You Don't Need More Air: A Complete Guide to Nasal Breathing for Performance and Longevity

When I was a jiu jitsu white belt, every round went the same way.

Two minutes in, my mouth was open. Three minutes in, I was working twice as hard as the guy on top of me and getting half as much done. And it wasn't just me. I'd look around the mat and see the same thing on almost everybody, mouths open, chests heaving, everyone burning through their gas tank in the first half of the round.

Then I'd go home and watch jiu-jitsu. And the high level guys didn't look like that at all. Same amount of work, sometimes more, and their faces were calm. Their breathing was quiet. You couldn't tell from their face whether they were two minutes in or ten.

It wasn't only grappling. I'd catch tennis highlights, watch Federer play a twenty shot rally, and the man looked like he was waiting for a bus. Sprinting, changing direction, hitting the ball as hard as he can hit it, and there's no drama in his face at all.

I couldn't figure out how that was possible. Same sport, more movement being done, but a completely different relationship to air. Some of these athletes looked so composed!

So I did what everybody does. I added conditioning. More assault bike. More rounds. More air. Harder effort. Trying HARDER. Because that's what it feels like you're missing when you gas out. You feel starved. Your whole body is screaming for oxygen and the obvious answer is to go get more of it.

Except the oxygen was already there. Put a pulse oximeter on someone in the middle of gassing out, which is that little clip you put on your fingertip to read how much oxygen your blood is carrying, and they're usually sitting at 95 to 99 percent. Full tank. The problem was never how much air I was taking in. It was what my body could do with it once it arrived, and how much energy I was burning just to move it around.

That's what this whole thing is about. You don't need more air. You need a better system for moving the air you already take in. And every part of that system can be trained.

In 2023, researchers published a screening of 1,933 competitive athletes. 90.6 percent of them showed dysfunctional breathing mechanics. Not sick people. Athletes. And the test they used is simple enough that you can run it on yourself in about fifteen seconds, which we're going to do in a minute.

This is the long version of the video below. Everything from the video is in here, plus the parts that wouldn't fit: what "belly breathing" actually means and where that cue stops being useful, why your pelvis position changes your breath, the jaw and face question I only touched on, nasal dilators, what your heart rate number is really telling you, and why I believe this form of breathing is a must for athletic longevity.

TL;DR Your body is almost never short on oxygen. It's short on the ability to unload that oxygen, and it wastes energy moving air inefficiently. Four things decide how well you do that: the diaphragm, the trunk it works inside, the airway it moves through, and the door the air comes in. Train those and the same effort costs you less, you recover faster between hard efforts, and you stop living at the top of your breathing range. It starts with closing your mouth.

The Engine: Your Diaphragm

Your diaphragm is a dome of muscle sitting under your lungs, and it does most of the work of breathing. It contracts and flattens downward. That drops the pressure in your chest, and air comes in to fill the space. You don't pull air in. You make room, and the atmosphere does the rest.

Put one hand on your chest and one on your belly right now. Breathe normally. Not a big show breath, just your regular breathing. Which hand moved first?

Now, one thing to be clear about before you judge yourself on this. Your diaphragm is always working. Every breath you take, awake or asleep, starts with that muscle. It doesn't switch off and hand the job to your chest.

The question is what else got recruited, and how much. When the diaphragm can't do its job properly, the accessory muscles step in to help. Your scalenes, your upper traps, the small muscles around your neck and collarbones. Those muscles are supposed to help you on a hard sprint or a max effort, not on a Tuesday afternoon at your desk. When they're working all day, they get tight, they get tired, and you end up breathing with muscles that were never built for volume.

So if the bottom hand moved first, your diaphragm is leading and the rest of the system is letting it. If the top hand moved first, or if it was the only one that moved, your accessory muscles are doing work they shouldn't be doing.

That's a version of the same test those researchers ran on 1,933 athletes. They were watching three things: does the belly move, do the lower ribs widen, and do the shoulders climb. Nine out of ten failed it. Competitive athletes. Some of them professional.

Up or wide

There are two directions a breath can go. It can go up. Shoulders rise, chest lifts, neck muscles get involved, and the whole torso kind of shrugs the air in. Watch a fighter who's truly cooked between rounds. He goes to the fence and hangs on it, because he's giving his shoulders something to pull against so his neck can help him breathe. Everybody has seen that.

Or it can go wide. The middle of the body expands. Belly, ribs, back, all of it moving outward, and the shoulders stay quiet.

Wide is what you want. Not just when you're relaxed, not just during a breathing drill. All day, at rest, at work, and still there when you're exhausted and it's the last thing your body wants to do.

Up is where most people live now. I know, because that's where I lived. I was breathing up at rest, never mind under load, and the second I got tired in sport it got worse. Soccer, then early jiu-jitsu, same pattern both times. Round starts, effort climbs, shoulders come up to my ears, and I'm gone by the halfway mark.

That's fixable. I fixed it. And I'm excited to help you learn to fix it for yourself, or the people you care about.

What the belly cue is actually teaching

Breathing into your belly is a good first cue, and I use it with people all the time. But it gets taught as the destination when it's really teaching two separate lessons at once.

The first is direction. Belly out means the breath is going horizontally instead of climbing up your chest. That's the point of the cue and it works fast.

The second is the part most people don't think about. Most people walk around carrying way more tension in their abs than anything they're doing actually requires. Stomach pulled in, everything tight, all day, like they're permanently ready for someone to punch them. A belly breath makes that impossible. You cannot hold that much tension and let your belly expand at the same time, so the cue teaches you to drop it.

I asked Belisa Vranich about the belly cue when she came on Power Project, and she teaches it the same way. She uses it on purpose because it's the fastest way to get someone out of breathing up, and then she refines it from there. The cue isn't wrong. It's step one.

Step two is the whole trunk. Belly first, then the lower ribs widening out to the sides and into your back, and on a really deep breath some movement up top as well. That part is fine. Upper chest movement isn't the problem. Shoulders climbing toward your ears is the problem. A full breath moves 360 degrees around you and it moves low to high, in that order.

So the tell isn't where the movement is. It's the order it shows up in.

Try it. Hands on your lower ribs, thumbs pointing back toward your spine, fingers wrapped around the sides. Slow breath in. See if you can feel your ribs push your hands outward and backward before your chest lifts. Most people feel almost nothing back there the first few times. Mine barely moved when I started paying attention to it, and I'd been training for years.

The movement decides the tension

Here's where the belly cue gets people stuck, and it's the thing I wish somebody had told me early. If you're lying on your back on the floor, you need almost no tension in your trunk to breathe. Nothing is asking anything of you. Let the belly go completely soft and breathe low and wide all day long.

Now stand up and walk. Slightly more. Now pick up a rope and flow with it, and your trunk has to transmit force from your hips to your hands while it rotates, so it needs more than that. Now hang from a pull-up bar. More again, because your core is holding your body together against gravity. Now pick up a heavy sandbag and carry it. A lot more.

Same breathing mechanics the whole way through. Low, wide, 360. What changes is the dial.

That's the part that's missing from most breathing instruction. People learn to breathe lying on the floor in a quiet room, decide that's what good breathing feels like, and then the first time they need to produce real force they abandon all of it and go back to breathing up into their shoulders. Others keep the floor version everywhere they go, belly soft and no tension anywhere, and end up hurting themselves in a position that needed some. And some go the other way entirely, decide bracing is what keeps them safe, and grip their trunk through everything including a walk to the mailbox.

And this goes way past breathing. Whatever you're doing, the goal is the least amount of tension that gets the job done properly. Not the least amount you can get away with, the least amount the work actually requires. Sometimes that's almost nothing, like lying on the floor. Sometimes it's everything you have, like standing up with a heavy sandbag, and in that moment a huge amount of tension is exactly right. The error isn't tension. The error is carrying more of it than the moment is asking for, because every bit of that extra is energy you're burning on nothing.

Which is why this has to be trained inside a movement practice and not just on the floor. Breathe while you flow the rope. Breathe while you're hanging. Breathe while you're carrying something heavy. Each one asks for a different amount, and the skill is finding the minimum that movement actually needs while your breath stays low and wide underneath it. You're training two kinds of efficiency at the same time. The breath, and the tension.

Why the breath spreads upward

The reason it moves in that order is worth understanding, because it changes what you're actually trying to fix. The diaphragm drops. It presses down on your organs. Your organs are mostly water, so they don't compress. They give a little, they shift, but there's a limit. Once they stop giving, the diaphragm is still contracting, and that force has to go somewhere. So it spreads the ribs outward instead.

Press your hand into a packed duffel bag. Nothing inside gets smaller. The sides bulge.

Which brings us back to the thing I said earlier. The diaphragm never stopped leading. What changed is the space it had to work in. If the belly can't give because you're gripping, if the ribs are stiff, if your position is closing you down, the pressure has nowhere useful to go and your body calls in the neck and shoulders to finish the job.

That's why "stop breathing into your chest" never fixed anybody. It describes the symptom. The work is giving the diaphragm room, which is the whole next section.

The other half of the job

The diaphragm isn't only a breathing muscle. It's wired into your nervous system in a way almost nothing else you can control is.

Your heart rate, your digestion, your stress response, all of that runs automatically. You can't decide to lower your blood pressure. But breathing sits on both sides of that line. It happens without you, and you can grab it whenever you want. It's the one handle on the automatic system.

Breathe low and slow and your body reads it as safe. Breathe high and fast with your neck muscles and it reads the opposite, because that's what breathing looks like when something is actually wrong.

The guy who convinced me

Rickson Gracie used to demonstrate this with a balloon. The breath wasn't a side effect of his conditioning. It was the thing he trained first, and everything else was built on top of it.

He learned a lot of it from Orlando Cani, who built a movement system called Bioginástica around breath and animal movement. The lineage matters. The best conditioned grappler most people can name spent his career treating breathing as the primary skill, not the byproduct.

So the engine works. Now let's look at what it's working inside.

The Cage: Your Trunk and Ribs

Sit how you normally sit. Now let your lower back round and your tailbone tuck under you, the way you'd sit on a couch at the end of a long day. Take a breath.

Now go the other way. Arch hard, chest up, like someone just told you to sit up straight. Take a breath there. Then find the middle of those two and breathe again.

Most people can feel the difference immediately. Slumped, the front of the belly has nowhere to go and the breath climbs. Overarched, the back and sides lock up and the breath goes forward only. Somewhere in between, everything is available.

Your diaphragm did the exact same thing in all three positions. What changed was the room it had to work in.

Ribs are supposed to move

Your rib cage isn't a box. It's a stack of arcs with joints at the back where each rib meets the spine, and they're designed to swing outward and upward every time you breathe in.

When those joints stop moving, and they stop moving in almost everybody who sits for a living, the volume you can get per breath drops. And your body is going to get the air one way or another, so it takes more breaths instead. Faster, shallower, higher. The pattern from section one, except now it's not a habit you picked up. It's the only option your structure left you.

That's the thing to understand about stiff ribs. They don't make you breathe badly. They make breathing badly the reasonable choice.

Two other people worth learning this from

I want to give you more than just my version of this, because it's an idea that gets clearer when you hear it from a few different angles.

Tom Myers wrote Anatomy Trains, and he comes at the body through fascia. He was talking breathing with Patrick McKeown a while back and he had people do the sits bones thing you just did, rocking the pelvis back and forth. His way of describing it stuck with me: roll back onto the tailbone and you shut down the front of the diaphragm, arch hard the other way and you shut down the back of it. Neither end gives you a full breath. And he's clear that the middle isn't one perfect spot you hold forever. It's a range you live inside and move through. Nobody needs to sit like a statue, and a body that never changes position has its own problems.

Belisa Vranich got to somewhere similar from a completely different direction when she came on the podcast. She works with the pelvic floor as part of the breath, so when you inhale and the middle of your body expands, the floor of that container moves too. She also wants the ribs stacked over the pelvis instead of flared open or clamped down.

The world's premier expert on fascia, and a clinical breathing coach. They came to the same conclusion with different vocabularies. Your breath is happening inside a container that runs from your pelvic floor to your collarbones, and what the bottom of it is doing decides what the top of it can do.

Where the tension part comes back

Section one was about the tension you carry in your abs. This is the structural version of the same problem.

Hold yourself tight enough for long enough and the ribs stop moving, the back stops moving, and the container gets rigid. Then you start resorting to your neck and shoulders to move air, which as we've mentioned is far more stressful. The tension habit and the stiff structure feed each other, which is why fixing one usually loosens the other.

The eight hours at your desk

There's one more thing that shapes the cage, and it isn't training. It's the desk.

Linda Stone, a former Microsoft and Apple researcher, noticed in 2008 that she held her breath when she opened her email. She started watching other people and found that around 80 percent of them did some version of it, holding or shallowing out in front of a screen. She called it screen apnea.

That was about 200 people and she wasn't running a controlled trial, so hold it loosely. But there's real research underneath the observation. A 2016 review pulled together 53 papers covering roughly 930 people, and in every single study that measured it, breathing rate went up under mental effort. Tidal volume stayed flat. Carbon dioxide dropped.

So people don't breathe deeper when they concentrate. They breathe faster and shallower, and they do it for hours without noticing.

Go back and check yourself right now, actually. You've been reading for a while. Where's your breath? Are your shoulders up? Is your jaw tight?

I work in front of a computer a lot, and this used to get me constantly. What helped was setting an awareness alarm on my phone. It goes off, and all it means is check your breath. Not fix your posture, not do a protocol. Just look at what your breathing is doing and bring it back to something calm and low.

I don't need the alarm anymore. After paying attention to this for years, I catch it myself. I'll be halfway through editing something and notice I've been holding my breath, or that it's gone fast and shallow, and I bring it back without thinking about it. That's the whole point of the alarm. It's training wheels for awareness, and eventually you don't need them.

The other thing I do is refuse to hold one shape all day. I'll work sitting on the floor for a while, then stand for a while, then move around a bit, then get back down on the floor. Different hip positions, different places for my ribs to sit. None of that is exercise. It's a microdose of movement, and the point is that no single position gets to set up camp in my body for eight hours.

What to do about it

Move the ribs. Anything that takes your trunk through rotation and side bending will do more for your breathing than another breathing drill on the floor. This is why rope flow shows up in almost everything I teach. Your trunk is rotating, your ribs are moving, and you're breathing the whole time.

Change position often. People learn to breathe beautifully lying on their back at a physical therapy appointment, then stand up and lose all of it. If you only ever practice in one position, you only own it in that position. Cat and cow is a good place to start, inhaling as you open, exhaling as you round.

Use the awareness alarm. One breath where you drop the shoulders, let the belly go, and feel the lower ribs widen. That's it. You're not doing a protocol, you're interrupting eight hours of the wrong pattern.

Do your own soft tissue work. This is a big one in the Stronger Human community, and the goal is bigger than breathing. What we're after is pliability and suppleness across all the tissues of the body. We're also searching for the places that don't take pressure well, or that are holding more tension than they need to, and learning how to get the excess out of them. You get there by attacking it from two sides. Movement is one side. Tactile work, actually putting pressure into the tissue with your hands or a tool, is the other.

The part that's relevant here is what it teaches you about yourself. When you work on your own rib cage, your trunk, your legs, you find the places where you've been holding tension you didn't know about. You can't talk yourself into that discovery. You have to feel it. Become your own bodyworker and you get two things: better tissue quality over time, and a map of where your body has been gripping.

I've been doing this on myself since 2013, and I've been on and off with it the whole time. The stretches where I stayed consistent are the stretches where it paid me back, and it kept paying. That shows up most in jiu jitsu, because close-quarters grappling asks your tissue to tolerate pressure and awkward positions constantly, and it shows up in every movement practice I've picked up since. The conversations I've had with therapists over the years sped all of that up.

So this one is non-negotiable for me. I know there are coaches who skip it and coaches who'll tell you it's useless. I've seen too much go the other way to take that seriously, and I think neglecting it is a bad trade.

The engine has room now. Next question is where the air is coming from.

The Gate: Your Mouth, Tongue and Airway

You can do everything in this article perfectly for twelve hours a day and undo all of it while you're unconscious. Think about the volume for a second. Say you sleep seven hours. A healthy sleeping rate sits somewhere in the range of 14 to 20 breaths a minute, so call it six to eight thousand breaths, every night, with zero supervision. Don't go chasing a number there, by the way. Anywhere in that range is normal. Whatever pattern your body defaults to when you're not there to watch it, that's the pattern getting reinforced. More reps than any training you'll ever do.

So the question is what your airway is doing while you're asleep. And that starts with something most people have never thought about once.

Where is your tongue right now?

Don't move it. Just notice.

Is it resting up against the roof of your mouth, or is it sitting on the floor behind your bottom teeth? If you're not sure what the top position is even supposed to feel like, do this. Swallow. Just a normal swallow, and pay attention to what your tongue does at the end of it. It comes up and seals flat against your palate. That's the position. Not the tip poking at the roof, the whole body of the tongue suctioned up there, held by suction rather than by effort.

That's where it's meant to live when your mouth is closed and you're breathing through your nose. Tongue up, lips together, jaw supported, and the space behind your tongue stays open.

Now drop it to the floor of your mouth and feel what happens. Jaw releases a little. Mouth wants to fall open. And the base of your tongue slides back toward your throat, into the space your air needs.

Do that lying on your back, asleep, with all your muscle tone turned down, and gravity helps it along. That's where a lot of snoring comes from. The airway fighting to stay open with the tongue in the way.

Obviously when you need to mouth breathe, the tongue has to drop. Hard sprint, heavy round, the mouth becomes the airway and the tongue gets out of the way. That's normal for a lot of people, especially anybody who hasn't built much CO2 tolerance yet, and we'll get to why that is later on. The problem is when the floor is where your tongue lives all the time, including the twenty-three hours a day you're not sprinting.

Taping, and who shouldn't

Before I say anything good about mouth taping, the caveat, because this one matters. If you snore heavily, if your partner has ever told you that you stop breathing at night, or if you sleep eight hours and wake up feeling like you got four, get a sleep study. Sleep apnea is a real medical condition and it deserves a real diagnosis instead of a hack from a blog.

And to be clear about what I'm saying there. Getting the study doesn't mean you've signed up for a CPAP. I know people who got diagnosed and decided to work on everything else first, the airway training, the weight, the sleep position, the taping. Some of them got a long way with that. What the study gives you is information about your own airway, and you want that information before you start making decisions, including the decision to skip the machine.

I also know several people with mild apnea who started taping and it helped them a lot. So this isn't a blanket "apnea means don't tape." It's "find out what you're dealing with first."

With that said, here's what happened to me. The first thing I noticed had nothing to do with breathing. I stopped waking up with a dry mouth. And I hadn't even clocked that I was waking up with a dry mouth basically every single morning, that's just what mornings felt like. Which is bad news for your oral health, and it's also a dead giveaway that your mouth has been hanging open for hours.

The second thing took a little longer to register. I felt rested. There's a thing where you wake up and immediately want to go back under for another hour, and that stopped. My wearables agreed with me, too. Better recovery scores, higher sleep scores, on the Whoop back then and on the Oura ring now.

These days I've tested it both ways, with and without, and I've got the habit now. My mouth stays shut on its own. I still tape most nights anyway, because it's a security measure. My friend Ron Penna has been taping for years and says the same thing, he keeps using it just to be sure his mouth doesn't fall open. Good habits during the day don't fully guarantee anything about your mouth when you're unconscious.

If you've tried tape and it wouldn't stick, or you've got a beard and it took your face off in the morning, that's exactly why I carry Hostage Tape on the site. Different packs, different colors. And if your nose is blocked right now and you're thinking none of this applies to you, that's the next part.

Clearing a stuffed nose

There's a simple thing that works for most people. Breathe in and out through your nose normally, then pinch it shut and hold. Walk while you hold it if you can, and bob your head up and down while you walk. The movement helps clear things out on top of what the hold is doing. When you feel a strong urge to breathe, let go and breathe in through your nose, then settle your breathing back down. Wait about thirty seconds. Repeat it five times.

The held breath builds up carbon dioxide, and that's thought to relax the vessels in your nose and open the passage. It's temporary. But it's usually enough to get you breathing through your nose and off to sleep, and if you do it consistently the baseline tends to improve.

The jaw and face question

Now the part I only touched on in the video, because it deserves more room than I gave it. The shape of your face was partly built by how you breathed as a kid.

The strongest evidence here is developmental. Chronic mouth breathing during the growth years is associated with a narrower upper jaw, crowded teeth, and a smaller airway. Some of the clearest work is Egil Harvold's from 1981, where researchers blocked the noses of young primates and their faces developed differently over the following years. Animal work, so hold it at that level, but the mechanism it points at is consistent with what orthodontists and sleep doctors see in people.

James Nestor plugged his own nose for ten days for his book and tracked what happened. His snoring went up dramatically and he started registering apnea events he didn't have before. One guy, no control group, and he'd tell you that himself. Compelling, not proof.

There's also a pile of research associating mouth breathing in children with learning difficulties and attention problems. Association is the right word there. Kids who mouth breathe often sleep badly, and sleep badly is enough to explain a lot of it on its own.

I sat down with Sandra Kahn about all of this a few years ago on the podcast. She co-wrote Jaws with Paul Ehrlich, and if this rabbit hole interests you, that book is the door.

Ten years of tongue posture

I started paying attention to where my tongue sat in 2016. Not as a protocol with a timer on it. Just an awareness I kept coming back to, day after day, year after year.

And I remember exactly what it felt like at the beginning. My tongue did not comfortably fit against the roof of my mouth. It felt cramped up there, like the space was too small for what I was trying to put in it. I'd hold it for a while, get tired, and let it drop.

Ten years later, it lives up there. No effort, no cramping, no thinking about it. That's just the resting position now.

And tongue posture wasn't the only thing I was doing in that decade. I've bought more packs of mastic gum than I could begin to count. Mastic is a hard chewing gum, much harder than anything you'd buy at a gas station, and I'd chew it through the day specifically to load the jaw and the muscles of the face. I still grab it every now and then. So between the tongue work, the chewing, the nasal breathing and the taping at night, I was coming at this from several directions at once, and none of them involved surgery.

Do I have guesses about what changed? Yeah. I think the palate widened over that time. I think the soft tissue adapted to a position it was being asked to hold constantly, and the chewing was loading the jaw in a way modern food never does. Probably some combination of all of it, and I won't pretend to know the exact breakdown, because nobody was taking scans of the inside of my mouth in 2016. What I know for certain is that I took consistent action for a decade and my mouth is different than it was.

Now, this practice got popular online as mewing, and it's controversial. If you go looking you'll find plenty of people saying adults can't change anything about their facial structure, and that the strong claims made for it aren't backed by controlled trials.

The trials part is fair. There aren't good long-term studies on this. But I want to say something about what that actually means, because I think people misread it constantly.

Research is often late. And it's especially late on anything that takes years of daily practice to show up, because that's brutally hard to study. Who's funding the study that tracks two hundred adults doing tongue posture for a decade, with scans at the start and the end, controlling for everything else in their lives? Nobody. So the absence of that study is not evidence the practice does nothing. It's evidence that the study doesn't exist.

Meanwhile there's a long history of oral and facial practices, across a lot of different traditions and clinics, with a lot of people reporting real changes. I take that seriously. I take my own ten years seriously. And I think if something is free, safe, and takes about zero time out of your day, waiting for a randomized trial before you try it is a strange way to make decisions about your own body.

So my position is simple. Tongue up, mouth closed, nose breathing, and give it years instead of weeks. That's a practice with no downside that I've done long enough to have an opinion about.

Two things to be clear on.

You don't need a device for any of this. Everything I just described is free and requires nothing but attention.

And it is not fast. My timeline was ten years of light, consistent attention. If someone is selling you a new jawline in eight weeks, the math doesn't work.

Now, the procedures side is a different conversation, and it's one you should see. My friend Joseph Everett, who runs What I Learned, made a really good video on what adults are doing to expand their jaws and airways, including the more serious interventions. Joseph has dealt with his own breathing problems and he's taken action on them, so he's not covering this from the outside. I believe there's a lot you can do as an adult without surgery, and that's most of what I teach. But if you suspect you've got a real structural issue, that information is worth having, and the conversation belongs with a professional who can actually look in your mouth.

About sleep apnea

One honest note, because I've seen people take breathing work too far with this. Doing everything in this article can meaningfully improve how you breathe at night, and for some people it reduces apnea events. There's real research on tongue and throat training doing exactly that. But obstructive sleep apnea has several different causes, and how much any of this helps depends on which one you've got. Some people's apnea is driven by tissue that collapses no matter how strong the muscles around it are.

And then there's the part people don't want to hear, so I'll just say it. Getting in better shape helps. Body composition is one of the strongest factors in how likely your airway is to collapse while you sleep, and dropping weight measurably changes that. Some of it is the tissue around the neck and throat, and some of it is that your tongue itself stores fat. So if you're working on your breathing and your training and your nutrition all at once, you're hitting this from several directions, and they add up.

So train the breathing, absolutely. Train the rest of you too. And if you have the symptoms, get the study. None of those are in competition.

The gate is open. Now the door the air comes through.

The Filter: Your Nose

You've got two doors into the same body, and they do not deliver the same air. Growing up, calling somebody a mouth breather was an insult. Turns out there was something to it, just not the thing anybody meant. Breathing through your mouth while you're sitting around doesn't make you slow. It means your breathing has a problem you probably don't know about.

And before I go further, mouth breathing has a place. When effort climbs high enough, the mouth opens, and for most people that's the right call.

But I want to be careful here, because people take that permission and run too far with it. At this point I can hold nasal breathing through some of my hardest efforts, and when I do, the work feels easier. Not easy. The effort is still high. It just costs me less to produce it. That capacity took years to build and it wasn't available to me at the start, but it's available to almost anybody willing to train it. So don't file mouth breathing under "what happens when things get hard" and leave it there. File it under "what happens before you've built the capacity to do otherwise."

The resistance is the point

Your nostrils are smaller than your mouth. That's not a design flaw, it's the whole mechanism.

Air coming through a smaller opening moves slower and meets resistance. So a nasal breath takes longer, which means you take fewer of them, and each one goes deeper.

That last part matters more than it sounds, because of something most people have never thought about. Part of every breath you take never reaches the part of your lungs that does the actual work. It just fills the pipes on the way down, your windpipe and the airways branching off it. That portion is roughly the same size whether the breath is big or small. So a small, shallow breath is mostly pipes. A bigger, slower breath gets far more air past them to where it can actually be used.

Twenty small breaths and ten big ones can move the same total air, and the ten big ones deliver much more of it somewhere useful. Try the resistance for yourself. Take a breath in through your mouth, then take one through your nose at the same intensity. The nasal one takes longer and you can feel the pull. That resistance is doing something for you, and it's free.

Quick thing worth clearing up, though. Breathing through your mouth doesn't automatically wreck your mechanics. If you've built good mechanics, you can take a mouth breath that still goes low and wide and travels upward the way it should. The diaphragm doesn't quit just because the door changed. What the mouth costs you is the resistance, the slower pace, the nitric oxide, and the filtering, which is plenty. But it isn't the same as breathing up into your shoulders. Those are two separate problems and they just happen to show up together in a lot of people.

The measurable version of all this is that nasal breathing at moderate intensity lowers your total ventilation, slows your breathing rate, raises the volume of each breath, and leaves more carbon dioxide in your blood. Every one of those is a marker of more efficient breathing. That's the strongest, least arguable thing in this entire article, and it happens the moment you close your mouth.

What else the nose is doing

It warms the air. It humidifies it. It traps dust, pollen, and whatever else is floating around before any of it reaches your lungs. It's a filter bolted to the front of your face and most people bypass it for hours a day, and while they sleep.

Then there's nitric oxide. Your nose and sinuses produce it, and it comes along for the ride on every nasal breath. Nitric oxide widens blood vessels and opens the airways in your lungs, so it helps you absorb oxygen more effectively. When you breathe nasally, the amount of it in your exhaled air is roughly 50 percent higher than when you breathe through your mouth. Breathe through your mouth and you leave most of that on the table.

Nitric oxide is also antimicrobial, which is where this connects to something you can feel. Do you get sick more than you think you should?

Breathing through your mouth increases the amount of particles that settle deep in your lungs by about 37 percent. Not 37 percent more stuff in the air, 37 percent more of it getting past the filter and landing in your lower airway, where your body has a harder time clearing it out and where an infection is a bigger problem. So you've got more junk arriving in the worst place, and less of the antimicrobial compound that's supposed to be meeting it at the door.

I don't get sick nearly as often as I used to. I'm not going to hand all of that to my nose, because plenty of other things changed in the same stretch of years. Sunlight, sleep, how I eat, how I train. But I think the breathing is part of it.

Nasal dilators

Now, all of this assumes air can actually get through your nose, and for some people it can't, or not well. This is the part I didn't cover in the video at all. Nasal dilators, whether the strips that go across the outside of your nose or the inserts that sit inside the nostril, work by physically holding the nasal valve open. That valve is the narrowest part of the whole airway, right inside the nostril, and in some people the sidewalls pull inward when they inhale hard. The harder you breathe, the more it collapses, which is exactly backwards from what you want.

I've been using one and that's the thing I notice most. The valve stays open. When I want to take a powerful breath in through my nose, it doesn't cave in on me, and the air comes in easier than it would otherwise. If you've got smaller nostrils or a nose that narrows under a hard inhale, that's a real mechanical problem and a dilator is a real mechanical fix for it.

What the research supports is exactly that. Dilators reduce nasal resistance and increase airflow, and the effect is biggest in the people whose noses are most obstructed to begin with. There's also decent evidence they reduce snoring, but specifically for people whose snoring is coming from the nose. If yours is coming from further down, the soft palate or the throat, a strip on your nose isn't going to touch it.

One thing to be clear about, because I've seen people get the wrong idea. A dilator does not fix sleep apnea. A meta-analysis on exactly this question found no meaningful change in apnea events, and for severe cases one study described the strip as an effective placebo. So if you've got apnea, this is not your treatment. What it will do is make it easier to breathe through your nose while you sleep, and that is genuinely worth something, especially alongside taping. Just don't mistake it for the solution to the bigger problem.

On the performance side, I want to give you the research and then tell you what I actually notice, because they don't line up neatly. Strips and dilators have been tested a fair amount for performance and the trials generally come back null. No meaningful change in VO2 max, no faster times. That's where the literature actually sits.

Now, look at what those studies tested. Mostly people with normal noses, breathing however they wanted, with the mouth available the whole time. If you can open your mouth whenever you like, of course a strip on your nose doesn't change your numbers. It was never the limiting factor.

That's a different question from the one I care about, which is whether a dilator helps you hold nasal breathing at intensities where you'd otherwise have to open up. And there I'll tell you what I experience. On runs, on sprints, on the assault bike, when I'm doing powerful nasal breathing, the valve stays open and the air moves in and out without fighting me. I have a big nose and big nostrils and it still makes a difference for me. Easier, more powerful nasal breathing at high output is a real thing, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that helps performance, even if the margin is small and even if nobody has designed the study that would catch it.

So use it for what it does. It makes the nose a better door, especially when you're asking a lot of it.

I'm going to be carrying dilators on the site, so you know where I stand. Which is also why I told you about the apnea part.

Humming, because it's free

One more thing about the nose, and it costs nothing. Humming raises the nitric oxide in your nasal airway dramatically. One small study measured it at around fifteen times higher compared to quiet breathing. That was ten people, and what it shows is a change in the physiology rather than a proven health outcome, so don't go expecting miracles. But the oscillation from humming moves air between your sinuses and your nasal passage, which is what drives the nitric oxide up, and it engages the soft palate at the same time, so you're getting two things out of one minute.

You'll see humming come back later when we talk about training the airway directly. So that's the hardware. Engine, cage, gate, filter. Now the part that explains why breathing less does anything at all.

Why Breathing Less Actually Works

Let's go back to that white belt on the mat with his mouth open, because I want to explain why more conditioning never fixed him. Him being me, obviously.

I spent years assuming my breathing was a fitness problem. Get fitter, breathe better. That's the logic, it's almost universal, and it's wrong.

Conditioning doesn't repair your breathing mechanics. You just get better at doing conditioning with the mechanics you've got. I proved that to myself over about four years of assault bike.

Six reasons you feel out of breath

Patrick McKeown breaks breathlessness into six separate drivers, and seeing it laid out that way reorganized how I think about this. When you're gasping, one or more of these is responsible.

How sensitive you are to carbon dioxide. Your everyday breathing pattern, meaning how you breathe when nobody's watching. How acidic your blood gets, which your breathing controls directly. Oxygen delivery to the tissues. Whether your breathing muscles themselves are fatiguing. And the psychological perception of breathlessness, that raw panicky feeling of air hunger, which he argues is the most important one of all.

When people feel out of breath, conditioning is the answer they reach for. It's the answer I reached for. But conditioning only pulls on one of those six. Oxygen delivery. Your heart gets stronger, your muscles get better at using what arrives, and that's real.

The other five are breathing problems. They respond to breathing training and they mostly ignore everything else.

So when I was adding conditioning to fix my gassing, I was hammering the one variable that was already working and leaving the five that weren't completely alone. For years.

Carbon dioxide is the driver, not oxygen

The most common misunderstanding about breathing is that oxygen tells you when to breathe. It doesn't. Carbon dioxide does.

Every breath you're taking right now is being triggered by CO2 levels, not by a shortage of oxygen. And CO2 isn't waste you're trying to dump. You produce it internally, and you only breathe out about 15 percent of what you make. The other 85 percent stays in you, on purpose, because your body needs it there.

It needs it there because of something called the Bohr effect. Your blood carries oxygen around perfectly well, but it needs CO2 present to release that oxygen into your tissues. Oxygen is the currency, and carbon dioxide is what lets you spend it.

And you are carrying far more of that currency than you ever spend. The air going into you is about 21 percent oxygen. The air coming back out is around 16 or 17 percent. Even when you're working hard, you use roughly a fifth of what you breathed in and send the rest straight back into the room.

Sit with that one, because it reframes the whole panic. When you're gassed and sucking air, you are exhaling most of the oxygen you just fought to get.

George Dallam, the exercise physiologist behind the nasal running study I'll get to shortly, draws the useful conclusion from it. Holding nasal breathing at a hard effort asks you to pull about one more percentage point of oxygen out of each breath. Seventeen becomes sixteen. That is the adaptation people are convinced their body can't make.

Which is why the gasping athlete is in such a frustrating position. He's fully saturated with oxygen he can't access, and every big panicky breath he takes blows off more of the CO2 he needs to access it. The harder he breathes, the worse the problem gets.

Why it feels like you're suffocating

The first time you try to hold nasal breathing through hard training, it feels awful. Mine felt like drowning. I was convinced I was doing damage and wasting my time.

But that feeling is not an oxygen emergency. In a healthy person, blood oxygen stays right where it should during nasal breathing. What you're feeling is rising CO2, and your body reacting to a level it isn't used to.

You've spent years venting CO2 through an open mouth. Your system got sensitive to it. So the normal amount now registers as suffocation.

That sensitivity is trainable. It's one of the fastest things to change.

The part that actually determines your limit

Now the piece I would have found hardest to believe back then, and the one I care about most now. Go back to that sixth driver, the psychological perception of breathlessness. The reason it's the most important of the six is that it's the one that decides where you stop.

It isn't your heart rate that tells you you're done. It's your breath. If your breathing says this is hard, your brain believes it, and you back off.

Which means that if you change what your breathing is doing at a given intensity, you change what that intensity feels like. And that has been the biggest practical shift in my entire training life.

When I'm producing the same power output through my nose, calm and controlled, with lower ventilation and a CO2 tolerance I've built over years, the work does not feel the way it used to. The effort is still high. My legs know exactly what's happening. But the panic isn't there, and the whole thing feels manageable in a way it never did when I was breathing through my mouth at the same output.

That's what I'm actually chasing. Not a lower number on a watch. Ease inside the effort. The ability to work hard without my nervous system telling me I'm in danger.

And as your power output at nasal breathing climbs, which it does, you end up doing genuinely hard work while feeling composed. That's the thing I couldn't understand watching those high level guys. They weren't working less. They were working without the panic.

How long it takes

The panic settles down first. A few weeks of consistent practice and the air hunger stops feeling like an emergency, because your chemoreceptors recalibrate.

Chemoreceptors are just sensors. You've got them in your brainstem and in a couple of spots along your arteries, and their job is to monitor the gases in your blood and tell you when to breathe. They're the thing that makes the decision for you twenty thousand times a day. And like anything else that takes input and produces a response, they can be retrained. Expose them to slightly higher CO2 regularly enough and they stop sounding the alarm so early.

Then the muscles. Your diaphragm and the muscles around your ribs get stronger from the extra resistance, and somewhere in the range of six to eight weeks you'll likely notice you're more efficient at moderate efforts. It could take longer than that for you, and that's fine. There's no rush on any of this.

Honestly though, don't hold me to that number. For plenty of people it takes longer, and the bigger changes are measured in months and years rather than weeks. I'm still finding new ground a decade in. What I'll say is that when the changes do show up, they feel close to miraculous, and that's not a word I throw around.

Holding nasal breathing near your top end is the long project. Months at minimum.

The clearest data on the far end of that comes from George Dallam, who studied runners who'd already been nasal breathing for at least six months. Ten of them, so a small group. When he tested them, their VO2 max was the same breathing nasally as breathing through the mouth. No performance drop at all. But their total ventilation was about 22 percent lower. Same output, considerably less air moved to produce it.

The way they got there matters, because it isn't what people assume. They weren't taking weak little breaths. The size of each breath was the same. What changed was how often they took one, dropping from around 49 breaths a minute down to around 39. Fuller breaths, taken less often, moving less total air.

And that saving goes somewhere. Your breathing muscles eat 10 to 15 percent of your oxygen at hard efforts, so cutting a quarter off that bill hands a few percent back to your legs. A few percent sounds like rounding error until you remember what the rest of the field does for the same return. Strength training a runner buys about two to three percent in running economy, and we build entire training blocks around that. This is the same size of prize for changing how you breathe.

Compare that to people who haven't adapted, who lose somewhere around 8 to 13 percent of their VO2 max when forced to breathe nasally. Same intervention, opposite result. The difference is entirely the adaptation period.

Dallam has also said in talks that athletes making the switch typically see something like a 15 to 20 percent drop in speed at the same effort early on, and that it normalizes over six to twelve months. That's his observation from coaching rather than a published number, but it matches what I went through and it's worth knowing before you start, because month one is discouraging.

Where I'm trying to take this

I'll tell you what I'm actually working on now, because it's the part that has me most interested. My goal is to push my nasal output as far as it will go. Not to prove a point about purity. Because of what I keep noticing as that number climbs: I recover faster. Even when the session itself is genuinely hard, if I did it nasally, I bounce back from it quicker. Which means I can do more work across a week, and the work I do leaves me feeling built up instead of beat up.

I haven't found my ceiling on this yet. Ten years in and the number is still moving.

And that's why I think this is a longevity thing more than a performance hack. Picture two versions of the next twenty years of your training. In one, every hard session is mouth open, redlined, and you spend the following two days feeling wrecked. In the other, you're producing serious output with your mouth closed and walking away from it feeling rejuvenated. Those two paths end up in very different places, and not just in terms of fitness.

I'm not the only one seeing it either. People in the Stronger Human community are reporting the same thing as they bring nasal breathing into whatever their practice is, whether that's rope flow, lifting, running, or grappling. Harder work, faster recovery, more capacity to train again tomorrow.

A number you can get right now

If you want something measurable to work with, there's a simple test. Breathe in normally through your nose, out through your nose, then pinch your nose and hold. Time it until you feel the first definite urge to breathe. Not your maximum hold. The first real signal, the point where you could let go and your breathing would return to normal rather than you gulping for air.

You'll see this called the BOLT score, and some older systems call it a control pause. Whatever you call it, it's a rough read on how sensitive you are to CO2.

For a reference point, a study of 51 people found that a breath hold above 25 seconds, combined with a short screening questionnaire, made it unlikely that dysfunctional breathing was present. Worth noting that it was the combination that did the work rather than the breath hold on its own. Well trained athletes doing this kind of work tend to land around 40 seconds. And scores in the single digits show up in people whose nervous systems are badly dysregulated, which tells you how directly this stuff is connected.

It's not a perfect test and nobody should get precious about the number. But it gives you a starting point, and it moves as you train. That's more than most things give you.

Now, the thing everybody wants to talk about. Heart rate.

Heart Rate Is Not The Goal

Walk into any gym and watch what people do with a heart rate monitor. They're trying to get the number up. That's the whole game. Higher number, better workout. I want to make the case that the number is telling you something, but it isn't the thing you should be chasing.

What I've watched happen

Here's what I've seen in myself and in people I've coached through this. As somebody's breathing gets organized, the heart rate they hit at a given effort stops climbing as high as it used to. Same watts on the bike, same pace on the run, lower number. And it keeps drifting down over months as the breathing gets better.

I've watched it enough times that I'd bet on it. But I want to be straight with you about why it happens, because for a long time I assumed it was the breathing doing it, and the real answer is more interesting than that.

The honest mechanism

Your heart moves a certain amount of blood per minute. That's heart rate multiplied by how much blood goes out with each beat.

Train aerobically for a long time and the second half of that equation changes. The chamber gets bigger, it fills better, and each beat pushes out more blood than it used to. Which means to move the same total amount, you need fewer beats.

So a lower heart rate at the same workload is real, and it's one of the clearest signs of genuine aerobic fitness. But the thing doing it is your heart, not your breathing. It's a structural change in the pump, built by years of consistent aerobic work.

This is also why chasing a high max heart rate is chasing the wrong half of the equation. Your max is mostly set by your age and your genetics. You can't train it up, and in well-trained people it tends to drift slightly down, which is normal and not a problem. Two athletes can have identical aerobic capacity with very different max heart rates, and the one with the lower number is simply moving more blood per beat.

Where breathing actually buys you something

Now, breathing does have a real effect on your cardiovascular cost, and it comes through a door most people have never heard of. Your breathing muscles are muscles. When you work them hard enough for long enough, they fatigue like anything else. And when they start to fatigue, your body does something that feels like a betrayal. It pulls blood away from your arms and legs to feed the diaphragm instead.

Blood gets stolen from the legs to keep the breathing going. So when you see a runner whose legs go out from under them late in a race, part of what you might be watching is a breathing muscle that got tired and started taking resources from everywhere else. That reflex also drives your heart rate and your blood pressure up, and it does it because your breathing muscles are in trouble rather than because the work itself got harder.

Train those muscles, though, and the response shrinks. In one trial, five weeks of resistance training for the inspiratory muscles cut the heart rate response to a fatiguing breathing task substantially and nearly eliminated the rise in blood pressure. The task was identical. It just cost the body a lot less to do it.

That's breathing lowering your heart rate for real, through strength and fatigue resistance rather than through anything mystical. It matters most at high intensity, which is exactly where you'd want the help. We'll get to how you train it directly in a bit.

What I actually use instead of the number

Here's how this plays out in my own training, and it's probably the most practical thing in this section. When I can hold nasal breathing, I can work at heart rates that would normally put me in a much higher zone, and the work doesn't feel like that zone. My body doesn't perceive it the way the number says it should. The heart rate is saying one thing and my system is telling me something different, and I've learned to trust my system.

So for long duration cardio, when I want to push the pace, I don't watch my heart rate at all. I watch my ventilation. Can I keep this nasal? That's the governor. Even on the assault bike doing what somebody else would call zone 2, I'm going off the breath and off perception rather than trying to pin a number.

Heart rate still earns its place, though. For sprints, for assault bike intervals, for anything short and sharp where I need to see how fast I'm recovering between efforts, the number is genuinely useful. That's where I look at it.

Long and steady, I go by breath. Short and hard, I'll use the monitor.

The one I use is the Morpheus, and it's on the site. It gives me a recovery reading in the morning and it's built around zone based training, so putting a session together is simple.

I'll say this about recovery scores though, from any wearable. I don't take them as gospel. Some mornings the number is low and I train anyway and feel great. Other mornings it's low and about ten minutes into the session my body makes it obvious the number was right. So I treat it as one piece of information rather than a verdict. Worth knowing, not worth obeying.

Where the Morpheus has actually changed my training is subtler. Having accurate heart rate data in front of me is how I learned what my ventilation does at different heart rates. I could watch where my breath started to climb, where nasal got difficult, where it settled back down. That's what makes the number worth having. Not as a target to chase, but as a way to learn your own breathing well enough that eventually you can read it without the monitor.

Rhythm, and the part I can't prove

There's one more piece to this, and it's a thing I believe that the research hasn't confirmed. You should know that going in.

My experience is that finding a rhythm with my breathing during effort makes the effort cheaper. When I settle into a rhythm on the bike, or in a sprint, matched to what my body is doing, the whole thing costs me less.

And you can see this in athletes if you know to look for it. Watch sprinters. A lot of them have a clear rhythm between their breathing and their leg cycle, inhales and exhales locked into the stride. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce is the best example I've got, and once you notice it in her running you'll start seeing it everywhere. There's an ease in it, even at full speed.

Now, the controlled studies that went looking for that effect have mostly not found it. When researchers have had people deliberately sync breathing to movement and then measured heart rate at a fixed workload, the heart rate generally didn't move.

I'd point out that most of those studies tested one session of somebody consciously forcing a pattern they'd never practiced before. A few tested manipulations no coach would ever teach. That's a different animal from an athlete who has spent years building a rhythm until it runs without thinking.

And I'd also say the heart rate might be the wrong thing to measure. What rhythm gives you may not show up as a lower number at all. It shows up as the movement becoming more automatic, so you're spending less attention on it, and the whole pattern starts organizing itself instead of needing to be driven. There's a psychological ease that comes with that, and the effort stops feeling like a fight even when it's hard. That's what you see in a sprinter who has it.

Rhythm is enormous in sport and it rarely gets trained on purpose. People talk about it like a personality trait, as though certain athletes were simply born with rhythm and the rest weren't. I don't buy that. What I see is that some athletes pay attention to their rhythm and work on it, so it gets better, and most never think about it at all, so it doesn't. And then everything they do feels harder than it needs to.

So I take rhythm seriously whether or not the research has gotten there yet. It's one of those things where the practice is clearly ahead of the measurement.

That's why rhythm is something we practice inside the Stronger Human community. We build challenges around breath and rhythm, and rhythm lives inside the movement work itself, in the rope, the clubs, the footwork. You can understand rhythm completely and still not have any. It arrives through reps.

Try it and find out for yourself. It costs nothing, and you'll know within a few sessions.

Why formulas wreck this

One more thing, because it undoes a lot of people before they start. If you're setting your training zones off a formula, the whole structure is built on sand. The 220-minus-your-age thing has no real scientific basis, and there are something like a dozen competing formulas for estimating max heart rate, which tells you how well any of them work.

Chris Hinshaw made this point when he came on the podcast, and he's coached a lot of elite endurance athletes. There are twelve different formulas just to estimate your max heart rate. Are any of them right? He's also pretty skeptical of wrist-based heart rate readings, because the consistency isn't there, and if you're making training decisions off a number, you want that number to be accurate.

And it matters more than it sounds for people who train the way my audience trains. Athletes who do a lot of both lifting and conditioning often have max heart rates well below what a formula predicts. So the formula hands you a number that's too high, you build your zones off it, and what you think is easy aerobic work is actually sitting in the zone that costs you recovery without building your base. You're working too hard, calling it zone 2, and wondering why nothing is improving.

So what do you aim at

Efficiency at each level of effort.

Can you hold this output while breathing through your nose? Is the breath still low and wide, or has it climbed into your shoulders? Is there a rhythm to it, or is it ragged? How fast does it settle when you stop? Those questions tell you more than the number on your wrist, and you can answer every one of them without any equipment at all.

It's the same idea from earlier in a different currency. Over-breathing is spending more air than the work actually requires, which is the same error as carrying more tension than the movement asks for. Either way you're paying for something you aren't using. Which brings us to how you actually train this, and what I wish I'd known about breathing during high performance.

The Five Gears of Breathing

Most people have two gears. Easy, and everything else.

And "everything else" is where they spend almost all of their training, because that's what training is supposed to feel like. If you're not breathing hard, are you even working?

I lived there for years. Every conditioning session was a fight. And I genuinely believed that was the cost of getting better.

Five gears, defined by your breath

Rob Wilson is one of the people who built the framework that reorganized how I think about this, and he's been on the podcast talking breathing. Instead of defining intensity by heart rate or by how much it hurts, you define it by what your breathing is doing.

These aren't hard lines. Where one ends and the next begins is a feel rather than a number, and you blend between them constantly.

Roughly, here's how I'd want a week to break down. Seventy to eighty percent of your conditioning in Gears 1 and 2. Around ten percent in Gear 4. Somewhere between five and ten percent in Gear 5. Gear 3 is small because you're only ever passing through it.

And to be clear about Gear 4, I'm not telling you to never go there. You will, and your sport will put you there whether you planned it or not. The problem is making it the place where most of your conditioning lives, which is what almost everybody does.

The black hole

Stephen Seiler has spent three decades studying how the best endurance athletes in the world actually train. Not how coaches say they train. What their logs say.

He found the same pattern across cross-country skiers, Tour de France cyclists, Kenyan distance runners. Roughly 80 percent of their training is low intensity, easy enough that breathing isn't a limitation. Around 15 to 20 percent is genuinely hard. And almost none of it sits in the middle.

Why almost none? Because that middle zone is the worst trade in training. It's too hard to recover from easily, and not hard enough to drive the adaptations you'd go hard for. You pay the recovery cost of intense work and collect very little of the benefit.

Seiler calls it the training intensity black hole.

That's the part that hit me, because the black hole is exactly where I had been living. Gear 4, every session. Mouth open, working, sweating, feeling productive. Too hard to come back from quickly, too easy to sharpen my top end. Months of my life in the least useful place on the dial.

The ceiling that doesn't matter as much as you think

VO2 max is the number everybody's chasing right now, and it does matter. It's your ceiling.

But in 1988, Edward Coyle tested 14 competitive cyclists who all had essentially the same VO2 max, between 4.6 and 5.0 liters per minute. Then he had them hold a hard effort until they couldn't anymore.

One group lasted a little over 60 minutes. The other group was done at 29.

Same ceiling. One group could stay near it twice as long. The difference came down to where their lactate threshold sat, which is to say how much of that ceiling they could actually use.

VO2 max tells you how high you can reach. It says nothing about how long you can stay there, or how fast you come back down when you stop.

There's a wrinkle in it that almost never makes it out of the labs. Put two athletes side by side doing the same work at the same speed, and one of them is doing it on a lower VO2 max. Exercise physiologists read that as the better athlete, not the worse one, because they're producing the same output on less oxygen. The number was never meant to be the goal. It's a measure of how efficiently you're doing the work, and the work is the actual point.

What changed for me

I didn't arrive at this from a study or a podcast. I got here because I kept noticing things.

Years of staying nasal through conditioning, watching my output climb while my breathing stayed quiet, watching my recovery between sessions get better. The evidence was accumulating in my own training long before I heard anybody put language around it. So I kept putting more of my work in Gear 2 because it kept paying me back.

The first few weeks were humbling though. Nasal only on the assault bike meant I was holding somewhere around 250 to 260 watts for fifteen or twenty minutes. I remember staring at that number thinking there was no way this was doing anything for me, because I could produce a lot more than that with my mouth open.

I stayed with it anyway.

These days that same session is 340 to 365 watts for twenty minutes, mouth closed the whole way. And it's still climbing. Ten years in and I haven't found the ceiling.

That's what I'd want somebody to understand before they quit in week three. The output you can hold nasally is not a fixed property of your body. It's a trainable number and it moves a long way.

Then I heard it from people who measure this

What made me more confident was hearing the same thing from people with metabolic carts instead of a feeling. Brian Mackenzie came on the podcast and described the thing he sees in testing. The genuinely elite endurance athletes move less air to produce the same work. Their ventilation is low. He talked about watching an elite climber hold around seven watts per kilogram for seventeen minutes, and the guy was breathing through his mouth at that point but you couldn't tell, because the breathing was just easy.

Then there's the other group. People who test with a high VO2 max and look fit on paper but can't sustain anything. Their ventilation is higher. They're over-breathing at the top end, hyperventilating through work that a more efficient athlete would handle calmly.

Rob Wilson gave me the cleanest version of the logic. If your breath rate stays the same and your work output goes up, then by definition you've become more tolerant to carbon dioxide. There's no other explanation available.

He also described what it feels like on the other side of that adaptation, and he used the word superpower. His explanation for why is worth understanding. Carbon dioxide is the trigger that tells your brain to breathe harder, and the set point for that trigger wasn't designed for performance. It was designed for survival. So when you move that set point, you're not just getting fitter. You're raising the threshold at which your own body starts panicking at you.

There's a practical side to it too that he pointed out. Keeping your mouth closed acts as a governor. You can only work so hard with it shut, which means the session stays recoverable whether or not you had the discipline to hold back.

The thing you notice first

Before your numbers go anywhere, something else changes, and it's the part that convinced me. Chris Hinshaw came on the podcast and said something I've thought about constantly since. One of the major measures of aerobic fitness isn't how hard you can push. It's how fast your heart rate drops when you stop. The steeper that drop, the better your aerobic system.

His example stuck with me. Picture an MMA fighter with one minute of rest between rounds, and imagine his heart rate dropped twenty beats lower in that same minute than it used to. He's walking back out in a completely different state than his opponent.

He also said that if you want to know whether a fighter understands what they're doing, don't watch the round. Watch the minute of rest.

That's what I noticed first on the mats, long before my numbers moved. I was back to normal between rounds while the person across from me was still trying to get themselves under control.

Erling Haaland trains exactly this way

If you want to see somebody at the absolute top of a sport doing this on purpose, look at Erling Haaland. He's talked about it on his own podcast appearances and with Logan Paul, and the setup is about as deliberate as it gets. When he does his hard conditioning, he tapes his mouth shut so he has no option but to breathe through his nose, and he does it inside an altitude chamber. So that's hard conditioning work, fully nasal, with less oxygen available.

And the reason he gives for it is the exact thing Hinshaw was describing. It helps him recover between sprints.

Think about what that means for a striker. Football is repeated maximal efforts with short, incomplete recovery, over ninety minutes. The guy who recovers faster between sprints gets to the ball a half step before the defender in minute eighty-three, when everybody else is cooked. That's not a marginal advantage in his sport. That's the whole job.

What I find most useful about his example is that he isn't doing breathwork as a wellness practice or a morning routine. He's using nasal breathing as a conditioning tool, deliberately, with his mouth taped, because of what it does to his recovery. One of the best strikers alive has decided this is worth building his hard sessions around.

Two things I don't want you to take from this

The first comes from Mackenzie and he's blunt about it. People hear nose breathing and decide everything has to become nose breathing. That's not the case, and there's a crossover point where insisting on it will limit you. At genuinely high outputs the mouth opens, even for him, even for the athletes he tests.

Now, I'll be honest about where I personally sit with that, because my goal is more extreme than what I'd prescribe to you. I'm actively trying to push the boundary of how much I can do nasally. I don't open my mouth on purpose during most of my conditioning anymore, and I'm working on whether I can touch Gear 5 while keeping some part of my breathing nasal. Usually I still end up opening it. But seeing how far that line can move is the project I'm on.

That's my goal, not my advice. You don't need to never use your mouth. You need to be deliberate about how much and when.

The second thing comes from Rob Wilson. He's seen plenty of people who are afraid of the red line and never go there, and he thinks that's a mistake. If competition or life drops you into that place and you've never been exposed to it, you come apart. You need regular trips to the zone where you aren't in control.

So go to Gear 5 on purpose. Once or twice a week does it. The difference is that now you'll have something underneath it.

A test you can run on yourself

Mackenzie brought up a benchmark on the podcast that I keep coming back to, and he credits it to an exercise physiologist named Alan Cousins rather than claiming it himself. Get on an assault bike for twenty minutes. Hold 2.3 watts per kilogram of bodyweight, breathing comfortably in and out through your nose, at under twenty breaths per minute. That works out to roughly a three to four second breath cycle. If you can do that, your aerobic base is functional. For women the number is 1.9 watts per kilogram.

It's a practitioner's test rather than a published standard, so don't treat it as gospel. But it's a real hour of information about yourself.

Here's why I like running my own numbers against it. I weigh about 240 pounds, which is roughly 109 kilograms, so 2.3 watts per kilogram puts my target right around 250 watts.

Look at where I started. Those first nasal sessions were 250 to 260 watts. I was sitting exactly at the benchmark and feeling like I was accomplishing nothing.

Now I'm holding 340 to 365 watts nasal for the same twenty minutes, which puts me somewhere above three watts per kilogram. For reference, Mackenzie mentioned that a Tour de France cyclist can hold around five watts per kilogram comfortably, so I'm nowhere near the top of what's possible. Which is sort of the point. There's a lot of room in this for all of us.

Nothing in the lower gears is wasted

The last piece, and it's what makes the whole strategy make sense. The adaptations you build breathing nasally in the low gears don't stay in the low gears. They carry upward. When you eventually open your mouth and go hard, you're doing it with a bigger engine, better CO2 tolerance, and stronger breathing muscles than you had before.

There's a version of this that applies to your whole week, too. A week spent mostly in the black hole is the same error as over-breathing or carrying too much tension, just at a larger scale. You're paying a heavy recovery cost and not getting much adaptation in return.

Now, the gears handle conditioning. Producing force is a different problem.

Breath Under Load: Producing Force Without Holding Your Breath

Everything up to here has been about endurance. Now the other half, which is producing force while lifting different kinds of loads, including your own body.

One of the first things you hear in a jiu jitsu gym is somebody yelling "breathe." It's almost a meme. A guy twenty seconds into a hard roll, red in the face, holding his breath while he tries to push, pull, escape, stop a sweep. Then he breaks free, gasps like he came up from underwater, and dives right back into it.

Not a beginner thing, either. I see it at every belt. People who've trained for years still shutting the breath off the second they need to produce force, because at some point their body decided that's how force gets made.

Why the Valsalva works, and it does work

When I started jiu jitsu I was deadlifting 755 and squatting 645. I knew how to brace.

What I knew was the Valsalva. Big breath in, lock everything down, hold it, move the weight. It raises the pressure inside your abdomen and your chest at the same time, which turns your torso into something close to a rigid cylinder. Force transmits better through a rigid cylinder. That's not folklore, it's well documented, and it's the best available tool for a true one-rep max.

A 2025 trial compared breath-holding against inhaling and exhaling during maximal bench press in trained lifters, and breath-holding won on total set completion and volume. So I'm not going to stand here and tell you the Valsalva is a mistake. For heavy loaded strength work it's the strongest option, and at genuinely maximal efforts it's close to unavoidable anyway. Your body will do it whether you planned to or not.

One thing to sit with on that study, though. Think about who those subjects were. Trained lifters, which means people with years of practice at the Valsalva. Nobody in that room had spent years practicing the alternative.

Because producing force on a forceful exhale is a skill, and it's not a small one. There's a rhythm to it, there's timing, and there's a specific amount of tension you have to find and hold while air is moving. Most people have never been taught any of that, and their first attempt is going to be clumsy, because first attempts at skills are clumsy.

So when a study puts a lifetime of Valsalva practice against a technique the subjects have barely touched, the Valsalva winning doesn't settle much. It tells you what happens when you compare a trained skill to an untrained one. I'd want to see that study run on people who've spent a few years getting good at breathing through their lifts before I accepted that one is simply better than the other.

One honest wrinkle here. Raising abdominal pressure does stabilize the spine, but the muscle work required to generate that pressure also adds compression to it. One older study found Valsalva increased lumbar compression in four of five tasks tested. So it's not a simple matter of taking load off your back. It's a trade, and for a maximal lift it's usually a trade worth making.

The sandbag, and why rotation broke my brace

A few years back I picked up a 150 pound sandbag for the first time and tweaked my back. One fifty, after years of handling a lot more than that.

Context on how I was lifting it, because it matters. I wasn't trying to pick a sandbag up cleanly. I was trying to wrestle with it. Throwing it around, twisting with it, picking it up off-center on purpose, treating it like a training partner rather than an implement. That's the whole reason I like sandbags, and it's still how I use them. And I was doing all of that while bracing the way I'd learned to brace under a barbell.

My explanation at the time was that a barbell is predictable and a sandbag isn't. Which is true. The bar is rigid, the load is even, you know where it's going, and you can set yourself before you move. A sandbag shifts while you're lifting it and the setup is never the same twice. But there's an actual mechanism underneath that, and I only found it later.

Researchers have measured how much abdominal pressure people can generate during a maximum Valsalva effort in different positions, and trunk rotation significantly reduces it. Rotate, and your ability to produce the very pressure the Valsalva depends on drops off.

So think about what was happening with that sandbag. I was deliberately twisting with it, and twisting is the exact thing that weakens a breath-hold brace. The more I did what I was trying to do, the less my brace was giving me.

What I needed was the thing I'm going to describe in a minute. The growling breath, which gives you abdominal stability while air is still moving, which is what a rotational lift actually requires. I didn't have that pattern yet. I had the barbell pattern, and I took it somewhere it doesn't work.

That's also why it shows up on the mat. A person trying to take you down is a rotational problem by definition. There's no version of grappling where you stay square and stacked.

What it costs your blood pressure

The other thing I didn't know for years is what the Valsalva does to your blood pressure. It produces the highest blood pressure response of any breathing strategy during resistance training. And the interesting part is how early that starts. A 2024 study found increased blood pressure, pulse pressure, and oxygen debt even at 40 percent of maximal load. So the cost isn't reserved for your one-rep max. It's there in your working sets.

If you've got a heart condition, certain eye conditions, or you've had eye surgery, this is worth an actual conversation with your doctor rather than a paragraph from me. And I want to say something specific to two groups of people here.

If you're older, or if you're newer to resistance training, or if you already have high blood pressure, then learning to produce force while breathing isn't a nice refinement. It's the thing. Lifting is one of the best things you can do for yourself at any age, and I want everybody doing it. But if your default under every load is to lock the breath and spike the pressure, you're attaching a cost to something that should be paying you back.

The irony that gets me is with isometrics. Isometric training has some of the best evidence out there for actually lowering blood pressure over time. Handgrip holds, wall sits, that family of work. And watch somebody do a hard isometric hold. Most of them stop breathing. So you've got a practice with real blood pressure benefits being performed in a way that spikes blood pressure the whole time you're doing it.

Breathe through your holds. It's the same point I made earlier about picking a rhythm, and this is where it matters most.

My theory about where the habit goes

Now I want to give you something that's my own thinking rather than a finding. Start with what we know. Holding your breath under load spikes your blood pressure, and it does that every single time, in a lifter who does it hundreds of times a week. Then watch where that pattern shows up outside the gym.

I see it on the mat constantly. A guy locks his breath to try to escape a position, and there's no barbell anywhere. I see it in people bending down to pick something up off the floor. I see it when somebody lowers themselves onto a toilet seat. I'm being completely serious about that one, watch yourself next time. I see it when someone is concentrating on a difficult task, or bracing for a conversation they don't want to have. Think back to the screen apnea thing from earlier in this article. That's the same pattern with no load at all.

My theory is that a lot of that comes from somewhere. If your training taught your body that the response to effort is to shut the breath off and pressurize, your body doesn't file that under lifting only. It files it under effort. And then every time life hands you something that feels effortful, you get the same response, including the blood pressure spike, in situations where nothing about the task required it.

I think that has health costs over a lifetime. The acute pressure response is documented. The pattern showing up outside the gym is something I observe, and coaches and therapists report the same thing. Whether the spread of that habit actually produces disease over decades is not something anybody has proven. That part is my reasoning, so weigh it as such.

But here's why I bring it up anyway. The practical conclusion is the same either way. If you can produce force while breathing, you have a choice. If breath-holding is the only pattern you own, it runs automatically, in contexts you never chose, with a cardiovascular cost attached each time. That's worth building the other pattern for, even without a study.

Uncertainty and pain pull the breath out of you

There's a second trigger for this that has nothing to do with load, and once you know about it you'll catch it in yourself constantly. Breath-holding shows up when you're unsure of a movement. New exercise, unfamiliar range, something that feels unstable. And it shows up even harder when a movement hurts, or when you're anticipating that it might.

That reaction isn't a decision. It happens below conscious awareness, which is why telling someone to stop doing it rarely works. It's a guarding response. Your nervous system reads uncertainty or pain as a threat and locks things down to protect you.

And for some people the source of that pattern isn't the gym at all. If you've been through trauma, breath-holding can be part of how your system learned to handle threat, and it fires the sympathetic side hard. If that's you, this is worth paying real attention to, and not as a training note. Start by just noticing where in your day your breath goes away. What you were doing, what you were thinking about, what had just happened. You can't work on a pattern you haven't located yet, and for a lot of people the locating is most of it.

Which means the breath-hold is information. When somebody is holding their breath in a range, that range is telling you something. We work on this in the Stronger Human community, and the goal isn't to force the breath on top of a painful range and call it fixed. It's to find the places where your breath disappears and work on breathing there, because that's usually where you own the least.

The soft tissue version, which I got wrong for years

Somebody finds a tight spot. They lean a tool into it, or dig a thumb in, and the second the pressure gets uncomfortable they hold their breath and push harder.

I know because that was me. I started doing soft tissue work in 2013, and my approach was to find the tightest thing I could and absolutely bury a tool into it while holding my breath. More pressure was better, and gritting through it was the point.

What I was actually doing was making the tissue tense up against me. There's a clean reason why.

Holding your breath flips you sympathetic. Sympathetic drive turns up the sensitivity of the sensors inside the muscle that report on its length and tension, and when those get more sensitive the muscle holds more tension at rest. So you are increasing the resting tension of the exact tissue you're trying to release. You press harder, the tissue pushes back harder, and you walk away thinking you need a stronger tool.

Normal breathing keeps a brake on that response. Hold your breath and you take the brake off entirely, which lets the pressure drive your system straight toward guarding with nothing opposing it.

The fix is simple. Slow exhale into the pressure, longer out than in. The exhale shifts you toward the parasympathetic side, which turns those sensors back down, and the tissue lets you in. You get deeper with less force and it hurts less doing it.

That's also the other half of what I had backwards. It isn't only about breathing, it's about using the right amount of pressure for that moment instead of the most pressure you can stand. Once I started breathing through it and backing the pressure off to something I could stay relaxed underneath, a strange thing happened over the following years. I could handle more and more pressure while keeping my breath going. The tolerance went up on its own, because I stopped fighting myself for it.

So less force, better breath, and the capacity for pressure grows anyway. The opposite of what I assumed at the start.

There's another layer to this that I've come to think is one of the real benefits of doing your own soft tissue work, and it connects to what I said about trauma. Some people are extremely sensitive to touch and pressure. Light contact registers as a lot. If you've been through something, that sensitivity is often turned way up, and it isn't a flaw, it's a system that learned to be watchful.

Working on your own tissue is a way to teach that system that pressure can be survivable. You control the depth. You control when it stops. You breathe through it and your body gets evidence that pressure arrived and nothing bad happened, over and over, on your own terms. That's a different thing from someone else's hands on you, and for some people it's the only version that works at first.

This is what I meant earlier about becoming your own bodyworker. Part of that skill is learning where you hold tension. Part of it is learning to breathe while you work on it. And part of it is teaching your nervous system to stay calm while something uncomfortable is happening, which is a skill that pays off well outside of soft tissue work.

Now the bathroom

I'm going there, because it's the clearest example of this pattern costing people something. Most people push to poop. Breath locked, abdominal pressure cranked, forcing it out.

We had Gil Hedley on the podcast, and he's spent thirty years doing cadaver dissections, so he's seen the inside of more human bodies than almost anyone alive. He called pushing a fake trick, and he's blunt about the cost: push and you get hemorrhoids, then you're sore, then you're bleeding, and the whole thing turns into a problem that feeds itself.

What he teaches instead is positional. Sit down and lay your belly onto your thighs. Lean all the way forward.

And I'll say this as someone who owns a squatty potty, which I bought for exactly this reason. Hedley's point is that the platform isn't the thing that matters. What matters is getting your thighs and your abdomen into contact. If you've got stiff ankles or hips, raising your feet can just push your back against the seat, and you've changed the shape of your position without changing the relationship that actually does the work. So if you use one, lean forward on it.

Then breathe and wait. Don't force it. Your colon has its own wave, a natural muscular contraction that moves things along, and your job is to let it happen rather than overpower it. The thigh pressing against the belly wall sits right against the colon, so you're giving your nervous system a structural signal that it's time. And as you breathe, the shapes inside you change, which is what actually moves things, not pushing.

I asked him on the show whether it comes out on the inhale, because that's what I'd noticed in myself. He said yes. On the inhale everything relaxes and lets go.

So that's the whole theme in one unglamorous example. Pushing is force production through a breath-hold. Breathing is force production with air moving. One gives you hemorrhoids and the other one works.

It all runs together. Breathe through the movement, breathe through the range that scares you, breathe through the work you do on your own tissue, and breathe in the bathroom.

Breath-holding is a Gear 5 input

This is how I think about breath holds when it comes to the gears of training. Remember the gears. Gear 5 is your redline. It's real, it's useful, you need to be able to go there, and it should be a small fraction of what you do.

Breath-holding under load is the same category. It's a Gear 5 input. There are loads where it's the right answer and you should have it available. It just shouldn't be how you move the majority of the weight you move.

I rarely use it anymore. Not never, but rarely. And that's because I'm running the same experiment with lifting that I'm running with conditioning, which is to see how much I can do without reaching for it. How much weight can I move while still breathing. That number keeps going up, same as my nasal watts.

To be clear, that's an experiment I'm running on myself. I'm not telling you to abandon the Valsalva. I'm telling you that most people have one pattern for producing force and it's breath-holding, and that adding the other pattern to your toolkit is worth years of attention. Build the capacity to move real weight while breathing. Keep the breath-hold for when the load genuinely calls for it.

What a forceful exhale actually does

So what's the alternative, and does it hold up? Try it right now. Breath in, then growl for five to ten seconds. Actually growl, don't just blow air out.

Feel your abdomen? That's bracing, and you can move while it's happening.

What's going on there is that a forceful exhale recruits your deep core automatically. The EMG research on this is solid. During forced exhalation the transverse abdominis, which is the deepest of your abdominal muscles, fires at around 75 percent of its maximum. That's higher than the rectus abdominis at 66 percent or the external oblique at 62. The transverse abdominis is the primary muscle of a forced exhale, and it's also the one everyone's trying to recruit when they talk about core stability. Another study found that abdominal recruitment is significantly higher with an expiratory load than an inspiratory one.

So you're generating intra-abdominal pressure, same as the Valsalva. The difference is you're doing it while air is moving, which means you aren't locked. You get stability without rigidity, and no oxygen debt stacking up with every rep.

Now the part that surprised me. On force production, forced exhalation mostly matches the Valsalva. A study testing maximal isometric contractions under different breathing conditions found forced exhalation produced peak forces statistically equivalent to breath-holding across shoulder, elbow, and knee extension. The authors' own conclusion was that given the cardiovascular risk of the Valsalva, forced exhalation should be preferred at maximal levels, especially for repeated reps.

That's not me making an argument. That's the researchers.

Something to keep in mind though. For loaded multi-rep strength work, like that bench press study, breath-holding still edged ahead on volume. So the Valsalva keeps its place. It just has a much smaller place than most lifters give it.

The grunt has been studied

Here's the one I didn't expect to find. A study on collegiate tennis players tested four breathing strategies during a forehand stroke: forced exhalation, forced inhalation, grunting, and the Valsalva. Forced expiration supported force comparable to the Valsalva, with added recruitment of the internal oblique and the abdominals.

Tennis players grunt. Boxers hiss. Martial artists shout on impact. Lifters who know what they're doing breathe out through the hardest part of the rep. That's not showmanship and it isn't an accident. It's people arriving at the same solution independently, and when somebody finally put it under EMG, it held up.

How I sprint nasal

This is where this section connects back to everything before it. When I do surges on the assault bike, or when I'm sprinting, my goal is to keep it nasal. And the reasonable objection is that a sprint demands serious trunk stability, and the obvious ways to get it are to hold your breath or open your mouth and gasp.

The growling breath is the answer. A forceful exhale through a partly closed throat gives me the abdominal pressure I need to keep my structure stable while I'm moving fast, and it does it with air still flowing. I'm not locked down and I'm not venting everything out of an open mouth. The tension is coming from the exhale itself.

That took years to build and the very top end is still a work in progress. But it's the thing that makes nasal work possible at intensities where most people assume there's no choice.

The pattern problem, stated honestly

My belief is that if breath-holding is the only way you know how to produce force, that pattern follows you everywhere. Into grappling, into sport, into picking up a couch.

I should tell you that part isn't proven. No study has tested whether Valsalva training specifically causes breath-holding in other contexts. What we do know is that dysfunctional breathing is the norm in athletes rather than the exception, and coaches and therapists see the strength-trained-athlete-can't-breathe-under-load pattern constantly. So it's well-reasoned and it matches what I've watched, and it isn't a proven causal chain. Take it as a coach's observation.

I'll give the other side its due as well. Powerlifters, strength athletes, bodybuilders, they all live on the Valsalva. They move enormous loads with it and most of them are fine. So the breath-hold isn't the villain here.

My honest read is that it's overused. It's the default for every set of every exercise for most people in the gym, when the loads that genuinely call for it are a small slice of what anybody actually lifts in a week. Keep it for those. Build the other skill for everything else.

Taking force, not just making it

The same principle runs the other direction.

In judo and jiu jitsu you learn breakfalls in week one, and a good instructor tells you the same thing every time. Exhale when you hit the ground.

Land holding your breath and your whole system is rigid, so the force has nowhere to go and it concentrates where you hit. Exhale on impact and the body has give, and the force moves through something that can absorb and spread it. Same reason a car has a crumple zone. Controlled deformation absorbs energy and a rigid structure passes all of it to the passenger.

I talked about learning to fall in the video I did on bone density, because it matters more every year you age. Part of falling well is not bracing in fear. It's breathing into the impact.

The through-line

Exhale on effort, whether you're making force or absorbing it. Punching, exhale. Lifting, exhale on the hard part. Getting thrown, exhale when you land.

And if your sport is dynamic, most of your training shouldn't live in the breath-hold world. On the mat, on the field, in the ring, you don't get to stop and set up a perfect Valsalva.

Which brings the tension idea from the start of this article all the way around. The movement decides the tension. A max deadlift asks for everything you've got and you give it everything, breath-hold included. A scramble asks for something that changes by the second. Matching what you give to what the moment actually needs is the whole skill, and the breath is how you dial it.

One thing left. The muscles doing all of this breathing are muscles, and you can train them directly.

How To Train Your Breathing Muscles Directly

Everything so far has been about how you use your breathing. This part is about making the equipment better.

Your breathing muscles are skeletal muscles. They respond to resistance training the same way your biceps do, which sounds obvious once you say it, and most people never do anything about it.

And they're expensive to run. At peak effort your breathing muscles are consuming somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of your total oxygen. That's oxygen your legs wanted. The stronger and more efficient those muscles are, the smaller their cut.

There are two halves to this, and they do different jobs.

The inhale side

The muscles that pull air in are your diaphragm and the intercostals between your ribs. You train them by breathing against resistance.

I've been using the Bas Rutten O2 Trainer for about eight years. You breathe through it, the caps restrict airflow, and the smaller the hole the harder your inspiratory muscles have to pull. Caps run from 14 down to 1, and level 1 is barely any air at all.

The first time I used it seriously, my ribs were sore the next day. Not my legs, not my back. The muscles around my ribs. That was the moment I understood I'd been training for years without ever directly loading the muscles that let me breathe. Right now I can hold around twelve minutes at about level 1.5, which forces me down to roughly two breaths a minute.

What the research actually supports. The protocol that shows up across the inspiratory muscle training literature is roughly 30 breaths against meaningful resistance, twice a day, for somewhere between four and eight weeks. Trials using that kind of dosing have improved time trial performance in cyclists by a few percent and improved rowing and swimming times, and here's the part I find most interesting: they did it without changing VO2 max.

So this is a performance variable that sits outside your aerobic ceiling, and it's directly trainable. That's rare.

The mechanism is the one from the heart rate section. Stronger inspiratory muscles fatigue later, which means the reflex that steals blood from your legs fires later, which means you keep more blood going where the work is happening.

On devices. The research is about load and dose rather than about brands. Any device that lets you breathe against real resistance will deliver the stimulus, and the O2 Trainer is inexpensive and has held up for me across eight years of use.

One thing to be skeptical about with any of these. Some of the marketing says that as you train, your breathing rate drops and so does your heart rate. The breathing rate part is fine. The heart rate claim is the thing I told you earlier the research doesn't support at a fixed workload. The honest version is the metaboreflex one, where stronger breathing muscles mean a smaller cardiovascular cost once your breathing gets hard. It gets you to the same place by a route that holds up.

Five minutes a day is enough to start. Keep your shoulders down and keep the breath low. If you're pulling from your chest and neck, you've just moved the problem.

One warning from watching a lot of people buy one of these. The device only works if you use it, and most people use it for a week and then it lives in a drawer. Five honest minutes a day beats a device you own and admire.

Think of it like training with a weighted vest. You load the system, it adapts, and when you take the load off, normal feels effortless.

The airway side

Now the other half, and it's a completely different job from the one above. The muscles of your tongue, soft palate, and throat don't pump air. They hold the tube open so air can move through it. When they're weak, the airway collapses on you, which is where snoring and a chunk of sleep apnea come from.

The most interesting evidence here comes from an unlikely place. In 2006 a randomized trial had people learn the didgeridoo. Four months, about 25 minutes a day, five days a week. The result was fewer apnea events, less daytime sleepiness, and partners reporting less snoring.

I'll give you the limitations, because they're real. It was a small trial, the apnea finding sat right at the edge of statistical significance, they used home monitoring rather than a full sleep lab, and the control group was a waiting list rather than people doing some sham practice. It also hasn't been directly replicated. So it's the best single piece of evidence on an instrument and the airway, and it isn't settled.

Why that instrument? Circular breathing. To hold one unbroken note, you press your tongue up against the roof of your mouth to seal off the back of your throat, push the stored air out of your cheeks to keep the note going, and sneak a nasal inhale at the same time. That seal between tongue and soft palate is the exact muscle action that keeps your airway from collapsing when you sleep. Every cycle trains it.

I play didgeridoo and I've spent real money on good instruments, and I'm going to make a genuine case that you should learn it. And not because of the study. The study is nice to have, but the reason I'd put this at the top of the list is that it's fun, and anybody can learn it. There's no musical background required. You can make a sound on day one, which is not true of most instruments, and that alone keeps people coming back.

Then look at everything it's training at once.

You're sending vibration through your own body every time you play. You're singing into it, which does something close to what humming does for nasal nitric oxide, except sustained and at volume. You're exhaling against resistance for minutes at a time. You're holding a tongue-to-palate seal you'd otherwise have no reason to train.

And this is the part I didn't appreciate until I'd played for a while. You're learning to coordinate deep, low breathing with force production on the exhale. That's the same skill as the growling breath, except now you're doing it with a target, because the sound tells you immediately whether you got it right. You're also learning to manipulate your diaphragm finely enough to shape a note, which builds the kind of control a trained singer has.

You don't need an expensive instrument for any of it. Go to a hardware store, buy a length of PVC, and you've got the training effect for a few dollars.

If a didgeridoo isn't happening, any wind instrument gives you a version of this, though I want to be careful about how strongly I put that. A 2020 systematic review pulled together the studies on wind instruments, singing and sleep apnea. Looking at the individual studies, the picture is encouraging. Double-reed players, oboe and bassoon, came out with lower sleep apnea risk than other musicians. Singers snored less. Didgeridoo players improved. But when the authors pooled the data statistically, they couldn't confirm an effect, they described the effect sizes as zero to small, and they graded the overall certainty of the evidence as low.

Their own conclusion was that playing a wind instrument or singing may have a small positive effect, based on few studies. That's a long way from a promise, and I'm not going to dress it up.

I play saxophone too, less often than I should right now, which is single reed, so the tongue strikes the reed on every articulation and the lips seal against the mouthpiece while you exhale against resistance. Less direct than didgeridoo, and I'd put it in the category of probably helping rather than proven to.

And singing is free. I know most people are self-conscious about it, and I know "learn to sing" sounds like a strange thing to find in a breathing article. But the diaphragm control that singing builds is remarkable. Holding a steady note requires you to meter your exhale precisely, for a long time, while keeping your throat open. That's the exact skill set this whole article is about, and you already own the instrument.

If no instrument is happening at all, here's the free menu.

Tongue circles. Tip of the tongue against your teeth, circle slowly around the inside of your mouth. A minute one direction, a minute the other. You can do this at a desk and nobody will know. I have the Stronger Human community doing these.

Tongue press. Press your whole tongue flat against the roof of your mouth and hold. Or slide the tip slowly backward from your front teeth toward your soft palate. This is the same tissue work as tongue posture, just loaded.

Humming. Free, and it does two things at once. It raises nasal nitric oxide substantially, and it forces the soft palate to engage. Stack it on top of the tongue work and you're training both in the same minute.

Balloons. Deep nasal breath, then push the air into the balloon with a long sustained exhale. This trains the soft palate, the lips, and your expiratory muscles together. A bag of fifty costs almost nothing. This is also Rickson's teaching tool from the beginning of this article, which is a nice loop to close.

And if you've got an O2 Trainer already, there's a setting that adds resistance to the exhale rather than the inhale. Most people never use it. That's the one that trains the expiratory side and the muscles holding your airway open.

The research on this family of work is genuinely encouraging, and it's stronger than the instrument research. A 2009 randomized trial had people with moderate sleep apnea do daily tongue and throat exercises for three months, against a sham group doing breathing exercises. The exercise group's apnea events dropped from about 22 per hour to about 14. Their snoring went down, their daytime sleepiness went down, and their body weight didn't change, which means the improvement came from the muscles rather than from losing weight.

A later meta-analysis of this kind of therapy across multiple adult studies found an average reduction in apnea events of roughly 50 percent. The caveat is that those studies didn't screen people by what was actually causing their apnea, so the effect is likely much larger in people whose problem is muscle-related and much smaller in people whose airway collapses for structural reasons.

Before you dismiss any of this as too small to matter, go do two minutes of tongue circles right now. Your tongue will be sore. That tells you something about how much you've been training it.

One tool for the moment

Different category entirely. The physiological sigh. Two quick inhales through the nose, then a long slow exhale through the mouth.

A Stanford trial put 111 people through a month of five-minute daily practice, comparing cyclic sighing against two other breathing patterns and against mindfulness meditation. Everybody improved. But the breathing groups improved more than the meditation group, and cyclic sighing produced the biggest daily gains in mood, with the effect growing over the month.

It's also useful in the moment. I'll use it between rounds or during a hard session to pull my heart rate down and settle myself.

There's a reason the double inhale is part of it. The tiny air sacs in your lungs do collapse a little over the course of normal quiet breathing, and a sigh is how your body reopens them. You do this involuntarily every few minutes without noticing. The deliberate version borrows a mechanism you already have.

The long exhale is where your nervous system downshifts.

You don't have to pick

Both halves, covered simply.

Inhale side. The O2 Trainer. Five minutes a day against real resistance.

Airway and exhale side. Didgeridoo first, because it's the most complete tool on the list, it's genuinely fun, and anyone can learn it. If that's not happening, another wind instrument, or singing, which costs nothing. And if none of that appeals, tongue circles, tongue press, humming, and balloons all do real work for free. Start with whatever costs nothing, because the free options genuinely work and a tool you haven't bought yet is a tool you aren't using.

That's all the equipment. Now the harder question, which is whether any of this is worth the years it takes.

The Long Game: Why I Think This Is Worth The Friction

Most people who try nasal breathing quit inside the first two weeks. Not because they decided it was wrong. Because for those two weeks you are slower, weaker, and more uncomfortable than you were before you started, and that feels like going the wrong direction. Add in everything else I've just put in front of you. The nose takes months. The breathing muscles take a couple of months before you feel anything. The jaw and the face move on a scale of years. Somewhere in there most people decide this isn't worth it and go back to breathing through their mouth on the assault bike.

I understand it. To get better at this you have to get worse first.

I know that trade.

The deadlift that had to get worse

Late 2014, I started training at Super Training gym. I walked in deadlifting 620, which was my max at the time, and which I was not shy about telling people.

Mark Bell and a few of the guys watched me pull. Two of them gave me suggestions. Changes to my setup, changes to how I was getting into position. I took them.

And my deadlift went down.

Not by a little. I couldn't move what I'd been moving, because the mechanics they gave me weren't the mechanics my body had grooved over years of pulling my own way. If you'd caught me three weeks into that, I'd have told you the advice was bad and I was going back to what worked.

Two and a half months later I pulled 715.

I think about that every time somebody tells me nasal breathing made their session worse. Yeah. It did. This is how any new habit or skill begins.

What I actually see

The thing I'd want you to weigh here isn't a study. I've been teaching this inside the Stronger Human community for a while now, and the message that comes back, over and over, from the people who got through the adaptation, is some version of the same sentence. The hard workouts don't cost what they used to. They finish a session and they're not wrecked. They've got an afternoon left. They can train hard again the next day.

That's a bigger deal than it sounds. For most people the limit was never how hard they can go one time. It's how often they can go hard and still be a functioning human being afterward.

And none of these people are finished. The skill is still climbing for them, same as it's still climbing for me. My nasal output on the bike is higher this year than it was last year, and I've been working on this for years. I don't know where my ceiling is yet.

In jiu jitsu now I basically never have to open my mouth. I finish practice and I feel good. Not survived-it good. Good.

Nobody has run this study

I'll be straight with you about where this sits. If you went looking for the trial that proves nasal breathing helps you recover faster or keeps you training longer, you wouldn't find it. For that you'd need somebody to take a few hundred athletes, randomize half of them into nasal training, follow both groups for years, and track how beat up they get and how long they keep showing up. Nobody has run it. I went looking.

There's a reason for that, and George Dallam explains it better than I could. Exercise physiology grew up around the metabolic cart, the mask and tube rig that measures the air going in and out of you. That test has been the backbone of the field since the 1940s, and it works by clipping your nose shut. The science of how humans breathe during exercise was built on an apparatus that made nasal breathing impossible to measure.

Somebody did eventually test it. In 1995 a group in Australia ran max tests comparing nose, mouth, and both. Breathing nasally cost those subjects about 11 percent of their VO2 max and about 8 percent of their time to exhaustion, and it dropped their peak ventilation by about 35 percent. The field looked at the first two numbers and filed nasal breathing under bad idea. The third one didn't get the same attention, even though the researchers themselves noted those subjects were breathing more efficiently.

And nobody asked the question sitting right there. Those subjects had never breathed through their nose during exercise in their lives. They were being tested on day one of a skill, and the result got recorded as a ceiling.

So the missing research doesn't move me much, and I want to tell you why. Science usually arrives after the practice, not before it.

Twenty-five hundred years ago there was a wrestler named Milo of Croton. Real person, six Olympic titles. The story they told about his training was that he picked up a newborn calf and carried it across his shoulders, then did it again the next day, and again, and kept doing it while the calf grew, until he was walking around with a full grown bull on his back.

That part is almost certainly legend. But people were telling that story two and a half thousand years before anybody wrote down the words progressive overload, and that's what I want you to notice. Wrestlers were already using the principle. The science took another twenty-five centuries to catch up, and it never made the calf any lighter.

I've always operated as my own experiment. My own n of one. Almost everything I know about movement, I learned by doing it on myself for years and paying attention to what happened, and a good chunk of that still has no study attached to it. If I'd waited for a journal to give me permission before trying any of it, I'd have spent the last ten years training like everybody else.

So I'm not going to tell you the research says this will extend your career. It doesn't say that yet. What I'd rather you do is be your own n of one. Give it a few honest months. Write down where you started and look at it again later. You'll end up with better information about your own body than a study could have given you anyway, because a study reports an average, and you're not an average.

Two places where it's more than my word

Your airway at night. The apnea material from earlier connects straight into this one. Untreated sleep apnea roughly triples your odds of developing high blood pressure, and roughly doubles your risk of stroke or death. Those numbers come from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort and a Yale study that followed people for years, and as this field goes, they're about as solid as it gets.

What hasn't been shown is that tongue exercises and a strip of tape prevent heart attacks. What has been shown, across the pooled myofunctional therapy trials, is that this kind of work cuts apnea events roughly in half. So the condition does real damage, and the work reduces the condition. That's the honest shape of it, and I'll take that trade every time.

The breathing device. At the University of Colorado, Daniel Craighead ran a six week trial on 36 adults between 50 and 79, all of them with higher than ideal blood pressure. Thirty breaths a day against heavy resistance, six days a week. Systolic blood pressure came down about 9 points and their blood vessel function improved. The control group did the same thirty breaths against almost no resistance and got neither. Three quarters of the drop was still there six weeks after they stopped training.

Thirty-six people is thirty-six people, and they weren't athletes, so I'm not promising you that number. But that's the same device I've been telling you to use for performance, moving a number that tracks with how long people actually live. That gets my attention.

Ease inside the difficult

So this is my theory, and yes, it's my theory. From practice, observations, and connecting some dots.

Exercise is good for you. Nobody argues about that. But most people's hard sessions come with a bill attached. A nervous system that got redlined. A body that needs two days. An afternoon that's gone.

What if the same work cost less? Not less effort, and not less output. The same session, with less disturbance left behind when it's over. Now run that for a year. Then run it for ten.

I can't prove that buys you more years of life. I do think it buys you more years of training, and when most people say longevity, I think that's closer to what they actually mean. Every person I know who's still rolling hard at 60 got there the same way. They kept showing up, and nothing ever took them out long enough to break the habit.

There's one more piece that's harder to measure than blood pressure. When hard things stop feeling like they're taking everything out of you, you want to do them more often.

So ask yourself what you actually want. Do you want every hard effort to feel like a redline? Or would you rather find ease inside the difficult, and then go looking for something harder?

It took me years to get here, and I'm still building it. I hope you give yourself the same chance.

Where To Start

That was a lot. All of it comes down to one thing.

Keep your mouth closed when your nose can do the work.

That's it. That's the only motor pattern that has to change for everything in this article to start happening. At your desk. On the couch. Walking to your car. The first ten minutes of training before things get serious. While you sleep.

Most of the time, your nose can handle it. The mouth opens when it has to. Not when it doesn't.

If you read this entire thing and the only change you make is that one, you'll still get most of what I described. Your nervous system gets a different signal all day. Your CO2 tolerance starts climbing on its own. The diaphragm starts leading because the resistance drags the breath downward whether you're paying attention or not.

A first month, if you want structure

Nothing here needs equipment.

That's two changes in week one, and they're both the same change. Use your nose.

Then take that same attention into whatever you already do. Rope flow, clubs, barbell work, carries, whatever your practice is. Notice what your breathing does when the movement gets harder or more complicated. Notice it in daily life too, when you bend down to pick something up, when you're on the toilet, when you're carrying groceries. You're building a map of where your breath disappears, and that map is what you work from.

Your output will look low and it will bother you. Mine did. Write down the number anyway, because in six months you're going to want to know where you started.

After that it's just time. The breathing muscles get stronger over a couple of months. The output you can hold nasally climbs for years. The jaw and face stuff moves on a decade scale.

Where the structured version lives

Everything in this article is the what. Untapped Breathing, inside the Stronger Human community, is the order.

I still think about those rounds as a white belt. Mouth open at minute two, cooked by minute four, driving home wondering what was wrong with me.

The answer turned out to be almost disappointing. Nothing was wrong with my conditioning. I was moving air badly, and I'd never once been told that was a thing you could be bad at, let alone a thing you could train.

Ten years on, the same round feels different. Not because I got tougher. Because I stopped spending energy I didn't need to spend. The air goes in through my nose, the breath stays low, the output holds, and I'm back to normal between rounds before the other person has gotten their breathing under control.

And I'm still finding ground. My nasal output on the bike is still climbing. I'm still working on whether I can hold some part of nasal breathing into a genuine redline. My tongue sits somewhere it didn't sit ten years ago and I'm curious where it'll be in another ten.

That's the part I'd want you to take from this. Breathing isn't a thing you fix and move on from. It's a practice that keeps paying you for as long as you keep paying attention to it, and it runs underneath every other thing you train.

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