Hello, breathers! Have you noticed everyone’s been talking about an airborne problem circulating these days?
I sure have. My gym sure has. It’s impacted the way we use
The Tank Goderich, and it’s impacted our training… for the better. See, we’ve dabbled in training our breath for years now. But with heightened attention on air quality and viral load and face masks, we pretty much had to become experts at breathing. It’s a thing.
There’s a right way to breathe and there’s a wrong way, and there are really effective protocols for getting really good at breathing the right way, I’m serious. The Tank is a
“General Human Preparedness” gym – we couldn’t keep saying that unless we stayed on top of mitigating the host of health problems that comes from poor breathing skills, and sharpening our athletic edge by becoming the best at breathing.
Let’s get right into it: did you know that, in a healthy individual, the feeling we call “shortness of breath" is not caused by lack of oxygen?
To put it another way, if you’ve ever put on your mask and gone for a walk and had that kinda panicky feeling of “air hunger”, that wasn’t your lungs crying out for more oxygen. The fact is, there's almost always more than enough oxygen available in your environment to fuel every task you could ever need or want to do.
Studies show that when the average healthy individual is breathing at rest, they’re exhaling 75% of the oxygen they’re inhaling. Even while exercising, when their muscles are firing and their rate of breath is much quicker than usual, they tend to exhale 25% of the oxygen that enters their lungs.
So why does a person breathe more heavily the harder their body works? It’s because of that “other” molecule, carbon dioxide. CO2 is commonly referred to as the “waste” molecule, because as oxygen is burned in the mitochondria of our cells, carbon dioxide is generated. It isn’t the fuel our tissues run on, so we need to breathe it out.
Carbon dioxide isn’t all waste, though – far from it! CO2 is the signal molecule that tells our brain it’s time to breathe. Whenever CO2 saturation goes up in our blood, we feel air hunger, or shortness of breath, regardless of oxygen saturation. This is why masks can make us feel like we aren’t getting enough air: when we wear a mask over our breathing holes, we impede the blow-off of carbon dioxide.
The good news is, there’s still plenty of oxygen in our environment – and likely plenty still left in our blood. The even better news is, it’s probably being delivered to our tissues better than ever, even though it doesn’t feel like it.
More on that topic in our workshop.
For today, what you really need to know is your own CO2 tolerance. What is that? It’s your body and brain’s comfort level with carbon dioxide. The higher your CO2 tolerance, the more at ease you feel when carbon dioxide saturation gently rises in your blood, and the more physiological health- and wellness-tools you have at your disposal. These are life-changing tools: Being able to keep your tissues richly oxygenated, which mitigates a HUGE list of HUGE health problems. Being able to keep your cool when you are faced with a stress trigger. HUGELY important for every human – especially we who have experienced trauma.
More on that at our workshop.It’s time to find your CO2 tolerance.
But that’s the end of this video segment. So tap the button to let me know I have your attention, and I’ll send you the link to the rest of this video and the chance to attend our breath workshop for FREE!
Thank you! Tap it! Thank you!
