Breathwork – Serenity Through Sweat

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about stress, especially the benefitial sides of stress for various areas of health. Maybe even reframing stress in a more positive light.

Stress gets a bad rap. Sure modern life is full of stressors, and you can always find something to worry about if that’s what you are looking for. In it’s most basic form, we need stress in order to have an adaptation response. We need stress to grow.

I can’t think of any group of people that doesn’t have multiple stressors in their life, but parents, aviators, and athletes each have their own unique variety.

One of neat things about stress is that the body doesn’t really differentiate between where the stress comes from. Did you just run some sprints, fly through some turbulence, did your toddler hurl his plate of trail mix across the kitchen? Your body doesn’t discriminate, it just responds.

Lots of easy walking days this week in recovery

The response is a cocktail of hormones that trigger a myriad of reactions that have helped us survive and evolve as humans. One of the primary hormones is adrenaline/epinephrine. This is a case where my highschool chemistry teacher would say “in the scientific community why have just one name when two will do”.

When we experience any event that our body has deemed as stress, amongst other things, adrenaline is produced in the body by the adrenal gland and in the brain by the medulla oblongata.

Adrenaline/epinephrine then has a number of downstream effects such as increased energy and alertness, increased blood flow to muscles, tunnel vision or a singular focus, increased memory retention, and increased immune response.

From an evolutionary standpoint these all make a ton of sense, if something was trying to eat you, the adrenaline boost would better equip you to escape, learn from the event, and heal any injury you might sustain.

Exploring koosh balls, gravity, and surface tension

The stress system it turns out is not just for unplanned, try to stay alive type of events, but can be activated at our discretion to engage all of those benefits. The following study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, demonstrates just that.

In the study of 24 participants was split into two groups of twelve, with one of the groups receiving ten days of training in mediation, breathing, and cold exposure, and the other receiving no training. Each group was then infected with E. Coli.

The intervention group which was trained had “profoundly increased plasma epinephrine levels”. This led to increased levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines, decreased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and lower flu like symptoms. The study ends with “In conclusion, we demonstrate that voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system results in epinephrine release and subsequent suppression of the innate immune response in humans in vivo.”

The breath work, cold exposure, and meditation served to activate the stress response, while also modulating it (too much stress for too long a period as we all know can be a bad thing). This allowed participants to have a significantly better immunological outcome to a pathogen exposure.

Balancing stress is always a tightrope walk, too much and you risk burn out, too little and you won’t evolve or adapt. The magic of the sympathetic nervous system and epinephrine pathway is that your daily SerenityThroughSweat habit (assuming appropriate application) also comes with an added immune boost.

A light cardio week with a minor surgical intervention

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty (and maybe even a little stressed too) my friends.

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about an interesting theory on exercise I came across in my reading, and why fitness becomes habit forming and can become

We talked a few weeks back about Breath, the book covering the science behind the lost art if breathing by James Nestor. After finishing his work, I followed the path to that of his research partner, Anderson Olsson and his book Conscious Breathing, and continued my own journey towards breathing better.

There is a lot of overlap in their respective work, and there is only so much innovation to be had in a bodily function that literally everyone does unconsciously. Olsson, differentiates himself in his obsession with CO², carbon dioxide.

heavy bag hangar and pull-up bar with my helper Bob the builder

Carbon dioxide is a simple gas that is the waste product of aerobic respiration. Olsson’s work is filled with all sorts of fun facts about the gas, that are interesting, enlightening, and perception altering.

For example, for those of you who haven’t abandoned your new year’s resolutions yet, weight loss is mostly in the form of CO². As your cells burn fat and carbohydrates for energy, you might lose some water weight in sweat, but the primary waste is your breath. (If you really want to nerd out, CO² is heavier than H²O).

Now try holding your breath. That hunger for air, those alarm bells blaring in your mind urging you to breathe, are controlled not by a lack of oxygen, but rather by an excess of CO². As CO² builds up in the bloodstream it alters the pH of the blood. Chemoreceptors in the brain measure these changes and regulate your breath to maintain appropriate levels of both gases.

First time on the heavy bag in over a year, felt good after seven 3 min rounds

The chemoreceptors, sensing an increased level of CO², will dilate blood vessels, and increase oxygen absorption, in order to regain balance. Exposure to higher levels of CO², will result in higher levels of oxygenation. Higher levels of oxygenation result in feelings of calm, content, and euphoria. This has been commonly referred to as a runners high, or in the case of this blog, SerenityThroughSweat

This is where Olsson’s theories become interesting. Exercise increases our metabolic rate, increasing the relative amount of CO². Olsson theorizes that many athletes have subpar breathing habits both during workouts, and in their everyday life. This leads to a condition where the athlete becomes dependent on the workout, as a means to increase CO², thereby increasing oxygenation potential afterwards, and the beneficial feelings that come with it.

Athletes become addicted to working out because it makes them feel better in a way that is possible by just breathing better. We become dependant, on our own waste byproduct.

All nasal breathing, and trying to consciously lengthen my exhale

This blog has been a forum for me to explore the many ways in which routinely increasing my own metabolic processes brings about a certain level headedness that then permeates to all the other facets of my life. The idea that this makes me an addict, chasing my next fix of CO², is a bit simplistic for my taste, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting.

It also means, that there are other ways to achieve that same sense of serenity, if Olsson is to be believed. Breath work, if done properly, can produce the same CO² imbalance, without all that pesky running and lifting heavy things getting in the way.

The lungs, intercostal muscles, and the diaphragm, can all be trained just like anything else. Just like you wouldn’t train your chest muscles while running in order to improve your bench press, you should train your breathing independent from your cardio. Breath work done on it’s own is important, and can help fill that gnawing ever present dependence we feel as athletes for a good CO² imbalance.

Breath work has provided me with a welcome new challenge, and an extra dose of CO² especially on those days when I can’t fit training in or I need some recovery. We all have our dependence on something, here’s to finding constructive ways to satiate the habit.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Tag: Breathwork

Stressed out

Dependance