn't unsee it.
The work with my Brazilian jiu-jitsu athletes showed me what that means in practice. In BJJ, you grapple. You get put into holds. You face moments where your air is cut off and every instinct in your body tells you to panic. What we did in training was give those athletes a controlled experience of that feeling — a measured dose of air hunger — so that when it happened in competition, their nervous system already knew it. They had trained that response. They could surrender to the discomfort instead of being taken over by it.
The results were immediate. What they practised in breathing training transferred directly onto the mat.
That is what this system does. It doesn't just improve how you breathe. It changes how you move, how you recover, how you perform under pressure, and how your nervous system responds when things get hard.
I work now with athletes who want to push their limits and move more efficiently — and with people who simply want to feel better in their own bodies. The principles are the same. Breathing is the fastest highway to the nervous system. And once you learn to use it, you have access to something that is always there, in every situation, for the rest of your life.
That is what keeps me in this work.
Vlad Codescu is an Advanced Oxygen Advantage® Instructor based in Romania, working with athletes and movement practitioners across performance and health.
Ready to build a practice grounded in the same science? Explore Oxygen Advantage® Instructor Training:https://oxygenadvantage.com/collections/professional-certification
