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This episode is brought to you by Oxa, the first breathing wearable with live biofeedback, and your coach for enhanced sleep and stress relief. Oxa measures in real-time your vitals like your heart and respiratory rates, and creates personalized breathing exercises for you to control stress and get better sleep. Head over to oxalife.com for more details on how Oxa can help you live a healthier life!

Show Notes:

In this episode, we talk with Brian Mackenzie about peak physical performance, the role breathing plays in it, what elite athletes get wrong about it, and what we can learn from it to optimize our physical performance.

Brian is an expert in human performance research on stress adaptation, and a pioneer in the development and application of custom protocols to optimize human health. His work lies at the interface of respiratory, movement, strength, conditioning, and endurance-based training. His protocols have been used to raise both mental and physical performance in world-class athletes, top executives, elite military operators, but also to improve the health of people suffering from pathological issues. 

He takes us through a recurring problem he observed with top athletes he has worked with, whereby high-intensity breathing regimes during training are wrongly preferred to low-intensity regimes.

Brian explains his concept of breathing gears and how they relate to heart rate zones during training. He shares how to build a balanced training protocol that encompasses all breathing gears to increase overall respiratory capacity, safely.

By the end of this episode, you will know how to approach breathing during exercising and the practices to adopt in your daily life to optimize your physical health!

Timeline:

(00:02:02) Athletes' misconceptions about breathing and their impact on performance

(00:10:49) Importance of downregulation for optimal physical health

(00:17:44) How to accommodate breathing gears and heart rate zones during training

(00:23:01) Everyday practice for low regime breathing to optimize respiratory capacity

To learn more about Brian’s work and book his services, take a look at The Health & Human Performance Foundation that he co-founded alongside Tanya Bentley, the SH//FT program he has developed, as well as his website showcasing the rest of his engagement around health performance optimization.

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Thank you for your time and your interest in the science of breathing! 

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