How the Texas Rangers Are Training for Pressure — Before They Step on the Field

"I Used Oxygen Advantage as a Player."

James Jones: Mental Performance Coordinator, Texas Rangers. Former Professional Player.

Before coaching pressure, James Jones lived it — as a professional player dealing with anxiety and the unpredictability of the game. He'd always been drawn to breathwork, but lacked the structure to actually use it. Oxygen Advantage® gave him one.

Before stepping into his current role as Mental Performance Coordinator with the Texas Rangers, James Jones was a professional player himself. He understood pressure from the inside — the anxiety, the stress, the unpredictability that comes with the game. He'd always been drawn to breathwork, but without real structure behind it, he wasn't sure what he was actually doing.

That changed when he found Oxygen Advantage®.

"It gave me a way to train something most athletes never actually touch — their physiology under pressure."

Most professional players already have the skill, James says. That's rarely the issue. The gap shows up when the moment speeds up, heart rate spikes, and access to everything they've trained starts to slip.

Pressure itself isn't something to eliminate — the real question, in James's view, is whether a player can regulate their system when it matters most. He uses tools like BOLT score and Maximum Breath Tolerance to give players measurable feedback on exactly how their body responds to stress, recreating the same high-pressure conditions they'll face on the field so they can train for it in advance rather than simply react to it.

He frames it the way athletes already understand training: reps, consistency, progression. Breathing, in his words, becomes strength and conditioning for the nervous system — daily practice building capacity, tolerance, and recovery over time, rather than a one-off fix.

"If you don't train the nervous system, it defaults to old patterns."

The shift isn't abstract, either. James treats it as real-time psychophysiology: fast, shallow, irregular breathing signals threat to the brain; slow, controlled, nasal breathing shifts the body toward control. Rather than players trying to think their way through stress, they learn to regulate their body directly — a skill that transfers from the batter's box to sleep, recovery, and everyday composure under pressure.

"It's not new. Their body has already experienced it."

Confidence changes too, James has found — not because of belief alone, but because it's backed by what a player's body has actually been trained to handle.