 Now if you've ever been speed dating before, you're gonna be comfortable with this one because we're gonna come thick and fast. Sometimes podcasts go on for flipping hours these days because people wanna talk about too much stuff in one go. We're gonna keep this really, really short. We're aiming for 15 minutes. Jaco's gonna drop some knowledge about how you can use some breath work to combine recovery during higher intensity efforts. But before we do that, we're very quickly gonna thank our sponsors, Spartan Race and Jaco's gonna tell you how you can get a free place at a Spartan Race of your choice in less than 30 seconds. Yes, now so there's 50 free spaces available from the lovely sponsors, Spartan. They've started to go. So there is not many left. So you need to jump on quick. All you have to do though is prove that you're training for this Spartan Race and you're gonna come to it by taking a picture or video posting on your Instagram and then tagging three things. Taggings at Spartan, that's them. Tagging hashtag Spartan Race. And then importantly, tag us at Scorecarsenix so that we see it. And then the final thing is send that to us in a direct message so we can verify that you've passed all of those criteria. And then we will send you the code to join. It can be any Spartan Race at all, but we would love you to join us on the 16th of July, 16th of July at the Midlands one to take part with the team, Scorecarsenix, on the morning, on that Saturday morning. So it's worth about, some of those Spartan races are like, I mean, they start from like 5K all the way up to 21K, but they're close to under an odd quid. So it's a fantastic offer from the podcast sponsors which we are grateful for and thank them very, very much. And we thank all of you. They've already signed up and look forward to seeing the rest of you there. Well done. Right, let's get into this one this week. A little bit of just some real practical takeaways as to how you can maximize performance in a conditioning session by utilizing some breathing techniques. Jaco, send us off. Roll that jingle. Listen, players! You're listening to the Movement, Strength and Play podcast by the School of Calisthenics. Here are your hosts, Tim and Jaco. So Timbo, a lot of people will be, have come across some of the like nasal breathing benefits for like low level aerobic work and how it's more efficient and everything. And you may even try to do run to the end of your road and be like, hold on, I can't even run like 50 meters through breathing through my nose. That's what I was like about three years ago. And then you also might be taking part in some higher intensity stuff. So I worked with a lot of rugby players, for example, or you might be doing CrossFit like Tim's been doing. Well, you might just do some high intensity work in your conditioning and your body weight training, whatever it would be. And you might be a little bit more aware and realize that, holy crap, when I do handstands, I hold my breath or when I come down and like completely like, or when I'm doing like some high intensity stuff, like I'm just completely losing my breath and I'm aware of like, that's not necessarily good. But then when I think about trying to nasal breathe doing that, I'm like, well, this is just impossible and this is not actually helping. This is actually worse. We're gonna talk about how when we understand the physiology of respiration, of breathing, so like how your body responds to breathing and what's going on the inside to help us understand what can we do to allow ourselves to fatigue less quickly, recover faster between bouts and not lose control of our breath, which is a really important element, to any conditioning work that you're gonna do. It's gonna let you basically do better work and then recover better from that work so you can come back and do a little bit more afterwards. Now I'm gonna make this real world for you to begin with because I know what people would do because people are like me and I know that because I've trained a lot of people. What you're not, most people listening to this, what you're not going to do is gonna go and do loads of steady state, low intensity, nasal breathing to build up your nasal breathing capacity and respiratory fitness, let's call it that way. What you're probably gonna do is listen to this, go to the gym, go like balls to the wall and just get absolutely kind of gas and all of a sudden go, yeah, I was supposed to do some nasal breathing, what should I do? This is gonna be like a shortcut to some strategies you're gonna find when you are kind of blowing out of your backside, probably considering that most people won't have done the base level, which would actually kind of lead you to help. So this might be the start of your journey. So if you're thinking about how you're gonna go and improve your efficiency, then yes, whenever you go out for your steady state runs or you're doing the longer sessions on a bike or whatever, then yes, you can go and learn from Jack about how to kind of optimize efficiency through nasal breathing at a relatively low to moderate intensity. Now what we wanna talk about today is there are always gonna be those cases in training where we find ourselves redlining. We're in that zone five, we are like properly giving it a noise. A body is absolutely craving whatever we can give it from an oxygen perspective because we are working super hard. So what do we do in that situation, Jacko? Because there's one thing that you find is there comes a point where like nasal breathing becomes impractical, right? You would just see your body's in a state of stress, let's say where you just cannot give it what it needs and continue to perform. So if you're doing something like a CrossFit workout or an interval-based workout, you might have got a 30-second break before you've got to go again. Or you get these windows where the intensity drops a little bit because it's in a slight kind of like, you go on a room which is slightly less hard work than a full-out sprint on an erg or something like that. So just talk a little bit about that context, how can people kind of like play around with different techniques and options within that? Yeah, so you've set the scene beautifully there and there is, I do want to say like, to be nasal breathing during the day when you're not excising helps you form that base so everyone can do that. And then yeah, if you do some lower level aerobic work for five years and you're nasal breathing, you improve the efficiency of that, it's going to help you do stuff. But like you say, people aren't going to necessarily put in the work early doors to be able to do that. But there are still loads of stuff we can do from understanding and it isn't all about just breathing nasally. The caveat is if you are willing to do the work, it has been shown that you can do your maximal intensity stuff nasally and have the benefits from that in that there was a study done in 2018 by George Dallow, who's like an Olympic triathlon coach. So context of it's like top level people and some of them have been training the nasal breathing for six years or more, I think. But they did VO2 max testing and compared the nasal breathing compared to mouth breathing and they had no reduction in power output when they were nasal breathing but their respiratory rate was 22% less. So they were 22% more efficient with their breathing, less energy spent on the act of breathing and therefore more energy to be able to do the thing that they're doing. But you're going to have to do a lot of put a lot of work in to get that. So the short like, not the shortcuts or the like, we don't like magic bullets and things like that. But there's just like some very, very simple principles that we can understand. We like principles, don't we? Principles we can understand. And I'm going to show you one that like changed got that hooked me into it about say four years ago where I tried nasal breathing for about six weeks on some of my easy runs and it was like pretty miserable, it was pretty crappy. And I couldn't even run to the end of my road at first. I then did a 5K at a park run. A park run I'd never done before. So I didn't know the course. When I finished it, I wasn't really happy with how I'd ran. So I didn't even look at my watch to see how fast I'd gone. After about 10 minutes I did and I'd knocked a minute off my 5K time. My training at this point was all calisthenics. I didn't do any running training other than do a park run on a Saturday. So my training for park run was doing a park run. I ran once a week. And nothing changed in my training other than I tried to do some nasally. But importantly during the actual run, the principle I was trying to use was larger, slower breaths are more efficient at delivering oxygen to your working muscles. So I said that again, larger but slower breaths. And I'll explain very simply why, but larger, slower breaths. So it was like I tried to start nasal breathing during this 5K, but I couldn't maintain nasal breathing. So I was like in and out through the nose, but after not long it was like in through the nose and out through the mouth. And then eventually it was in through the mouth and out through the mouth. But I was always trying to take a larger, deeper breath from like low down the diaphragm and slow and trying to slow it down. And that's because the best thing that you can understand about your training. And we know this intuitively. What's the worst type of breathing when someone is like fast mouth panting? It feels rubbish. It looks rubbish. Everyone actually knows when you see someone breathing like that, that if you're doing a crossfit session with your pal or just in a group and you see someone do their first person to start breathing like that, you're like, well, they're the least fit out of everyone. And if I stay away from that panting, I feel in control of my breath and actually feel ahead of a lot better. And that's because physiologically there's options being delivered better to your system. The reason being, every breath you take, there's about 150 millilitres of air lost in dead space. So the more breaths you take in a minute, the more air you're wasting in dead space. That's air, there's space in your lungs and your airways that just cannot be occupied. So a principle of being able to slow down my breath allows me to get more oxygen in per minute to the lungs that can then get transferred into the blood and into the tissues. That has to though, slower breath, needs to also then be a bigger breath. Otherwise you're reducing the total volume of air going through. So we want to be able to take a larger breath, but slower. The other thing that's then gonna help is breathing from deeper, lower down, from activating from your breath coming from the diaphragm. Those mouth panting breaths, they're very shallow highs, like your upper chest, you're lifting it up a part of the ribcage where you're then not sending air in the breath you take down to the lower portion of the lungs. It's important to send air to the lower portion of the lungs because that's where the most amount of blood sits because of gravity. Gravity only works in one direction and I should do in handstands, all of the blood is gonna sit more lower down and there's a greatest density of alveoli at the bottom portion of the lungs and that would be by, for me, it's like by design, you can argue as to why, but by design or for whatever it's, there's greatest portion density of alveoli at the bottom portion of the lungs because that's where the blood sits. So if I'm breathing shallow upper chest, I'm wasting a load of air in dead space and I'm not sending air into the lower portion of the lungs where oxygen can be transferred into the blood. So it's not even, so it's really inefficient. I'm not getting oxygen to the tissues where they need to be and therefore I stay feeling out of breath and I stay with that fast panting and I never actually recover my breathing until I completely stop the exercise or completely reduce it down to a very low level before I'm gonna get my breath back. So if I, rather than I can take a larger breath and even if it's through the mouth and I'm trying to make it come from lower down so that it's breathing into, not people with use that might be used of term like belly breathing, but I don't wanna go into the detail of whether some people get their knickers and a twist about that, but breathe from lower down in more towards the belly region than your upper chest, make them bigger and make them slower. And the little tip I start to use a phrase is to use your mouth a bit more like a nose. So the nose, those holes are very small, it provides resistance. That helps slow your breath down and gives it diaphragm something to pull against. You can make your mouth be that as well. That stops you from getting to that point and if like, and losing your breath, losing your mind, losing everything. And that for me dropped my 5K time from 20 minutes, 15 to 90 minutes, 17 in six weeks of like no training, just deeper, larger, slower breaths during the actual exercise. So that can be during the exercise as well as during your recovery periods is gonna help with that. Do you know what I think has been like a really interesting, because I've experimented with this more so recently as my training changed towards including more high intensity elements. And the biggest thing for me that I experienced and then also seeing others and it is the biggest thing for me, Jacko, I think is awareness of people just being aware of what they're doing because I think there's, because a lot of times as you said before, people aren't taught this stuff. You kind of find yourself in your 20 or 30s, kind of just doing what you've always done and we would never talk breathing when we were playing rugby or anything like that really. So you end up kind of going into a training environment and you just kind of go, right, it's an all out high intensity session. So your default is to go and just kind of like try and get through it. And people do end up just panting like dogs. Whereas if you're aware of it, you start to kind of like think about moderating the breathing. And it's just, for some people, it might be just that they, it's not a massive additional load to think about because a lot of times people think like, can I physically get through this? Am I strong enough? Am I fit enough? So the breathing just kind of like is part of the parcel of just, that's just kind of what happens. Whereas if you can be more intentional about it, then you start to kind of just, I'm not going to say give yourself more capacity, but the awareness just gives you more control and therefore you might have to moderate your intensity of what you're doing for a period of time. But if we are training for the purposes of health and performance, and you can buckle, I can kind of partner both of those two things together, because I don't think it makes any difference. Having an awareness of the entire system is far better than just relying on whether you are strong enough or technically like fit enough to complete a session, but thinking about how do you complete a session? So I talk to people all the time now around the shoulder stuff of like, don't just move away from A to B, think about how you're moving from A to B, because it's important. So how you're completing a high intensity session with regard to your breathing is important. And yes, you might go a little bit slower to start off with, but you are training, creating a stimulus, and therefore building an adaptation which will reap rewards as Jaco's explained in the long term. And I just want to get your point on the thoughts on this one, Jaco. So something like a real quick fix that I've tried to do is be more mindful for one, like throughout the whole workout, when it gets hard, if I'm doing an intensity session, I'm going to switch nose in, mouth out. If I'm properly kind of like gas in, I'm going like, yes, I'm trying to take those bigger breaths from the mouth. But the other thing, if it's kind of like, if it's a weightlifting type CrossFit sort of session, where you've got these gaps between, it's like an E-mom or something where you might have got 20 seconds recovery in between rounds, just taking that time to go like three or four, long kind of like nasal inhales, exhales, seems to bring the system down a little bit, just gets you control back over the breathing before you then go again. And then the other thing is that after the workout is finished, everyone just kind of often claps on the floor as I'll tend to get up, walk around, nasal breathe, just to try and bring the system back down. And there's a really easy way to do that. Just put some water in your mouth, right? It's an old school trick that everyone talks about, but it really does work. Just hold some water in your mouth and just get that system down regulated through some controlled breathing. Have a little wax liquor on that, Jaco, before we wrap it up. Yeah, yeah, no, just the down regulation, so your training is a stimulus, there's a stress on the body. We recover when we are not in a state of stress. So we have to bring ourselves out of that stress state, bring ourselves out of that fight or flight state. And your breath is the direct sort of link into a remote control of your nervous system. So as Tim says, when your nasal breathing is gonna slow your breathing down, so post-training when you can like get it to take some larger breath, start to slow it down. And if you can, we want to be extending our exhalations because it's the exhalations that help with that down regulation. It helps activate the parasympathetic nervous side of the nervous system. So that relaxation response, whether you do that with watering your mouth or not is totally up to you. And I don't have, you know, some people like take their mouths closed and all this, I don't advocate for that in actual training circumstances. I like to choose to have my mouth closed and then open it if I want to be able to. But yeah, so the slower extending your exhalations will help with that down regulation. It will help kickstart that recovery process and get you shifted from a state of stress, fight off light into a state of relaxation, which is the parasympathetic activation. Glorious. Now we're still gonna keep it short. So I reckon there's some stuff to go away and play with there, guys. So gonna have a play with it. Start to build that awareness. You've got a real kind of simple things. Start thinking about the takeaways that Jack has explained very eloquently for us. So yeah, let us know how you get on. We're interested to see this as just an evolution of getting a better understanding of how your body is working, how to optimize it, listen to what your body is telling you. These are new tricks that say new, crikey. These are tricks that maybe haven't been part of your training up until this point or weren't in your initial kind of training. They weren't in hours, like years ago, as Jack has said, he didn't really become aware of this until four years ago. So just gonna start thinking about how you can implement some of this stuff and play a long game. Don't look for like a quick win. Just invest some time in it and it will improve, but it needs to become more habitual rather than like, oh, I'm gassed what I was supposed to do to try and help my breathing. It should become a little bit sort of your basic and default response. Yeah, and if you have any other questions on it at all, just reach out and ask. And if you want to take a bit of a deeper dive into some of it, then there's the Pro Breathwork app to check out where there's a whole sports performance course where there's a free foundations course that you can have a look at and learn a little bit more and follow along with some of the recordings and exercises within that. So I'll put a link into the show notes for that as well. Glorious. All right, until next time, keep exploring your physical potential with movement, strength and play. Class dismissed.