Welcome And Breath As Priority

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Hello, hello everybody, and welcome to another Beauty of Breathing podcast recording. We are super excited to have you guys here. If you're watching this live on Instagram, please interact with us. Uh, you're welcome to send us questions. We are uh I'll be watching both screens while we're doing this live. Uh, let me go ahead and introduce our speaker to you guys. Today we're excited to welcome Tyler Bremlett, a movement coach, father, and co-founder of WeShape. Tyler's approach to movement was shaped by his own 15-year healing journey after a cycling accident shattered his femur and permanently damaged his knee. Through working with leading physical therapists and coaches and studying functional anatomy, biomechanics, and rehabilitation, he discovered that lasting transformation comes from moving smarter, not harder. Today, Tyler is known for his philosophy of movement freedom and helps primarily women at 50 plus reduce pain, restore confidence, and build a healthier relationship with their bodies. With more than 800 million views and 6.3 million followers across platforms, he's become a leading voice in movement wellness, mindset, and resilience. Tonight, we're going to talk about something that often gets overlooked in movement: the breath. How we breathe can influence how we move, how we perform, how we recover, and even how we feel in our bodies. Tyler, welcome to Virg Breathing.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here and to talk about this important subject because I think a lot of the world of fitness really kind of puts this on the back burner. And as you'll come to find out, I really put this on the front. This is one of the most important things that people need to learn how to do. So yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

You know, that nowadays we're speaking to other professionals way more. You know, back in the day, you go to work, you're nine to five, and you just put your head down, you treat your patients in front of you, and you go home. We didn't have as much the ability to just reach out and speak to other professionals and learn how everything that we do is so connected and we can really help our patients by just sitting down and having a conversation.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, I love it. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Today's topic is breathe better, move better,

Movement Freedom And Healing Journey

SPEAKER_02 3:02

feel breath uh better. Breath as a coaching tool, not an afterthought. So your philosophy is centered around movement freedom. What does that phrase mean to you and how did your own journey lead you to it?

SPEAKER_00 3:14

That's a great question. I'll try to give you the 50,000 mile overview because I could talk all day about this, you know. I think a lot of people start their fitness journey with pretty vain intentions, right? It's usually like I want to lose weight. It's usually like I want to look good naked, these kind of things. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the industry itself is the one who kind of invented this narrative and sold it to us, right? So I want to bring awareness as a starting point to everyone that the fitness industry does something really simple. It says, it says, hey, you should hate your body. And unless you look like this ideal figure, and this is by my program so that you can change your body so that you can finally feel happy and get validation and all this stuff, right? And so this is the thing that we've believed is the way to do fitness for like decades, like five, six more decades, right? And we're out there trying to do something different because to me, I did the same thing as everybody else. I started out with that same intention. I was not, you know, fit as a child. I was in a family that, you know, thought diet soda was a health food and grew up eating, you know, fast foods and not moving my body and stuff like that. But um, as luck would have it, I ended up getting hit by a car. When you when you're in pain, nothing motivates more to focus on feeling better than just constantly being in pain. And so it really damaged my knee. And every step I took caused pain. And so every step I took was a reminder that I want to get rid of this. I don't want to feel this way. And so I spent a lot of my time and energy early on in my life, um, as you said, traveling the country, learning from some incredible coaches, physical therapists, mentors of mine over the years. And I quickly learned that fitness shouldn't be about how you look. It should be about how you feel. It should be about what you do with your body, right? What you can do. And so, coming back to the question at hand, movement freedom. Movement freedom is I want to be able to do the things I want to do with my body for as long as possible. I want to listen to my body and not ignore it and beat it up and punish it and try to make it lose weight and shame it and hate it. I want to respect it. I want to love it. I want to take care of it and I want to make it feel good. And so, so much of what I do now is I spend my time teaching people simple ways to move better and feel better. So, yeah, that's that's that's my philosophy. Movement freedom. That's the key.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

This is amazing. Um, I was talking to you right before we went live that I had a night rent blessed done exactly 30 days ago. And I have not been able to work out. And right before I had my surgery, I was like on this, you know, road of like, okay, I'm back. I'm really working uh on my health now. I want to be able to feel good forever and you know, be able to do things when I'm older. And today was my first day back. Yeah, and I still can't do much. But first, I did not have a great night of sleep last night. Um, my son was next to me and he was tossy and turning and kept me awake. Um, so again, gotta look at sleep. Second, how are you breathing? The reason why I got my surgery done, one of the reasons to breathe better. And if you're not breathing well, you're less likely to sleep well. And then how are you even gonna work out the next day? You already have zero energy. I am on this also. Um, it's been over 30 days already, almost two months, uh, with no caffeine. Oh my gosh, it's killing me. It is so difficult. So, what message do you have for those people who feel like this, like they have zero energy to even start? What is the first step that you would recommend?

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Yeah,

Waking Up Exhausted Start Here

SPEAKER_00 6:46

you know, I think people might be interested in this because if they came to our social media platforms, most of what we do is I call it the Trojan horse model. It's like, hey, if your shoulder feels funky when you bring your arm overhead, maybe it's because of these things, try it this way. And what we're trying to do is give somebody like an immediate feeling of like, wow, I just learned how to move better, take better care of my body, and I feel better, right? We don't talk a ton about breathing. I've done some videos on breathing and stuff, but a lot of people don't naturally gravitate towards that. But when they actually come in and join WeShape, where we build customized routines for all of our members, the first thing in every routine is breathing. The first thing in every routine is breathing. And I learned this a long time ago from one of my mentors. And it was, I think it's an old Chinese saying, breathe for breath is life, right? We can we can not drink water for maybe eight, 10 days. We cannot eat food for who knows how long. There's a lot of people doing some crazy extended fasts now. But try holding your breath for five minutes, right? It's very rare that you meet a single person who can do just that. So it's so important, but we take it for granted. And another thing to consider is really interesting is like, you know how many breaths we take a day? We take about like 20,000 breaths a day, right? And here's the thing that I want people to realize when I teach people movement, people will say, for example, like, I like to go for a walk and I walk because it helps me become more healthy. And I'm like, well, maybe it depends on whether you're walking correctly or not. If you're walking poorly, then you could actually be maybe wearing down your joints and eventually causing pain and damage to your body. But if you're doing it correctly, then by all means, walk as much as you want. Breathing is something we do all day long, all night long. And when's the last time you paid attention to how you're breathing, where you're breathing? And this is so important. When we learn to breathe diaphragmatically, when we learn to breathe deep into our bellies, not only do we regulate the nervous system, we drop it from that fight or flight down to that rest and digest, we drop the cortisol levels down, we the body starts to relax, right? So that's what we do when we start to deep breathe. But not only is that important, our posture changes. If anything I've learned over the years when it comes to somebody really being able to feel good in their body, is if your posture sucks, your body's gonna feel crappy. Now try this real quick. If you're if somebody's listening or watching, right, you can just literally try this. Like take a big chest breath, like breathe into the top of your chest. Like and pay attention. What do you feel? What do you feel? What muscles do you feel flexing when you do that? You feel the belly probably, but pay attention to your neck and your traps, right? The scalenes, the muscles on the front side of the neck, like around the traps and stuff. Every single time we breathe into our chest, if we're doing that, we're getting 20,000 reps a day of neck tension, of excessive neck tension, right? Now, and if this if you're standing and we do a chest breath, pay attention to what happens with your pelvis. Is your pelvis staying centered or does it tip forward? It's probably tipping forward. You're coming into a slight anterior pelvic tilt when we flare our ribs out like this. Okay. So now you're messing with your pelvic posture, you're overfiring your neck, and all of a sudden we wonder why we we wake up one day, we go, I have back pain, I have neck pain, my shoulders never feel relaxed. I can't bend my neck from side to side. Well, it doesn't matter how many neck stretches you do. If you stretch your neck for 20 minutes a day, but you breathe 20,000 times a day wrong, you're never really going to be able to fix the problem because you're not fixing the root of the problem, right? So the fundamentals of breathing are simple. I always teach people the simplest way. One hand goes over the belly button, one hand goes on the chest. And what we do is we breathe as deep as we can into that belly as much as possible. And then at the very end, the chest can rise a little bit. And then when we exhale, we just let the reverse back down a little bit down on the chest and then all the way down into the belly. And sometimes people think too much like belly belly. So I sometimes I think about the pelvis. Like we don't want to just like push our belly out. We want to think about like our entire stomach and our back. We want to feel the breath in our lower back if we need to, right? And what this does is it stabilizes the pelvis, it strengthens the diaphragm, which are these deep core muscles, not just about breathing, it's about these deep core muscles that help stabilize posture. It relaxes the neck, the traps, and the shoulders, which allows those muscles to relax and settle into a much more comfortable position. And it also relaxes the entire nervous system. So something as simple as that, having that big of an impact, is worth practicing and bringing awareness to each day. So that's why I start every single routine with it. I start almost every single one of my days with some form of breath work or another. And I'm sure we can talk about different ways to breathe and do breath work

Diaphragmatic Breathing For Posture Relief

SPEAKER_00 11:21

as well, um, because it's so impactful on the body.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

I love it. I always tell my patients if they have a hard time engaging the diaphragm to try to start those breathing exercises laying down. That's a great way for you to try to eliminate as much as the chest movement. Uh, something else that you can do is rib cage breathing, where you can hold both of your sides, both of your ribs on either side with your hands. So you put all of your fingers to the front and not just your thumb to the back. And whenever you breathe in, you're gonna breathe into your hands. So trying to expand a little bit of that rib cage. And as you breathe out, always through your nose, whenever you're doing breath work with myofunctional therapy, especially. Um, you squeeze the ribs a little bit so you can feel, try to, you know, um, encourage your diaphragm to expand and contract as you're breathing in and out. Um I would love for you to share with us uh a couple more um ways that people can wake up if those people like me that wake up and they're like, I have to have caffeine, like don't speak to me until I've had my caffeine. So those women, those women in their 40s and 50s that, you know, wake up exhausted and irritable. Um, they're right, you know, they probably didn't breathe well all night long. What is one thing that you would recommend them doing just to kind of center themselves and try to reduce this anxiety right when they wake up?

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah, I love this. That's the other thing I love about breathing, is it creates a state change. Nothing works faster than breathing to create that state change, right? If we're anxious, if we're fearful, if we're sad, if we just aren't regulated, how do we regulate our bodies, right? So, what I want people to realize is that this isn't about like one thing. This is about trying things and developing like a menu, right? Like develop the menu of things that you like because there's a lot of different ways to do breathing and breath work. And some of the ways can feel really off and not appropriate for you. And some of the ways can feel absolutely perfect, right? So it's not about um this way is the best way, it's about this way feels like the best way for me right now. Okay. So um, before we get there, I did want to mention one thing. You talked about nasal breathing. And so I want to encourage people if you have the capacity to do all of the breath work through your nose, by all means do it. Sometimes we wake up and we're congested and it might be worthwhile grabbing a tissue and blowing your nose or doing something to try and clear those pathways. Cause I know every morning when I wake up, some days I've got nice nasal breathing, and some days it's not as easy as other ones, right? But it's so Yeah, it's so powerful. This is there's something that a lot of people don't realize is when we nasal breathe, it slows our capacity to breathe in. Like even right now, if you just go in like that, you can feel like there's a little pressure that's that's required to breathe in. And that slowness, it swirls the air in the nose, it heats it up to the right temperature, and it actually increases nitric oxide production. Now, this is really important because our lungs are a bunch of blood vessels that are trying to absorb oxygen as they flow through it, right? And nitric oxide actually um dilates blood vessels. So if we're able to breathe through our nose, I believe the figure is somewhere between 10 and 20% increase in nitric oxide just by shifting our breathing from our mouth to our nose, which means not only are we going to be breathing better air and more naturally, but we're actually going to be taking in more oxygen into our bloodstream at the same time. So if you can breathe through your nose, by all means, I understand some people can't do it very easily. When it comes to like building that breathwork menu, right, you have to come, you have to try some stuff. So the first thing I would say is just that basic deep breathing. Again, lying on your back is one of the best ways to learn this. You can even put like a little something heavy on your belly, like a book or like a even like a small dumbbell, and just breathe deep into the belly and then let the weight kind of slowly press the air out of you, right? Like just like that. So that'd be the starting point. It's just really learning how do I breathe into my belly. Okay. And just doing that for one minute can make a huge difference, slow and controlled. Now, there's other types of breathing. Some of my favorites, box breathing is a fantastic way to regulate the nervous system. So it's really simple. If you just imagine a square, all you do is you you count to the same amount uh on each square. So we go four seconds in, four seconds hold, four seconds out, four seconds hold, and we repeat just like that. So that's a really fantastic way to work on regulating the nervous system and controlling your breath as well. One of my favorite ways to personally do that is do a box breathing ladder. So I would go inhale one, hold one, exhale one, uh, hold one, inhale two, and see how far I can go. So you might get to a place where you're going like seven, eight, nine, ten on each one of those pieces. And then when you get to a place where it feels like too much, you can either go back down if you want to continue, or you can just stop the practice right there. Okay. That's one of them. Um, another one of my favorite things to do is um the physiological sigh. It's fantastic for waking up the body and regulating the nervous system. So, what this looks like is more like this it's an inhale followed by another inhale, trying to really get all the air inside your body, and then oh, the physiological sigh. So it sounds like this. And you can find a pace that works for you. Um, if you want to excite the nervous system a little bit, going a little bit faster. If you want to relax the nervous system a little bit, going a little bit slower. So it depends, right? Are you in uh uh the end of the day and you want to relax your body? Go slow, right? Make it a slow breathing practice. Is it first thing in the morning? Probably speed it up a little bit and get that that oxygen flowing through your body a lot faster. Um, another one I particularly like, uh, you've probably heard of it in a couple different ways. The ancient way they called it was tumo. And then uh more recently, Wim Hof made it very popular. But it's a a kind of a more rapid breath. I wouldn't say crazy rapid, but it's a deep inhale and a fast exhale. And you try to do that for anywhere between, I'd say if you're a beginner, maybe start with like 15 or 20 and then work your way up to the point where you can do about 50. What's interesting about this is when we do this rapid breathing, and it sounds kind of like this, right? It's a real fast breath like that. Um, when we do about 20, 30, 40, 50 of this, we're blowing off carbon dioxide. And so we're increasing the oxygen and our blood supply, and then our body doesn't need to take an inhalation. So, what you'll find is after 30 or so breaths, you can exhale, not inhale, exhale, and you can just sit there for 30 seconds, a minute, 90 seconds, two minutes sometimes, right? And you might be surprised at how much longer your breath hold gets when you have that type of breathing. Okay. So that's another one. That's my favorite one, probably first thing in the morning to wake me up if I if I um if I'm feeling really exhausted or sluggish. Um, another one that I really love, uh, it's hard for people to get the rhythm around, but it's it's pranayama, the breath of fire. Yeah, right. And so this is forceful exhale and let the inhale take care of itself and work up to a really rapid pace. So it might sound more like this. You might start at like a pace like this. So breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe, right? That and I try to work up a little faster over the course of those. And I try to do around a hundred to two hundred of those at a time. Okay, so I might work up to a real fast pace, like a right, a real quick.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

Women, whenever they're having a baby. Yeah, it is it's very similar.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

That right, that type of breathing, right? So um, there's another one that's fantastic. That one is really, I would say, more advanced, and it's a little bit harder to get the rhythm around. But what's really great about that one is man, if you want to feel your deep core muscles, your diaphragm working hard, oh my God, doing some best fire is fantastic

Build A Breathwork Menu

SPEAKER_00 19:17

for that type of thing as well. So, yeah, I mean, there's a few different methods for people to try. I think there's got to be something in there that feels good for people so far. Um, but the big thing is like just give it an honest shot, right? Just set a timer for three minutes, pick one of those variations and do it for a week and just see how it feels. And if it feels atrocious, throw it in the trash and do the next one and try that for a week and see how it feels, right? Um, again, my personal preference first thing in the morning is wake up, drink a glass of water, lay down, and do about 10 minutes of breath work. And I feel like it's one of the best ways for me to like really regulate the body, strengthen my lungs at the same time, and really just drop into uh an embodied experience for the day instead of feeling like I'm stuck in my head and I'm exhausted and I'm reaching for the coffee and all this different stuff, you know?

SPEAKER_02 20:09

You mentioned uh posture a little bit earlier. We often think of posture as something we need to fix. How does breathing influence the way someone naturally organizes and positions their body?

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Yeah. So I want people who are listening to imagine what good posture should be. Okay. And so the way I like to think about this is like if the shoulder girdle, you know, the shoulders, the shoulder blades, all the way down to a spine is an upside-down triangle, right? We got an upside-down triangle. We want it balanced perfectly in the center, and we want it balanced if it was three-dimensional, we want it balanced front and back too, right? And then underneath it is a little line for a spine, and then another upside-down triangle, which is your pelvis. And we want that one balanced from side to side and front to back as well. If I take the lower triangle, if I take my pelvis, and imagine like you're standing up and you have like your pelvis is like a bowl of water and you're pouring that bowl of water out forward, you're coming into what's called an anterior pelvic tilt. When we do that, it's influencing the way that upper triangle has to orient itself. And vice versa. If I take that bowl of water in my pelvis and I pour it out backwards and I come into a posterior pelvic tilt, now I'm influencing the way that my shoulder girdles react to that. Okay. So what do we want? We want everything to be balanced and in the center. The more balanced and the more in the center we are, the more our bone structure is holding our body up efficiently. When our bone structure is holding our body up efficiently and our fascia and our muscles, we're achieving a position where things function well. The moment those triangles get out of balance, right? And probably the more common one I see is anterior pelvic tilts. So the pelvis tilting forward. The more that gets out of balance, the more all sorts of little things start popping up. So if I'm in anterior pelvic tilt where my pelvis is tilted forward, now my lumbar spine, my lower back is in an excessive arch. When it's in excessive arch, it puts excessive pressure on the discs, on the nerves, on the lower back. So it's rare to find someone with back pain that doesn't have a pelvic postural issue. Vice versa, when it comes to the upper back, oftentimes we can feel either overcorrected where the neck is pulled back and the shoulders are pulled back, or opposite where the shoulders are rounded forward and the head is jutting forward, right? Both of those are going to be positions that cause discomfort in the upper back and the neck and sometimes the shoulder girdle as well. And like I said already, probably one of the biggest influencers of your posture is how you breathe. All right. Again, just taking that deep breath and staying in like a nice upright position, you can feel even if you take a deep belly breath, let's pretend you have an anterior pelvic tilt. So your pelvis is tilt. Tilted forward. If you take a deep belly breath, watch what happens. Your pelvis will tilt back into the center, right? If you have a posterior pelvic tilt and you take a deep belly breath, your pelvis will tilt back into the center. Okay. So every time we fill our lungs with air all the way down into the bottom, way down into the pelvic floor, what we're doing is we're filling this balloon of air around our spine, which is putting those two triangles that are supposed to be balanced back into their appropriate position. But if we are breathing into our chest or if we're breathing in these lazy positions, right, all of a sudden every breath we're taking is actually contributing to those imbalances that might be happening within your posture. So I don't know if everybody could visualize exactly what I'm saying there, but the point of this is really simple is when we have aligned posture, that's not just something that we want to have to like look better or anything like that. This is how our body's supposed to stand and sit and function to have the most efficiency and the most shock absorption as well. So if you can't jump and land, well, maybe your posture is a little bit off, right? So this is a huge thing, is addressing posture. And we do want to work on muscular issues that might be trapping us in that position because here's the reality: you might have been breathing poorly for decades. And so there might have been some substantial tissue changes that have happened since then. Perhaps muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia have gotten shorter in certain areas, longer in certain areas, perhaps muscles have turned off in certain areas and had to be overactive in certain areas. So we want to do actual movement work along with breathing work. But if we never correct the breathing work, all the movement work we do might never actually correct the problem at hand because we're doing so many reps of it poorly. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 24:27

It makes a lot of sense. Almost every one of our patients that we see in

Tongue Position And Nasal Breathing

SPEAKER_02 24:31

myofunctional therapy have an interior pelvic tilt. And you guys can notice a lot of people, they're skinny, but they look like they have a belly because of the way that they're moving. Their pelvis interiorly makes your belly stick out. And as soon as you correct your posture, and a lot of times, just with malofunctional therapy working on their breathing and their tongue position, you see the posture fix itself. It is insane. I have a post recently that went viral, and it's this young girl from Sweden who, you know, I'm recommending palatable expansion and all these things. And the parents are very holistic and they're like, we don't want to do anything. And they live in an island. So it's even, you know, takes four or five hours to just get out of the island to have to go to do a truck provider for palatable expansion and other things. And I always ask for pictures as we're working together. And when I saw her her photo, I think was six weeks or six sessions after, I almost fell backwards. And that's the one that I have shared on my um Maya Move's Instagram. If you guys want to go check it out, it is incredible how if you're still young, um how impactful it is to get a tongue in the right position and start breathing correctly.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Yeah. This is huge. This is huge. I can I comment on that? So I have two daughters, and um, you know, one of them's all spun up on ADHD. And a lot of what we discovered early on, especially with kids who um have trouble with nervous system regulation, is they're they're often their their nasal pathways aren't really developed and their jaws not very developed properly, and the position of their tongue and their mouth um oftentimes can influence this, right? And when we can't breathe all the way, what's happening to our body? If I if I put a pillow over your face and smothered you and you couldn't breathe all the way, what would happen in your body, right? You'd go into an adrenaline response. Yeah. Go into a stress response. And in a stress response, what happens? We're manic, we're intense, we're more energetic, right? So a huge amount of people's um inability to regulate their nervous system often comes from not being able to properly breathe because of nasal shape mouth positioning. And I just want to highlight what you said. As an adult, this is a lot harder. You usually have to go to a specialist and they can put you know mouth expanders in and over time create space and then things like that. And you could do tongue, yeah, all this different stuff, right? To help out. That's fantastic. As a kid, you can do a lot with just a few simple drills and tongue positioning and practicing actually nasal breathing and diaphragmatic breathing. So, um, for everybody out there who's listening, if your mouth is closed and you're breathing through your nose, congratulations already. That's a good start. If your tongue is on the bottom of your mouth, then there's something else that we could address. If you we really want to feel is the tongue just kind of resting gently towards the roof of the mouth. And as we inhale through the nose, really feeling the airways like almost all the way through the back of the nasal passage and in the back of the throat, should feel really open back there. And when the tongue comes up, it creates space for all of that to come down. So it's another thing that's really um, I think overlooked. Something I don't talk about a lot to our members, but um I think is really important.

SPEAKER_02 27:39

So yeah, a lot of people come to us and say, no, but we breathe through our nose. And then whenever you go look inside their mouth, they either have a tongue tie, and usually the tip of the tongue will be touching the roof of the mouth, but the back of the tongue will be low. That's mostly how how people have their tongue positioned right now. And if the back of the tongue is low, you're not applying pressure to the roof of the mouth, the whole roof of the mouth. Whenever you apply pressure there, you create this negative pressure that counteracts with the pressures and of the nose. That's when we see correct craniofacial development happening. If your tongue is low, you're still going to develop like a mouth breather. So even if you're breathing through your nose, you're not getting all the benefits of an easy breathing. Nitric oxide is also uh produced during the exhale more than the inhale. It's producing the perinesal sinuses. So that's why we say breathe in through your nose and out through your nose. And the exhale should always be longer than the inhale during rest. Of course, we have tons of exercises that you have to blow. Um, and also if you hum, that's a little secret sauce for you to increase your nitric oxide. So just start humming all day long. If people ask you what it is, it's a great opportunity for you to teach them.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

That's a great one, by the way. All the breath work practices I shared, you can pair with the hum on the exhale, right? So I'm a huge fan of the you know, on each one. And the biggest thing about breath work, can I just say, which is this is shocking to me. I love breath work. I've been doing it for almost more than a decade now. Um, and uh, whenever I invite someone to do kind of some of these more, I think, I guess aggressive looking practices with me, they don't want to do it. And I think there's this thing of like, I don't want to look weird, right? I don't want to be there, and so I think it's one of the most important things when you enter breath work is like check your ego at the door, right? This is about developing lung capacity, developing sort of breathing rhythms, and like it's okay to look weird, you know. My my probably my best story ever about looking weird was um, I, you know, they they have this thing now where they say on a flight, they call it like raw dog in a flight, where you just basically sit on an airplane and you you don't read, you don't do anything, and you just sit still for the entire flight. And I laughed about this because I was doing this a really long time ago. I would say it was a great opportunity just to sit and meditate. And we were somewhere with a group of friends of ours one time, and I was just sitting there in peace, and I'm on the middle of an airplane, you know, I'm in economy along with everybody else, and I just kind of felt the urge to just do some pranayama right there. And so then I'm, you know, I start doing the fast breathing right there on the airplane, and I finished and I looked over, and like everybody I was with just looked appalled. Oh my god, you are the weirdest human being on the planet, but you feel comfortable enough to breathe like that in in a in an airplane filled with people. So again, check your ego at the door, like realize this is about every action you're taking is about health, it's about self-care. And if you think that someone caring for themselves in the ways they feel they need is wrong, then we gotta check that belief as make sure I was seeing a patient once, and he would always uh sit outside of a library of a public library when he was seeing me uh for his sessions, and it was so funny.

SPEAKER_02 30:59

It was one day talking about being weird. I was teaching him an exercise, and it was something like you have to say the sound umk with your mouth open, you can't close it. That's working on the orpharyngeal muscles uh for sleep. So you go, uh, and you have to like blow the air out. Um, uh, um, and there are people walking around him, probably think he's having a you know a stroke or something. Like it is okay, but he didn't care. Our patients are super invested in um you

Coaching Breath Through Embodiment

SPEAKER_02 31:31

know, feeling better, so they they do funny things. Uh what's the difference between simply telling someone to breathe uh and actually coaching their breath? I feel like people have such a difficult time understanding how to properly breathe and engage a diaphragm the right way. How is that process?

SPEAKER_00 31:51

Yeah. I think this is a big problem on more than just breathing. Um and why I say that is because uh almost everybody who comes to us that I get to coach and talk to and we that we work with, the the problem is we've been stuck in our heads our whole life. So we're really good at thinking and we're really good at living behind our eyeballs. But the moment I say, where do you feel the breath? Where do you feel the pressure on your feet? What muscle do you feel working? Do you feel it here? Do you feel it there? It takes a lot for someone to take their awareness from behind their eyes and their head and drop it down into their body and really start to feel what it feels like to live in the body that they have. Most people end up with pain and discomfort. And oftentimes a lot of our traumas and our negative feelings are stored in kind of memories, not necessarily in our body, but there are triggers in our body that was memorable.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

They're infinite.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

So, anyways, this is like a huge problem is that people are not embodied. And so, to me, what like the entire philosophy I have around move, move better and feel better, the starting point is embodiment. It's learning like how do I feel the pressure on my feet? It's learning like where am I breathing? Am I breathing more through one nostril or the other? Right? Am I pushing my belly out forward when I'm being taught to breathe, thinking it's the right way to do things, but really I'm just dipping myself into an anterior pelvic tilt, right? So um I don't know if this is a great answer to your question, but I think that building uh somatic awareness, building awareness of our bodies and taking some time away from our thinking and into our felt senses is really the key to be able to coach someone to change the way that they're moving. And ultimately, you know, breathing is a movement. And it's it's if we want to change the way that we're breathing, we have to feel the way we're breathing, not think the way we're breathing. And so much of like it's crazy to me when I work with somebody on a movement that they're doing that's like corrective, for example, and they're doing it, and I uh they keep trying to think their way into it. And I just keep saying to people, like, you're never ever gonna think your way into doing this movement correctly. I want you to feel your way into doing this movement. And the more we can get them into that state of mind, the higher the likelihood of them doing it better and better over time. And then that that awareness and that focus and that embodiment, well, guess what? That's what reroutes the nerves that changes the way we do things, right? So, what most people don't realize is um uh you are what you repeat. All right. There's an old saying by um, I believe his name is Dr. Donald Hebb, who really looked at nerves. He said nerves that fire together, wire together. You probably heard that before, right? And what this means is if I tape my two fingers together for a week and I'm moving them up and down like this, when I take the tape off, those two fingers are gonna move in tandem for a while until I start trying to move them independently again. Okay. And so every time we breathe, our brain and all the nerves that control, all the muscles that regulate our breathing and control the way we're breathing, those are rehearsing a pattern. And the more we do that pattern, the more it becomes kind of second nature. We all breathe second nature. So when you're changing your approach to breathing, at first it can feel really clunky because we're having to unlock new neural pathways to new muscle groups, new areas of the body that are having to work in ways that they haven't worked before. And what happens is people go from this starting point, right? I like to tell people about this starting point. We all start moving with unconscious incompetence, right? We're not aware that we suck at moving. We're not aware that we suck at breathing. And then they listen to a podcast like this and they immediately become aware. Now we move to the next stage, conscious competence. Okay. I've got to work really hard to get this right. Okay. Actually, there's a stage in between which is conscious and competence. I'm aware that I'm incompetent. Okay. So I don't know. Now I know. Then it's conscious competence. Now I have to work at it. But when we do things enough, you are what you repeat, then it becomes less and less conscious competence. And eventually where we want to get to is unconscious competence. Okay. And that means I've changed the way I breathe permanently and I don't have to think about it. And breathing is just one of those capacities. We like to focus on teaching people how to walk, how to go up and down stairs, how to bend over properly, how to stand up from a chair, um, how to sit, how to like do all these different things, right? In a way that actually is um supportive and healing to the body and supports movement freedom for as long as possible. So um, yeah, I don't even know what the question was anyway.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

I love it. Well, I have a loaded question. All right, let's do the little

Breathing For Lifting And Running

SPEAKER_01 36:51

little bit of a personal question. Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:54

Should people be breathing differently when they're doing strength training versus mobility work versus higher intensity exercise is the little question. But I really want to know is how in the world are you supposed to breathe when you're running?

SPEAKER_00 37:09

Yeah. Okay. I love this. Okay, so let's let's let's break it apart because they're they're all different. Okay. So if I breathe with tons of tension when I'm stretching, is that gonna serve the purpose that I'm after of relaxation and reducing tension? No, of course not, right? We can all hold our breaths and tense up tight and then try to stretch and you won't get very far. Okay. So when it comes to mobility work, when it comes to flexibility work, we want to do our best to stay more in that physiological sigh, that conscious relaxation, that slow diaphragmatic breathing, right? Real slow. And every time what I do is if I'm stretching a muscle, I try to bring my mind into the muscle. I try to find the spots that are tight. Then I take that big inhalation, and then I do that relaxing sigh. Now there is one caveat here. There's a type of stretching called PNF stretching, um, which can be helpful for supporting nervous system safety to increase mobility. Um, I'm not gonna go into details on that one. It's it's a little bit more of an advanced technique, and it often is helpful to have a practitioner with you. But in that particular case, you're doing this series of tension and relaxation to create more mobility. Okay. Most of the time in mobility and stretching, we want to stay relaxed, okay? When it comes to strength, I want you to imagine this. Imagine there's a rock on the ground that you got to go pick up, and that's rock's heavy, right? You know you can pick it up, but it's gonna be tough. Now walk up to that rock and exhale all of your air and relax as much as possible and go try to pick it up. What's gonna happen? Yeah, it's probably not gonna come up. And even if you do, you're probably gonna have not a lot of support around the spine and you're gonna, you're gonna risk hurting yourself. Now, the opposite. Take the biggest breath you can deep into your belly and then take a little bit more. Contract your pelvic floor, your diaphragm, contract your deep core muscles, right? And the way you can do this is you can take that big breath in and try to blow the air out, but not actually blow the air out. That's creating what's called bracing and stability in the core muscles. This is creating stability and rigidity around the pelvis and the spine. So when we're doing maximal strength movement, we want to do large inhalations and we want to either hold our breath or exhale through like pursed lips or through like a hissing noise, which is called the valsalva maneuver, which they found helps generate more muscle tension. So it's either big breath in and hold the breath. Some people have blood pressure issues. So I want you to be careful with this, or big breath in and then like this tension or through the pursed lips, okay? We want to create intra-abdominal pressure because that's what keeps our center of our body safe and stable, which helps support the stability of the rest of our body. Okay. Now, when it comes to cardiovascular work, we want to syncopate the breathing with the movement. And it depends on the intensity of the movement. I'll give you a great example. If I'm doing squats and I'm doing them at a medium pace, it's pretty natural to inhale down and exhale up, right? Now we're matching the force to the hip extension so that we're creating stability in the position of most compromise at the bottom, like we're doing for strength, but we're not rigidly holding it. And then we're exhaling it to produce force and power, and then we're inhaling back in to create that rigidity. So we're doing that, our simple squats. Inhale down, exhale up. Now, if you start doing jump squats, though, if you keep on that breathing rhythm, there's probably going to be a point where you lose it. And then you're going to go into what's called panic breathing. And instead of inhaling down, exhaling up, you start and you start doing that kind of breathing, right? And that's your body panicking because it doesn't know how to syncopate the breathing with the movement. In this particular instance, a type of breathing that I like to utilize is called two-cycle breathing. It's exhale at the bottom and exhale at the top. And so if we're doing fast movement, it's quicker, excuse me, quicker. And the reason why we do that is because we're reaching an anaerobic threshold. We're reaching a point where we literally cannot take enough oxygen to be able to keep doing the movement. But if we increase the pace of breathing to match the movement, then we can actually sustain it for longer. Probably an even better example of this is a burpee. If I jump down to the ground and I bring my chest down to the ground, and then I jump back up and I jump my body overhead and I try to do that in one inhalation, you're probably gonna lose your win pretty fast. You're gonna find that panic green pretty quickly. But if I exhale at the bottom and I exhale at the top and I inhale in between, now I've developed rhythm. So when it comes to cardiovascular work, what you want more than anything is rhythm. You want rhythm that's connected to the movement. And if you can connect the rhythm and the movement together, that's what's sustainable for that particular movement. If we're talking about running, we want to find what feels right for us for that particular pace. So if I'm running slowly, I'm gonna treat it more like a box breathing technique. I'm gonna take my steps and I'm gonna use my steps as a count. Inhale, two, three, four, exhale, two, three, four, inhale, two, three, four, exhale, two, three, four. Right? If I'm running faster, inhale, two, three, exhale, two, three, or inhale, two, exhale, two, inhale, two, exhale, two. If I'm sprinting, it might be inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale as I'm doing it, right? So it's really about learning how to syncopate the breath to the movement at hand, if that makes sense. Hopefully that answered your question.

SPEAKER_02 42:24

Yeah. So running depends how you're running, breathe. Okay, because I've seen people like tape their mouth and run.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

Yeah, yeah. And I think here's the thing like there's people who take everything too far. Let me put it that way, right? So, yes, nasal breathing is obviously the healthiest and best way to breathe. Um, if you're running at a medium pace and you want to practice your nasal breathing and you want to tape your mouth to encourage that, go for it. You know, knock yourself out, right? Um, if you end up at a place where you're getting past your oxygen path, your capacity and into anaerobic capacity, you're probably not gonna be able to do that. You're probably gonna have to start breathing through your through your mouth, which is totally fine, right? I'm okay to stretch my lungs to the max and hit my VO2 max threshold, right? And I'm not gonna do that with nasal breathing. I'm gonna have to shift to breathing through my mouth at some point in that sprint or that interval or whatever it is. Right. Um, so yes, for the most part, nasal breathing when we're doing cardiovascular work, but if it gets to be too extreme or too intense, you're naturally gonna have to shift to mouth breathing because this is a much bigger hole than this, right? So you'll be able to take more oxygen in and out while you're doing it, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 43:33

All right. So we have uh myth or fact.

Breath Myths Mindset And Free Trial

SPEAKER_00 43:37

Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_02 43:38

Which takes us right into it. You should always breathe through your nose during exercise.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

Uh not always. Yeah. Myth. Partially true. In the middle.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Holding your breath can help you lift heavier.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

If if done properly, yes.

SPEAKER_02 43:59

More soreness means a better workout.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

Oh, I want to know more about this one.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_02 44:14

You have to work harder to get better results.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

No, you've got to work smarter to get better results.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Breathing can influence how you move.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Absolutely. Breathing can influence how you move.

SPEAKER_02 44:25

And better movement can improve how you feel about your body.

SPEAKER_00 44:29

Yeah, absolutely. Inside and out, right? How you feel about it and and and um and in it. And why I say that is, you know, so much of what we do is this physical work, but we also work on the mindset. And again, I started with the fitness industry's kind of goal. And it's really the fitness marketing's goal is to create shame, is to create self-criticism and self-judgment. And when we constantly criticize and judge ourselves and think that's the way to motivate ourselves, and then we quit over and over again and start and stop and start and stop, it's no wonder why that happens, right? Because the whole entire time we're being cynical towards ourselves. So we're basically becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of like, I'm a failure, I'm overweight, I'm this, I'm disgusting. And then, okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and take the actions to fulfill that. And so instead, what we try to get people to do is go like everything that I do, that's movement, that's mindfulness around taking care of my body is me cultivating more self-care. And when we do that, we start to feel proud of ourselves. We start to feel grateful for what our body can do for us. And that feeling good motivates us and inspires us to continue. It's no longer a loop of criticism and negative feelings that makes us feel like we want to quit. It's not worth it. It becomes the opposite. I like to think about it as like this loop of a spiral that like takes us up. It like elevates us into I did something good, I felt good. Wow, I took care of myself. I'm gonna do that again, repeat all the way up to the point where we become someone who wakes up each day and goes, How do I take better care of me? What does my body need today? Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:05

I love it. Tyler, how can people find you?

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Yeah, you know, I'm all over the social medias and interwebs. You know, we've got our main um social media platform, uh, which is uh just type in WeShape anywhere and you'll find us. Um, you know, myself, Dr. Lisa, we're on there teaching people about movement, teaching people about mindset. We have a podcast as well called the Feeling Lighter Podcast. Notice it's not called the Being Lighter Podcast. It's about learning how to change your mindset so you can feel lighter and start showing up for yourself in a better way. Um, and if anybody ever wants to try out WeShape, uh, you know, we have a simple onboarding survey that we take people through so that we can build a customized routine. Um we made a link for your listeners. It's WeShape.com forward slash beauty of breathing. They can take our movement assessment and they can try WeShape for two weeks for free. And that way you can give it a shwet. See if you like it. If you do, say hi on a coaching call. And if not, uh just cancel and you don't have to pay anything.

SPEAKER_02 46:59

So well, thank you so much for offering us that. What a blessing. I'll share with our our our circle members also. Thank you, thank you. This has been such an amazing talk. Thanks for spending some time with us. Um, and we'll see you guys next Tuesday. Thank you, Tyler.

SPEAKER_00 47:15

Yeah, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 47:16

Bye, everybody.