Boost your CO2 tolerance and improve your breathing by practicing nose breathing techniques.
In this episode of The Movement Movement, Steven Sashen talks with Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP, founder of LifeSpa and a respected figure in Ayurvedic medicine, who discusses how he’s been combining ancient wisdom with modern science for over forty years. His groundbreaking work, particularly in his book Body, Mind, and Sport, examines the benefits of nose breathing versus mouth breathing during physical activity. Dr. Douillard’s research indicates that nose breathing enhances nitric oxide production, a crucial factor in efficient oxygen intake and stress relief. It also significantly improves overall health and performance, as demonstrated in his work with elite athletes and firefighters. A strong advocate of the health benefits of nasal breathing, Dr. Douillard encourages making it a daily habit to enhance respiratory health, immune function, and overall well-being.
Key Takeaways:
→ Nose breathing improves oxygen intake and carbon dioxide removal, enhancing respiratory fitness.
→ Engaging the diaphragm and rib cage through nose breathing leads to better respiratory health.
→ Breathing through your nose during exercise lowers your breathing rate and enhances performance.
→ Proper nose breathing techniques can enhance athletic performance and recovery by activating the lower lung lobes.
→ Chronic mouth breathing in children can negatively impact facial and airway development.
Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP, is a globally recognized leader in the fields of Ayurveda, natural health, nutrition, and sports medicine. With 40 years of experience, he has helped over 100,000 patients. Dr. John is a renowned Ayurvedic educator, host of the Ayurveda Meets Modern Science podcast, and bestselling author of seven health books, including Eat Wheat and 3-Season Diet. He is the creator of LifeSpa.com, where he proves ancient Ayurvedic wisdom with modern science in articles published weekly. With its thousands of free educational articles and videos, LifeSpa.com is the leading Ayurvedic health resource on the web with 500,000+ social followers and newsletter readers.
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen
Are you breathing wrong? I know that sounds crazy, but maybe you are, maybe you’re not. I don’t know. We’re going to find out today on this episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Typically starting feet first, you know, those things at the end of your legs. But we’re going to be, you know, moving up a little bit to talk about things above your legs this time, and including your legs too, frankly. We also break down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, CrossFit, whatever it is you like to do, and to do it enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. And I’ve been gone for a while. Have I said enjoyably? I know I did. It’s a trick question because look, if you’re not doing something that you enjoy, you’re not going to keep it up anyway. So find something that works for you, that you have fun doing because that’s going to make the biggest change, that consistency. I am Steven Sashin, co founder and chief barefoot officer here at Zero Shoes. Here’s my T shirt to prove it. And I started this. We call it the Movement Movement because we’re creating a movement. And by we, I mean all of us, everyone listening and everyone you talk to. We are creating a movement about movement, letting your body what it’s made to do instead of getting in the way with things that are sold to you as, you know, better versions of something without a whole lot of evidence behind it. And the we part is really simple. Spread the word. Really, that’s, that’s it. Share with your friends, tell people to come here. If you want to find out how you can, how you can do that, go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. nothing you need to do to join. There’s no secret handshake, there’s no money involved. We don’t get up every morning at 6 and do the same chant. It’s just a place where you can find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media and all the way places you can find the podcast and you can share that with people if they don’t use the one that you use to find podcasts and basically give us a like and a thumbs up and a five star rating and you know the drill. Basically. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. All right, let’s get started and have some fun. John, welcome, welcome. Really good to see your face, Tell people who you are and what you are doing here.
John Douillard
Hi, yeah, my name is John Duillard. I have been practicing ayurvedic medicine backed by modern science for about 41 years now. And my first book was a book called Body, Mind and Sport which happened back in the early 1990s. It was really one of the first books on nose breathing versus mouth breathing exercise. We published studies in the International Journal of Neuroscience and I ended up kind of introducing nose breathing to a lot of athletes. Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova did the forward to that book. I worked with many tennis players, ended up getting a job as the director of player development with the New Jersey Nets in the NBA and taught them how to nose breathe. And it’s been a wonderful journey, kind of diving deeper into how we breathe. When I first started, you know, I would talk to medical doctors, pulmonologists, comparative anatomists and they will say there’s no difference between nose breathing and mouth breathing. And now you probably have have heard that everybody’s talking about nose breathing now. And I’d like to maybe today talk about some of the original research we did, which is mind boggling. And, and I was fascinated by the runner’s high and the zone and that best race is my easiest race to experience. And we did years of research and liter that we can make that happen. That’s what I want to share with you guys today.
Steven Sashen
Well, I’m not interested in any of that, so it’s nice talking to you and hopefully we’ll see each other again but. Oh well, you know, good shot. Actually, I’m gonna back up. So you and I met. I mean I started zero issues with my wife just shy of 16 years ago and I think you and I met like, like a year in. And this is one of those things where we had our lives within a few miles of each other and I think this is the first time we’ve seen each other in about that much time. And this is, you know, not even seeing each other, seeing each other. So it’s wacky. But anyway, it’s a pleasure. Okay, so that said, definitely want to talk to you about all of that. And the reason I want to kind of be candid up front, the reason that you are on this call is the one word that you used and I don’t remember, I’m not going to give the exact word. I don’t remember if you said scientific or science based. But either way that Part and I. There’s so many people who are doing work that could sound similar to what you’re doing or what’s going on now with the whole, you know, fat of nose breathing and mouth taping. And if anyone listening or watching doesn’t know what that is, just do a search and it’ll blow your mind. And there is some research coming out about some of that, but by and large, a lot of people who are promoting it do not. They haven’t done any primary research for sure. I don’t know how well steeped they are in any of the research at all. And of course, research in general, I’m not going to poo poo it and say that it has no value, but there’s a lot like in my world, the number of studies that have no value because they don’t understand that we’re not talking about footwear as much as we’re talking about form, and that it takes time to adapt to a new form. And the number of studies that say things like, oh, we gave people five minutes to get used to running barefoot, it’s like, no, no, that doesn’t work. So, you know, understanding how to even read a good piece of research or understanding how to read to see if a piece of research is good is a whole challenge. So anyway, with that as a giant, you know, caveat, slash, umbrella, slash, whatever, where would you like to begin? Let’s do the simple thing, because I know this is going to sound really dumb. This will be the dumbest question I think I’ve ever asked and I’m proud to do it. Can you tell people, I know it’s going to sound really silly. What’s the difference between nose breath, mouth breathing? And I actually have a reason for asking that that makes it not quite so stupid, but I know that sounds really stupid. I’m all in.
John Douillard
I mean, there’s the. The basic things your nose is. A filter rarefies the air. So when you breathe in through your mouth, it comes in kind of in a big. Through a very big tube, your trachea. But when you breathe into your nose, it goes through the turbinates, which are like a turbocharger, which swirls the air into a RA that drives it all the way down into the lower lobes of the lungs. Take a horse, for example. They’re obligate nose breathers. When they breathe, look where their nose is and look where their lungs are. It’s a long way away. So the only way it’s going to get into those lungs and they have massive Capacity for endurance and sprinting is to actually create a turbaned, a turbocharged drive of the air. When they first created the engine that we use today, the internal combustion engine, the air would mix with the gas and they would have a spark and boom. It would blow up and the piston would move and your car would go. Right. But they had a problem where the explosion kept happening in the same place and basically wearing out the engine very quickly. So they actually changed the valve that let the air and let the air in. And it came in like a throw, which is the beginning of the turbocharger. And when that happened, it drove all the gas, mixed all the gas in the air into the entire piston chamber. And that’s what we have today, is the internal combustion engine, this thing that can last 2,300,000 miles. That’s exactly how we’re designed. We’re designed to breathe through our nose. We’re obligate nose breathers. We learn how to breathe through our mouth as we grow up, feel stress, get stressed out, and every time that we get stressed out, we breathe a little different. The rib cage responds to that. And that stressed out upper chest version of breathing becomes normal to you. And then another stress comes along and that becomes normal too. And next thing you know, you’re breathing more shallow, opening your mouth, and there’s all kinds of problems that take place with that. So other than moistening the air and filtering the air, it does this kind of turbocharger effect to give you respiratory efficiency, but it also drives the air through the olfactory plate, which activates things like nitric oxide, which are the Nobel prize winning gas. That research was done in 1998. They called it the panacea gas that you make only when you breathe through your nose. And you make zero of this panacea gas when you open your mouth and breathe your mouth. Then also from the Ayurvedic perspective, which I love their idea, from the Pranayam perspective, and now we have research to back that up, is when you actually breathe through your nose, you activate what’s called the brain, lymph and glymphatic systems, which dump three pounds of trash plaque out of your head every year while you sleep at night. And if you don’t drain, well, studies show congestion of the brain, lymph and glymphatic systems are now linked. They only discovered that about 15 years ago, maybe 17 years ago now, in the University of Virginia. And congestion of those channels are linked to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation and autoimmunity. And Studies show early in Covid that long haul Covid was linked directly to the congestion of the brain, lymph and glymphatic systems which are pumped by the diaphragm, number one breathing muscle, which, which and when you’re using the diaphragm with nose breathing, you’re going to get a natural pumping effect of the brain’s lymph and lymphatic system. And I can go on and on and on, but that’s a good intro.
Steven Sashen
So you just did something that is challenging. And what that is is you referenced a whole lot of ideas that obviously since I have not taken a dive into the research I can’t comment on. And the, the odds that you know more than a fraction of the people listening or watching this would be any different is pretty low. So that’s a request which is, you know, I want to make sure that we can reference all of that so people can take a look and see what’s some of the research and see what’s going on there. This is not a do your own research thing on the Internet where you’re just looking to prove something you believe.
But definitely wanting to look into it. I mean, I’m thinking about some of the things you said from a causal direction. So the phenomenon, I mean what you made me think of is I remember the first time I bought a shower head that was designed to be a low flow shower head, but put out more pressure. And the way it did it is that it had these little air intakes and was literally compressing everything from a bigger pipe into a smaller pipe, injecting air into it. And it actually was a low flow, high velocity shower head. So that’s an interesting phenomenon where I’m also going just for the fun of being a complete dick when I say things like this is it’s tricky to compare what we’re doing to.
While I like the analogy for the internal combustion engine in terms of getting the air in in the right way, of course we are kind of vacuuming the air in with the diaphragm moving rather than forcing the air in, which does create a different thing.
I don’t know if it does anything different. And the other my, my last sort of fun thought is for some of the things that we’re talking about, some of which I have heard and did raise my curiosity hackles if you will, not in a negative way, but just like, oh, that’s an interesting statement, I want to check it out is the thing about nitric oxide and for which is not the same for letting people know as nitrous oxide, which is what you get when you go to the dentist if you ask really nice or what you get if you were one of my friends in high school who stole it from his dad, the dentist.
But nitric oxide, which just for the fun of it, another my. My favorite thing I discovered about nitric oxide is how it’s produced in the blood vessels from just basically, if you just kind of bounce up and down a little bit, that shearing stress creates nitric oxide as well. Anyway, the nitric oxide thing and the. The turbulent, not in a negative way, the turbulence, however I want to put it thing that talked about with horses. That’s the kind of thing that I imagine both of those would be relatively. Well, the first, the nitric oxide one would be easy to see.
Just get a sample further down from your. After everything goes past about here and you’re breathing the horse one. I keep imagining something like a wind tunnel. There’s got to be some way of actually seeing that which would be cool as shit if. If you can. So anyway, that’s my weird collection of responses to lots of info in there, some of which.
Some of which obviously I have no way of making any intelligent comment about other than cool. It’ll be fun to take a look at into that. And some of it’s like, ooh, here’s some interesting ways that I wonder if people have looked at that so that people could. Some people are going to write it off right away. And what I’m really trying to do is get people. Wait, I’m going to say something really weird. People call me all the time to try to sell me on marketing programs to help our company do better. And I say, say, oh, wait, where the hell did this thought go? Come on, I can do it. This is working on not nearly enough sleep after getting back from Europe. I. Oh, man, I totally lost it. It was something about not proof, but some easy thing.
John Douillard
Anyway. Marketing program you were talking about.
Steven Sashen
Well, like when people try to sell me on something, they’re always trying to sell me on the good news. And oh, that’s what it is. And I’m always giving them every edge case and every reason why what they’re telling me won’t work because the only thing I can control is how much money I spend. And whether I’m going to lose it or not is managing risk. But what they don’t realize is what I’m really doing is saying, here’s all I’m looking for to make me give you my make me give you my money. So when I say something that sounds not, I mean it could sound critical, it’s really an invitation to say cool, since I don’t know enough about that, where can I go so that I can see if I’m going to give you my money? And I’m being highly metaphorical with that one, obviously. But anyway, that’s why I’m saying I hope we put together a good resource page for everyone.
John Douillard
Yeah, well, I appreciate your request for research and that’s pretty much kind of my world. I. I know.
Steven Sashen
That’s why I asked.
John Douillard
Not only have we published studies on this, but on my [email protected] there’s over 1500 articles and my stick is kind of to look at ancient medical wisdom and find the science to prove it. And if you have something that’s been around for thousands of years and it’s still here today and you have science to prove it compared to science alone, which can prove whatever it wants, coffee can be good or bad, anything, you name it. I can give you studies on both sides of that aisle. But if you have something that’s been around and you have science, I feel like it’s something we should at least look at.
And my first kind of foray into that world of ancient wisdom and modern science was nose breathing, which I learned when I was training in Ayurveda in India. And when I came back we published studies on this. So there’s really good science on the difference between mouth breathing and nose breathing from nitric oxide perspective that is just to pubmed nose breathing, nitric oxide. And you will see that is absolutely hard science. The idea of the nose creating a rarefied stream of air is based on what we call turbinates in your nose.
They turbocharge your air. Pretty logical. And when you suck the air in through the contraction of your diaphragm, if it goes through a big hole, it’s going to not have the effect if it goes through a turbocharger, which is your turbinates. So logically and well scientifically documented, there is a complete difference of how the air comes into your lungs through your nose or your mouth.
And then what’s kind of cool is what I was fascinated by was the runner’s high the zone experience and how to we get that. I really wanted that. And I went to this must have been in the early 1980s. I went for a lecture on ayurvedic medicine and meditation and yoga and I was training for an ironman at the Time. And I went to this guy afterwards, I said, okay, I’m training for an ironman. What do you think about that? All this training from the ayurvedic yoga meditation perspective.
And he goes like, what is an Ironman? And I told him it’s 2 1/2 mile swim and 112 mile bike and marathon and all that. And he looked at me and said, why do you do that? And I had really no answer for that. I didn’t never really, no one ever asked me that before. And he looked at me like I was sort of an idiot. And he said, do you meditate? I said, yes, I do. And he said, do you sleep while you meditate? And I said deeply, I get this real deep knockout sleep. And he looked at me again like I was an idiot and said, meditation is not sleep. Meditation is a state of being alert and resting at the same time. It’s the coexistence of opposites. Your mind is aware, but your body is getting deep. Rest kind of like a hurricane. You have the calm and the winds of the storm at the same time. It’s the law of nature. And that’s what meditation is trying to replicate in us. I was like, wow, I didn’t realize that I would get this deep, deep sleep. And he goes, you’re exhausted dude, and you should probably stop doing all that.
And I was like, but what if I meditated more and trained less and I didn’t fall asleep? Could that work? And he goes, yes, yes. And he just kind of shoved me, next please, you know, just to get rid of me. And so I started doing exactly that. I started training less. I started going on weekend meditation retreats, about four or five of them. I went to a two week meditation retreat where they wouldn’t let me run. I could only walk and meditated. Yoga, breathe, meditate, yoga, yoga, breathe. All day long for two weeks straight. I came back out of that shot, out of the cannon. I started competing at a significantly higher level, started winning and placing in many of the events. Triathlons, I was in many of my friends. This was in the South Bay in California in the early 1980s when triathlons were just kicking off and everybody thought I was on steroids. Some of my dear friends who I trained with, they started meditating right away because they were like, what are you doing? And that just got me fascinated in this idea that less is more. And I had this runner’s high thing for about three months. Not just in my training, in every aspect of my life. I was Just like had a level of capacity. I was in my clinical internship at the time. I had a level of capacity that was like I was on some drug for like three months and then it ended and I wanted to get it back.
So I was able to then get invited to go. Well, I didn’t get invited. I went to India in 1986 for just a 3, 4 week vacation to try to learn ayurvedic medicine. Ended up getting invited there. I stayed there for a year and a half, closed my practice in Boulder and started learning all about Ayurveda.
I met Deepak Chopra there, came back, started running his center for eight years. And that’s when I started teaching medical doctors where I had to put the ancient wizard and the modern science together. So that’s why I’m very science based in this world. So then what we did, we published, we did a study on nose breathing versus mouth breathing with athletes. And we had them nose breathe one day and come back do the next week workout with a mouth breathe. They did 200 watts of resistance on an exercise bike. It’s pretty good workout. And when we had them breathe through their mouth, their brain waves. We had a brainwave test done. Their brainwaves were in a, in a fight or flight beta state. It’s pretty stressed out, like you’re driving in traffic. They came back the very next day and their brainwaves went into a meditative calm. All alpha bursts throughout the brain throughout the. And that was the first time anyone had ever seen alpha in the brain during vigorous exercise. With unprecedented finding published in the International Journal of Neuroscience in the early 1990s.
And you can get that on my website. Just type in nose breathing and all that will come up. And we also measured how many breaths they were taking during that workout when they had either the fight or flight state or the alpha brainwave state. And when they had their mouths closed, they were breathing at 14 breaths per minute, doing 200 watts of resistance on a bike when their mouths were open. Same kids, they were breathing at 48 breaths per minute. So imagine doing the same workout. One day you’re breathing 48 breaths per minute, the other day you’re breathing at 14. Most people sitting here watching this podcast are probably breathing at 16 or 18. Now you’re running as hard, pretty much as hard as you can go, or pretty darn fast, submaximal at least.
And you’re breathing four breaths per minute slower than you are sitting in your chair. We measure their perceived exertion, which is their, you know, where a 10 was the worst you could feel. Asking you how do you feel? How do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10 when they’re breathing, nose breathe, mouth breathing, they’re a 10 out of 10. When they’re breathing through their nose, 4 out of 10, same workout. So imagine you’re in a competitive state or you’re driving in traffic and you’re handling life stress.
This is a model. Exercise is a model for stress. If you can handle the stress of an exercise from a calm place, why can’t you handle the stress of your life? And that’s like how we take it off the mat. Not just like, I meditate, I feel good, then I go, you know, lychee seal, get stressed out and burn myself out.
The idea is to take it with you, right? And we also did a study where we measured the fight or flight nervous system and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. And normally in exercise, any kind fight or flight goes to 100% and your parasympathetic goes to zero, which is your rejuvenative system. In our study, what happened was the sympathetic only went up 50% and the parasympathetic didn’t zero out, it went down. It only went down 50%. And we had the two opposite nervous systems coexisting. And that was the magic because that’s what was the runner’s high. The idea of the runner’s high is my best race, is my easiest race. You know, I feel this incredible effortlessness, but I’m, you know, going faster than I’ve ever gone before. You know, even Roger Bannister, when he broke the four minute mile, said, I felt like the world was standing still, yet he was running faster than any man alive.
Surreal phenomena. And since those studies in the 90s, we’ve now proven that when you are in the zone, your brain flips into a meditative alpha state. And when you look at the fight or flight nervous system, you need to have the dynamic activity and the composure in common at the same time.
I call it the hurricane effect. So the bigger the eye, the more powerful the winds. So the idea is that you actually don’t break your body down to build it up with fight or flight stress. What we do in traditional exercise is to create a level of efficiency with nose breathing that activates lower lobes of your lungs, where the receptors for parasympathetic activation the vagal responses in the lower lobes of your lungs. And that will tell the body that even though I’m going harder, this is not an emergency. And we have a whole protocol of how to actually make that happen every single time. It’s pretty cool.
Steven Sashen
The obvious. The semi obvious question is one that kind of comes to me, but for a different. But I have a very different answer. People say, well, if this whole barefoot thing or natural movement thing is so good, how come everyone isn’t doing it? And my answer is, because we’re not paying those people the way they’re getting paid to wear big, thick, stupid shoes. Yours is a very different thing. But. So the magic question is, what’s your take on how many people are doing this or have found this? And for those who haven’t, what up?
John Douillard
I mean, more and more. I mean, you know, James Nestor wrote a book called Breath, which was a massive bestseller. He’s a dear friend of mine. He actually cited my original research in the very. Be started his book with my original research, and he finished that book with my original research, which is pretty cool. And then all this new research in between, that’s happened since I did that study back in the early 1990s. So it’s become way more of a phenomena. You know, Patrick McEwen, who’s more of a Buteyko kind of a guy, he’s pushing, you know, pushing the needle out.
There’s a lot more. When I started it, I was laughed at. Now you have. There is real good science, you know, backing up, why we should become nose breathers. And I don’t necessarily suggest you should breathe only through your nose. You should be able to breathe through your nose under a certain amount of stress, indicating you have what’s called respiratory efficiency. Otherwise, what happens, like I said earlier, every time you get stressed out, we change how you breathe, and that becomes normal to you. And the ribcage, without you even knowing it, gets tighter and tighter and tighter, and the diaphragm gets weaker and weaker and weaker. In one very recent study, and you get the citations on my website, 91% of athletes that were tested did not have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully, right? So these are the best kind of, you know, the best respiratory fitness we see. And their diaphragm isn’t working as effectively as it could or should. So every one of us need to do this because as we get older, our ribcage gets tighter and we shallow breathe or over breathe.
And what that means is that you’re breathing in faster than you need to. And in one study showed that 75% of the oxygen the folks were breathing in, they were breathing that 75% out unused. So we’re just jamming in oxygen into oxygen saturation that’s already 98%. But the body can’t take any more.
And they’re breathing off all this excess oxygen because you’re over breathing. And when you’re blowing off all that excess oxygen you can’t use, you’re blowing off CO2. And what happens is you’re in your blood is your oxygen levels go to 98% saturation, but your CO2 goes very, very low. And that’s the perfect storm for stress and anxiety, which is why when people have an anxiety attack, you put a paper bag over your mouth, you Rebreather carbon dioxide, CO2 levels come back up, and you get calm. And what also happens is when that CO2 levels are low and oxygen is high, the bond between the oxygen and your hemoglobin stays very tight. It’s called the Bohr effect, which means that the oxygen is reluctant to actually leave your blood and get into your tissue.
So you walk around somewhat hypoxic. But as you learn how to nose breathe, which slows the breathing down. We talked about 48 breaths versus 14. It slows the breathing down. It gives you more time for CO2 elbows to naturally build up. There’s a receptor in your brain stem for carbon dioxide tolerance. And as you train yourself, you become more able to hold your breath or breathe slower without the need for panicking and breathing in an emergency state.
And the more you build CO2 tolerance, the CO2 rising is the trigger to release the oxygen from your hemoglobin into your tissues, and you restore this chronic hypoxia that people have walking around. Particularly notice over 50, 60, 70, and 80 when they walk around and they can’t really breathe. And I was.
I’ll tell you one quick story about this. I was coming out of a restaurant about a year ago, and there were a handful of elderly folks in their 80s or 90s coming out, and they were really struggling. Their mouths were open, they were really frail and fragile. And I was helping them get out of the door, and I was like, golly, if someone would have just told them that they could breathe five minutes a day, like 10 years ago. The studies show that that would that five minutes of breathing a day, strengthening the diaphragm in a specific way.
Western medicine calls it maximum inspiratory breathing techniques. It would reverse their heartburn, Guerdon reflux, which is shown in about 15 different studies, lower their blood pressure. Done at CU Boulder. Faster than in three minutes a day faster than the western medication or as well the western medication. It’ll pump their entire lymphatic system to detoxify their brain lymphatic system and combat this tendency for age related cognitive decline. And it’ll actually help move their entire lymphatic system because nobody knows that the diaphragm is the number one pump of your lymphatic system, which is critically important for carrying your immune system, taking the trash out of every cell of your body, and of course delivering properly digested fat into every cell of your body. So if you’re tired, immune compromise and you feel like your skin is breaking out or you’re holding on to water and you can’t get through, you feel toxic. This is most commonly a lymphatic concern. And your diaphragm is the pump for that. And most people are walking around with a level of respiratory efficiency inefficiency and they have no idea.
Steven Sashen
Okay, I’m going to pull one tiny thing out of that to dive into a little bit. So the comment of you don’t have to be nose breathing all the time, that’s not the expectation. Talk about the times or situations where it’s not. And of course one of the things I’m thinking about, since I am not a distance person, I’m a sprinting person. And of course you watch sprinters and especially a good 100 meter runner, maybe you have three breaths and some people are nose breathing, some people are not, doesn’t really matter. But the one thing that is common is as soon as you finish the hundred, there’s a lot of this going on and just trying to get some air in, since it was a totally anaerobic thing to do. And it’s an argument I’ve had with people who talk about high intensity interval training and they say, oh, sprint for 30 seconds, rest for 30 seconds, do that eight times. And I go, if you can do that more than twice, you’re not sprinting. You might be running as fast as you can, but you’re not sprinting. And I had this argument with somebody and finally I said, look, when you go all out for 30 seconds, how far do you run? And the guy very proudly says about like 150 meters. I said, okay, that’s cool. I’m twice your age and I run about 225 meters in that same 30 seconds. So we’re doing a very different thing biomechanically and energetically. And I mean energetically in any sense other than putting out energy and putting out force. Into the ground. So other than when you are trying to recover from some massive anaerobic something, what are the other situations where people might find that mouth breathing is just the thing?
John Douillard
Well, you know, first of all, from the endurance side, I’ve worked with so many endurance athletes. I mean, I was, my world, was the triathlon world originally. And I’ve got, you know, Scott Molina, who was one of the, who was the Ironman winner, champion and worked with so many triathletes over the years. John Weissenreider was the number one mountain bike rider racer in America at one point when my book first came out and I worked, worked with him and he was a nose breather, mountain bike riding in Colorado. So that’s a powerful piece. You know, tennis players, Billie Jean King, Martina, they nose breathe. So it’s a matter of creating a level of respiratory fitness. Now if you’re breathing through your mouth all the time, your rib cage is going to take advantage of that by doing what it only knows how to do, which is squeeze all the air out. And the rib cage will become like a cage squeezing your heart and your lungs 26,000 times per day. Where. So if you don’t get that diaphragm engaged and get that rib cage moving, which is also part of the pump of the lymphatic system, then you’re going to, you’re going to lose your ability to breathe. And just from the mechanics of breathing, getting the air in again, the CO2 out is going to be compromised. But all the other science about that’s connect to how the breath connects to everything else is, is critically important. But if you’re, you know, when John Ricenreider was climbing up a hill, mountain bike riding, he didn’t have his mouth closed the entire time. You get up, you have to get up to the top of that hill and then you try to recover and reset your nose breathing on the way back down. You know, when I first started my book first came out back in the 1990s when I was here in Boulder, I taught a free class in North Boulder Park. You may have heard of it. You were here in Boulder as well?
Steven Sashen
I’m only there every Sunday with friends for a picnic brunch. So.
John Douillard
Yeah, yeah. Well, this was like every Wednesday at like 7 o’clock in the morning. Yeah. And we had all these nose breathe people come to learn nose breathing. It was a free class. And then one day this fire trucks came and parked and they put all their stuff on. They came walking over to my class with the helmets and the gas masks and the tanks. Air tanks. And I was like, what are you guys up to? And he goes, we’re here for the nose breathing class. I’m going like, really? And they said, yeah, we have a competition every year where we see how long a tank can last. And the record’s 28 minutes. And we had this little kid who’s one of our intern guys, and he come into your class and he broke the record by like, he was like, 35 minutes. He goes, One minute can save a life. He blew it up. So we’re here to learn this. And so I said, okay, let’s do it. So we taught him the nose breathing stuff and ended up doing an in service in Denver Fire Department, teaching them how to nose breathe because it created that level of efficiency. So it isn’t like you have to. That’s. That’s wrong. Obviously, we. We. We have to. I’m breathing through my mouth as we speak, but when I go to bed at night, I do. And we are designed the Native American children in India, I saw studies where they had trained their children in a traditional way to tuck their chins, sleep on their side, and become nose breathers. Because when you breathe through your nose, you do produce nitric oxide, which is the body’s most powerful antiviral gas. And so after we talk and interact and breathe, whatever, during the day, you go to sleep and you wash your respiratory tract with this antiviral gas, which again, another piece of the respiratory immune response so you don’t get exposed and give the viruses a chance to proliferate inside of you. It’s just such a beautiful understanding of how this diaphragm and this breathing is really a part of everything in our body. And it’s not just breathing only as people think, you know.
Steven Sashen
So given what’s happening of late, which we both referenced before with regard to nose breathing, AKA mouth taping, talk to me about your thoughts on that.
John Douillard
I don’t think that you have to mouth tape for the rest of your life. I think that’s a little ridiculous. However, if you wake up with a dry mouth ever. And that means that when you open up your mouth, you are actually drying out the bacteria in your mouth that actually. And there’s about a thousand different species of bacteria in your mouth that are antibacterial. And when you dry your mouth out, there’s opportunistic bacteria that take advantage of that dryness. One called Streptococcus mutans, which is Dracula linked to the plaque on your teeth. That get. That bacteria gets into your mouth. And 64% of the plaque in your arteries comes from that bacteria. So the entry point for these bacteria, plaque causing bacteria, come from your mouth.
Steven Sashen
Which is why I gotta pause right there to highlight something. So my father was a dentist, and one of the things that people, the dentists will say that people do not seem to put two and two together about, is after certain kinds of dental procedures, you are at a higher risk of a cardiac event. And people have no. I mean, it seems so crazy, but you just explained the why of that in a way that when people, when I were telling people that years ago, because I had heard it directly from my father, it sounds crazy. It’s like, why getting my teeth cleaned, is that making it likely that I’m going to have a heart attack or have other, some other stroke or any other ventricular event and, or vascular event? And so do me a favor and give me that one again, just so people hear it, because it does sound crazy off the top.
John Douillard
So there’s. When you dry out your mouth, you wake you sleeping through your mouth while you’re snoring or sleeping with your mouth open, you’re going to dry out your mouth. It’ll dry out the environment that supports a health, healthy microbiome in your mouth. When you dry it out, the good bugs sort of the environment disappears. They go first. You’re ended up with opportunistic bacteria called streptococcus mutans who can get in through bleeding gums and into your blood.
And it’s responsible for 64% of the plaque in your arteries. And there are also research showing that that same bug might be responsible for the plaque in your brain related to Alzheimer’s. So there’s a lot of research going on about that. But it goes even more than that, Steven. There’s, you know, we all heard of nitric oxide, and it’s the panacea molecule. And there’s a lot of research on how do we get that. And a lot of people are eating beets and, you know, taking orginine and citrulline and all these things to arugula to get more nitric oxide.
And it turns out how that actually works is the nitrates in foods like arugula and watermelon and beets and lettuce and things like that, that when you eat that and you chew it with your saliva, the saliva, the bacteria in your mouth are actually converting those nitrates into nitrites. And then when that. And you swallow that, that’s what triggers the nitric oxide in your body globally, not just in your mouth. However, if you have a dry mouth and you’re killing all the bacteria which are responsible for converting the food into from night, the nitrates in food to nitrite, you don’t get that. And also what happens if you’re using alcohol or fluoride toothpaste or anything like that? You’re killing those bugs that change the nitrates into nitrites to give you nitric oxide, nitric oxide. By the time you’re 40, you’re already producing about 40% less nitric oxide than you did when you were 20.
So it’s one of those age related decline factors that are directly linked to the accelerated aging and aging and cognitive decline, age related concerns. So, so you really want to chew your food with your saliva. You want to have saliva that’s got the right bacteria in it. In an ayurvedic medicine, what they would do. I saw this for the first time when I was in India, like in 1986.
And there’s this guy in a fountain and he was taking a bath in a fountain. I was like just staring at this guy and he had a little bottle of oil and he was putting oil over his body in the fountain. Then he would put the oil in his mouth and he was swishing it in his mouth. And now we have science. I’ve written articles about the science of what they call oil pulling. And when you swish your mouth with oil, it’s been shown to be as effective as the mouthwashes without the alcohol.
That kills 99% of your bacteria. And that is obviously really bad. It actually kills the bad bacteria, creates an environment for the good bacteria to proliferate and sets you up for what we actually need on the most subtle level, to take the nitrates in that food to actually convert them into nitrites and nitric oxide.
And that happens in your mouth when you chew the food with your saliva. So all sort of roads in that regard lead to oral hygiene. So how would I recommend people do. And I get this at our local grocery store. It’s called, it’s a nexcare tape. We sell it at King Soopers here in Colorado. And it’s a micropore tape for sensitive skin. It’s a blue color. And what you do is you put it on your mouth like this, vertically instead of. And then you can still talk to your wife or spouse or whatever partner a little bit.
And if you wake up in the morning and it’s on the Ceiling somewhere didn’t go well. But if you wake up in the morning, after a couple of days you’ll wake up, it’ll still be there, which means we’re starting to breathe better at night. And once you get there, then go here, seal it all. You can’t put lotion on. Seal it all the way. And again, once you get that where that’s there in, you know, every night for about four or five nights, take it off.
You’ve trained yourself to nose breathe you and you will not have a dry mouth. Once you start waking up with a, with a dry mouth again, you can do a little kind of re education for it. But that’s how I look at it because we really do want to breathe properly as we. And even the guy, the original, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but one of the researchers told me the guy who invented, coined the phrase sleep apnea.
Steven Sashen
Yeah.
John Douillard
Said it’s all about the long term, chronic dysfunctional breathing through your mouth and snoring while you’re sleeping. And if you actually keep your mouth closed, you mitigate all that. And there’s research on kids when they breathe through their mouth, they don’t get facial development. Airway development doesn’t happen. There’s so much research on, you know, kind of a, kind of a V shaped palate versus a nice wide palate in your mouth that creates airway space that we just don’t have as a culture. Dentists are now seeing people who actually don’t even have room for their wisdom teeth. And because they’re calling it a devolution where we’re actually devolving to have a smaller jaw because we don’t breathe properly to keep it open and wide to make room for the teeth. So now we’re having kids that are, that are being born and they don’t even make the wisdom teeth anymore. We’ve changed that much because of, of this sort of dysfunction where traditional cultures were training their kids. The papoose in the native American cultures were designed to keep their head like that, little baby’s head like that, which forced their mouth close and therefore made them into nose breathers. It’s just amazing, really.
Steven Sashen
Yes, quite. And I had somewhere that I was going to go from there, but now I can’t remember that at all. So what I’m trying to think of something else. So if people want to start experimenting with nose breathing and this kind of goes back to Nestor’s book in a way when they’re being active, talk about that, about getting you know that habit or. Because I know that. I know some people who I’ve talked to, played with this, and they kind of try to go all in, or they’re doing. They’re. They’re putting out too much effort or doing something where they have the idea that they should be doing this. But they. I was gonna say they try it and they go, it doesn’t work. It’s kind of like when someone says, I tried this barefoot thing and it didn’t work. And the first question I ask is, were you actually barefoot? And they go, well, no, but I was wearing. Wearing shoes that are sold as barefoot. And I go, which ones? They go, well, these. And they’re, you know, like an inch thick. And. And they’ve. And then I also say, look, it’s about form, not footwear. So that’s a whole other thing. So if people want to start experimenting with this, what advice can you give them for having a positive experience or at least knowing what to do if they don’t?
John Douillard
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, after my years of teaching that course outside North Boulder Park, I was invited into a healthcare club to teach it inside a health club because it became quite popular. And I said, it’s fine. I’ll do it. In healthcare, you have to let the public come into your health club for free. So they gave me a bank of treadmills, okay. And this is what I would have them do every time. And it’s written as an [email protected] just type in the runners higher the zone, and that article will pop up.
And so what we do is you get on a treadmill two miles an hour. Everybody can pretty much walk pretty slow at two miles an hour. Now, while you’re just walking a zero degrees elevation at two miles an hour, breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your nose, really long and slow and deep. And the key piece here is to notice the space between the top and the bottom of each breath, right? You’re not breathing in, out, in, out. You’re breathing in and out like a sine wave. Nice, long and slow, a natural linking of each breath.
So you’re walking at two miles an hour and out. Now, to make it a little bit better, if you do what Ayurveda calls ujjay pranayama, where you constrict the back of your throat, that will engage your abdomen and force your abdominal muscles to contract on your diaphragm, which contracts onto your heart, which is where the vagus nerve is.
And that creates a vagal response which tells your body the war is over. This was Carl Sta’s work who, who did the research with the Olympic team in the 1964 Olympic team, when it was the first time they were going to do the Olympics in Mexico City at altitude. So they hired this breathing expert who taught opera singers and he taught them how to exhale all the way, which they weren’t doing. I think it was Evans who won, they won more gold medals there in Mexico City than any other time before. And they were all taught to fully exhale. And that’s really important because that creates the abdominal diaphragmatic cardiac massage which puts the brain into an alpha state. So we want to have a full exhalation during this process. So inhale long, slow and deep, exhale all the way, squeeze your abdomen, get that air out.
There are secondary muscles of breathing. So after about five minutes of just getting the rhythm down, then we’re going to increase the elevation, 1 degree of elevation every 15 seconds. So every 15 seconds increase it a little bit, A little bit. But you’re watching that breath, that space between the breath. And if you begin to lose the space between the breath, say at 4 degrees elevation, you go right back down to 0 degrees elevation and re establish that calm linking of the breath.
And I’ll be asking people on the treadmill if they’re at 4 degrees, are you breathing the same rhythm of the breath you were with the space between each breath you were in very beginning? And they’re like oh no. And I go, Then you go back to zero. Right? Because we are so conditioned to exercise to the blood lactate threshold that we’re right on the edge of anaerobic activity way before the breath lost that space. Now we’re doing this breathing through our nose, ready to go into full blown mouth breathing exercise. So you need to pick up the stress earlier on. And you probably know that the, that when you’re exercising your, your muscles can convert the blood lactate, metabolic waste on the muscle site back into glycogen. But when you ask the body for too much, it’s going to ship all that lactic acid back to your heart. And then what’s going to happen is you’re going to have to breathe faster and heart’s going to have to pump faster.
And that’s the beginning of when that breath rate starts to get a little bit faster. So if you can become tuned into that and then slow it back down. So at four degrees you lose the space between the breath, you go right back to zero Reestablish the link, the space between each breath. Once you get it, go out, go after it again, one degree every 15 seconds. And this time, and I did this for 10 years, every week for free for so many people, thousands and thousands of people.
And I’ve never had anybody say go. Didn’t see their breath rate go like some 4 degrees. Now they’re doing 8 degrees. And now the breath gets short, then they go back to zero. The next time they’re doing 12 degrees, breath gets short, now they’re zero. And then when, then you just increase the speed to three or four miles an hour and go through the same process.
And people would literally be able to document the fact that they’re doing more work with the same exact exertion level that they had in the very beginning. And that’s how you start building that, that eye of the storm. You’re building a level of composure and calm that’s allowing you to handle more stress. You don’t have to break your body down to build yourself up. Of course that works in the world of athleticism, in the world of sports, but we’re trying to squeeze out as much performance from a 18 to 25 year old, as much as we possibly can, with no care about what happens to them in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, you know what I mean? We’re just trying to squeeze it out, get as much stress, recover stress, recover. And as we all know, as we get older, we don’t recover as fast, we can’t handle as much stress as we once did. So we break down, stop exercising. But when you actually get respiratory efficiency, you are able.
And here’s the best part, the final phase, the first phase is called the resting phase in my book. You listen to the space between the breath, five, ten minutes, the listening phase of the next phase where you listen to you go a little faster and you listen carefully as you, your body saying this is going to be calm or going to be a stress. As soon as that breath gets short, you bail out. And the final one is the performance phase. This is the runner’s high phase. So what happens? This is the magic. All of a sudden as you go on that treadmill, you start going a little bit higher on elevation.
Your body is going to choose, instead of breathing faster, it’s going to realize it’s more efficient to breathe deeper, longer and slower because that’s where all the oxygen exchanges. If you’re fully exhaling, you’re squeezing all the air out, the dead air space, 500 milliliters worth of air out so you can breathe in that much more air. So your body is starting to realize, I’m a more efficient machine. When I actually breathe longer, deeper and slower, I’m building more carbohydrate, more CO2 tolerance, and that’s driving oxygen in my tissues better, more efficiently. It’s sort of like a free diver, right? They’re diving down 300ft down there for 11 or 12 minutes without any oxygen at all. Their CO2 levels are rising. The body’s saying, dump all the oxygen I have into your tissues. And they’re happy down there unless they die, which happens. Push it too hard. But there is a phenomena, it’s called intermittent hypoxia. When you hold your breath, which is really well studied, and that happens very gently and gradually when you begin to become a nose breather, either in transition. I’d only been able to breathe through your mouth. I got.
Steven Sashen
I got two, maybe two or three thoughts, thought. Number one, I have a friend who was a therapist, but also did a lot of breathing work and was living in Colorado Springs and had a bunch of Olympic athletes that came to him from the Olympic Training Center. Most of the, he said the majority of the endurance athletes that showed up asthmatic, which, which was fascinating. The second one had another friend who invented the first real time biometric sensing device. It was basically a neoprene vest, a bunch of sensors in it, and a little Palm Pilot that was recording all that data. And they had this on a race car driver, and they’re watching him in a race, you know, averaging about 200 miles an hour. And while his pulse was pretty high, like 160, 170, his breathing was not slow. I mean, this is, you know, like a crazy event. At one point, they suddenly see the breathing drop and the heart rate drop dramatically, and they’re like tapping the computer to see what’s going on. They’re checking all the wires. Then finally someone looks up and they see the car rolling. And when he finally came out of this fiery wreck, everyone said, what the hell happened? I mean, we suddenly saw everything just slow down. He goes, well, once it starts rolling, there’s nothing else I can do. Which, which I bring that up as a training that, you know, it is a kind of breathing training that there’s nothing happening there, there’s no reason to be stressful. But they just learned this from just time and time again, like, the best thing I can do is just like, wait and see if I make it. And, you know, he did. And happily, frankly, Racing’s gotten much safer and there are very few deaths.
John Douillard
I hope so. I can’t tell you how many letters because this is way back before emails and all that, when the book came out that I got with people with exercise induced asthma. Yeah, just like you said. I mean study. I mean, patient after patient after patient. I would take these. One. I remember one big rugby player, he came in, I said, well, he came to our clinic, I said, well, let’s go for a walk. I want to teach you how to breathe, you know. He goes, oh, no, no, no, no, I can’t walk because I. I don’t do that. I have my bag of inhalers. This big monster of a guy couldn’t even go for a walk. And I was like, like, let’s do this, you know. So I worked with him for a week and he, After a couple of days, he was like, man, I haven’t taken a walk like this in years and years because of my exercise induced asthma. The thing that causes exercise induced asthma can be fixed by proper breathing. I mean, absolutely. I’ve seen it so many times. And that’s because they’re huffing and puffing, creating this fight or flight emergency response. Shallow breathing, upper chest breathing. The rib cage gets tighter and tighter and tighter. Now you got a cage, you got a problem. Once you get that opened up and get that diaphragm involved, which is pumping lymph, which is. The lymph is taking the waste out of your heart and your lungs. And if that’s not, everything’s going to back up and you’re going to be in a fight or flight breathing state. So I’ve definitely seen that, you know, the race car drivers, you know, I think it is like, just, you know, cut the bait and see what happens.
Steven Sashen
Yeah. All right. I got two things that I’m going to say in both because I’ll forget one of them if I don’t. The first one. Crap. Oh, the first one. So when we talked about breathing about this slow, full inhale, exhale, and really squeezing that last bit out, we kind of glossed over a little bit about the space between the breaths. So I want you to dive into that a little more and then I’m going to give you the other one because again, I’ll forget otherwise. I’m curious what your experience has been with people who have chronic fatigue, which is similar to some of the things we’ve already talked about. And one of the things that they often report is, I don’t remember. There’s a term for it. But basically any sort of exercise or exertion has a paradoxical effect on them. It isn’t helpful. It’s often the opposite. But anyway, I don’t want to poison that well and prejudge your answer, but talk about the space between breathing and then if you have anything to add for chronic fatigue people, I’ve heard from a few of those that would be.
John Douillard
That’s a great, great, great question. And so the simplicity of this is you go for a walk, walk and you breathe long, slow and deep, right? And long, slow and deep. And you tune into the space between the breath and then you start going up a hill and then you see if that space gets a little bit shorter. Keep asking yourself, do I have the same space between my breath, same comfort between each breath as I did when I first started? As I’m going up this hill and if you didn’t turn around and start walking back down the hill until you get that space back down, back, and once you have it back, turn back and go up the hill again and you’ll find that that hill you couldn’t do today. In a week or two you’re able to do it. But you’re right. I always tell folks, be prepared to suffocate for the first three weeks because you don’t know how to do this.
Your rib cage has gotten so tight and rigid, you’re not going to be a nose breather day one. So just give yourself some time to kind of make this happen. So it’s really very, very simple, very simple, simple technique. You can also simple technique is go for a walk and just count how many steps you take on your inhalation. 1, 2, 3, 4 steps for your inhalation. And then count how many you do for your exhalation. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. On your exhalation, your goal always through the nose, in and out through the nose is 10 steps for your inhale and 15 to 20 steps for your exhale.
That’s your goal. And if you have more on the exhale, that gives you CO2 more time to build up. That tells your body to calm down, turn off the alarm bells, and also drive the oxygen into your tissue. So that’s another really simple way to kind of enter into this as well. Now, with chronic fatigue syndrome, we know that the lymphatic system, which is pumped by your diaphragm, does three things. It carries your immune system, it takes out all the trash from extracellular fluid in your body, and it also delivers fat as properly broken down, properly broken down fatty acids for energy to every cell of your body.
Now, if you’re, if your lymphatic system is congested, you’re not going to deliver that energy and you’re going to be chronically fatigued. When I see Epstein Barr virus in my practice, or chronic fatigue syndrome, my practice, I always evaluate their lymphatic system on my [email protected] we have a lymph quiz. You can take a quiz and ask yourself all these questions about different types of lymphatic concerns. There’s brain lymph, there’s skin associated lymph, there’s gut lymph, there’s respiratory limp. They all have different symptoms associated with them. And once you see, yeah, that’s me, then we can treat that lymphatic system with hydration, with ayurvedic rhythm, which destagnate that with exercise. Obviously. Clearly, number one is breathing. Of course, breathing while you sleep at night can be another piece of that puzzle as well.
But you know, chronic fatigue doesn’t mean we need to give you more B12 guarana. You know, you know, caffeine to stimulate your adrenals and drive your body, make energy that you literally don’t have and drive you further into debt. Even though symptomatically I feel good for 20 minutes. It’s a deeply resolve and understand the upstream cause of this problem. And I address the lymphatic concern. And where does the lymphatic system start? Inside your digestion.
So a troubleshooting, you know, really deep dive troubleshooting. You’re running a fine tooth comb through every aspect of your digestion is critical because your digestion is your ability to not only deliver energy, but also detoxify. They use the same pathways and if your limbs congested back up, evaluate digestion. We have another article you can get all for free called the Digestive Health Quiz. Ask yourself all these questions about your digestion and find out where that’s broken. Then you can fix that and then fix your lymph and then get the breathing going. And then all of a sudden you’ve treated some upstream stuff and a lot of your problems are going to disappear simply by doing those things.
Steven Sashen
Love it. Anything we left out, this is quite comprehensive. I know. You know, people tease me. They go, your podcast is one of the only ones that I don’t listen to at double speed because then I couldn’t understand it. But this one, it’s a similar thing. Not because of talking fast, but because of just the amount of Information that I know people are going to want to take a look at. So anything we left out before we wrap it up?
John Douillard
Well, the other thing I would just say is just kind of, kind of tease everyone to understand. You know, I learned the nose breathing when I was in India. And that’s the world of pranayama, right? Breath, you know, breath training. And prana means breath and yam means to pause, hold or extend the breath, right? So what we’re talking about here is slowing down your breath. And studies show when you actually slow down your breath, like a free diver, they’re not even breathing, right? That slows down the breath. The body goes into a state of what’s called intermittent hypoxia. So the original Pranayama technique was to train your body to hold, pause or extend your breath. That’s what the Ayama of Pranayama means. And when you do that, there’s incredible science. So when you learn how to slow down your breath, really slow, six breaths per minute, or four breaths per minute, or three, or even two, or even one, you go into a natural state of intermittent hypoxia. And I’ve got three or four articles on this on my site to dive into the details. But when you’re in intermittent hypoxia, which is the original Pranayam idea, you produce this intermittent hypoxia, which is called, which is when you produce stem cells, the EPO that Lance Armstrong got busted for injecting, you make yourself. When you hold your breath, you produce endothelial growth factors to protect the lining of your arteries. You produce guardians of your genome, transcription factors that protect you from age related expressions of genetic weaknesses or tendencies that can oftentimes take us out. It’s been shown to increase your nitric oxide change, neuroplasticity, which is old crazy mental patterns of behavior that make us do the same dumb stuff again. Lower blood pressure, lower blood sugar. It’s sort of crazy what they found when they started studying these free divers. They’re like, wow, they’re holding their breath. They’ve got a skill to do that. And look at what they’re getting in benefit in return. You know, of course, if they don’t push it too hard. So that’s where this really goes. It gives you the idea that this breathing thing is ignored. The diaphragm, the biggest muscle in your body. Nobody exercises it because you can’t put a dumbbell on it. But it’s the most important muscle in our body. And that’s kind of the takeaway here today. Is just, you know, go to my website, try some of these breathers. An article called the best Diaphragmatic Exercises. Another article called Lateral or horizontal breathing. Watch those two. Get your diaphragm back online, do some nose breathing for fun and enjoy the ride.
Steven Sashen
So other than going to lifespa.com anywhere, anything else people should check out or any other way, if people want to get in touch with you, they should do that.
John Douillard
Yeah, well, they can. You know, I’m on all the social platforms as well. We also have a podcast. You’re on my podcast as well, so you can check out or you know, when I dive into, you know, deeper in discussions with other people on some of these topics as well. But yeah, lifespy.com is where you can go. You can sign up for our newsletter. Get we put publish three articles on ancient medical wisdom and modern science a week. So we’re constantly putting out new, new, new content, taking a deeper dive into things like nitric oxide, nose breathing and so much more.
Steven Sashen
Love it. Well, John, first of all, as I said, great to see you again. Thank you for all of that. For everybody else, I do hope you take advantage of looking all this information up, putting it into practice, more importantly and getting in touch with John to let him know what that has done for you. And I want to hear about that too. Speaking of which, a reminder, head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the places you can find us on social, all the things you can do to spread the word, to share and like, and give us a thumbs up and hit the bell icon on YouTube. And. And like I said, you know what to do if you want to be part of the tribe and be part of the movement. Movement, just subscribe. And more importantly, if there’s anyone you think I should have and have a conversation on the movement Movement, let me know. Drop me an email. Move m o v eoin themovementmovement.com and if you know someone who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome and you can get them to talk to me for a while, that would be a blast. No one’s taken me up on that yet. I’ve tried. Has worked. And last but not least and again, I think most importantly, between now and whenever we chat next, go out, have fun and live life feet first.