S01E01 June 07 2021 -Optimizing Breathing with Guest Coach Adam Ramsden

Our first episode welcomes guest coach Adam Ramsden. We talk about the science of breathing and how proper breathing technique can enhance our athletic performance.

TRANSCRIPT
Sam Rhee: [00:00:00] Welcome to the inaugural Herd Fit podcast with David Syvertsen and our guest coach today is Adam Ramsden. Our topic today is going to be about breathing, which sounds simple, but its probably one of the hottest topics lately. And one of the most complicated actually as athletes. So before we start I'm really excited to have Adam for a couple of episodes here.
I've known Adam for a really long time, obviously, as both of us have. Talk a little bit about Adam and our experience with Adam and what he means to, 
David Syvertsen: [00:00:30] Yeah, Adam was one of our, not our first hire, but it was, I think he might've been number three on the list behind it was Terry and Liz and Adam.
And I think that one thing that drew us to Adam right away when he came out was just just the general sense of he gets it, like what CrossFit is, what the community is, what Bison is how to structure proper learning of how to do movements correctly, how to fix yourself how to be coachable.
And he also is just a smart guy. He's very well-read I've always noticed that about him, is that he's one of those guys that I always said this about him when he talks people listen. And no matter what the topic is, whether it's CrossFit or something out across it. And it's because you know that he's already put a lot of serious time and thought effort.
Into learning everything he talks about, he doesn't just blabber out. So there are topics that I pick his brain on all the time. And there are certain topics that I think he knows a lot more about even in this fitness world than a lot of us we do. So that's we brought him onto our staff for the reason that, oh, we think he's gonna be a good guy to have around and help lead classes, teaching background.
But the more time that goes by, it really goes to show. Just how smart he is and how much that, how much being smart really plays a role in your fitness. He, 
Sam Rhee: [00:01:45] thanks. He sorta my or a lot of people's sort of WOD whisperer. So he's so good to have next to you when you're pushing really hard. There have been a number of moments in the Aycock and also in the open where.
Adam's right next to you and his tone and demeanor is perfect and he'll often have coaching advice. And sometimes I don't, I can't even hear what he's saying, but just his presence is very calming. And I know anytime I have some sort of big online thing where you have to compete or something, it you're like a really good person.
Adam Ramsden: [00:02:19] Now, can you tell Lana that she would be, she would say the exact opposite, but thank you. 
Sam Rhee: [00:02:28] All right. So let's get into the topic breathing, which is interesting, cause it's one of the few activities where you can flip control, right from you can voluntarily control breathing, but most of the time, like 99.9% of the time.
Your brainstem is just doing it for you. 
Adam Ramsden: [00:02:45] Yeah. So a lot of autonomic process, which we don't control, heartbeat, digestive function, all that stuff. Breathing is one of the few that we can control. Like you said you can choose to control it or you can't, so it's something you don't have to think about.
So a lot of us don't think about it, and just because we say, okay, we're experts, we've been breathing since the moment we were born, we'll be breathing until we die. And take 26,000 breaths a day. And it's just like something you don't think about, but it's such a huge component to fitness, to everyday life, to sleeping to everything we talk about that affects how we perform in the gym and outside of the gym.
That it's something that we should be thinking more about. 
Sam Rhee: [00:03:24] So what got you into breathing and thinking about breathing? Cause I know it's really hot right now for a lot of people and I hear podcasts about it. So how did you get into breathing 
Adam Ramsden: [00:03:34] as an app? And luckily luckily has become a popular topic because growing up I was a terrible asthmatic horrible mouth breather.
Never. I was always congested, always blocked in the nose. And that just affected a lot of things that I did. Athletic performance, concentration focus energy levels. When I started getting into meditation, mindfulness and stuff like that's one of the things that they focus on always is using the breath to calm yourself down, to get into that nice relaxed state.
And so I realized that as I did more of that, I needed my rescue inhaler less, I didn't need to use the Advair every 12 hours, which I had been doing for years and years. So as I realized that was helping, I started digging a little bit deeper into the topic, getting into, what could I use this for in other aspects of life, besides just, how to get through the day without having an asthma attack and struggling to breathe.
Sam Rhee: [00:04:29] So if I'm a CrossFit athlete and let's suppose I'm listening to this and I'm like, okay, But I breathe pretty much. Okay. The only time I really think about breathing is when I'm like, and I'm trying to catch my breath after I'm like totally spent. So what is it that I can do? Or what did you found that can help me as an athlete be better?
Adam Ramsden: [00:04:50] Yeah. So I think we. We only think about our breath when we're gasping for it. At the, in the middle of a workout, we're like, okay, I can't do one more rep until I get these eight to 10 minutes, really strong breaths. And panting really quickly. So one thing that we have to realize is that when you're doing that and starting to over breathe, you're effecting a lot of your body systems.
Inversely, you're getting more oxygen into your system, but it's actually the level of carbon dioxide in your blood that signals the red blood cells to release oxygen into the tissues and and your muscles. So the more you mouth breathe during a workout, the less work your muscles can do. So one of the things that I started doing, especially when we got deeper into CrossFit, as I started was I started picking points in the workout where I could say, okay, this is where I need to focus on my breathing.
Anytime I'm taking a rest, Dave will say, when he can tell when I'm really tired, cause I'll like, stop and take this huge. Bigs nasal breath. Because I'm thinking about it at that point. I can't do it when I'm in the middle of a set of 15 wall balls because your mind's elsewhere.
No, your legs, how much, this sucks, how much more you work you have to do is the ball, right? Yeah, exactly. And so I started doing it during those breaks and as I. As that seemed to start helping me. I said, okay, when can I do this more? Now during the warmup, I'm always trying to keep my mouth shut when I'm not like making a comment to the rest of the class or being inappropriate.
But I try to keep my mouth shut, try to only nasal breathe during warmups when it's a light RO a lot of times at the beginning of a class, we'll say, okay, hop on the rower 30 seconds. Nice leisurely pace. Then pick it up. For those first three intervals, I try to only nasal breathe.
Then when it gets really intense, you just can't, you have to take that big mouth breath, but as much as you can work it in, 
Sam Rhee: [00:06:40] I'm sorry. No. So then the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing is just the over breath or is there other things that are involved with that?
Adam Ramsden: [00:06:48] Our guests. So one of the things that nasal breathing does is it releases nitric oxide into The system. So that's in your nasal cavity which you don't get during mouth breathing. Nitric oxide is like a big thing with like beet powders and all that stuff that you're seeing now. It's a hot, hot molecule as they say.
So that helps with again, carbon dioxide levels and everything like that. As we were saying before, when you're exhaling through your mouth, you're losing a lot more water. And we're always talking about, staying hydrated and getting away from that dry mouth feeling. That's usually when you have to go get a sip of water in the middle of workout.
So if you can pull that back, that's going to help you stay hydrated throughout the work. Interesting. 
David Syvertsen: [00:07:32] Have you incorporated any of this in your, he has, he's talked to me about this. This has become like a big training trend where you'll see a workout where it's low intensity or it's at a paced on.
With just nasal breathing. So say it's a five minute row, three minute bike woman at ski, three times nasal breathing only. And that had first been introduced to me to two years ago and for training for performance purposes. And I remember asking him about it and he explained some of what he says.
And like right now it's like, all right, I have to do this. Like why, if it's going to help my muscles relaxed and it's going to help me stay hydrated, like, why wouldn't you do it? And. I've been back and forth on trying, like he's very disciplined and diligent, mal warmups, light RO in between movements, transitions, where I'm so focused to focused on performance, intensity, being high, strong, going all out where I've actually had a hard time slowing myself down to the point where I can do a nasal breathing.
Like I don't think I've ever done an entire session with nasal breathing, but the one time. I started to realize what he has been talking about for a couple of years now is when we first start wearing mess, where I, when I started wearing the mask here in September, the worst part was it got sweaty. And then, because I'm such a breather, right?
The mass would circle in your mouth before we had those plastic cups. So the only way I could combat that was. Keep my mouth shut, with my mask on and you really, I would keep my chin down and just like nose on, like in 10, in the middle of an intense workout too. And I noticed like how much more efficient that became to a point where I don't know if the mass was really impeding performance that much.
I know it definitely impedes a little bit. Like I think now that we've had a couple of days without the mask, people are like, oh, I feel so much better. I think as part of a mental something had on your face, but if you know how to breathe correctly, It really shouldn't make that big of a difference wearing the mask, right?
Adam Ramsden: [00:09:34] Yeah. No, and I think it interesting too. Do you know some study of how much more carbon dioxide you're keeping in your system with the mask? Because you're breathing into the mask. I think that would be something interesting to study, but one thing to realize is we didn't evolve as humans to do 20 minute.
Amwraps right. We always said, okay, going up through history, it's like you have a minute or two to hunt or kill this animal, or you're not going to eat today. So you need to flood your body with oxygen because you knew that after that two minutes, It was over right now. We're wanting to do work for longer and longer.
So we need processes that are different from just that get as much oxygen in the body. So you can do as much work in this short amount of time, which I think is where the nasal breathing can come in. 
Sam Rhee: [00:10:22] It's interesting because a lot of these concepts that I've heard scientifically I've dealt with physiologically, but only in really sick patients, like in the ICU, like nitric oxide as a pulmonary dilator F to open up the pulmonary artery and allow more blood flow into the lungs, or high carbon dioxide levels is what causes people to feel.
Suffocation. It's not your oxygen, your blood oxygen level and all these things, but I've never really applied them or thought of them as performance improvement factor. I thought humans also had both, but, we always talk about in CrossFit, like the aerobic and then the anaerobic, right?
We're as humans, we are evolved to do that really quick, high energy, but we also have some capacity for long stuff maybe to Chase animals for like days or something in order to kill them or something like that. So how do you so how do you use this for do you, so do you just nasal breathe all the time when you're working out at this point?
Adam Ramsden: [00:11:21] No, and I don't think you can, especially when, it involves heavy lifting or anything. That's really intense, if we're talking about those day-long hunts that like Amazon, they still do in the Amazon rainforest. They'll notice they're always at a jogging to running pace. Yeah. But they're always now nasal breathing.
The work we do in here where it's burpees, where it's handstand pushups and stuff like that. And it's just at some point you just switch over because you need the oxygen, your brain just tells you, 
Sam Rhee: [00:11:49] what do you do outside the gym now to try to train your breathing? Because I know for example, seals, Navy seals is box breathing is a big deal.
I've heard that, in yoga, there's so much about breathing control. Like it's all about breathing really. So what do you do outside the gym to try to help yourself?
Adam Ramsden: [00:12:05] There's a bunch of different breath work. Resources online. Brian McKenzie is a huge breathwork guy who has been a really interesting follow 'em Wim Hoff does a lot of breathing techniques.
He does cold immersion and breathing. And so there are a bunch of different. Avenues, you can go, depending on Patrick McMillan who wrote the the oxygen advantage. He has now a company oxygen advantage that you can follow on Instagram. They do a lot of box breathing, Buteyko breathing methods and stuff like that.
Sam Rhee: [00:12:34] So what have you tried and what has worked for you and your personal story? 
Adam Ramsden: [00:12:37] So I've tried the LSD approach, which is light, slow, deep nasal breathing. To calm yourself down three to five minutes, I try to work that in multiple times during the day, whether I'm doing something else or right before bed, as I'm trying to relax for the day breath holds are a big thing to increase your carbon dioxide tolerance.
So that's something I'll do you know, every couple of days, if I have the time what's that. It's depending on who you approach or go Wim Hoff is one that does a hyperventilation. So it's about 30 really deep breaths. And then you exhale just until you're comfortable and try to hold your breath for as long as possible.
And that's, signals the carbon dioxide tolerance increases that, and you should be able to hold your breath longer and longer. The more you practice that have you, has that worked for you? I like it. Yeah. It's almost like a natural high of, like when you get that second, that last big breath of oxygen gives you a nice little energized feeling, which is good that I've enjoyed.
Yeah I don't know if I've seen. A big difference in performance after having done that. But I have been doing it for a long time. So as I, improve over time, I have seen some improvement in that area. 
Sam Rhee: [00:13:52] I know that one of the things that I just got, which I haven't tried yet is that mouthpiece, the airway, which is supposed to also assist with increasing decreasing cortisol levels and increasing your oxygen exchange and so forth. What do you think about that? 
Adam Ramsden: [00:14:09] I think it, as far as I know, from what the AirWave is, and I'd have to do more research on it, but I think one of the things I noticed is that since you have to climb down since the mouthpiece, your airway is restricted, so you're going to slow down your breathing.
You're not going to have that. Over-breathing feeling of the gasping for air. If you use it during a workout But I'd have to do more research into actually, whether it signals you to more to nasal breathe more often, which I think is, you know what you're looking for as you try to increase performance as far as, respiratory effects during workout.
Sam Rhee: [00:14:44] So if I'm an athlete and of course I could look at all these resources and try to figure out some stuff, but what are like, what would they be the first thing I could do in a workout? Is it just say to myself, try not to mouth breathe so much. Or like you said, are like in between sets, just sit there and try to nasal breathe the way you do.
What are the, what's the simplest thing I could start with to try to do this. 
Adam Ramsden: [00:15:07] So I think this is going to be harder to do with the masks off now. Because with the mask on what I was doing for a little while, if there was, I know we did a two K row a couple of months ago, I take my mouth shut for that, so I couldn't breathe through my mouth unless I was gasping for air and really had to force it.
But, it's a mental thing to get over. But if you can just purse your lips and concentrate on keeping your mouth shut, you just naturally I think can make improvements in the nasal breathing. 

David Syvertsen: [00:15:36] I think one thing you always keep track of, and I've talked to a few people about this and the workout, because right now, like this might be like overwhelming for some.
Especially if you're new to CrossFit and every time you come here, you're thinking about wait, what's the thrust or where do my hands go? What are my feet go? And now on top of that, while you're doing all this complicated stuff, keep track your breathing. I always tell, try to challenge people in the middle of a workout, like a conditioning based workout.
Try to find the pace that you can control the control, your breathing. Or like you, you stop and go based on not how tired of your legs, not how tired arms can you control your breathing. And what does control your breathing? Like you can stop and go at any given point. And then I think the next step would be more along the nasal.
If you go to the point right now, like you just, you're one of those like big, heavy mouth breathers and you can't control it. It's just you have weird sounds coming out of your mouth and errands. One of them, when he runs like that there are points where like you need to slow down based on how well you're breathing.
Like I remember Chris Hinshaw talking about when he was coaching Matt Frazier. And Matt Frazier would be in the middle of a games event, a long run. And he would be, he's trying to pick and choose his spots of the workout, where to push and where to dial back. And he was so fit, but also so smart that he would bait.
He would pick his pace based on the guys, around him, what they were breathing like. So he would know that the two guys behind them and the one guy in front of them were about to slow down because that he, they couldn't control the breathing. The weird sounds, the huffing and puffing and the short where he's like in full control of his breathing.
So I think that one thing you could apply to your fitness workout is like, if you're in the middle of a workout and you feel like you have control, you can stop and go whenever you want. And you're not making those weird, like hissing sounds like that would be a time for you. Like you should be able to push now, you don't slow down just because you're in minute 17 workout and you're tired.
If you can control your breathing, you're good to go. And I think what it could do, it can open the door of be aware of how you're breathing, how many people here are aware of how they're breathing. Probably very few. 
Adam Ramsden: [00:17:37] And I think when we do lifting workouts, when we do squatting workouts, one of the cues we always give is that if you're wearing a weight belt, press your stomach into the weight belt.
So if you take a big nasal breath, that's going to move your diaphragm down your diaphragm. Doesn't move. You've met with breathe through your mouth, cause you're only breathing through the upper chest. So if you take a diaphragmatic breath, Your stomach's going to come out, it's going to stabilize your core.
So that's something I think can help a lot of people immediately, with when we do those, EMA moms of, a power clean and front squat, you're usually holding your breath during those anyway. So you just, as you're getting ready to lift lock in that core and do your lift.
David Syvertsen: [00:18:16] And the breathing is not just associated with coordination Conditioning and aerobic work like lifting, like breathing is a huge part of lifting.
And we talk about this all the time. Like when you inhale exhale on a dead lift, like filling your stomach with air, releasing at the top and be foo before you start your descent. Again, you hold that breath in your stomach like that. That's a big part of breathing. It goes far beyond you just breathing heavy during a burpee set.
That's 
Sam Rhee: [00:18:40] interesting. I watch a lot of lifters on Instagram hook grip and so forth CrossFit. And I got us now start watching them to see how they take their breath 
David Syvertsen: [00:18:50] before they do see a lot of them do it. It's a huge part of high level training, whether it's Olympic lifting or it's CrossFit or it's any other sport where it's like slow controlled movements.
It's a huge part of it. You watch golfers, like they're very cognizant of how they're breathing before they swing. It's a big part because the more stable, the more control you have here, the safer the rest of your body is. And it's also a lot easier to control extremities, right? When you're not like when you're doing a complex movement here, take a handstand pushup, for example, right?
And say there's a double on their hand, stand push workout, and the double unders Jack your heart rate up, you need to be able to control your breathing when you're upside down, kicking your legs up and extending your arms. It's a huge part of movement efficiency, but also safety. And the second you lose, like you'd never want to see someone doing thrusters and inhaling exhaling in the middle of the rep at the bottom.
Because your torso suffers, your bar starts to move forward. You ran your back. You're in a bad position. Like you always want to be. That's what makes thruster so hard. You have to stay on top of your breathing in the middle of a rep. I would assume 
Sam Rhee: [00:19:53] that posture is a huge, like you said, thing in breathing.
Cause I can only imagine that if you are hunched, It's just going to be so much harder to actually move air. 
Adam Ramsden: [00:20:01] Absolutely. Yeah. And nasal breathing actually helps you see, you sit up straight or when take a big nasal breath, your tongues in better positioning in your mouth, it's, it fits up in the roof of your mouth.
So that you can sit up straighter. And it's one of the things we always say is that, when we're watching the games or watching the semi-finals and we're saying, that the consistently good athletes never look like they're uncomfortable. Yep. But you look at other people that are two lanes down from them and they will play their Don shamble.
Because they're like, they're panicking, they're taking these big, small breasts in their upper chest and their body thinks they're about to die. It's so that's why they're freaking out, but Froning Frasier. They always just like nice and calm and it's probably, it probably has something to do with their breathing.
Sam Rhee: [00:20:44] I was just thinking right now is watching a lot of the semi-finals lately this weekend. And there are some long ass chippers and stuff in there and short stuff. But the athletes are not panting. You're right. They're all mostly nasal breathing. It's only at the very end. Maybe you might see someone like 
David Syvertsen: [00:21:04] little, 
Sam Rhee: [00:21:04] right.
But I was just thinking of, especially on the true form runner on the biker that they're on. There's some lots with that. They're all just nasal breathing away. Yep. 
David Syvertsen: [00:21:14] Interesting. Yeah. 
Sam Rhee: [00:21:16] So what would be the first best resource that you would say. If someone wanted to get interested in and say, you know what, I need to explore this topic a little bit more.
Yeah. 
Adam Ramsden: [00:21:24] Yeah. I think yeah. Patrick McMillan, who does the oxygen advantage has written two books, the oxygen advantage and the breathing cure. Breathing cure has pretty much a breathing strategy for every known problem. You can have, it goes from COVID to asthmatic to women who are pregnant, and it just breaks down these little breathing exercises that you can do.
You can flip through the front, the back of the book, depending on what you're looking to do. So that's what I think are two absolutely great resources. If people are looking to dive a little bit deeper into breathing.