Breathwork is not a new thing. You know, it’s been around in yoga for years and it’s been around in all sorts of things, you know, even as far as people learning during pregnancy to breathe properly. But what I found is like the breathwork is not really delivered these days in a way that’s easy for everyone to be part of and everyone to take home from the breathwork exactly what suits that person best. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to episode number 139 of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. This episode is how to hijack your breathing to control your emotions and increase your performance. And my guest today is Darren Stojanovic from Dynamic Stability. And Darren is a physiotherapist but he’s also doing a lot of work in breathwork, which is breathing. And I’ve gone along to some of Darren’s classes

where he is teaching you how to use your breath to not only control your emotions, but also to improve your health and increase your performance in sport and also in life and in work. And you might think that that sounds like a lot to do with just breathing. That’s a lot that you can improve by just changing the way that you breathe. But by going through some of these classes and some of these courses with Darren, I’ve noticed a big difference across all of those things. And you’re about to learn what some of those breathing techniques are, when to apply them and how to apply them. So I’m sure you’ll enjoy this episode with Darren as we talk about some of the benefits of it, but more importantly, how you can use it to improve your day and improve your performance in the pool. We’ve just added a whole range of new clinics for 2020. So if you are in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Nusa or Perth, we’ve just added some new freestyle clinics

that will be running up until April next year. So jump on to effortless swimming.com, click on the clinics and camps link and you’ll find the freestyle clinics there. So if you’d like to come and work with myself or other coaches, where we’ll do underwater filming, we’ll analyze your stroke and we’ll let you know exactly what it is that you can do to swim faster and we’ll give you that roadmap to improve. Then you can join us in an upcoming freestyle clinic. Let’s get into the podcast. So Darren, first of all, welcome to the podcast and we’ve been wanting to sort of talk about this stuff for a little while, but finally got you on. So thanks for joining me. No problem. Thanks for having me on. Well, we, I mean, we’ve known each other for a couple of years, just kind of three triathlon and being in Melbourne scene, but I’ve sort of been interested in breath work for a little while, but never really learnt too much about it.

And you contacted me a couple of months ago and said, I’ve started to run these breath work courses out of your practice, would I like to come along? And so I came along to a couple of those classes and found them, my eyes were really open to the power of breath work and some of the benefits of it. And I’m only sort of scratching the surface really, but I’m looking forward to learning a lot more. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about on today’s podcast. So I think first of all, like, how did you come about, how did you learn about this stuff and find out about it? Yeah, well, thanks, Brenton. Well, my main background as a physio, I’ve been working as a physio for probably about 20 years now. And my involvement probably in triathlon over the past sort of five to 10 years has sort of led me to the point where I’m sort of looking for new things to enhance performance. And not just on a physical sort of level, but a little bit on that sort of mind, body,

sort of mental approach. And a couple of years ago, I came across guys that live up in Gold Coast and they came down, they work under the company Breathe Me. And they came down to Melbourne and sort of ran a little bit of a class for my staff. And a few other people. And that very first session that I did with them, I just was completely blown away on the intensity of the breath work. And how incredible you felt after you’ve done a session and the changes that had in your body physically as well as mentally.

And so then after that, then I sort of had a bit of a chance to sort of reflect on it and chatted more to these guys and then I organised sort of regular monthly sessions at my clinic at Dynamics Stability. And I invited all my clients and various people to come along to these sessions once a week. And for a whole year we ran monthly sessions, getting sort of 30 to 50 people in this one day in for classes and just had pretty incredible results with all my client base and decided then to pursue it a bit further beyond that. And you’ve kind of dove, you’ve dove really deep into all the different kinds of breath work and I guess through all of that and learning all these different types of techniques, it seems like you’ve kind of put them together and come up with your own way of teaching it and taking your clients through it. Is that a fair summary of what you’re doing now in these breath work classes? Yeah, definitely.

I mean, breath work is not a new thing. You know, it’s been around in yoga for years and it’s been around in all sorts of things, you know, even as far as people learning during pregnancy to breathe properly. But what I found is like the breath work is not really delivered these days in a way that’s easy for everyone to be part of and everyone to take home from the breath work exactly what suits that person best. Now you have your athletes, then you have your people that are suffering from anxiety and depression and then you have your sort of people that are in chronic pain and then you have a whole lot of other people that are doing it just well being. So, you know, my idea is to sort of learn a lot of the different breath techniques, you know, package them together in a way that people can come to a class and they can experience more than just one style and really learn like what breath pattern resonates well for them.

Still practice all of them, but you know, they get a bit of an idea of getting one area they can really focus on and then really developing an appreciation for all the different styles of breathing that you can do and how it can benefit your body. And let’s talk about how breath work can alter the body’s systems and how can someone start to implement this in their day-to-day life like, so what does it look like for you? How often are you doing it and how long does it have to go for to get a benefit? Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I suppose when we look at the body, you know, there’s all our organs, you know, our brain function, all that stuff. And one sort of really interesting thing is our lungs are actually one of the crucial organs in the body that can run itself on automatic pilot without us thinking, but we can also take complete voluntary control over that system. You know, we can make some changes to heart rate,

but really, you know, our organs and our heart and things beat away and carry on a little bit in the background without us able to gain control over it. And mentally, you know, we can do some positive affirmations and make changes to our thoughts and things, but our breathing is something that’s a lot more tangible for how we can take control over that system. And so by doing that, you know, we can actually make quite radical changes to our whole organ network because they’re all very interconnected energetically. And we have sort of, you know, a nerve called the vagus nerve which sort of runs from the head through the body, you know, goes through the lungs, goes through every organ in the body, goes to our digestion. And it is like the, you know, the connecting unit that sort of connects all these organs together. And one talks to the other and when one changes function, it alters the function in the other area.

So I suppose with that knowledge, you know, if we can actually, you know, hijack our breathing system, you know, we can actually make changes to our whole network, you know, whole body just by altering how we breathe. And if we’re trying to make dramatic changes to that, we can actually breathe with some pretty intense breathing patterns to actually bring about changes in our blood, alkalinity, changes in our mental function, you know, calming our nervous system, waking our nervous system up. We’ll make changes to our kidney function, liver function, even to the point where we all change inflammatory markers in our body to alter inflammation. And, you know, we can work on these techniques on a daily basis to make a big change. And what I like about when I was doing one of your classes was you explain the science behind it. And because you say, you know, changing the way you breathe can alter all of these things.

It’s like, yeah, okay, maybe. But there’s a lot of science to it and there’s been a lot of study into it. And that’s what I really liked about the class because I think for me at least, like with that knowledge and that, with that knowledge of the sort of science behind it, it helps me buy into the belief and the importance of it. But then obviously when you do the breathing, it really, you feel it, you experience it and you get a really, you really notice a difference. And some of the feelings that I had going through those breathing exercises, like it’s really can be a natural high and you can have some really bizarre and out there kind of feelings and experiences in the body just by doing these breathing exercises. I mean, in terms of how it can help people, what are some of the results that you’ve seen people have as a result of the breathing?

Well, yeah, sure. So some of the important things that it can help you with is on a basic, you know, physiological level, it can actually really improve the efficiency of someone’s breathing. And I don’t think, you know, if you analyze most people’s breathing techniques, we’d be actually breathing very efficiently. So especially with respect to swimmers that are so involved in how the oxygen exchange and their use of their diaphragm. So you can have massive benefits on teaching people how they’re over-breathing, how they’re over-utilizing certain parts of their lungs and under-utilizing certain parts and really improve their efficiency of breathing.

For me, definitely what I’ve noticed is just the better breath technique can actually help you with your connecting to your core. You know, we also know we need our core to power some of our stroke. And I think getting a little bit better efficiency in your breath pattern can really help you with that connection and later get better power delivering to your stroke by giving you a better connection to your core muscles, which are really generating a lot of this breath pattern.

I’ve also found, so just with, you know, neck and back soreness, you know, if you’re breathing a little bit out of sync, you know, your swim stroke starts to impact on neck pain and back pain. And then, you know, relaxing in the water a bit better and really calming your breath and getting good breathing rhythm can have enormous improvements to do with sort of back pain and neck pain. And I think just general diaphragm conditioning as well, you know, we obviously, you know, as athletes, you know, we do breathe and do get better performances with our breath rhythm, but I think, you know, really learning to isolate the diaphragm and get great conditioning and endurance in the diaphragm muscle can have really dramatic improvements in your stroke and your timing. And then we sort of, you know, as physios, we work a lot with people, sort of thoracic spine and back mobility and joint mobility and ribs. And I think, you know, there’s so many swimming drills

that really require a certain amount of thoracic mobility and back mobility to do correctly. And if you think about our breath mechanism, like you really, it’s completely related to how we store tension in our ribs and whether we use our intercostal muscles correctly, whether we actually have mobility through the upper back where we can gain rotation and movement through the whole spinal area. So, you know, these repeated work on the breath patterns can have really dramatic effects on back mobility, you know, upper neck tension. And I think then beyond that, you know, mentally when people have actually finished training, you know, your body is wide up from exercise. And one thing I’ve noticed is when I get out of the pool, especially if I do an evening session, I’m not going to sleep in a hurry. I’m awake for hours and hours and my system is, you know, is revved up. And one major thing that breath work can do

is actually really start to calm your nervous system. It helps you switch on what we call our parasympathetic nervous system. It’s an automatic system in the body, but it governs all of our rest and regeneration and our recovery properties. So we can do a certain breath technique where we help to switch off our fight or flight and we switch on our parasympathetic nervous system. And what that does is actually helps our body dial down the stress response that happens through exercise and bring on the recovery phase that is required for sleeping. And therefore, enabling us to calm down our nervous system after intense exercise and help our body slip into that recovery mode. And therefore, you know, have much better sleep patterns and get into deeper restorative sleep. And when we’re in Thailand for our Halloween camps in October, I took their groups through this, I think most mornings, I did some of the exercises that I learnt at your classes

and just got them to lie down for 10 to 15 minutes going through a couple of these exercises. And I think one of the most obvious differences that I saw doing that was in the technique session. So on the first day, we do filming and analysis. The second day in the morning, we take them through some drills and exercises to improve their stroke. And before that, I got them to go through these breathing exercises. And what often happens when people are going through drills is they really want to make these changes. So they tend to be very tense and they try and force it and they’re not really relaxed because they’re concentrating so hard on the changes. But what this breathing did was, it just got them in this state of mind where they were very calm, their breathing was relaxed and it’s from that place where it’s so much easier to make changes to your stroke. And that’s probably the best results I’ve seen in terms of improving technique

within that session that we’ve ever had. And I put a lot of that down to the breathing that we did at the start because it got them in the right frame of mind and it got them breathing relaxed. It got, I guess, the body and the mental state in a place where they could really make the changes. So it was noticeably different. And that was just one of the differences. But boy, it really helped. And it’s something that I’m gonna continue to do. Yeah, I think on that note, like one major thing with breath work is learning in your body are peak state. So peak state is very much characterized by that optimum arousal. Now, none of us will swim well by being really relaxed and none of us will swim well by being overstimulated. And each person’s optimal arousal is slightly different. You know, the occasional athlete will really need to be revved up a bit and some will need to be really calmed down to get the most out of them.

So one thing that does happen with breath work is that when you’re going through the exercises on your own, you are learning in your own body the different feelings of what it feels to be really relaxed, what it feels to be sort of revved up a little bit. And you can learn in your own body where it is that your body sits when it gets to peak state. And I think I’ve always experienced like the occasional swim where you feel like you’re un-fatigable, but there’s no effort. It’s just all happening, it’s all flowing. And that’s a characteristic of peak state. And they talk about athletes learn over time to bring themselves to that peak state, but it’s not often a technique that people are taught to do. We just accidentally end up there and we think, wow, that was a great session. And then for months, now you’re trying to find that peak state again. You had no idea how you got there.

Yeah, so it’s a good point to bring up because I think it’s sort of, it is a skill and it is an awareness as well. And people connecting to that mental state is an important thing. Yeah, and it’s like there’s some really, going through some of the breathing exercises which we’ll talk about in a moment, we’ll give some examples of those types of breathing. There’s some really strange experiences. Like you sort of prefaced some of the classes with as we go through some of these exercises, you might feel some pretty extreme emotions. Some happy, some sad. You might feel like your body’s tingling. You might, like for me, my face in some of the breathing exercises where we’re really, really lifting and breathing right out. Like my face was all contorted and like this really weird, I’m glad I didn’t have like a camera on me because it would have looked really bizarre but like I couldn’t control what my face was doing.

Then at other times with some of the exercises I was, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. Like it was just really bizarre. So can you talk a little bit about like why that is and like what some of these things are that can happen as you’re going through them? Yeah, sure. Well, first thing sort of just to note is like when we look a bit deeper on the different breathing techniques we sort of realized that our whole nervous system is sort of divided into and we have a whole autonomic system. One is our sympathetic nervous system which is governing all of our fight or flight. You know, when we’re exercising, when we’re pushing a little bit, our blood pressure sort of increases, the heart rate increases, we get hormones injected into our bloodstream to promote exercise and fight or flight. And then we have the opposite which is the other half of our autonomic nervous system which is our parasympathetic system. And that system sort of governs

that rest of the generation I was talking about before which helps to lower your heart rate. And it also helps to sort of bring on muscle repair, decrease inflammation, get you to sleep, you know, put you in all of that sort of really meditative state. So there’s going to be forever a balance between these two systems that we’re working with. And then when we do some of the breathing exercises, we can actually breathe in a particular way to stimulate the sympathetic response or breathe in a way to stimulate the regenerative response. So as a general rule, you know, during our inhale, we’re actually stimulating the sympathetic response, our sort of fight or flight. And then during the exhale phase, we’re actually promoting our rest and regeneration a little bit. So you can imagine we breathe in a particular style where we’re emphasizing the inhale breath. We will be raising that vibrational energy in the body

up and up and up and up to a level that it will become quite strong. If we’re breathing in a way that we’re investing in the exhale breath, what we’ll be doing is actually really helping calm the system down and actually change brainwave patterns and put you into much more of a calmer sort of situation where you may feel like you are going so calm that you’re not falling asleep, but you’re sort of almost for yourself drifting off in a certain place. And so in some of the classes that you’ve done is what we’ve done is we mix up those breath rhythms and give people a chance to feel all the dynamics of the body. So, you know, what we can start with is quite a calming sort of breath, which is like a circular breath. So if you imagine drawing on a blackboard, you know, a circle like a clock face, you can imagine that when you breathe in and move around the clock face, you can think about your breathing from sort of six o’clock at the base

and breathing around past nine o’clock all the way up to 12. And in your mind’s eye, you can imagine taking five seconds to breathe your breath from the bottom all the way to the top. And then without pausing, then breathe out and then visualize yourself moving down through one o’clock, down through three o’clock. And then when you arrive all the way back at the base, you imagine you’ve arrived back at six o’clock. And if you can take five seconds to do the inhale breath and take five seconds to do the exhale breath, what you’re doing is putting almost equal importance on both the breath patterns and therefore creating a calming effect on the nervous system and allowing your body to switch in to a really good state, not over aroused, under aroused, but in a way sort of getting a perfect harmony within the body. And there’s been sort of talk about that breath pattern being called what we sometimes call a heart resonance breath.

And what it does is to really help energetically the brain and the lungs and the heart start to move into the same energetic rhythm. I think probably all of us sort of found moments in our life where we sort of feel a little bit out of sorts. Now, commonly that’s a bit related to these organs in the body not being on the same energetic level and not connecting and talking well to each other. So there’s no way our heart beats without connecting to our lungs. And there’s no way our lungs breathe without some input from the brain. And all these organs actually have constant little highways that go between them and they all have messages that are going back and forth, giving feedback on what’s happening in the lungs, giving feedback on what’s happening in the heart, even giving feedback on what thoughts and emotions are being felt. And so when we breathe in that first breath circular pattern, the five in five out,

or actually creating the best harmonizing breath to put all those organs together so they sink and they talk to each other well and they all harmonize on a similar vibrational frequency level. So that’s a bit of that optimum state.

And so would you recommend that kind of breathing for like someone who’s, let’s say they’re driving in there, their car on the way to the pool, would that be a good type of breathing to do on the way to training? Yeah, it is a good breathing. Like I sort of say to people, like it can be a bit of your go-to breath, it’ll suit everyone. Definitely if you’ve had a busy day at work and your mind’s racing, that breath pattern will help you stay attentive, so driving is safe. But it also allows you to gain a little bit of control over the rhythm and you’ll calm down the nervous system after a bad day or after a day of a few arguments or whatever it might be. And you’ll arrive at the pool, then much more able to listen to instructions and much more able to process the cues and the things that are being told to you. Because commonly in different brain states, you might suggest someone to keep their elbow in a particular position

or have their hands placed in a certain angle. They’ll hear the words, but because of a brain state, it’ll mean nothing to their body. So they’ll dive back in and they’re like, they’ll have no connection really to your instructions. Whereas if they’re in a mental state that is processing, well, whatever words come in will mean something very quickly to them and they’ll be able to activate that neuromuscular process quickly because they’re in that optimum sort of arousal state. That’s good. And move beyond that, like where we actually sort of changed that breath pattern which is sort of what you’re talking about and doing a few other styles. And we’ve got a couple of other ones sort of written down here and that we went through in the class. So we’ll talk a little bit about those other styles. So we’ve got box breathing, triangle breathing and then talk about the energy breathing. So what’s the difference there and what’s the purpose behind these other styles?

Yeah, sure. So the box breath, I sort of liken that to our breath. You would imagine like a sniper would be using. You know, a sniper needs to be kept extremely calm but also needs to be highly on alert. So if you imagine the mix of that is almost like our peak state feeling. You know, we don’t wanna get too calm, we don’t wanna get too relaxed but we also wanna be paying attention and be absolutely at the ready. So the box breath starts to bring in a little bit of that where what we do is we visualize moving around a box shape and when you breathe in you can give yourself rising up to the top of the box and then when you get to the top of the box you just gently without too much tension hold your breath in for the same number of seconds that you breathed in for. So we can start at roughly four seconds if you’d like. Someone take a four second breath in then they’d hold their breath in for four seconds and then they just nicely breathe out

so their breath out took four seconds and then once they finish their breath out what they’re gonna practice is just staying calm and relaxed and rested at the end of their breath out and just pause. So we’re not sort of clamping our breath and holding on for dear life. Now what we actually sometimes doing is imagining like you are continuing to mentally breathe out during that pause and then just keep seeing yourself go around the box four seconds inhale, four seconds holding the breath in four seconds to steadily breathe out and then four seconds to just pause and rest at the bottom of the breath out. And then people can develop that. You can develop that to five seconds on each section up six certain breath classes we try to build that to eight or 10. We’re actually trying to breathe so slow that imagine 10 seconds to breathe in, 10 seconds to hold 10 seconds to breathe out and 10 seconds to pause is actually taking like about 40 seconds.

So it means the person might only be doing a couple of breaths a minute which is an incredibly slow rate of which over time you can build up to. And imagine for a swimmer what that means you know that means they have the ability this like it’s almost like the dexterity of an opera singer now you’re giving to the diaphragm and that swimmer then has the ability to know they can control the rhythm of their breath and control the timing and they can actually get an even structure in their breath rhythm. So there’s no emphasis on the breathing in being more important or the exhale being more important that actually helped to develop. And like we talked about the box shape imagine if it’s gone from say four on each section and now it’s six and now it’s eight and then maybe it’s 10 can you see how that breath square the box is actually expanding? So in the person’s mind’s eye they’re seeing their lung volume getting bigger

and bigger and bigger and just feels like you then have this unlimited ability to use your lungs which clearly is an advantage in swimming. Yeah, I like the analogy or the name for it like a sniper breath like it’s a good for me that’s a good way to remember when would you use this type of breathing? And one of the immediate

almost immediate sort of benefits and the things that I noticed was when I trained for the couple of weeks around those sessions that I did the breathing felt easier but I didn’t have to think about it like the breathing just naturally improved and so I was able to sort of have this higher output for no extra effort like I was just able to sit at this faster pace without feeling that to be taxing on the aerobic system so it happens pretty quickly because it’s something that most people aren’t training and like with most exercises you do if you do a little bit of it that you notice quite a big benefit fairly immediately. Yeah, definitely I mean I’ve got people that come in they might even walk in the room stressed and we’ll leave an hour for the class but within like five minutes you see their system just drop away and calm right down so you can get enormous improvements with this stuff if you just put your mind to it

and spend like 60 seconds doing a particular breath style and really what I’m trying to do with these classes is encourage people in their normal everyday life just arrive five minutes early to something you need to do or just take two minutes out lunchtime as you finish work every day take another two minutes out and make all these breath sequences just part of your normal everyday life and start to see the dramatic changes you can have to your whole day. And the triangle breathing? Yeah, so then now that we understand a bit of the purpose of the box breathing and we talked before about the inhale breath having a little bit of a focus on our fight or flight so our sympathetic response which also we need, we don’t wanna turn up to a meeting

looking like our eyes are popping out of our head and we’re half asleep, we don’t wanna be too relaxed so it’s important we know how to upscale our energy when we need it. So the idea of the triangle breath is you imagine now change your box breath to a triangle shape and what you can imagine if you can breathe in to the top of your inhale and actually only hold the inhale breath so therefore it becomes a triangle shape because then once you’re finished holding your breath in you just steadily breathe out, breathing out to the bottom but then when you get to the bottom of your exhale you just breathe in again without a pause. So you might repeat five to 10 triangle breath where you hold the inhale breath and that way expanding the inhale side and then imagine then the triangle breath that is flipped the other way you could actually then be holding the exhale breath so we’d breathe in steadily without a pause we’d breathe out

and then when we get to the bottom of the exhale breath we would then just stop and rest and we’d really invest in the exhale pause and try to send we sometimes think about, okay Al we already talked about that vagus nerve sending messages around the body you can imagine the way you breathe you are sending signals and messages to every cell in the body even as far as the blood vessels in your feet you are sending messages down to every structure so if you’re gonna breathe in a particular triangle breath when you’re doing the breath out pause what you can visualize is that breath out pause is sending that little emotional message through the nervous system and it’s being seen and heard by every cell in the body the brain cells, the heart cells you know our digestive cells right down to all the blood vessels that are in our body adjusting towards what we’re doing and you can think about the quality of the message

that you send so if we take a triangle breath breathe in breathe out and I’m sort of holding my breath under stress then I’m not sending the best message am I what we wanna be doing is like actually really investing in that breath out pause and even visualizing our self on holidays and imagine that moment when you get on holidays and you see the banana lounge and you lay down on that banana lounge and go you know what I’ve got a whole week ahead of me here with no one’s gonna pester me when you breathe out and land that banana lounge you breathe out in a particular way and you really emotionally invest in the idea that you don’t have to get off that banana lounge for a whole week if you really don’t want to so we try to bring into the breath pattern is like make people don’t just physically breathe in and out in and out and count your numbers actually try to then emotionally invest in what you’re trying to achieve

and during that one we’re trying to invest in the exhale pause and a great breath technique for those of people that wanna calm themselves down you know maybe prepare yourself for sleep it’s probably the example breath of what we talked about before about aft training of calming the system down so you might be a bit wide up so if we go into our triangle breath where we breathe out pause we’re actually continually signaling the parasympathetic system and like I said then if we emotionally invest in the quality of how we breathe out pause and we can even visualize some calm things and then bring the mind into it as well all we’re gonna do is to create an enormous effect on the parasympathetic system to switch off all of our fight or flight and switch on all our regeneration and within a very short space of time you’re gonna be feeling extremely different calm down ready for sleep or even just calm down after you’ve got yourself worked up about something.

This is good so we’ve got we’ve spoken about the circular breathing which is we’ve mentioned is the heart resonance breath or almost like you go to breath during the day we’ve got the box breathing which is like the sniper breath where it sort of prepares you almost at peak state the triangle breathing which is can help you almost like the after training breath when you want to sort of quiet and everything down and now that the last one we’ve got here is the energy breath so do you wanna talk a bit about the energy breathing? Yeah so we’ll talk about that one today you know that this breath sort of probably falls under in my mind some of the advanced categories and definitely an incredible breath and if you’re going to some more advanced breath classes that you may see advertised around the place they probably utilize a little bit this breath rhythm where what we’re trying to do is to generally raise the bodily energy

and if you think about like if we put something in the microwave to heat it up what we’re actually doing is putting food in the microwave the microwaves are creating a change in the vibration of the molecules in the frozen food and by passing the microwaves through what they’re doing is they’re vibrating via inputting energy they’re vibrating all the cells of the food till the cells are vibrating at a faster pace and that’s what’s creating the heat so what we’re actually doing in our own body is we’re breathing in a way to raise vibrational energy in the cells, in the whole bodily structure if you think back to how you feel when you’ve got the flu or when you’re recovering from the flu and your body feels heavy and dead and everything is like is stiff and sore that’s a bit like poor vibrational energy that’s what we feel like when we’re just flat and nothing is active so imagine doing a breath class where you practice some of these different techniques

and then when it’s time what you do is move into an energy breath where you start to play with that working the inhale breath but relaxing the exhale breath and when you continue to create this circular energy breath what you actually do is you continually raise the vibrational energy of the body to the point where you are waking up dormant areas in the body and you are increasing this sort of energy flow throughout the whole system and I quite often think about the science of Chinese medicine how we know how all the meridians go from the body they go down the arms, they go into the feet it’s been a known fact for years that they work off that theory and then we talk a little bit about our chakra levels like our heart chakra, our crown chakra you know, our base chakra of being more like energy vortex levels within the body and there’s sort of seven main ones of those and a lot of smaller ones so I quite often think about

when I’m doing some of these energy breaths that I’m gradually just building the energy that is available in the system and what our body does is actually utilize that energy in the areas that it needs it pushing it to the fingers, pushing it to the toes pushing it through the periphery to open up areas that have been blocked and we can have some amazingly profound experiences during these energy breaths where our whole body starts to wake up my interesting sort of approach there is like I’ve had quite a few clients that have been sent to me with chronic pain and the definition of chronic pain is really that there are areas of pain in your body that have no reason to be sore you don’t have pathology or injuries associated with these sort of areas and there are nerves that are just lighting up for no real major reason and they are causing a stimulus back to your brain and your brain is picking up this stimulus as pain

as an injury or something like that but there’s no actual injured side so what actually happens interestingly in this energy breath is imagine these people going to this energy breath and all of a sudden their chronic pain sites are lit up they can feel the neck pain they can feel the back pain they can feel all the pains that they live with day to day that really have no reason to be sore and what’s happening in that instance is the bodily energy is building up where these overactive nerve cells that are firing off these pain signals actually light up in their system now you can either choose to fidget round or stop breathing because you’ve got pain but then mentally when you realize that your body does not have anything actually wrong with it and all you’ve got to do is lace fill and keep breathing eventually what you do is you deprogram these sensitized nerve endings and nerve structures to the fact that okay there’s actually nothing wrong

maybe it’s time just to calm down and over repeated sessions what happens is the person doesn’t get these pathway patterns lit up and what happens they then dampen down their chronic pain and they can then live their normal life without these pain signals being generated

I really like the analogy of the microwave and that’s literally kind of how it feels like the cells in your body are vibrating like it really feels that way and then yeah interesting with the people with chronic pain and do you find that some people they get to that point where they’re feeling that pain doing the breathing exercises to some of them obviously they’d probably want to back off they’d want to just stop breathing because it’s causing them pain but do you talk to them beforehand and let them know like this is probably what you’ll experience so if you’re comfortable you should continue breathing through it because this is the result you’ll get yeah look definitely and look and what we’re talking about here is energy breath this is I mean this is probably one of the most powerful things that you can do to your body I mean we can pop a few vitamins and have a massage or have a stretch or go for a run you know people might think this breathing

is quite a subtle thing of which it is but this actual technique when people get involved in it is definitely I liken it to those catcher brushes when you’ve got some oil on your driveway and you go out there and you get one of those high pressure water turbo things and when you turn it on the water pressure coming out of that thing is immense and when you blast the concrete you know you get off years of dirt off that thing so this energy breath is really in my mind a bit like taking to your body with one of those catcher brushes and I’ve talked about it on a physical level so far but really the main approach here is on a mental level of what we’re doing is actually sort of helping our body block and clear out certain blockages in the brain and like you said you know like people do approach a lot of these techniques of when things get a little bit tough like the idea is oh look I better give up better back off here

and I suppose that’s where some of the isomersion work comes in after this sort of work or in addition to this work where some of the Wim Hof technique where people have actually then keep going with this energy breath and then they move to dunking themselves in the ice and then if you’ve ever heard your brain tell you to get out you’ll definitely hear it then all our automatic subliminal programs that are in our brain that tell us all sorts of stuff you know on a small subtle level for the swimmers it might be the bit you know all the can’t do’s you know like I can’t do that time or I can’t stay in the pool for long enough or I can’t execute that stroke pattern all of those things are really automatic programs that are embedded in our brain and some of those programs actually help us live I mean we’ve probably experienced the sort of times where sometimes we’ve been driving home and you know we’re busy thinking about something

and then something we realized oh wow turning in the driveway you know we’ve actually managed to get home with very little conscious thought of what we’re doing and what they actually use is all those incredible automatic processes that are in our body that can run our life and run for us a program like getting home, making a coffee or doing something in our work life that we can do pretty easily but on the flip side like we can have a whole heap of automatic programs in our brain that actually are very detrimental to how we perform and you might sort of have an old coach or an old sort of you know other person you’ve coached or trained against that has mentioned a few really sort of important comments that probably didn’t stick with you that well and maybe left a little bit of a negative effect in your brain that you now unconsciously believe is true and so breathing exiles like this part of what it’s trying to do is to uproot

some of those laid-down programs and like you said when you’re in the breathing method what’s happening is it’s changing a little bit of body chemistry that’s altering some of your brain processes and it’s allowing some of the sort of locked in emotions that we hold against ourselves to be released out of the system so commonly during this energy breath if we sustain it for long enough you know we can actually get to a point where we can feel our body releasing some of these emotions and sometimes like you said it is absolutely laughter and I’ve been in one class myself where you know one girl started laughing and then another girl started laughing then I’m laughing and the whole 12 of us in absolute hysterics like and we are all still breathing trying to get through it and then you know that wafts off and then before you know it’s someone in the corner is crying and then like and then the mood changes now that group energy is incredible

when you do breath work but you can achieve all of that sort of stuff in your own space doing your own breath work as well and basically your own emotional energy then gets a chance to come out and we sort of hear a lot of people talk about they feel a bit blocked or they feel like you know something in the background is holding them back you know you have some guys you know all girls you know should limit it to just guys you know people in general like you know feel like they’ve got some pent up aggression or bottled up emotions and some of those things have come from real life traumas that are actually completely real and their body hasn’t been able to get rid of those traumas at the time and they’re sitting as little things in their body that actually don’t benefit them that actually sort of work against them so a lot of those little things you can feel definitely in some of these breath work sessions and we’re going to record another podcast

a more advanced breath work podcast but we wanted to kind of do this one first so you could give the introduction to breath work and I think I mean a lot of this stuff is still for people who are new to it will seem quite advanced and it’s all new but we’re gonna do a follow up podcast for this and for those that are listening let them know where your classes are how they can get involved with those because I highly recommend them and I’ve done a couple so far and I’m gonna be doing quite a few more because it is such a, I mean really beneficial but I really think there’s a lot there as well just for improved performance but also mentally as well like it really sort of covers all the bases with it so if you wanna let people know where they can find you and a little bit more about those courses. Yeah, sure. So I run the sessions out of our physiotherapy clinic which is called Dynamic Stability. We’ve had Dynamic Stability now for about 19 years

in the Richmond area and about another clinic for about 10 years down in Rippon Lee, just off Glenora Road and so we sort of devote, we devote a day or even some weekends to these breath work classes out of the physioclinic. I have an Instagram page which is Dynamic Breathwork and what I try to do on that page is just to be continually giving people little snippets, positive affirmations, different breathwork sort of ideas and techniques and then just let keep people updated basically on all the different sort of classes that we run. You know, I sort of try to divide the training up into a bit of level one, level two, level three so everyone sort of attends like a level one class just once and that gives them a bit of this information, bit of the basics about what breathwork’s about and how it can affect you and give you a few take home messages and then the level two work is about them practically practicing all these techniques

and learning some sequences that you can do at home to different playlists and I normally sort of run that as a four week course covering sort of a little bit of different emphasis on all the different techniques and then the level three class is a little bit more about the energy breath where people have been through a range of the techniques and then what they do is they embark on a full class on the energy breath where they’re really doing that as an energy clearing technique and just to take their skill level to another level. So if you sort of look up, there’s links on our website dynamicstability.com.au If you scroll down, you’ll see some of the dynamic breathwork page or you can just go straight to our Instagram page which is dynamic breathwork and have a little look at all the different sort of stuff I’ve got on there for you. Excellent. Well, thanks again for being on the podcast, Aaron. And once this podcast goes out,

we can use some of the questions that we get from that and answer them in the second podcast. So thanks again, mate. And I’ll put all those links in the show notes and looking forward to that next podcast. All right. Thanks, Brendan. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.