Breathing Gears System update: Blog on Athletic Breathing and my experience on over a decade of work on this: shiftadapt.com/athletic-brea… Breathing Gears System update itself: shiftadapt.com/the-breathing… *much more work to do, and details of Art of Breath BGS detailed course coming. @DrAndyGalpin @hubermanlab

The ventilator in the study below is the extreme version of “unloaded.” Or strong breathing mechanics. Performance at high intensity improved about 15% in the classic papers. Nobody is walking around with a ventilator on a climb. More efficient ventilation is the smaller, usable version of the same idea: you move the air the work requires with less muscular cost, and those muscles fatigue later, so the clamp on the legs shows up later. You still pay. You pay later, and you pay less. Build the capacity to move air cheaply so more of the blood stays with the thing you actually showed up to do. When rate climbs early, it is expensive early.

When the inspiratory (inhale) muscles fatigue, sensors in those muscles fire. The nervous system tightens blood vessels in the legs so the breathing muscles keep getting paid. Researchers call that the respiratory muscle metaboreflex (blood stealing). It shows up under heavier load. This is why we treat breathing & ventilation as capacity, the same way we treat the legs or the heart. If the work of moving air stays cheap, the legs keep more of the heart’s output. Demand didn’t change where cost does.

At high intensity the primary breathing muscles are not a side show. They take a real share of the blood the heart is pumping. Harms and Dempsey tested this on a bike (Effects of respiratory muscle work on cardiac output and its distribution during maximal exercise. J Appl Physiol. 1998;85(2):609–618. PMID: 9688739) Riders stayed at the same watts. In one condition a ventilator did part of the work of breathing for them. In another, extra resistance made breathing harder. When the ventilator helped, more blood went to the legs. When breathing was made harder, less blood went to the legs. The swing was about 2 liters per minute! At max effort the breathing muscles were taking 14–16% of cardiac output. Blood Stealing People already feel a version of this on a climb or when breathing gets expensive and the legs go with it. This read is often correct. It is not always “the lungs failed.” It’s two sets of muscles competing for the same blood. The place to develop the strength, flexibility, and the endurance of these primary muscles is where you can breathe fullest and work. This is <80% of Max HR for most (closer to 70-75%). You’ll know it when you’re there. It’s deep and coordinated and feels smooth.

Harder is not always the most useful next step, rarely, if ever. Sometimes you build capacity. Sometimes you change pace or remove demand. A response is where those two meet. Watch the cost, then decide. Do not add load just because the story wants a harder day. This has been one of the easiest parking-brake removals we teach clients.

I remember when he started this. This is probably closer to a decade of work than a few years. He’d walk into my house and talk about all of these “things”/protocols. Rummage through my cupboards and eat my food and pass out on my couch talking about it all. He deserves everything he’s worked for, including what this brings. Congratulations @hubermanlab

We use a breath-hold to the first urge to breathe (not a max hold) as a simple check of how soon air hunger shows up today. That urge is a primal protective signal: the respiratory centers drive us to breathe because gas exchange isn't being met, and the nervous system can tag it as a threat. It mainly reflects current CO2 drive and how we tolerate that sensation. It changes as some demands increase/decrease.

The same work can cost more today or tomorrow. That does not automatically mean you got worse. Sleep. Travel. Heat. Hard conversations. Leftover load. Demand that stacked. Before we add volume, I ask what moved: demand or our capacity to meet it. Breath holding is a great tool for understanding this. In particular, a hold to the first urge to breathe. This trigger has little to do with CO2 and more to do with how our brains are interpreting stress right now. While post-WKO will differ from first thing in the morning, doing this at the same time in the am gives a fast readout.

how can you not believe in God when octopuses DREAM and otters have a favorite rock they carry around in a little SKIN POCKET and cows have BEST FRIENDS and bees are out there communicating the coordinates of flowers through INTERPRETIVE DANCE and they have REGIONAL DIALECTS?? cats are PURRING at frequencies associated with bone healing??? forests get absolutely incinerated and respond by growing FLOWERS??? dolphins literally invent NAMES for themselves and yell them across the ocean??? penguins are waddling around Antarctica looking for the PERFECT LITTLE ROCK to give their beloved??? CROWS REMEMBER YOUR FACE. THEY TELL OTHER CROWS ABOUT YOU. THEY TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT YOU. YOU CAN HAVE GENERATIONAL BEEF WITH A BIRD. goats have ACCENTS. rats GIGGLE when you tickle them. elephants mourn their dead. whales make SONGS and then OTHER WHALES LEARN THE SONG and suddenly everybody across the ocean is singing the new hit single. monarch butterflies are born knowing how to fly thousands of miles to a place THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN. sea turtles hatch out of an egg, immediately sprint toward an OCEAN they have never seen, disappear into it for like THIRTY YEARS and then somehow come back to THE SAME BEACH??? birds can see COLORS THAT WE CANNOT SEE. there are colors happening RIGHT NOW that we don’t even get to know about. there are sea slugs that eat algae and STEAL ITS CHLOROPLASTS and then are just like great thanks I’ll be PHOTOSYNTHESIZING NOW. there are mushrooms communicating underground. there are seeds sitting in the dirt for DECADES like no actually I will wait. squirrels plant MILLIONS OF TREES because they simply cannot remember where they put their snacks. A CATERPILLAR GOES INTO A LITTLE BAG, DISSOLVES MOST OF ITS BODY INTO ORGANIC SOUP, REARRANGES ITSELF, GROWS WINGS AND LEAVES. and you’re telling me a tiny acorn knows how to become a 70-foot oak tree??? nobody tells it what to do??? it just has TREE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE IT??? your body started as ONE CELL. ONE. and that cell divided itself into a brain that can think about its own existence and eyes that can look at stars and hands that can hold somebody else’s hands and a heart that runs on ELECTRICITY without you even asking it to??? the iron in your BLOOD was made inside a STAR. I’M SORRY????? we are walking around on a wet rock covered in bioluminescent oceans and singing whales and laughing rats and birds holding lifelong grudges and flowers exploding out of FIRE and somehow we’re supposed to act like this is a normal place to live?????????

A limiter is a cost you keep paying for after the demand is gone. This is temporary and intentional in many training cases. However, a loop is a miss you protect because updating a model /indentity is expensive. Ventilation/breathing tells on both. About 20,000 cycles a day. Each one predicts the cost of the next demand. If the work ends and breathing doesn't return to a baseline (anyone who's trained hard enough knows this), the cost keeps running. That is the miss. Look at that before you add more load. This is why we will use an exhale assessment (timed exhale as long as possible), or a breath hold to the first urge to breathe, as they are immediate giveaways of a difficult-to-understand resting respiration rate.

The likeness is intercept versus chase. It is not “we are dragonflies, plus consciousness.” A dragonfly predicts the next fraction of a second of a fly. We predict who we get to be; free will lives here. Catching a ball does not require a self-story. Updating a self-model does. That update has a metabolic price. Defending the old model feels cheaper—which is why breathing can still work overtime after demand ends. A limiter is demand that current capacity cannot absorb. A loop is a miss that still paid off (short-term usually), so you protect it. Those are different reads. Fusing these is how a cost turns into an identity that costs valuable energy.

Or, in many cases it is to become an authority on matters. To establish a hierarchy where one sits above others. Intellectual opportunity.

Predictive biological intelligence. Be more like a dragonfly and predict where the bug (target) is going to be by learning where it wasn’t last time.

This was a surreal experience being a part of this build and then how quickly @JonnyBones got this done.

The nervous system operates in patterns and returns. The stories we create about training, work, life are lived & acted out in these patterns. Behavior patterns Movement patterns Breathing patterns Tissue patterns Physiological patterns… The truth lives in exposing (outside) these patterns and the limitations they create.

We’re not stressed out. We have an algorithm problem w/ amplitude and zero boundaries. This comes with a refusal to understand what those limitations are or mean. The singular solution is to stop loading demands we can’t absorb. Easier said than done.

Remember this? I’m still here. Never give up. Never stop. Stage 4 cancer. A year to live. Now, five years later, I’m still here, still grinding. This life is worth fighting for. Stay strong. Stay focused. Stay savage! 👊🏻