Full video transcripts:

Patrick McKeown
0:02

And another one, our podcast — this time we have two master instructors, Daniel Pålsson from Sweden, and Bryan Mirabella from New York. And I suppose I'm going to start off with Bryan — this is really, Bryan's background is very, very interesting, we were just having a chat beforehand, as human beings we — life can be pretty tough and pretty challenging, and there's kind of an idea out there that life should be comfortable and easy, and that's not always the case. I'd love to get your thoughts on that, Bryan, based on your background — is it that we're setting our kids up to fail by telling them that life is a very, very easy journey, when obviously it isn't?

Bryan Mirabella
0:45

It's all yours. Well, number one, thank you, Patrick, thank you, Daniel — Patrick, I was actually even a little nervous to be on this podcast with you.

Patrick McKeown
0:56

Oh, breathing, Bryan, it solves everything, don't worry, you can make a total mess, nobody's going to be listening to it anyway, you're all good.

Bryan Mirabella
1:07

I mean, you are the sole reason that I've been able to transform my life, so I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this knowledge of the first pillar of health that I call breathing, and it's never made more of an impact — nothing's ever made more of an impact on me than breathing, than what you've taught me, and I want to continue with this for the rest of my life, and I'm going to represent Oxygen Advantage to the best of my ability for the rest of my life, so thank you for this opportunity.

Patrick McKeown
1:32

Pleasure.

Bryan Mirabella
1:35

Thanks, friend. When I was growing up, you know, I was born in 1969 in the Bronx, to a poor single mom, and she smoked her whole life, she started smoking when she was 12, so she smoked all through pregnancy — so if you want to talk about trauma, I was traumatized from the second I was conceived, because I was feeding on chemicals my whole life. And then for 18 years of living with her in a one-bedroom apartment, under very poor conditions, my trauma skyrocketed all the time, because she also didn't treat me very well, and I didn't have a father, I never met him. And she was very verbally abusive to me, she was very physically abusive to me, but you know, in the '70s you were allowed to hit your children, you know, people can't do that anymore, but back then parents would — you know — beat the crap out of kids in front of other people, and my mom took it to another level. But having said that, God rest her soul, I forgive her for everything, and she also taught me a lot of good things, so I don't want to say there's nothing but bad things, but the trauma that we're speaking about creates an inability to breathe properly for the rest of your life, because you're constantly bracing yourself, waiting for the next shoe to fall, you're guarding yourself all the time when you're in the house, and you're sucking in your belly, so you corrupt the perfect childhood breath that you have from the time you're zero to five, before they sit you down in chairs in school. So I think the trauma, from that moment in life, really did a number on me, and I know this because as I got much, much older — right around, so I met you in 2018 in Toronto, I got certified, so a little over five years ago — I was a very, very poor breather, I mean everything was going wrong in my body, I was riddled with joint pain, I was told by an acupuncturist that guys like me have a heart attack in their 60s and die, because I've been adrenalized my whole life. I went from being in a traumatized household — and again, I want to say this to the world, that my situation, please don't feel bad for me, because there's a lot of people out there who have it much worse, it's just, you can't describe that to a child, right — every child is going to go through trauma, and it's going to be bad for their nervous system. So I was under duress my whole life, and then I started wrestling when I was 14, and wrestling was the best thing I ever did, because it got me away from that situation, and it put me out on the mat, where I could be the one who was succeeding, and she couldn't take that away from me, because she always said bad things to me, my psyche told me I'd never amount to anything — and now I know that was a reflection on how she was feeling from her life, because she never got to do what she wanted to do, so I cognitively understand that now, and that's why I can love and forgive her for that. So I wrestled non-stop from the time I was 14 to 26, and as a wrestler, you're a bent-over athlete — it might be the single worst besides being on a bike, it might be the single worst sport you can do for your breathing, because one leg is forward, so now my hips are alternated, one pelvis is going forward, one pelvis is going back, and that's going to go up the chain, so now we go from the pelvis to the organs to the diaphragm, and my diaphragm was also twisted — it was literally twisted, because it's fascially woven to the entire cellular communication in your body, I call it the fascial diaphragm, but we can go there in a second. So when it's twisted, you're never going to take a full breath, you're never going to open the diaphragm and gain that amplitude and intra-abdominal pressure that you need. Now, I was very successful, but I also got to the point of success where I had performance anxiety, and it held me back. So, you know, you could look at it and say — now I look at it and I'm like, well, was it my breathing, like you always talk about, was it the asthma, or was it the breathing that fed into the asthma, or was it the sleep apnea that fed into the breathing, right, that feedback loop of breathing, emotions, and sleep, and that's what really got me thinking and really had me diving deep into this world of breathing. And long story — you know, now, six years into this journey, I've been able to recover every physical deformity that I've had, my organs are now in tip-top shape, I have no more joint pain, I'm 54 years old, I'm moving as good as I did when I was 20, and I was a broken-down man at 40 years old — 28 discs — I've regrown all the tissues in my body, you can regrow all the tissues in your body. And now, I get to work with world-class athletes, and I think the reason I'm successful at teaching our method of breathing is because I can easily relate to them, I know what kind of trauma — other than their family history — I know what kind of athletic trauma they've done to themselves, because I could put myself right into their shoes, and I can literally put myself into their sport, it doesn't matter what sport they play, I know what it is, because as a wrestler — I don't think there are athletes that work harder than a wrestler, and not to mention that I'm fighting somebody the whole time, and I could be doing that two or three times a day, every single day, and I'm never taking a rest, and of course there was never even a sliver of mention of breathing. And the way I got into breathing was, right before I met you, I went to a Barefoot Movement seminar here in New York City, and they brought out somebody on day three — it was a four-day seminar — and they brought out a person, and they said they were going to talk about breathing, and I went, oh Jesus.

Daniel Pålsson
8:25

Was this — do you remember who it was that they brought out?

Bryan Mirabella
8:29

Lois Laney.

Daniel Pålsson
8:35

Oh, very good, excellent.

Bryan Mirabella
8:36

And I remember thinking to myself, almost out loud, like, Jesus Christ, I came here to learn movement, why are they bringing someone out to talk about breathing, I was totally against it, I was like, I don't need to know about breathing, what is this — and then boom, it just hit me right there, it just hit me, and I said, okay, this is something I need to follow through on. And then, like dominoes, once something's in your awareness it starts happening, and then literally a month and a half later, somehow I got an email about your book, and I read your book, and it was so far over my head, because I didn't learn anything about respiration — I was a Phys Ed major, they didn't teach us respiration, you go to the doctor every year for a physical, they don't look at how you're respirating, it's the single most important thing for a human being, and it's not talked about — well, now it is, but it wasn't talked about at all. How do you live an entire life and not actually teach somebody to breathe? You teach them how to brush their teeth, you teach them how to comb their hair, you teach them how to put eye drops in, you teach them how to eat with food, but you don't teach them how to breathe properly, you just take it for granted. And then, due to trauma, people that are holding on to the trauma and these repressed memories, it's stifling your breathing, it's speeding up your breathing, it's almost never slowing it down, right, it's not going to slow it down, it's going to speed it up. And what I say a lot is that, you know, I've worked with — now in six years, Patrick, I've probably worked with at least 600 people, because I do a lot of online trainings, and I've only met — just recently I met the second person — I've only met two good breathers in six years. Two. And that's striking to me, so I say the world has a breathing disorder, and when I measure people's BOLT, I would say the average is 7 to 14, and for an athlete I would say it's 10 to — he's, 15 to 22, because athletes breathe a little bit better, because they're working harder and they're dealing with their carbon dioxide more than a person who's sedentary. So trauma plays a huge role in that, but you can overcome it. Now, I also want to talk about methods of breathing — there's a lot of breathing out there, and they call it breathwork, I don't teach breathwork, I'm a restorative breath instructor, and I teach restorative breath exercises to establish our innate ability to breathe the way we're designed to by God. And if you speed up the breath, you're not going to be functionally breathing correctly, and you may have a cathartic release — and I don't want to name names, you guys know what I'm talking about — you may have a cathartic release in the moment, but does that mean you've released trauma just because it comes out to the surface? No — in fact, it could get worse, people could get stuck in that trauma that just came out. So what I like to teach people is, I believe that we're channeling the way the masters taught it — when I say masters, I'm talking about thousands of years ago, monks, Indian masters, where they had nothing to do all day, and they weren't talking all day, they had already mastered the art of breathing because they didn't have to traumatize their airway by talking, so they were coming from a place of already knowing — that's what I call it, gnosis, right, they already knew how to breathe. And then somewhere down the line, somebody profaned the mysteries, and they said, well, what if I sped up my breath — and then it started to gain some steam in certain sections, and then it dissipated out into the world, and it doesn't mean it's good for you, even if you feel good from it. And I would counter, and I'd say, well, if I feel good from it, that's because I put the awareness on myself during the session, and for the first time I actually focused on my own breathing, so it gave me some good awareness of what was happening, and I might have felt good from it, but did it functionally make me a better breather? And I would say no. So when people talk about these cathartic releases of trauma, because there's a lot of that happening — we just had a really big thing in New York City, where 500 people went and did a lot of hyperventilating, and they were interviewing them afterwards, and these people were like, oh my God, I had this release — that's like, in the moment, again, it's in the moment, you're interviewing somebody who might have a great experience because they finally focused on their own breathing, but what about six months from now — did they get rid of all their anxiety, did they get rid of their inability to sleep, did they get rid of their joint pains, did they get rid of their stress and trauma and anxiety? Probably not.

Daniel Pålsson
13:39

So, question, Bryan, question then on that — six months, like you said you had a poor breathing pattern until you were like 48 or 49 years old — how long did it take you to restore your breathing, and not how long only, but how much time did you have to put in, because we're talking about people who've already mastered their breathing, they're quite different than a normal person — so what would it be for you, and then what would you tell a normal person, what can they expect?

Bryan Mirabella
14:20

Great question, Daniel. Well, number one, I don't think I've mastered my breathing yet, I think it takes at least 10 years to become a master at breathing, and I'm only five and a half, six years in, so I don't even think I've mastered it, because if I think I've mastered it then I believe I know everything, and I know I don't know everything, and for me I'm more of an experiencer — so like I said, when I read the Oxygen Advantage, it was so far over my head, because I was trying to intellectualize an experience, and that's really difficult to do when it comes to breathing, you need to experience just breathing. And, you know, you and I, Daniel, have talked a lot, because we do a lot of private meetings, and when I prescribe breathing, I don't prescribe it in baby steps, I work with elite athletes, and I'm like, if this is what your assessment is telling me, then this is what you need to be doing, and I might give them an hour a day of breathing, because I'm not going to do it in baby steps, because that's not the way you transform, at least not the quickest. So for me, it took a year and a half — it took a year and a half for me to literally find my diaphragm. Now, thank God I have a mentor here in New York City, I actually have three really big people in the Eastern medicine world, and my chiropractor — I would go in every day, and I would be like this, because I was paradoxically breathing, not only were my nostrils collapsing when I inhaled, but I was breathing — my belly was going backwards and my chest was getting larger, I had a negative-one relationship between my inhale and my exhale, so I was in dire straits, and that's why I felt terrible, that's why I was an insomniac, that's why my organs were failing, because I was riddled with acidity. And it took a year and a half of very much constant struggle — in fact, I didn't feel good every day. Now, for the world out there, it doesn't mean that that's going to happen to you, you know, the younger you are, the easier it is to change — but from my experience, and Patrick, in the beginning we didn't have a support group, right, there were no OA refresher courses all the time, there weren't a lot of online trainings, as you know, every time you've done an online training I try to show up, because I want to hear what you have to say, because it's just going to keep reinforcing my own knowledge, so I try to go to the trainings, but in the beginning it wasn't really like that. So for two years after I took the OA certification, I was sort of left out in the cold — not your fault, but I was sort of left out in the cold of, what's happening, why do I feel terrible when I'm trying to do all the right things, I'm following everything to the T, but something's happening, I can't feel good, I can't breathe. And I was so stuck in my upper chest, when I tried to slow down my breathing, my nervous system said, oh no, Bryan doesn't breathe like this, he breathes hard, fast and shallow, and you have to take time to repattern that respiration center in the lower half of your brain stem, which is your primal brain, which is your subconscious, it's where you store all your stress and trauma. So here you are, in your 48th year of life, learning something new, but now you have to overcome everything you've put yourself through for 48 years, and you try to do it with slow breathing. So for Daniel, for me, it took a year and a half, and it happened on my chiropractor's table — he was working on me, and all of a sudden I felt it, I felt my diaphragm go, and all this stress released — all this stress released right around here — and I went, oh my God, and he looked at me and I said, what just happened, and he said, yes, and I said, Zev, what just happened, he said, your diaphragm released, and I was like, holy — and all of a sudden it was like a wave of energy released from me. And that was my first "aha" moment ever with breathing, and I've had three, and that "aha" moment was — and if you had asked me if I was an anxious person before that I would have said no, because I thought, well, I've wrestled my whole life, but I'm an athlete, I didn't put that together, that I was actually anxious, that the anxiety was stopping me from sleeping, was stopping me from breathing — or was it, Patrick, was it the breathing causing the anxiety, causing the inability to sleep, right — and that "aha," from that moment on, I said, wow, this is profound, and I need to teach this. And I was only teaching it in bits, Patrick, I was only teaching it — I'm a personal trainer as well —

Patrick McKeown
19:26

Alright from your calendar, breathing with Bryan, weekly discussion I have — you're very technologically advanced as well, Bryan, well done.

Bryan Mirabella
19:41

So from that moment forward, I said, okay, I just basically added years to my life, because I realized that when the anxiety left my body, it was so profound that I said, there's got to be even more that I can attain. And then, because I'm a wrestler, because I have an intense discipline and desire — as you guys know, I'm a fruitarian, that takes intense discipline and desire to eat fruit most of the time of your life — and I just put myself to work, and then boom, COVID happened, and I'm in Manhattan, and when COVID happened we were the first city in all of America to be shut down, and I said, oh, now I have no more job, I have no more income coming in, what am I going to do, so I said to my wife, we need to make a website and I need to start teaching breathing online as soon as possible. But up until that moment I was kind of scared, because I was feeling so terrible, and it was like, in conjunction, it was like the universe supported me — I found my diaphragm, I started to breathe a little slower, and not perfect yet, Daniel, but I started to breathe slower, and as soon as I found the ability to breathe slowly, I gained the wisdom of knowing what it feels like not to breathe well, and that wisdom is what got me on the road to say, I'm going to start sharing this with the world.

Daniel Pålsson
21:16

And I had a question, Bryan — I think for you, ironically, and for you as well, Patrick, you told your story many times — that if you're far out in the spectrum, it becomes an easier decision to make. A lot of people kind of, like, have their stressed days, the good days, but there's no real incentive because they don't even know it, whereas if — in your case, Bryan, where maybe the breathing pattern was so bad, the joints and so on, that there's only kind of one way to go — versus somebody, if you can call a normal person, why would they invest in breath training? So, I think — and you, and I mean Patrick you as well, you have also, like in most of your — depending on looking at the BOLT score, prescribe an hour per day with breath training, almost — sometimes more — so I think that's a lot for a lot of people to spend. I think there's an important conversation here — how in earth has something like breathing been overlooked, and this, Daniel, it's — we're still on the fringes, we're still early adopters, it's still the innovators who are doing it, and if I was to say — I think I probably would insult probably a couple of disciplines and many people in the process — but I think it's been taught very, very poorly for decades.

Patrick McKeown
22:34

I think misinformation has crept in, I think the way it was communicated — you know, and this is another thing, Bryan, you were talking about, okay, a lot of fighters do have trauma, and it's not the fighting necessarily that causes the trauma, but they go into fighting because of their background trauma — if you talk to MMA fighters, boxers, in your situation, wrestlers, that's a way of releasing it, so they're strong there, but the ability to self-regulate must be vitally important. You know, I worked with a company this morning, a company of lawyers, they're working 16 hours a day, especially the younger lawyers, and they have no ability to self-regulate, they've gone through law school — there are different age groups. So I'm going to circle back to Bryan — why do you think — breathing — why do you think it took you up to — New York is very much ahead, we've always considered it a very progressive city — how come 48 years of age before you tapped into breathing?

Bryan Mirabella
23:44

Well, I've studied with all the top movement coaches in the world, and I've always been progressive in my learning, I've always never said, this is it, and this is the only thing I'm going to believe in, I've always prided myself on being a critical thinker, and it wasn't until somebody showed me how poorly I was breathing that woke me up. But I don't know why, I mean, I don't know why, although breathing is getting more popular even in New York, like I just said, but they were doing hyperventilating, and they were trying to give all these people these cathartic releases, so they have them sit in a gymnasium, 500 people, and hyperventilate for an hour — I mean, that's where the breathing is going, so now it's waking up, but it's waking up, in my opinion, in the wrong direction, because the way I look at the BOLT score is that once I get my BOLT to 30, and I start to feel that ease in my breath, and maybe find that natural passive pause at the end of my exhalation — well, what I noticed was, as soon as I got my BOLT to 30 — now I was, I was a five-second BOLT score, and it took me a year — it took me six months to go from 5 to 22, and then it took me another six months to go from 22 to 30, because I was traumatized my whole life, not just from my life, but my wrestling background, because after I retired in wrestling, I also coached kids for 18 straight years, so I've been involved in wrestling for 40 years, as a bent-over athlete who's not breathing correctly, so I'm in a position where it doesn't really coincide with a good deep breath, right.

Patrick McKeown
25:28

So when you talk about a deep breath, you're talking about with good recruitment of the diaphragm, as opposed to how people normally interpret the deep breath.

Bryan Mirabella
25:36

Yeah.

Patrick McKeown
25:38

I think it's probably — we'll never get the answers to it, I suppose we're much better off knowing that breathing is getting out there, but it's the degree, it's the bigger picture we need to be looking at in terms of breathing, and as you spoke about breathing in different aspects of life, and weaving it into our way of life, and understanding breathing from a biochemical and a biomechanical and the mind-body connection — Daniel's point earlier on, he said that probably you were more motivated to do something about it because you were on the floor — how can we address that in terms of getting this into the normal individual, that feels — well — not a whole lot wrong with me?

Bryan Mirabella
26:20

Yeah, well, what I've done is create a program of 10 criteria, so I have people look at what their breathing style is, look at their regular breathing patterns, I measure their rib excursion, I look at their nostril size, I test their 12 cranial nerves, I test their HRV, I test their BOLT score, I test their seated breath hold, I test their walk breath hold, and I forgot the 10th one. So when I talk about all those things, people usually resonate, and they're like, oh, that doesn't feel good for me, and they sort of start to adapt to it in their own fashion, because I don't actually — even on Instagram, I don't talk at people, I just speak about my experience and what I know, and it's like — you're a projector, so you project your life and your words and your story, and everybody who falls within your light resonates, and the people on the periphery — those are the ones that, like me in the beginning, were like, I don't want to freaking hear about this — but you allow that projection to just keep going, and then eventually the light's going to expand more and more and more, and more people are going to come into that light, and then the ones that are on the outside, it's not that they're doing anything wrong, it's that they're just not ready, and the only way to get people ready is to talk about what you know.

Daniel Pålsson
28:03

I think that — yeah, I think that Pat, your books, our podcast, the biometric devices — but what's lacking is, in a school system, to bring it in — actual training, but also education, so when you go to school you actually learn about it, so it becomes something that you just do, just like warming up for an athlete. So I think there's ways to go, because for doctors, if it's not in their curriculum, I don't think it really exists, I think they do a little bit of course, but also for physical education, if you put it in there, I think that's a very important step. But I think you can see now, athletes more and more — we talked about it before, Patrick — the mouth taping, this is one small sliver, but it highlights breathing, because you see it — if you don't have it there, it's like, what's that guy doing, oh, he's doing a breathing exercise, but you can't see — but when you place the tape, you see he's doing something, or they think he's doing something. So I think, definitely, it's coming, probably got a long way to go until it reaches the masses on a really broad scale, but I think for athletes it's definitely been pushed on by sleep coaches, and the next step in line, in my opinion, is breathing, because they're so intertwined. So I think it's coming, in pockets, but slowly.

Patrick McKeown
29:29

Yeah, and there you got — yeah, this is a 2019 article, Daniel, and I think the title says it all — "The Athlete's Secret Ingredient: The Power of Nose Breathing." Wow, you know, it's a secret ingredient because still so many athletes don't know about it, and this is from a professor at — St. Joseph's College — but it's still very interesting, like he's talking about nasal breathing as the secret to improved health and athletic performance and recovery, respiration as the gas exchange from the environment to the alveoli, athletes continually try to perform better and break records with their athletic abilities, and many serious athletes admit that their competitive drive to win is relentless, they dream of winning medals for themselves, unfortunately some athletes, in their quest for greater performance, even choose to use illegal performance-enhancing drugs, but he asks, what if small changes in how an athlete breathes could support greater athletic performance — and that's really the conversation, isn't it, it brings together what you were saying, Daniel.

Daniel Pålsson
30:46

Yeah, and it's interesting that just the headline, "secret ingredient" — so if you want to hide something, hide it in plain sight, like it's the most natural thing that you do, 23, 22, or 24,000 times a day, nobody pays attention to it. I think that was the one with Roger Federer, who was more of a nose breather, and Naomi Osaka, who was a mouth breather, I think they investigated us — so I think that is very interesting, she had a little bit of a mental challenge a year or two after that research report came out, so — question is, what caused what — but it shows you that people are looking at it, but they call it "secret ingredient," that means most people think it's — maybe the research is not enough on the topic, so I don't know, work with — they don't want to talk about it, they want to keep it their own secret ingredient, and that's another sort of detriment right now, that's happening, is that they don't really want to talk about that, that they're actually focusing on their breathing.

Bryan Mirabella
31:47

And it kind of sucks, because you get an athlete like Fred Warner, who I've worked with, the best linebacker in the NFL, and if he talked about breathing, my God, I think every young kid in America would want to start learning breathing, because Fred Warner's doing it, you know, and that is what we need. And I want to be that beacon of breath for the world, and I know that it's going to happen, so eventually we're going to get that athlete, and I'm hoping to work with young athletes — so I'm in talks right now with the number three-ranked wrestling program in America, Virginia Tech, and I've given them two presentations already, and it's been a few weeks, it's on the table, they said — still, but they haven't adopted it yet, so I chose to work with one of their athletes, pro bono — so this kid, as a freshman, took fifth in the country last year, and this year he's ranked third, so I'm working with him, and if he can win the national title as a sophomore, that would be a really cool thing. I think, Daniel, it has to happen with — I don't want to call them lesser — but with the lesser-known athletes, it's got to start in the kids' programs, you know, and I've talked to a lot of people, it's like, what are we doing to children, like you get children on a soccer field, right, or in a wrestling room, and usually the kids that aren't performing well are the ones that get tortured the most, they get looked down on by the athletes that are working harder — but are these kids not working hard because they don't want to work hard, or because they can't breathe? And, Patrick, now I'm looking at that, and I'm looking at the kids as I was starting — because I stopped coaching during COVID, but I started to look at the kids who weren't performing as well, and I'm like, well, they're the ones with their mouth open, and I started to teach the kids how to breathe, and then I started to actually rewire my own subconscious and say, stop saying anything derogatory or negative to a child that isn't performing well, because what they can't do is combust energy well, and then what are they going to do, they're going to lose focus, and when a child loses focus, now the coach is yelling at them, because the coach sees them as not paying attention, but it's because they can't breathe. And the way I would like to see it is, like, okay, we're all in a big group, we're on the pitch, we're on the soccer field, we're doing this drill together, but there's three kids that are not doing as well as they could, or they're losing focus — well, maybe they can go to a side group, it's not that they're being punished, maybe they can go to a side group with another coach, they can continue to work on skills, but they're not working as hard at the moment, so they can focus on breathing while they're doing that secondary skill, they can focus on not working as hard, but they can focus on breathing, and they can continue to work on their skills, without having to be pushed to the max, because that's what we do with all athletes, right, you're taught to — I always say heavy breathing is like wearing a patch on your arm as a right of passage, because everyone who's ever worked hard is like this, and they feel as if, yeah, I'm working hard because I'm over-breathing, because no one ever taught them that over-breathing might be detrimental to their nervous system. So we teach people to get into that state of over-breathing. Well, I got an athlete in Canada, in Ontario, he's fought 87 professional Muay Thai fights, kickboxing fights, and he said, I'm in the best shape of my life, and he's got a very famous coach, this guy's name is Wolfgang, he's from Austria, he's one of the top kickboxing coaches ever, and when Rocky started breathing with me, he said to the coach, Sinang, I respect you and love you, you've been my coach forever, but I'm actually working with a breathing instructor, and when I get out of breath in practice I'm either going to slow down or I'm going to stop and recover my breathing, and the coach — he thought the coach was going to flip — and the coach said, I trust you, that's it. And Rocky was like, okay, wow. So, Daniel, you and I have talked about this, so I taught Rocky that every single day you want to make one percent adaptations, one percent, and you can only work in relation to your metabolic requirement, and as soon as you feel like you're getting out of breath, you have to slow down or you have to stop and recover your breath, and he did it, and a year later he's like, I'm in the best shape of my life, my pad guy tries to murder me and he can't get me out of breath — because, you know, it's like in cycling, functional threshold power, so the guys are working at 95% of their max, and their reserve capacity is based on their BOLT score, how much reserve capacity you have. So as soon as they hit a hill, now they're working above 95%, and when they open their mouth — because they're going to do that, they're going to open their mouth to work harder to get up the hill — but when they come back down, they've got to go all the way down past 95% in order to recover, right. But if we trained at 95% — let's say we're on the assault bike and today I'm doing 100 watts, but my cadence — so I'm on the bike, and I also train another very famous athlete, and I'm not going to name his name because he's not breathing correctly and I don't want to call him out — so let's say you're on the assault bike and you're at 100 watts today, right, and I'm telling you you need to keep a cadence of three seconds breathing in and four seconds breathing out, maybe even five, but that's for the really advanced breathers, so let's say three in and three out, or four in and four out, but you can only work to that level without opening your mouth, and as soon as you can't, the exercise is done. I don't care if you think you need to work out for an hour, if it only takes 10 minutes till you hit that anaerobic threshold, where you're now running on sugar and not oxygen, the exercise is over. And then the next day, all of a sudden I am at 105 watts, but I'm still breathing in for three and out for five, and then the day after that I'm at 110 watts, because I'm still breathing in for three and out for five, and that's how you build power into your nervous system and respirate at your metabolic requirements, because as soon as you go past that threshold, you're now creating an energy depletion in your nervous system. And it's a very simple concept, but are the athletes willing to do it, are they willing to buy in, and that's where it is, Daniel — where's the buy-in?

Daniel Pålsson
39:00

And the buy-in is going to happen, it's going to happen — how do you, how do you then in practice, for me it makes sense, although it will be very difficult, especially with teams, because if you have an hour's practice, they're going to have an hour's practice, but if somebody in any sport — if they reach that anaerobic threshold, do they just have to go for a while with mouth breathing and then try to recover as soon as possible, micro reset, or what's your — what's your intent in practice?

Bryan Mirabella
39:31

No, you don't open — but in games, in competition —

Daniel Pålsson
39:36

Games or competition.

Bryan Mirabella
39:37

Games — if the athlete feels the need to open their mouth, then they can open their mouth, and the way I'm liking it, I call it "cheetah breathing," so if you look at the animal kingdom, because they're breathing exactly as we are, except they're bent over, so they're breathing exactly as we are, carbon dioxide and oxygen, and when the cheetah and the antelope are in the chase, the cheetah's mouth is closed, it's breathing through its nose, and so is the antelope, and as soon as the cheetah gives up, it gives up not because it has a thought that says, oh geez, I can't catch this little guy — it intuitively feels that the lactic acid has become too much, and the cheetah doesn't say, like a human, well, I'm going to push myself as hard as I can, I'm going to open my mouth and I'm going to keep running till I'm exhausted — the cheetah would never do that, it intuits, that's it, I've hit my anaerobic threshold, I'm going to stop. So when the cheetah stops, then it opens its mouth, it pants, to dump the extra carbon dioxide in the lactic acid, and then eventually the mouth closes, the cheetah sits down, or it might even be sitting down and opening its mouth, and then it lies down. And I follow a cheetah enthusiast page on Instagram, and they talk about the average cheetah needing 30 minutes of recovery in between each event. So I'm like, wait, we're doing Tabata training, we're telling people you only have 20 seconds to recover, because we think that high-intensity training is making us better, but that's because we're not thinking about breathing at all, so we're like, okay, I'm going to take less time in between my events, my Tabata-style training, because that's making me a better athlete, and in the short term that might be what we notice, but in the long term, are we going to break down and suffer from performance anxiety, because we've been caught in that state of hyperventilation, breathing through the mouth? So in practice, I would be like, well, no — but coaches have to buy into that.

Daniel Pålsson
41:43

I think, yeah, it's easier for athletes, I guess, because you see the heavy mouth breathing, but Patrick and Bryan, in normal day-to-day life, at an office or something, they may have an elevated respiratory rate, or even mouth breathing, but you don't see it, you don't pay attention, because it's not — the difference is not big enough — when you get stressed versus an athlete that's pushing the boundaries, so you really — you really know that it has an impact. So again, I think athletes are sometimes leaders of this, because if you switch that, then you can bring it and explain it to normal people — well, it's a smaller difference that over time has a big impact, but in the moment may not have that much, but over 5, 10, 20 years — but you don't see it, so again, that's a problem, but for athletes, they notice it right away, so I think they could be the gateway for actually the masses, as well — that's my opinion.

Bryan Mirabella
42:43

Yeah, yeah, so in competition, I would say, well, open your mouth if you need to, you need to pant — yeah, it's not panting, but if you need to, in competition, open your mouth, absolutely, off-gas that extra lactic acid, but in practice you need to practice breathing through your nose as much as you can. You know, if we just gave the athletes just a little bit more time, you know, instead of 20 seconds, give them 45 seconds, it's not really that hard to do, and allow them to recover well, then the next bout they'd be able to practice harder. And, you know, in the ancient Russian martial art Systema, they do that, they go all out in a set, and then they don't do it again until they're fully recovered, they know that — it's called Systema, so there is one martial art that practices that form of breathing, because they know that if you're not ready, your nervous system's depleted, you're losing all your chi energy, you need to fully recover. I don't let myself get out of breath — I mean, I'm not a competitive athlete anymore, but there's no reason whatsoever to get out of breath, except for the mind thought of, if I'm not out of breath, I'm not working hard.

Daniel Pålsson
44:03

What do you mean, Bryan, because people may interpret "out of breath" differently — you're not talking about being breathless, but you're talking about being at a point of degree of breathlessness that you cannot sustain nasal breathing, is that what you mean?

Bryan Mirabella
44:15

I'd even take it to the point of cadence breathing, so if I'm in the middle of a set — and actually the OA podcast Instagram channel put a video of me, a five-minute video of me swinging an RMT club, and if I'm swinging a club that's very heavy and I'm moving fast, well, I'm actually focused on breathing in for four and out for six, so I might take five swings of the club and breathe one time, so that's how I've taught my nervous system — but I had to very gradually get there, so I won't let myself get to the point where my cadence is broken, and as it breaks, I'm done, because I've hit my anaerobic threshold and my body's now running on sugar.

Patrick McKeown
45:02

So you're going to have athletes practicing this and they're saying, oh my God, it's going to be an impossible goal — so what you're saying is, for people to do it 1%. And I just want to kind of give a little bit of an overview — literally when we're talking about this, we're talking about training the body to be able to do physical exercise with less ventilation.

Bryan Mirabella
45:21

Yes.

Patrick McKeown
45:22

And normally, when we do physical exercise, or an athlete does physical exercise with their mouth open, mouth breathing during exercise will not change breathing patterns, doesn't improve them, so this is almost like — it's training for the body, but also training for the breath, and training for the brain, so that when you do your physical exercise —

Daniel Pålsson
45:46

Now, I probably wouldn't be as strict, and the nasal breathing 100% to an athlete's more professional, I kind of bounce it a bit, but I do see exactly —

Patrick McKeown
45:54

You know, I think this is a great conversation, so we're getting athletes to do their physical exercise with their mouth closed, we're purposely adding an extra load onto the diaphragm, and also adding an extra load onto the biochemical dimension of breathing, increasing carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood, and — okay, you could argue the theory is that we're resetting the respiratory center in the brain, but I think there's also neuroplasticity kicking in there, that we're changing the behavior, and then the benefit of this is that then when the athlete goes to do what they do, they don't get gassed out.

Daniel Pålsson
46:37

Yeah, yeah — a question for both of you, what if, when you nose breathe and you get up to the CO2 tolerance level — let's say at the 50 millimeters of mercury pressure, whatever it is — if you do two, three hyperventilations, for example, to reduce it, because you reduce it very, very quickly, it may be down to, I don't know, 35 or 30, whatever it is, and then once you kind of master that, you go to two, and then when you master that, you go to one, and then you kind of go see where you can go, so you kind of take it in, because it's, you know, zero to 100, it's a big difference, and if you see three, you get back to where you can nasal breathe again, and then two — that is maybe one way to bridge it for athletes, first in training — although you're a little bit more hardcore — and then in competition, how fast do you think you can get it down, Patrick, in your experience?

Patrick McKeown
47:29

Normally, one — well, one single big breath can remove between seven and 16 millimeters of mercury pressure of CO2, that's one single big breath.

Daniel Pålsson
47:44

So how many, 16 or 17, or six —

Patrick McKeown
47:48

Between seven and 16.

Daniel Pålsson
47:50

One, seven and 16, okay, yeah, one single breath.

Patrick McKeown
47:53

But I think there's two parts to this answer — one is what Bryan spoke about already, and I'm not sure if we want to do the math so quickly on this, but when we're talking about ventilation, we can be talking about the air that's coming into the body versus the air that gets down to the small air sacs in the lungs, and then we have the respiratory rate multiplied by tidal volume to give us minute ventilation. And if we have an athlete who's panting, say, 20 breaths per minute — now I'm going to keep the maths simple here — they're not going to be breathing 300 mil, I'm just doing that for easiness' sake, but we're saying six liters, especially during physical exercise, in order to find out how much air is getting down to the small air sacs in the lungs, we have to subtract dead space, because the last 150 mil of air doesn't actually reach the small air sacs. So in this instance, this individual is panting fast and shallow, and even though they're breathing six liters of air into their body per minute, only three liters is actually taking part in gas exchange, because three liters is stuck in dead space. So Bryan is talking about slowing down breathing to improve alveolar ventilation — from 20 down to six breaths, we'll say each breath increases proportionately to one liter, we're still breathing six liters as before, but when we subtract dead space, 1,000 minus 150, this gives us 5.1 liters. So here's two things — one is that if we change our breathing pattern to slow down the respiratory rate, but to take fuller breaths without hyperventilating, we improve gas exchange, so that oxygen can come in easier and the excess carbon dioxide can be removed from the lungs easier — so I think that's one aspect, Daniel, and the other aspect is you're saying that when carbon dioxide increases in the blood to, say, 50 mm of mercury, and it's very difficult to sustain — this is tricky too, because I'm not sure what does it increase to during high intensity exercise — if I look at Dempsey's paper, it was 44 mm of mercury — see, the body is very sensitive to the accumulation of carbon dioxide, so we're saying, well, how can we get rid of this excess CO2, because excess CO2 generates air hunger, and you're saying, take a few fuller breaths, get rid of CO2, then we go back to normal breathing — and this is all the good stuff that we are talking about.

Daniel Pålsson
50:29

Yeah, so I will do that, I will test that almost tonight, that's what I do — but also, like one of these pulse oximeters, when you go really hard, it may drop down a little bit, so it's not that much — I think the CO2, but it's more difficult to measure, it's more expensive I would say, so this one is easier, but it won't move that much when you do the breathing, when you train hard. But I think that is one way for athletes to kind of bridge that gap, to go from, you know, their normal breathing, the way they breathe today, and tomorrow you tell them, you know, 100% nose — that will — but bridging that with some maybe some mouth breathing in the time, that's one way of doing it, at least in competition. And then the question is, in training, what is the best — is it Bryan's method — it may be the best, but from a practical standpoint, working with elite teams, it may be very, very difficult, because you need, like, say, a full buy-in.

Bryan Mirabella
51:11

So even though you have one, you need a coach like Bryan with a whip in hand.

Daniel Pålsson
51:17

Exactly, exactly, so I think — what's the optimal way of doing some stuff, and what's — the practical way, not the — yeah, yeah — so, because it's — I think that I definitely would be coached hard by you, Bryan, because when I train in CrossFit, I do mouth breathe, and I'm very, very aware of it, and I've tested a lot of stuff, but it is — and that's also more difficult, because you change movement, it's not the same movement, so just the fact that you change movement, it's also difficult, but I am thinking about it all the time to optimize it, so I will try — your hypertense and vasoconstricted, and I don't really see how that's really any benefit to the athlete at all.

Bryan Mirabella
52:17

I mean, that's just — see, it's like, when we started as an athlete, we started at five years old — now I didn't start wrestling till I was 14, but it took me years to learn how to wrestle, so why can't we take years to learn how to breathe? And that's because the athletes want everything right now, and yet, like my fighter in Ontario, he did it the right way, in my opinion, he did it the right way, and he took eight months to learn how to breathe, but it only took eight months out of his 15-year fighting career, to get to the level where now he's like, I'm in the best shape of my life. So I have that experience with an athlete who's been world champ, and he might fight for the belt again, so it'd be pretty cool to see.

Daniel Pålsson
53:11

What about — Bryan, okay, you do that, but the loss of potentially muscular performance, because if you work out for, like, whatever, 40 minutes, and you do whatever you do on a bike or whatever, versus 10 minutes in the correct way for breathing, then you lose 30 minutes of potentially muscular performance, so you get, like, a bank account, plus and minus — you gain here, maybe it's short-term versus long-term, as well, the long-term goals overarch the short-term goals — so, how — what's your view on that?

Bryan Mirabella
53:47

Well, that's tough too, because — D, frequency would be better than duration, so if we really wanted to — maybe a wrestling practice would be 30 minutes in the morning, 45 minutes in the afternoon, and another 45 minutes in the evening, instead of two hours straight, right, so you allow the individual and the nervous system to calm down and restructure itself, rebalance itself, rebalance the blood gases — but of course, that would change everything, right, people would have to buy into all of that, and every wrestling practice I've ever been to is two hours, and it's two hours of brutalization — it's not even — when I was in high school, I did football first, because I didn't know anything about wrestling, and I was doing pull-ups in football practice one day, and I was doing pull-ups, and the coach said to me, I jump down, he goes, why'd you stop, I said, I got bored, he goes, what do you mean you got bored, how many did you do, I said, I don't know, like, 47, he said, what, I said, yeah, like 47, I stopped, and he said, are you going to wrestle, and I said, what's wrestling, he said, if you ever want to run with the football, you're going to wrestle. And so I did three months of football practice, and then I got to wrestling practice, and the first two weeks were so difficult that I went home every night and told my mother, I want to quit, I want to quit, it's too hard, and that's it, they went up such a level with wrestling that I was just like, I can't do it, and then something clicked, and then all I ever wanted to do was wrestle again — but you know, I had that ability to want to be pushed, but it didn't mean it was good for me. And knowing what I know now, at the age of 48, when I was told my organs were failing, well, I think that my whole life of over-breathing led to my inability to keep my organs in good shape, because I was lactic, I was holding on to acids my whole life, and then I wasn't utilizing oxygen. And here I am, six years in, and I feel like I'm younger, I feel like I'm moving better than I ever did before, and I feel like I can wrestle with 20-year-olds — but I took the time, because I'm not a competitive athlete anymore, I took the time to regenerate my nervous system.

Daniel Pålsson
56:09

A question for both of you — does it make sense, if you're an athlete, because — and you train twice a day, and most of them are over-breathing, and mostly they're over-breathing for a majority of the time, so let's say three out of the four hours — how much do you have to compensate, to kind of, if you can call it, under-breathe, to maintain baseline, on every day, because if this is your baseline, you get up and you're at a pulse rate and respiratory rate that is very, very high — how much should — do you have a percentage, any of you, that think, if you train hard for four hours, you're in over-breathing for three hours, you should compensate a minimum an hour a day, even more — any thoughts on that?

Bryan Mirabella
56:55

I don't think there's a minimum or a maximum, I think it's based off their ability to recover, because I tell athletes there's no such thing as overtraining, there's only such a thing as under-recovery. I don't ever want to take the training away from the athletes, but I want to make sure that they learn how to recover, so it depends on your BOLT score — if you've got a BOLT score north of 40, well, you're not going to need to do an hour of slow breathing a day, because you're already kind of in recovery mode, because you're ventilating less when you're exercising, right, Patrick? So if you're ventilating less when you're exercising, then you don't need as much time recovering, because you've already built that stature in your BOLT — but if your BOLT is under 15, well, geez, you know, you need a lot more recovery than the next person.

Daniel Pålsson
57:44

So what determines recovery for you — if it's back to recovery, I mean, to both baseline, or is it something else, like, what determines that you're — or is it a percentage of your recovery?

Bryan Mirabella
57:59

It's resonant frequency cadence breathing, that's what I call it, so we want to neurologically rewire the brain stem to be in parasympathetic mode, and that's what six breaths a minute does. And when you guys put out that paper on our Master's group, how if you take six breaths a minute, and you study those people for 15 minutes, and then another group breathing at seven breaths a minute, just one more breath — and more than frequency, resonant frequency — well, there was like 50% less positive benefits to the group that took one more breath, seven breaths, than the group that took six. So it depends, and with recovery, I think we could leave it up to the athlete too — like, I have a terrific young man playing for the Ottawa Senators right now, and he's a kind of a phenom young defenseman, he's already scored three goals this season, and he's practicing resonant frequency breathing as often as he can in his off time, because he says, that makes me feel the best, that's when I feel recovered, is when I'm sitting still and I'm focusing on my cadence, four seconds in, six seconds out, because the brain waves slow down into alpha and theta, and as soon as that happens, the body starts to rewire itself, and then the parasympathetic tone takes over. I mean, look, as an athlete, we're forcing ourselves into fight or flight, but fight or flight is something that's not supposed to happen, ideally we should live a hundred years without ever experiencing trauma, that's really what life should be, meditative flow, right — I don't even believe there's a flow state to get to, I think it should be part of my everyday experience, but as an athlete we're always in the fight-or-flight response, because we do things that are outside of baseline, but ideally we should never even experience the fight-or-flight response, because it's designed to get me out of danger, or fight for my life, other than that, the brain doesn't want to experience it. The brain only knows three things — namaste, the god in me sees the god in you, I love you — number two, I'm calm — and number three, I feel safe. And most people don't feel safe in their own skin, and they don't even know it.

Daniel Pålsson
1:00:33

So, what about, for an athlete then — like, do you mean, wrestling frequency, like, that they should be able to, after sprints, be able to breathe like four and six out, for them to start the new sprint, and then also after practice, before next practice, they should recover their whatever it may be, BOLT score, HRV — so, like, if you need three hours to recover until you train again, that's it, or five hours, and then also overnight — would you, if you take those three, like, if you're sprinting, your next sprint, should it be — you should be able to sustain that cadence before you do?

Bryan Mirabella
1:01:08

No, definitely not, there are — there are micro-recovery methods, right — there's macro-recovery, which is meditative flow, being in bliss all the time, but then, for athletes, right, there's micro-recovery segments, so I'm going to recover differently after sprint repeats than I'm going to recover after a long practice.

Daniel Pålsson
1:01:31

Yeah, so we alter the recovery protocols after each segment of the training — okay, so an example of that — like, you run a sprint, and you want to do — because that's, I guess, a fitness test — you want to do a sprint again, 400 meter sprint, for the sake of argument, how long should that — what do you do before that next sprint, is it a cadence breathing, and then you kind of — okay, now I'm ready again — would that be it?

Bryan Mirabella
1:02:03

Yeah, for me, and what I teach, is I have them learn to minimize their breathing in six breaths — so, Patrick, you might not know this, but Daniel's seen this — so back in July, right before I kind of hurt my hamstring, I was running at a six-minute pace — I'm not really sure what that is in kilometers, the pace per minute — but I hit 290 meters following a passive exhale, so I was able to breathe out, hold my breath, and I ran for 290 meters, and as soon as I got to 290 meters — it wasn't to the point — even, Patrick, I follow the principles to the T, it's challenge, but don't stress yourself out — so I'm only saying, that's an important one, there should be a caveat, don't do this at home.

Patrick McKeown
1:03:01

So just to explain what Bryan did — he did exhale and hold his breath, so take a normal breath in through the nose, out through the nose — I don't know if you pinched your nose or not — hold your breath and sprint it for 290 meters, that's about two and a half football fields on a — well, at least an Irish football field, I think, is 110 yards, but —

Daniel Pålsson
1:03:19

Yeah, that's tough, that's good going.

Bryan Mirabella
1:03:22

But I was able to recover in six to eight breaths, and that's my benchmark. So, Daniel, that's how I teach the athletes — your workload can't exceed your ability to recover, okay, you've got to focus more on your recovery, so if you can't recover, then your workload was too hard, and that's where the 1% adaptation comes in. So after a 290 meter run, I was able to recover in eight breaths, and then I took one minute of cadence breathing, and then I did it again, and I did it like six times — so I didn't just do it once, I did it six times.

Patrick McKeown
1:04:10

So now I know, Patrick, you have it all, you know, outside your house you can just — you have the run down to the ocean, have it all here, just on the point — and because sometimes I'm just conscious of time, but on the point that we often think that athletes will have good breathing patterns, and then we look at a paper like this — now, this was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in, I think, 2022, they looked at 1,933 athletes, and they found that 90% of them had dysfunctional breathing from a biomechanical point of view, and there were athletes across multiple sports and ages, screened from 2017 to 2020, they were assessed using the high-low test. It's very interesting here, it tells us a few things — one is that these athletes had been playing sports, but their breathing hadn't — wasn't improved as a result. And my first point would be that in terms of our everyday breathing patterns, how we breathe during sports is how we breathe outside of sports, so it's very important to consider — yes, consider how you breathe during your training, but in terms of recovery, what Bryan was talking about, and Daniel, how you breathe outside of your training — because it's your breathing during rest which is going to influence your breathing during sleep, and your breathing during sports. And secondly, these athletes would have been at an increased risk of injury — 1,933 athletes, 90% of them had dysfunctional breathing, and if you have dysfunctional breathing from a biomechanical point of view, you're going to be more at risk of injury, so there's so many different aspects to it.

Daniel Pålsson
1:06:01

Yeah, it's amazing that it hasn't — I think it is, though, it is, you know — I think it's great where it's going, I think it's super, and it's not a fad, it's not just one of these honeymoon phases it's going through, I think it's here to stay, because people are starting to get it.

Patrick McKeown
1:06:16

Final words to Daniel and Bryan.

Daniel Pålsson
1:06:19

No, I think — I think we, myself and the three of us, could keep on going all day, I'm fascinated by, especially, the sports performance, because I think when you go to the extremes, it gives you an easier overview, you can see it easier, versus when you don't necessarily do anything, you can't really — especially with breathing — it's harder to tell. So I think, when it comes to athletes, it's easier to see, and you get, sometimes, an easier buy-in, because you can really see it make sense, versus somebody who kind of just lives a normal life — and I think that's it, we probably get there at some point, but I think for athletes you can see that — so many top athletes are doing it, and they're saying they're doing it, that means it's probably a big shadow number as well, so I think that's why I'm interested in how athletes are doing it, and then getting into schools, universities, and educations — once that happens, it becomes more mainstream.

Bryan Mirabella
1:07:23

Yeah, yeah, I just like the fact that we're changing the paradigm, we're actually supporting the athlete, that's how I look at it, I'm supporting the athlete, I want the athlete to be able to perform the way they want, but I also want them to live a healthy life, and I want them to live a long and healthy life after sports, so I'm not just trying to help them become a better athlete, I'm trying to help them become an overall better version of themselves, so they can have everything they desire in life, and not die at a young age, because athletes typically die young — and, you know, I've worked with professional soccer players too, and you guys know this, every year a soccer player dies on the pitch — every year — why do you think that happens? Because they've overworked, right, and they're not breathing well. Now, if you got into a car and the steering went on the car, they pulled that line of the car off immediately, but why don't we do that for human beings? So I think there's something really important that we're striving for, and that's to protect the athlete and everybody else, and to teach them that breathing is the way, the truth, and the life, really, if you want to go there — I mean, that's exactly what it is, it's the single most important thing you can do, and you have to do it well.

Patrick McKeown
1:08:43

So, in terms of how people may hear about you, Daniel?

Daniel Pålsson
1:08:50

Well, I'm on the Oxygen Advantage website, so that's where you can find me, Daniel Pålsson, Oxygen Advantage.

Patrick McKeown
1:09:00

And Bryan?

Bryan Mirabella
1:09:02

I'm also on the Oxygen Advantage website, I have my own website that's called quantumfitness.org, and my Instagram channel is Breath Universe, like Universe.

Patrick McKeown
1:09:15

Excellent. Pleasure, guys, great conversation, thank you very much.

Bryan Mirabella
1:09:20

Thank you, that was great.