What is Performance Breathing?

I want to share here the concept of performance breathing and elaborate on what it means to me. When I talk about performance breathing, what I mean is the deliberate practice of developing your functional breathing and aerobic capacity so that you can perform at your highest level in every aspect of life.

Functional Breathing

Functional breathing is awareness of your breathing and the willingness and ability to consciously (and, eventually even unconsciously) choose breathing that is appropriate to the contextual demands of the present moment.

I think it is helpful to understand functional breathing by considering it as having three components: the mechanical aspect of breathing (how the body moves to drive ventilation), the biochemical aspect of breathing (how the body transports and utilizes oxygen and regulates carbon dioxide), and the psycho-emotional aspect of breathing (how the body responds to stress and how stress and breathing are interrelated). These components of breathing are useful to consider separately when discussing functional breathing, but as we get into this you will understand how they are interconnected.

How you breathe affects how you move, how hard you can work, and how you respond to stress. How you move, how hard you work, and how you respond to stress all influence how you breathe. These are continuous feedback loops that run both directions and though we can consider them separately in the abstract, they are inseparable. Improving one of these improves them all. Dysfunction in one of these is dysfunction in all.

For example, poor positions and movement patterns lead to poor breathing and poor breathing contributes to poor positions and inefficient movement. Inefficient breathing limits an athlete's work capacity and aerobic capacity. An athlete's work capacity will affect the efficiency of her breathing. Poor stress management leads to inefficient breathing and inefficient breathing reduces an athlete's capacity to respond consciously to stress.

I believe it is important that we understand not only the relationships between breath, movement quality, work capacity, and our psycho-emotional state but also understand that we can develop the ability to consciously manipulate our breathing to drive positive changes in these relationships. Conscious awareness of our breath and intentional development of breath control gives us the opportunity to harness the relationships between breath, movement quality, work capacity, and our psycho-emotional state rather than being unconsciously affected by it.

Aerobic Capacity

In addition to developing your functional breathing capacity, performance breathing includes developing your aerobic capacity, which means improving your ability to efficiently deliver oxygen to your brain, organs, and working muscles and the ability for your body to use that oxygen. Efficiency relates not only to the biomechanics of breathing, but to the biochemistry of breathing - this is very much driven by improving your tolerance to carbon dioxide. This training is biochemically complex but for now I will reduce it to developing the ability to breathe through your nose as your default way of breathing throughout most of your day and in almost all circumstances.

 Performing at Your Highest Level

My goal with performance breathing it to help you develop your breathing as to tool to unlock performing at your highest level, which means training that develops your ability to:

- Work harder for longer, with less effort

- Move more efficiently

- Recover faster

- Perform better and make better decisions under stress

I know from my personal experience and from training hundreds of people in the Oak Park community that improving a person's functional breathing and aerobic capacity will lead to increases in athletic performance, business performance, and ability to self-regulate and respond to the stresses of life (not just in the gym).

Adaptation versus Suffering

There is an element of suffering inherent in life and particularly when we are striving to do extraordinary things. There is necessary suffering in some seasons of life that cannot be eliminated. But there is also suffering that comes as a result of maladaptation and is a choice. My intention is to help you cultivate intention in your training so that you are not simply learning how to suffer more, but instead are intentionally choosing to develop your maximum human potential. A question that I think is important to come back to with any training is, "Am I adapting or am I just getting better at suffering?" I think it is important to appreciate the distinction here and choose the path of growth.

How do we measure progress?

I will share a series of assessments that will give you a baseline from which you can structure training so that over the coming weeks and months your ability to perform, train hard, recover from training and respond to stress all improve in ways that are measurable: (1) objectively, by using performance metrics; and (2) subjectively, by your experiential feedback. Do the numbers show it? Do you feel it? We want to answer "yes" to both.

There are many more detail to follow. For now, this is my view of the big picture. I invite any feedback or questions you may have.