Blog

By Rachael Colacino

Grace and grit. Yin and yang. Teammates, friends, sisters.

Ten years ago, teammates Erin Cafaro Mackenzie and Iva Obradovic won the NCAA Championship for Cal Berkeley. Both went on to the Olympic stage, and both have continued their journey as rowing and strength and conditioning coaches.  Now they are joining forces under the POWER SPEED ENDURANCE platform to share their knowledge and hard-earned lessons on how to row and train for the 2000m Olympic Race distance in the Shift WINTER ROW 2K SERIES.

Teammates first

Erin remembers the first day she met Iva, back in 2004. It was one of the first days of the Cal Women’s Rowing Team practice, and the team was running the stairs at the football stadium. A long, hot, grinding workout. The Head Coach, Dave O’Neill, told Erin that summer that a couple heavy hitters would be added to the team this year: two standout rowers from Serbia. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was enough for Erin to want to join the team again. When Erin arrived at the football stadium that day, she noticed two tall, beautiful blond Serbian rowers with impossibly long legs that looked to her like badass Barbie dolls. Iva did not disappoint as she pushed to the front, bringing the level of the whole group up a notch. Erin recognized immediately that Iva was indeed badass and had the drive and tenacity she’d been seeking in a teammate.

Iva remembers their first meeting similarly. Being new to California and away from home for the first time, she was afraid but determined not to show fear. She gathered her courage and set her face in the bravest way she knew possible. She ran those stadium steps as hard as she could. But then there was a short pesky blonde girl – Erin of course – pushing her own limits, pushing Iva’s limits, going hard, huffing and puffing right behind her.

Their friendship was solidified for Iva on the day of their first 2k row test, when she saw Erin, short for a rower by all stereotypical standards, using that grit for which she’s known to row her heart out and then some. A mutual trust and respect had been established. There was no turning back, Iva and Erin formed a friendship. One so strong that they just tell everyone who asks that they are sisters to make it easier to understand.  

Helping athletes become better rowers

After retirement (Erin in 2012 and Iva just this past summer in 2016) both Erin and Iva wanted to continue their journey as coaches. Iva is now the assistant coach for the UCLA Women’s Rowing Team. Erin continues to travel the world coaching athletes and coaches in rowing and strength and conditioning principles. She’s also quite busy helping build the best damn platform for information on training and coaching for sport.  

Erin and Iva have happily watched the rise of rowing in gyms and clubs worldwide and want to augment the growth by sharing their knowledge of what works (and what doesn’t) to guide athletes on a straighter path to their potential. The training they’ve developed for Shift ROW 2K SERIES is a well-rounded program that combines the lessons from their rowing experience in the past 15 years. The program will help address any individual weaknesses, transfer them into strengths, whether physiological, physical or mental. With the help of individual video assessments, Erin and Iva are also able to help each athlete target the movement pattern that has been holding them back and treat it with individualized coaching cues and drill Rx.

But, as Iva and Erin learned early on through their experiences at Cal, one of the biggest advantages you can have in rowing is having a good team to train with, coaches to help you stay accountable and guide you in the right direction, and most importantly teammates to push you and also share in the pain of the hard days. That’s why Erin and Iva wanted to make sure to create a community for the Shift Row 2k Training Series. It’s all part of the process of evolving and growing as an athlete — that vital combination of truth and encouragement. They want all their athletes to see the good that will come from sport in their lives, to practice skill and finesse and also grit and fortitude when needed.  And most of all find joy throughout the process.

The best motivation is information

Every person is a different athlete with a different body and different mentality. Recognizing that truth brings us one step closer to being the best athlete we can be. Our differences make us individuals and give us our own styles. And as Erin’s Olympic coxswain Mary Whipple so aptly puts it, “the best motivation is information.”

Erin and Iva are grace and grit. As athletes, Iva is one of the best technical and graceful rowers on the water. Erin is a bit more feisty, we could say… would row through a brick wall to get to the line first. Yet, ironically as coaches, Iva is known for being the hard-ass and Erin has focused more on movement efficiency and technique.

“Erin would row through a brick wall to reach her goal,” Iva said. “I would walk around it and look at it, brick by brick.”

And that’s the interesting part about rowing. We can be mired in stereotypes, that rowing is a tall person’s sport. With Erin and Iva’s different styles and approaches to rowing and coaching, they hope to show athletes that there are different ways to reach the same goals, and that stereotypes about what kind of athlete can perform should never hold you back.

“You can be whatever the hell you want to be,” Erin said. “Set your goals and make it work.”

By Darrel Wang

Let’s talk about the different types of stress that can (and do) affect us.

First, let’s get started with physical stress – exercise-induced stress, to be more specific. We’ve all been through it… 2 minutes into a 1-Mile Time Trial  where we came out too quickly and can’t maintain this bat-out-of-hell pace. Your mind races with negativity and thoughts of throwing in the towel for the workout. What do you do in that situation? Go home, crawl into bed, and start Monday over tomorrow? Surely not.

There’s a lesson to be learned in every mistake that is made. With the above example, you now know that the pace or effort put forth was not sustainable – lesson learned. Next time, we’ll be a better judge of our own capabilities. This holds even truer when your training partner calls in sick and you’re in the gym all by yourself. In the words of my favorite singing duo, Penny & Sparrow, “Empty rooms are honest places.”

Next, let’s talk about mental stressors: work projects, family issues, or financial burdens. All of these cases are surely to arise at some point or another. If you go into the real world thinking that mother earth and her occupants owe you something, you’re in for a terribly rude awakening.  

“Darrel, if I know stress is going to come knocking on my door, how can I prepare for it?”

To be prepared to face stress, we need to understand that just because circumstances are bad now doesn’t mean that they’ll last forever. But, in all reality, the daunting face of stress will rear its ugly head and hang around for a little bit. This is relatable to sitting in a dark room – don’t worry, your eyes, at some point, will adapt to the darkness. Sometimes it’s acceptable to not go seeking for the pinprick of light in a dark room. Sometimes it’s healthy and character-developing to accept discomfort.

To be clear, none of us are saying that you should let yourself be upset for an extended period of time – enough is enough and you know yourself better than anybody else. Know when to turn the page.

So, to answer your question, the response back to stress knocking at your door would be, “Hey old friend, I wasn’t expecting you today, but come on in.”

Here are some things we can do to manage stress:

1 – Breathe. Deeply and often. 10 breaths can change your whole state of mind.

2 – Expect adversity and expect to overcome it.

3 – Fail. Take notes, create a game plan, and fail better next time.

4 – Meditate. ‘nuff said.

5 – Phone a friend. Cliché, but expressing your feelings with somebody who is close to you may help you unwind and break down the frustrating situation.

6 – Change. If you can’t change the stressor, change the way you feel about it.

We here at Shift care for each and every single one of you. Speaking as somebody who has lost dear friends to depression, reach out. No matter what time, no matter what form of contact, find one of us. Don’t let physical or mental stress get the best of you. Instead, use that stress to help you be the best you.

By Rachael Colacino

As humans, we are always looking for improvement. And runners in particular — well, we are a stubborn bunch. We want to improve in every way. We want to run faster, run farther, and all without pesky injuries that will sideline us and keep us from meeting our goals. But through all these chased goals, race finishing times, complicated training plans, and quests to find the perfect running shoe, rarely do we discuss the actual technique of running. How to run. How to run better so you can run faster and longer. And of course how to run without injury.

And that’s a pretty important place to start.

You’ve heard this cry before, a call to return to a more natural state for athletes and movement, and not just in the running world. But that idea of natural running does not mean running without instruction — it means best utilizing the laws of nature. Here’s how to do just that.

Step 1: Run Tall

Just like with all movement, running starts with good posture, and good posture starts with a solid and organized core. Squeeze your glutes to set your pelvis in a neutral position, and then pull your bellybutton toward your spine to stabilize your center. While running, maintain enough tension to keep your core organized, somewhere around 40 or 50% pressure.

Eyes should be forward, chin parallel to the ground, head neutral. This will not only keep your body in alignment, it will also ensure that you’re not blocking off airflow by tucking your chin as you look down. Pull your shoulder blades down toward your back pockets, spin your hands out, shoulders externally rotated. Again, this will not only keep you aligned but maximize oxygen to your lungs, a process that will be less effective if your shoulders are hunched forward.

Now pick up two dumbbells and run a mile. Just kidding. But still, consider how you’d carry those dumbbells. Did you swing your arms wildly? Or did you hold them close to your body? Consider that when you’re running… your arms do indeed have weight, just like dumbbells. Keep them close to your body, use them for balance. Think of your arms as a counterbalance to your legs, helping you to unload the weight of your body with every step. They mimic what your legs are doing and must work together with that movement, not against it.

Step 2: May the Force be With You

Let’s go back for a moment to the concept of running with the laws of nature for maximum efficiency. Movement comes from the destruction of balance. What causes that movement is one of the strongest forces in the universe: gravity.

To access gravity, you must maintain your good posture from Step 1, and fall forward from your hips. That’s it. However, it is extremely important though that your body stays in alignment. Hips must be below your shoulders and above your ankles. If any link in that chain is out of alignment, you won’t be able to use gravity effectively. That fall forward is your gas pedal. The further forward you fall while maintaining good posture, the faster you’ll run.

Step 3: Avoid Falling on Your Face AND Landing on Your Heels

Let’s talk now about the most active part of running. Up until now, you’ve been holding your body in a static position while gravity does its work. Remember this is a controlled fall, and to avoid falling flat on your face, you’re going to pull your foot off the ground as soon as it lands.

Think of your movement like a wheel in reference to contact points on the ground. What happens at that contact point determines how fast and how efficiently you’re moving. A wheel that’s fully inflated and therefore moving quickly has a single contact point with the ground. A wheel that’s deflated and moving less efficiently has a larger footprint on the ground. If you’re falling, moving fast, and landing underneath your body, you’ll keep moving quickly. On the other hand, if you land in front of a forward-moving body, you’ll slow it down or stop movement completely. That’s what happens when you heel strike. Focus instead on landing on the ball of your foot, underneath your hips.

With all this talk of landing, it’s tempting to focus on your feet while you’re running. Don’t. Instead, shift your focus to your hamstrings, one of the largest and most powerful muscle groups in your body. Focus on pulling your foot off the ground quickly every time you feel it touch the ground. The goal is to create less contact time, so pull your foot off the ground as quickly as possible.

Wearing shoes with padding and thick heels? Remember that cushioning is interfering with your body’s proprioception. By the time your brain registers that you’ve landed, it’s already too late. Try running in socks indoors or outside on a grassy or protected surface. Start out with 5 sets of 50m at a time, not for speed but for technique. Notice how your feet land, how mobile and supple (or not) your feet feel. You’ll always run faster in shoes because of the protection they provide from dangerous objects, but in addition to improving your mechanics, the best way to become a better runner is to strengthen your feet.

Step 4: Change How You Think About Cadence

Most of the time when runners discuss cadence, we’re talking stride rate or steps per minute. But with all our focus on pulling our feet off the ground, avoid thinking about strides or steps. Focus instead of the singular action of pulling your feet off the ground.

So how then does cadence come into play? The shorter the distance between where your feet land and the quicker your cadence, the faster and more efficiently you run. If your cadence is low, you have a long stride and are therefore more likely to be landing in front of your body. In the worst case, this means landing on a locked-out knee which not only slows you down, but will cause injuries over time as the impact of up to three times your body weight puts extra pressure on your muscles, bones and joints.

To practice running with a fast cadence, purchase a metronome or download a metronome app on your phone — there are many. Minimum recommended cadence is 180 pulls per minute. Start there, pulling each foot UP off the ground with your hamstrings every time you hear a beep. If the beeping is too distracting, set your metronome to half (in this case 90 beats per minute) and focus on one foot at a time so it’s easier to find the rhythm, switching every so often. Pull in place, then maintain good posture, break balance at your hips and fall forward to start your motion. Pull only as high as you need to stay on cadence.

Step 5: Bring Yourself Back

Meditation is the practice of bringing your mind back to focus when it starts to wander. What meditation isn’t is controlling your mind all day long, every day. The same thing applies here with running technique. Your attention will wander, but it’s all about bringing it back to the fundamentals.

As you run, remember that pain is our greatest teacher. Listen to the feedback from your body. Sharp acute pain is not normal under any circumstances, whether it happens during your run or after you are finished and your adrenaline has quieted. Listen to those pain signals and become curious about how to solve the pain pattern with changing your form rather than depending on pain meds or the latest icy hot concoction or even your physical therapist. You hold the ability to fix and heal your pain by simply listening to your body and making conscious changes to your form.  

If this is your first exposure, start with the basics as we’ve outlined here. The difficulty is typically in maintaining posture and fast cadence as you start to fatigue. When you do start to feel tired, reset and bring yourself back to your good body position. Focus on using gravity by falling forward in an aligned position. And pull your feet off the ground as soon as they land. Repeat, over and over, until it becomes your natural way of running.

By Brian MacKenzie

Stress affects everything.

When we train for endurance events, we tax our systems, causing muscle damage and physiological changes. While your brain knows the difference between 400 meter repeats and that overdue project you need to finish at work, your body doesn’t. Work stress, relationship stress, stress about the unending tragedies in this world all contribute to keeping you in a heightened sympathetic state – the anxious mindset of fight or flight.

The problem is that most of us, myself included, live constant sympathetic lives. We’re stressed all day long and then we train with intensity to buffer off the stress. This is problematic. Not immediately so, but over time as the chemical reactions from training and the stress in our lives compile, we may not be aware of the damage we’re inflicting until our bodies completely lose the ability to recover.

Lucky for us, nature provides inherent balance. Let’s take a lion and gazelle for example. For the lion hunting the gazelle, both animals are in a sympathetic state. The difference is that the lion wants to be in that stressful situation. The gazelle does not.

And once that race is over, nature restores balance as both the lion and gazelle (assuming she escaped) down-regulate and become parasympathetic almost immediately. We see the same abilities in the animals in our lives. Dogs bark at the sight of a possible intruder and then relax. A dog that barks all day will have behavioral problems, largely due to existing in a constant heightened state.

We human animals are no different. If we’re paying attention, nature in her infinite wisdom tells us when to downshift to parasympathetic responses. The question is whether we can hear her call. My guess is that boredom and swapping technology for experiences our environment are severely limiting our ability to remove ourselves from stressful situations. In fact, there’s a small but growing movement that believes avoidance with the surface of the Earth may be a major contributor to physiological dysfunction and chronic stress. One study, for example, found that contact with the Earth’s surface electrons may be an untapped health resource, one that can be accessed simply by being outside and barefoot.

As author of Sapiens Yuval Harari so finely put it, there is nothing “more dangerous than an intelligent, bored animal.” When we’re bored, when we have to live vicariously through celebrity culture or what the media has dredged up about presidential candidates, we become emotionally involved in events for which we have no attachment. We have no daily interaction with natural sympathetic and parasympathetic shifts, so we manifest tragedy and refuse to release ourselves.

Children, though, are almost never bored. As a child, if I was bored I went outside and explored. The rule in my house was I had to be home when the streetlights first shone. I was fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood with a forest, with friends I could explore with and skateboard with. When I wasn’t outside in nature – when I was confined indoors and bored – I become very destructive.

If we are in nature and more in tune with our environment, we can find balance. After vacation, everyone returns revived and refreshed – the parasympathetic state. When I arrive in Hawaii, for example, it takes me three days to down regulate from what can feel like my standard 800 miles per hour, when I’m trying to solve all my issues at once and commit to more than I can manage. Hawaii gives me a reality check every time; a reminder to spend time on myself, to explore, to sleep. It’s natural law that we return to those patterns.

And speaking of busy, reframe your thoughts. Busy is unorganized. You have to enjoy your life, what you’re doing. Living is not plowing unheeded through life’s list of unpleasant tasks. Look at the process and understand. Being busy just to be busy, working at a job you don’t like to buy things you don’t need to live a life you’re not living – what’s the point? Find your balance.

For years, Unscared has been a word we use to describe our athletes. Our coaching style. Our philosophy. How we approach training. How we approach thinking. How we approach life.

Unscared is the art of dealing with fear. We all have fears in our lives and in training. It’s fear of injury. Fear of heavy weights. Fear of gaining weight or not gaining weight. Fear of eating carbs, the fear of not eating carbs. Fear of short intervals. Fear of distance events. Fear of high intensity.  Fear of not meeting our own expectations. The fear of our own limits as humans, and the fear of not testing those limits.

Unscared is not about being unafraid. There is no such thing, we would literally die crossing the street without fear present. It’s how we manage fear. It’s a mindset of being open and prepared to deal with fear as it comes. It’s a conscious choice to act in spite of the pressures of self-preservation.

At Shift, our goal is to provide you with a practical guide on how to acknowledge those fears, and then how to deal with them. We’ll provide our perspectives and listen to yours. Because in the end you don’t have to suffer to find what you are searching for.

Are you ready to acknowledge your fears and be #UnScared?

By Brian MacKenzie

Earlier this month, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the poetry tucked into his song lyrics. After weeks of silence — no issued statements or acknowledgment of the award, save for a brief mention on his website that was removed — Dylan mentioned to a reporter from The Telegraph that yes, he’ll be at the Nobel Prize ceremony, “if it’s possible.”

While only speaking from our own experience and without judgment or interpretation, Dylan’s silence long silence and reticent acceptance flies in the face of society’s current fascination with play for approval. And we identify with you, Mr. Dylan.

Seeking acceptance for doing what we love is different from pursuing our passions for the sake of satisfying that fire that burns within. For some, the achievement of races and competitions is crossing the finish line. There’s an identity inherent in finishing a marathon or an Ironman. For others, the achievement was set in motion just by signing up for that race, by committing to learn from the training process. It doesn’t matter your goal – what matters is your understanding of your own reasons why and learning from that process.

As Endurance athletes and coaches, when we look at what we’ve done with the Endurance training movement in general, our sports have never been perceived as sports of position. Running especially has been something athletes just do. Suffering included.

But there’s a learning process to training, not only of your body but of yourself. In anything we do, from sitting down to picking something up, to moving across a horizontal plane to climbing over something, we make innate shapes. We see people making shapes as they move, transforming in and out; speed and distance limited only by our fitness, our mobility and by the strength of our minds. Everything plays a role in how we move. When range of motion is limited, when we try to force something that isn’t there, we experience pain. But when we allow ourselves to move properly, to feel that pain and be present with it, everything connects. We are nothing more than a reflection of our openness and our willingness to learn from everything. Everything is connected.

As Endurance athletes, we fixate on the clock. Our mile times, our race PRs. But running a four-minute or five-minute mile is not a complete definition of your fitness. Technique and strength, mobility and flexibility sit astride your reasons for wanting to run a mile that fast. And when ego takes a front seat, the entire goal is headed on a collision course.

In the end, it all comes down to the behaviors and thoughts that mold who we become. Our posture is reflective of our physical and emotional strength. You don’t see the strong and powerful lion with weak posture. Healthy animals have healthy posture and healthy movement. We are no different. There’s inherent freedom in understanding yourself and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Learn from yourself at the deepest levels.

So back to our friend and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan, whose radical personality has always flown counter to mainstream culture. While we can only speculate, his long silence before acknowledging the praise of an audience may have been a deep gut check on his passion, his talent, his motivation, his reasons for why in everything he does. Or not. No matter what Dylan’s reasons, his introspection reminds all of us to pause and discover something that may be difficult to consider: that there’s no real difference between Dylan’s perceived hesitation and our need to run a 100-mile race. It doesn’t mean we can’t go out and do it – but it’s a deep gut check on the reasoning behind it.

By Rachael Colacino

One of the first lessons children learn is to identify shapes. We learn squares, rectangles, circles, and call them out to fit them into the puzzle of our small, developing worlds. As adults, shape identification moves to environment. Buildings, rooms, furniture, backyards. What will fit where, directions for moving around and between shapes in our world, the size and shape of our homes and workplaces and where we socialize.

Shapes manifest in us, in our bodies and in our movement. We are flexible machines capable of shifting patterns through action and within environment. As athletes, we learn movement techniques and begin to realize the potential for the shapes our bodies make. Beware though. Technique is a siren, whose song can lull you into thinking there’s one perfect way. While technique itself does not change from person to person, the shape one athlete assumes is not necessarily the same another will take on.

How you move your body in and out of shapes communicates who you are and what you think your relationship is to the world and people around you. So then if there’s power inherent in those shapes, there’s also strength too.

Nature stores power in our shapes, and these relay quiet power externally and internally. Let’s take yoga’s relatively simple Warrior Pose, for example. It’s a strong shape, one leg back, one leg forward, hips facing forward, and chest lifted. Physically, the pose fortifies feet, hamstrings, quadriceps and glutes, as well as strengthens the core. Mentally, the pose also relays power: the stance can increase inner strength and courage, while allowing you to open up to yourself and others.

For endurance athletes, who move their bodies in and out of shapes over the course of several hours, those shapes communicate to the world about your preparation and your performance. Strong foundational shapes not only keep you in a strong and efficient position, but can be a competitive advantage. Imagine the psychological damage to your fatigued opponent who notices your relaxed facial muscles, your open shoulders and your upright posture.

Are the shapes your body makes strong or weak? When you stand up under load, are you squared, all angles and rigid like the mighty rectangle? Or are you circular, round and soft? And what happens to your viewpoint of those shapes as you move over distances? Are you moving forward effortlessly, like the fluid circle? Or are you jerky and halted, like a rectangle rolling down a hill?

Train for ideal shapes. Your endurance event should finish the same way you started it. You cannot outrun or out-train bad technique. In the end, it all comes down to how well you can hold the shape (or position) in anything we do. So no matter how long, hard, or heavy, once the standard shape breaks so do we.

By Cody Burkhart

 

The Inception Moment within our Tarantino Plot.

Tick tock, tick tock. The seconds tick away.

Tick tock, tick tock. You feel the urge to gulp. You swallow, but you don’t take in a breath.

Tick tock, tick tock. Your diaphragm begins to spasm. You dig deep and don’t give up.

Tick tock, tick tock. Suddenly you get a “second wind” and can’t explain it. Riding the wave you go further.

Tick tock, tick tock. The pain builds, your body is screaming at you and the world… begins to close in around you.

Tick tock, tick tock. You gasp for breath and click stop on the timer.

When you first started your max breath hold homework, some of these steps may never have occurred. You may have gotten to the “gulp” phase and called it quits. You may have gotten freaked out by the chest spasms. Hell, the idea of a second wind in the middle of a breath hold is disconcerting enough for many people that they pull the plug out of astonishment. The funny thing about what you were challenged to do was this inert need for competition… engrained in us as animals. A fight for survival? Sure. More so, though, it’s the fight against those seconds ticking away on the clock in your hand. Silly how competitive we are, but thank goodness.

Your head says “Can I beat my previous time? Can I make it to the next 15-second threshold? The next minute mark? What are my actual limitations?”

This is exactly why the first week of the next experiment I want to embark on with you began with no goal and limited input. I simply said “max time” and your body read “challenge yourself to go farther every day.” What we did was let you feel out your body and also aided in the elimination of the headspace modifier of this activity. In the results of our first test, I mentioned that my mental fortitude is a likely impact on my five percent performance increase. This mental driver will always exist, but the more we do something the less overpowering this element can become.

As an example… I can get some massive gains out of an athlete who has never squatted before over the first cycle. Gains that seem inhuman. Much of the benefits come from actively training, others from the quality of the applied programming, and still others from motor patterning and the skill adaptations benefited by myelin. On top of all this, there is the mental acceptance of the “newbie” that what they thought was possible is far from what they actually have in the tank. As time goes on from here we start seeing plateaus… and the plateaus give zero fucks as to how much you mentally want to will yourself to that next level. At this point, it’s the applied methods (programming, timing, nutrition, and supplementation, etc.) that start to turn the tide. So… we had you breathe and played a sleight of hand: you thought we were continuing the diaphragm test for improving gas exchange in your body, but while the left brain was getting its rational rule set… the right brain was dreaming of its limits and chasing the numbers, the seconds, on the clock. By now you have likely found those limits on a rough order of magnitude.

I started my hold times at just over the 2minute mark this past week. I willed myself from 1:30, where I miserably wanted to stop, to over 2min on the first effort. Each day I since I have willed myself further and further. Until I got back to my current limit, not my lifetime PR. Respect the difference. You may have made even more massive leaps percentage wise than my 25% or less, but you are now likely at a point where fighting for inches, for split seconds, is all you can do. Now we can start learning and playing with what applications generate success and failure. Now we can see physiological adaptation instead of being hampered by the data skewing psychological buffering. Remember: your headspace controls your hypothalamus. To understand the physiological modification to the system, we need to first get the input from our hypothalamus (the fight or flight response) consistent. Controlling our experimental variables is a must if we want solid, applicable data on the back side.

Now, before we jump into the “Five degrees of separation” methodology for our next experiment, lets Tarantino this and jump back to key baseline knowledge hidden in the tick tock intro…

What’s with the gulp?

I am confident in assuming we all accept that our inhalation is trying to get necessary O₂ into our bodies and our exhalation is trying to clean out the end result of waste CO₂. While we have touched on energy cycles in previous posts and your middle school science teacher tried to give them substance to you once upon a time, it’s more likely that I can ask you what process creates oxygen from carbon dioxide in plants than I can ask you how the body produces CO₂ from the oxygen we inhale. It’s a scary reality that we live in our bodies, but usually don’t understand how they really work. Don’t take this as a stab, the fact of the matter is it’s actually not a simple question to answer if you listen to a professor crank through it. And now… for the Inception moment within our Tarantino plot to clear this up:

First things first… Oxygen helps but is not a requirement for your body to produce CO₂. This is precisely what we touched on with conversations of aerobic (oxygen rich) and anaerobic (oxygen less) energy systems. We use oxygen as an agent for combustion. Your head likes to see combustion as explosions and flamethrowers and so you may not believe we run on combustion, but this is because of the slow rate of the reactions occurring inside your body. Irony, however, proves this knowledge is already engrained in us:

If I told you to guess what happens to someone as they start working out when viewed through an infrared camera (the blue and red images), you could tell me that they would start blue and would start to turn red.

You probably participate in a “warm-up” before activity?

Heat stroke is a concern of training in hot environments.

The heat is coming from somewhere. Combustion is a chemical reaction in the presence of oxygen that creates heat and light. You are a combustion engine, folks. And, just like your car engine, oxygen helps light that candle. This is when you need to remember the basics of chemistry and the building blocks of our world: atoms and molecules.

Molecules are the combination of different elements. O₂ is just two cool Oxygen atoms bonded together. Carbon dioxide adds a third, Carbon, atom to the fiesta. In simple terms, a carbohydrate molecule (glucose) is six Carbons, twelve Hydrogens, and six Oxygens: C₆H₁₂O₆. A fat molecule is comprised of a glycerol (three Carbons, three Oxygens, and eight Hyrdogens) with a fatty acid attached to it (one Hydrogen, two Oxygens, a Carbon, and our particular fatty acid chain of atoms) that bond together to make a triglyceride and water. Proteins come in all sorts of flavors as well, with a base set of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen atoms (and sometimes Sulphur). The point of all this is you can see that hidden within every single one of our macro nutrients is Oxygen (as well as Carbon and Hydrogen). Breathe it in or consume it… either way it’s in our system and ready to rock.

From here, you likely know, or can at least make an educated guess, that Oxygen is fed to your cells and Carbon Dioxide is released, in turn. It is with open arms we welcome the cell powerhouse: mitochondria. Loosely put, the mitochondria are located in the floating jelly of the cell, cyctoplasm, of a cell and use particular enzymes to produce energy output, which is exactly why they are called the powerhouse. To do so, the mitochondria participate in the Kreb’s Cycle, also called the Citric Acid Cycle. Prepare yourself as we dive in because I’m going to ping pong around like Forest Gump, but I promise to tie it all together in the end:

 

Mitochondria, located inside the cell and suspended in the cytoplasm, is the powerhouse of the cell. The Kreb’s Cycle is hosted within the mitochondria (extended information and image available here).

In rough terms, the Kreb’s cycle is run off Acetyl-CoA (acetyl coenzyme A – an acetyle group attached to two Carbon atoms). Two molecules of Acetyl-CoA (A-CoA) input into the cycle produce waste H₂0 and CO₂, while generating high energy particles (6 NADH and 2 FADH₂) to run the cell and GTP that eventually produces further ATP. Along the way we see many enzymes react before the process completes its circle (eight if you are wondering). The circular nature is important because the first step of the process requires our fresh two-carbon molecule Acetyl-CoA to combine with the final 4-carbon molecule from the cyclic Kreb’s cycle called Oxoaloacetic Acid. In light terms, we toss more tinder onto the coals to start the fire back up. In terms for the other nerds out there:

1. Acetyl-CoA bonds with Oxaloacetate to form a 6-Carbon citrate and our coenzyme is released
2. Citrate becomes isocitrate via a dehydration and hydration process and goes through oxidative carboxylation, fancy way of saying it kicks off Carbon (that forms CO₂) and Hydrogen (that reduces to NADH) to form a 5-Carbon Ketoglutarate
3. The Ketoglutarate, with some sweet over-watch support from a CoA molecule, is stripped of another Carbon molecule and enzyme reaction produces a 4-Carbon Succinyl-CoA as well as ATP, NADH, and C0₂
4. Succinyl-CoA loses its CoA fire-team member via another enzyme reaction to form a 4-Carbon Succinate and, as a bonus of this process, GTP (a high energy version of ATP) is created
5. Succinate gets dehydrated by the next enzyme and becomes a 4-Carbon Furmate
6. Furmate gets hydrated by yet another enzyme to form a 4-Carbon Malate
7. And a final enzyme reaction dehydrates the molecule again to turn our Malate into the original 4-Carbon oxaloacetate

If you want to go ahead and memorize the steps, there you have them and I encourage you to chase what completes you. Big picture considered, however, I want you to see that this cycle produces Carbon waste that becomes Carbon Dioxide twice during the Kreb’s cycle. But… “what the shit is Acetyl-CoA and where did it come from?” Right? (And the super nerds – “hey you missed the fact that Kreb’s cycle actually converts Pyruvate into Acetyl-CoA first”… seriously you are taking all the fun out of my Forest Gump analogy) And so we bounce…

Before we get to the nerd concerns, let’s talk about those top end inputs and where we are going, again. As humans we suck in oxygen and stuff our faces with macronutrients (Carbohydrates, Fats, and Proteins). I made all this hub-bub about what makes them up and then just kind of walked away from it (if you think it makes me look crazy, try thinking like this every day and you will understand why no one understands my text messages). I was leaving it for later, in favor of taking a backwards approach to figuring out how our exhaled CO₂ is produced from our Oxygen input. The Kreb’s cycle helped us see where the C0₂, that is eventually pushed out of the cell and carried via our blood stream to exit our bodies in our lungs (we will get to blood and gas bonding in a later post), was being made. So, onto the next:

The nerds were right to interrupt, but timing is, or so I am told. We showed how the Citric Acid cycle’s cyclic fire is fed by A-CoA tinder, we just didn’t talk about breaking the branches up to make the tinder. A new step emerges:

1. 3-Carbon Pyruvate undergoes catabolism to form Acetyl-CoA (and boy is this a broad step)

Forewarning: while we went into depth of the Kreb’s cycle, we are going to save these other cycles for a later time and cover them just at a 30k foot view for now. The intent is not to overload you too much all at once.

 

Proteins, Polysaccharides (Carbs), and Fats each have difference paths to making the Pyruvate necessary to oxidize into A-CoA aka to feed the Kreb’s Cycle. Proteins get really tricky with Amino Acid Degradation because while some amino acids directly degrade to Pyruvate (what we need in our new step zero), others can degrade to many of the other carbon molecules we covered in the Kreb’s cycle. Protein can also harness the power of Gluconeogenesis where its Pyruvate variations can be converted into glucose when our body is running low on natural stores. This glucose, like the glucose formed from the carbs we intake, can undergo Glycolysis (oxygen not required) to generate more Pyruvate and energy. Lastly, fat undergoes beta oxidation such that fatty acid molecules are broken down in the cell cytosol (the jelly) to form A-CoA. Now we know how our macronutrients are forming CO₂ in our bodies and how it’s possible to produce this CO₂ without mentioning oxygen. The molecules themselves have the carbon and oxygen built-in to produce the waste gas in the Kreb’s Cycle. So why do we even worry about oxygen?

Wood can burn, but, with added oxygen, it can bonfire.

Oxygen is the oxidizer: the agent used to convert our Pyruvate into A-CoA inside the mitochondria to kick off our Kreb’s cycle. Without it our only remaining solution for energy is Fermentation of Pyruvate in the jelly (a long, slow and inefficient process in comparison). So our body got smart and decided to use what our atmosphere gave us and inhaled… letting Oxygen light its fire.

In its most basic form what we just proved was how our CO₂ out is controlled by our O₂ in:

C₆H₁₂O₆ (glucose) + 6O₂ (oxidizer) = (combusts to produce) = 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + heat (aka energy)

The rooms jars… you wake up from the dream, Inception moment over. How are you feeling? Ready to continue? Let’s…

Your body is producing CO₂ as part of the wondrous factory going on inside the cells, largely from the Oxygen you inhale. As the levels rise, your body chemistry changes and chemoreceptors in the body pick up on this fact. It’s an early warning system. The cool thing is that your body has spare Oxygen stashed all over the place, so it still has some tricks up its sleeve. In “nice guy” mode it says: “hey, you should consider taking a breath, I’ll remind you… it uses this guy [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][GULP!].” But “La Resistance” must go on.

We fight the gulp and then our body starts to get a little more affront with its approach. We have spent weeks learning the benefits of the diaphragm and how little energy it requires to push/pull massive amounts of air… our bodies are way ahead of us and, struggling to keep up with the rising levels of CO₂ and figuring out that its O₂ reserves are plummeting, it starts to jump start our diaphragm. This is when the convulsing begins.

Tick tock, tick tock. Suddenly you get a “second wind”

At this point down breath hold road, body starts pulling the ace up the sleeve or should I say… up the spleen. This entire time the spleen has been holding onto a bonus reserve. The body tried gentle, it tried rough, now its straight into desperation. It spends its “life savings,” as it were in its attempt to save its life, to give you up to another 15% more high quality O₂. The system can keep working and it feels alive again: the second wind. You become in-human in the most humanly way possible… brought back from the dead.

 

And then the train starts to go off the rails. The acidic environment change of the blood is troublesome and the brain, recognizing it’s the biggest consumer of glucose and (by everything we proved today with oxidation and combustion) therefore the biggest consumer of oxygen (20%), starts compartmentalizing… aka shutting down. The clock is running out and the lights are going dim. You start losing capacity to outthink your brain and its takes over. Either it knocks you out or triggers enough pain receptors to get your attention, either way it’s going to attempt to take a breath.

Most of us will never get to the point of a blackout, laying on our backs trying to set our previous PR, but in a real-life scenario you need to know what’s going on to stay alive.

…this flashback approach brought to you buy Mr. Tarantino.

Cliffhangers are becoming all the rage with my blog and since Tarantino was such an inspiration, we might as well pay tribute to his favorite Grindhouse style and leave the resolution for the next post. A good story, though, leaves it really edgy on the way out. So, without further ado:

How well we react to this growing level of CO₂ can be trained just like any of the other common signaling changes in our body. Uniquely enough (or not so uniquely after what we continue to learn) our ability to manage CO₂ has been linked directly to positive health benefits across the board. This makes total sense because of all the process work required to effectively produce energy in our bodies. If we are good at managing the waste, the system doesn’t get gummed up. One test of your relationship with CO₂ that you can perform on your own is the Control Pause Test (as part of the Buteyko method). It only takes a few steps:

1. Spend 5-7min breathing normally, while sitting up
2. On your final exhalation, hold your breath and start a timer.
3. When you feel the first signs of discomfort (indicating that your CO₂ levels are high enough to trigger your chemoreceptors) aka the gulp, take a breath and stop the timer.
4. Compare your number to the following:
   1. 1-10s = Critically sick
   2. 10-20s = Sick
   3. 20-40s = Typical (modern) “healthy” state aka underperforming
   4. 40-60s = Good health
   5. Over 60s = Ideal health

 

Try it out and see where you stand. Think about ways that you can improve this function from what we have talked about so far. Start feeling out your body and working your way through the “Tick. Tock.” steps we have covered. Become more involved in your body and aware of its responses. Next week we are going to use all of these new found talents for processing how our body manages Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide to tackle a highly tested method (Apnea tables) and see if we can play “Innovator” with it and come up with a hybridized test program to boost our performance, yet again.

Inhale in.

Now exhale out.

Now inhale in, deep with the belly.

And hold….

By Cody Burkhart

 

Don’t Run with Scissors, Go Run with Lizards

Today we begin our story in the jungles of Costa Rica…

Straight out of biblical reference, the Basilisk Lizard, often referred to as the “Jesus Christ” Lizard, is capable of running on water. It’s a pretty wicked thing to watch (and yes I’ve got you covered on that front, but it’s more than a cool display of a featherweight, speed demon: it’s a survival adaptation. Its dominant food source is winged insects, which have intelligently adapted over the years to be faster and more agile. Insects like the dragon fly (which has its own awesome repertoire of evasion skills) don’t hang out long. Ever tried to catch a butterfly? You can get lucky, sure, but most of the time you look like a crazy person trying to catch handfuls of air.

To adapt to its predatory needs, the Basilisk has evolved to have long toes on its hind feet that extend when they are in the water, along with flaps of skin between those toes, effectively increasing the surface area of their feet on the water. Their fast speed mixes with the splaying of these custom foot mechanics to produce pockets of air under their feet that generate sufficient lift to overcome the light weight of their bodies.

The result is awe-inspiring, but, even more, this adaptation is crucial to their survival. Either they adapted, or they perished. The cruel reality of being an animal. Funny thing is…

Human

1. A member of the primate genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other apes by a large brain and the capacity for speech. (Definition from the free dictionary)

… you are, by definition, an animal as well. That large brain often comes with an even more massive ego: an ego that makes us forget that “adaptive” isn’t simply a two-dollar word for our resumés.

Adaptation is an interesting thing when you really think about it. While it is an organic process under the concepts of evolution, I don’t aim to make this about Creationism v. Darwinism (precisely why our good buddy the “Jesus Christ” lizard is the ideal candidate – insert your favorite “winky face” emoji here). Instead let’s examine the facts. Animals have a very effective tool toward the organic supply of adaptation… either they change to match the modifications of their surroundings or their genes, and skill sets, don’t get passed on. Why? Because “dead.” Humans, however, use that big noggin to think up innovative solutions instead of adaptations. There is a DISTINCT difference here folks. What do I mean? Let’s play animal v. human:

Cold Polar Bear? Extra fat and thick fur.

Cold Johnny? The winter collection at North Face.

Hot Kangaroo? Cooling of surface veins using their own spit.

Hot Sally? Industrial Big Ass Fan.

We look pretty smart. I mean,  it’s not like we can go Polar Bear because “Society” doesn’t condone anything but flat stomachs and six packs. And, if my massive pools of sweat from training are already problematic to people at my gym, heaven forbid I start spitting on myself in my next meeting while living on what appears to be Magma Fields, TX. But for S&Gs… let’s keep playing:

No water for months Camel? Internal storage tanks.

No water for months Sam? Um… dead.

If you were about to answer, “Bottled water” or “Humanitarian aid” you get a gold star for out-of-the-box thinking even though you get my point. Innovation is wonderful, but it has limitations and it also has accessibility issues. The entire point is that if your actual, physiological system isn’t providing the necessary change to solve the environmental condition of concern then you are, quite literally, exposed. And as Mike Tyson says:

“Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”

So what does this seemingly nihilist point of view on human innovation have to do with our test and the analysis of the results of our diaphragmatic breathing protocol? Let’s play the game one more time:

Extremely low oxygen environment Trout? Buoyancy-providing swim bladder that is filled with oxygen released from hemoglobin when blood pH is lowered, reducing the workload required to stay afloat.

Extremely low oxygen environment Rhonda? Unconscious during a very inopportune moment.

We are full circle. Rhonda has a big problem and, as it turns out, we have some new knowledge that might just save her life. Along the winding path of our first experiment, numerous topics were covered regarding breathing and its relationship with the heart and our metabolic pathways. Juxtaposing Rhonda with the trout was no accident. It likely forced you to imagine Rhonda under water (zero oxygen is, after all, an extremely low value). Now, Rhonda could hold her breath and likely make it a couple minutes before blacking out if she stayed still, but chances are she is in a high workload scenario: aka “Panic.” Fear, and its physiological impacts, is something we will jump more into as we discuss the parasympathetic v. sympathetic nervous system responses that we dabbled in when we discussed the Hypothalamus, but for now let’s limit our view of the problem to the core of our test. If we could change the physiological backbone of Rhonda, we won’t be able to guarantee success, but we sure can increase the odds. As I pointed out last week, even 5% can be a big deal under the right circumstances.

By providing Rhonda, or yourself, with a more efficient metabolic system, more effective management of gas exchange, and a larger starting reservoir of oxygen – all made possible by training our diaphragm and applying its use to our training – we are creating an adaptation.

If I use innovation, I could use the miracles of modern society and provide her with pure oxygen for 30 minutes prior to her low oxygen spell and, plausibly, double her breath hold time. If we examine the world record times for static apnea (limp-noodle breath hold under water) we find an insane 11:54 record by Branko Petrovic squaring off against the mind-melting, pure-oxygen record from Aleix Segura of 24:03 (mind you, this came only 12 days after he previously set it at 23:09 in February of this year – looks like someone has some adaptation response all right). If we use this as our solution we simply just need to bring an oxygen tank around with us and breathe it for 30 minutes before every time we hold our breath. Easy peasy (he says, dripping wet with its over concentration of sarcasm).

If I instead work on adapting my body to be more efficient, I won’t suddenly halve my exposure risk with some 30-second training mask intervals or focused diaphragm breathing skill work in variant positions. However, just in teaching people how to breathe with the diaphragm properly in camps that I have run, I have watched people go from barely holding their breath for a minute to almost 3 minutes over the course of one exercise. With practice and application of the techniques I have, myself, even broken the 4-minute mark. This is where that large brain comes in handy. It has a significant processing power that allows it to assess the system surrounding it and start making physiological changes real-time. Otherwise, my whole college career in Colorado would have been an unrelenting episode of altitude sickness.

You may be scratching your head right now because I just, in many more words, said your body naturally adapts, which counters my whole original argument. It should, but moreso, it would if it wasn’t for the bare necessities.

The human body isn’t wasteful like we are. It has a discrete methodology to its madness. If it doesn’t make small physiological adaptations it will risk being damaged, but the guy wheezing next to you on your mountain tram tour, as he finishes his third Starbucks pastry, washing it down with a double shot venti, extra caramel sauce, pumpkin pie melted milk shake, is handling the altitude just well enough to survive. Toss in an emergency need to run, though, and my point manifests itself. Adapting can be a bare minimum scenario: the bare necessities. In fact, prior to the sustainable, physiological changes of long-term altitude acclimation, our body shortcuts the living hell out of the problem. It increases its breath rate (the return of our good friend hyperventilation), experiences vasoconstriction (turning off blood supply to non-essential functions), increases heart rate (managing the flow of gas exchange to make up for the quick breath and high pressure requirements of the constricted veins), and even starts to slow down digestion (good ole parasympathetic). Sounds awfully eerie considering what we found out in our test, doesn’t it? Almost like our test was designed to attack these same issues, teaching us how to overcome their natural occurrence as we begin to suck wind during our row intervals? Light bulb moment. Light bulb moment, indeed.

If we are simulating this exposure in our training, our body is going to have the same choices you have when dropped directly onto the top of powder on your winter ski trip to Steamboat: stay entirely in a negative-response, reactive state or start to improve its overall mechanics. That means if altitude acclimation can garnish me increased production of aerobic enzymes, increased numbers of mitochondria, and more dense concentrations of capillaries in my ever-so-crucial skeletal muscle tissue, just to name a few, and my test showed signs of my body reacting equivalently to our interval methodology… well, you don’t need to live at the top of the Rockies with the goats to promote adaptation, and you don’t need to train with a bag over your head. You can activate the intelligent design of your diaphragm and begin unlocking hidden powers that change the literal expression of your genes.

Train smarter. Meld the worlds of human ingenuity and biological adaptation. Don’t run with scissors, go run with the lizards.

Before we disband for the week, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t leave you with something to do: right now, unannounced (unless you are driving, operating heavy machinery, etc.), lay on the floor with a running timer and PERFORM A MAX TIME BREATH HOLD. Record your results. Then, throughout the week, continue to apply your interval training (2-3x) just like the testing environment. As an addition, focus on your diaphragm and breathing mechanics as often as you can. If you catch yourself in the car chest breathing, fix it. If you start rib cage heaving during your workout, diaphragm that shit. EACH DAY record how long you hold your breath in the same, laying-still configuration. Don’t forget. EVERY DAY. You will need this information when we jump off yet another cliff next week.

By Cody Burkhart

 

 

Five percent. Doesn’t sound like much at first glance

 

Today we are going to get heady… in more ways than one. Might as well kick off the fun with a little nerdy dad-joke: my personal specialty.

What did my post row-interval pissed-off brain say to my nociceptor?

“You’re a real pain.”

Over the past week you have been digging into your test results, possibly collecting a few more data points to increase the quality of your experiment. You also probably got a few brief moments to gloss over some of the research topics I assigned as “speed dating” homework. We bought the yarn, studied the pattern, now let’s make us a quilt.

To begin fine tuning the analysis section I will refer back to my deltas that I posted last week:

 

The green column of distance variation pre and post the training mask interval testing was identified as our dominant measure. The intent in picking this measure goes back to the original question that put us on this path:

“If I strengthen the contractile function of the diaphragm, do I become super human or should we just let sleeping babes lie?”

I averaged a 348.5 meters per minute row interval over the four efforts on my baseline test. My resulting increase in row performance per interval (reminder: this is not considering any of my real-time data, but only compares where I started to where I finished in my re-test) was 17.75m. To solve for each of these all I did was add all my distances up for my baseline and divided by four, similarly I summed all my interval (green column) deltas from my post testing and divided by four. If I take the change I saw (17.75m), divide it by where I started (348.5m), and multiply by 100%… I will be solving for the percentage increase/decrease seen over the course of my experiment; in this case I saw approximately a 5% increase in my performance. There is nothing fancy about the math. There are tons of other statistical formulas we could run, but we are not trying to solve for pi to 100 decimal places here… we are trying to get a general grasp of what happened to our system (our bodies) by applying a new breathing tactic.

Five percent. Doesn’t sound like much at first glance. If I told you that you would get 5% off your next purchase you may not be moved to find this a considerable benefit on, say, your morning Starbucks. True, there are some of you that will run the numbers like me and see long term potential and become ecstatic for the 5%, but typically this could be seen as noise. When we talk about performance though, this is an entirely different story. If Usain bolt ran his world record 100m time from Berlin in 2009 (9.58s) the same 5% faster we wouldn’t just have a sub 9.5s human, we would have a 9.1s 100m bullet of a human soul. The same half a second decrease in the 100m time took over 50 years between 1956 with Willie Williams’ 10.1 and 2009 when Bolt hit his miraculous 9.58. Now, we are going to get plenty deep into the world touched on by David Epstein in “the Sports Gene” as it references technology’s hand in the improvement of human performance, but for now focus on the simple fact that 5% increase took over 50 years. Five percent. Doesn’t sound like much at first glance.

If I am trying to answer my base question with this organic progression of one of the most revered performance measures on earth, the answer is, certainly, “YES, diaphragm breathing for the win.” If analysis was that easy, you wouldn’t probably be cruising through this blog right now. The honest truth, however, is that it really is that easy. What isn’t easy is understanding if the connections we need to draw for this change, or any change that you might be experiencing from this or any other training method, are directed to our applied modification. What I mean by this is: did the training mask use increase my performance or was it the repetitive act of this new task or possibly the mentality I had during my baseline when I didn’t know what to expect v. my re-test when I knew what kind of consistent output I could manage? Fact is… I know, without a doubt, that I went harder on my re-test. I did, in fact, know that I could consistently hold a sub 1:30 500m split and not die by the final round in too terrible of a fashion. I also was in significantly more discomfort at the end of my fourth interval during my re-test than in my baseline.

If I left it here… you would walk away with “I knew there was a catch.”

Yeah, but I’m not the one who leaves it there because you have to also ask yourself the question: but what about fatigue from so many similar intervals of the same high intensity as a precursor to the re-test. I will tell you that I ran my baseline when I was sufficiently recovered to ensure there were no latent CNS fatigue issues or residual muscular deficiencies to skew my start point. The actual application occurred on back-to-back days… I came into the re-test practiced and timed, yes, but I also came in, effectively, more beat up. This is how the analysis game goes. It’s a rabbit hole of “well, wait, what about this factor’s influence on that factor?” This is why the addition of supplementary data can be highly beneficial.

Let’s take a look back at our toolkit of data: I had a decrease of my HR during and after my intervals as well as a lower saturation of oxygen. Considering we are talking breathing, I would be inclined to draw the immediate reaction that if I am getting more oxygen into my system during recovery, then wouldn’t my oxygen saturation rate show an increase when compared to my previous baseline? And since it doesn’t, wouldn’t that mean I wasn’t more efficient with my breathing? This assumes one tricky component that we can’t see: the levels of our CO₂. Given that our SAO₂ is higher than 95%, we are assumed to have normal neuron functioning, cellular oxygen supply to the muscles, and proper pressure. Fast check of our data confirms that we are in the clear, and definitely not below the 90% threshold that defines hypoxemia. How do we, know, then, if we are managing our CO₂ better in response to our seemingly indeterminate results in oxygen levels in our blood? This is where the research side comes up to bat.

If the body doesn’t have enough CO₂, that’s right I said NOT enough, bad things start to happen. If we follow the response of the negative side effects of clearing the off-gas CO₂ from the energy pathway reactions in our body, something might just run into our data to help us out. Enter: hyperventilation. Go ahead… try it, we all know how. What happens? Feel like someone took your breath away when you are done? That’s because the over-breathing you just completed pushed more CO₂ out than O₂ in. The response of the body to the low levels of CO₂ is vasoconstriction of the blood vessels to the brain and tightening of the airways. From last time we learned what happens to heart rate during vasoconstriction: it increases. Boom. I found my connection. I will know that I am over-breathing by the application of my diaphragm techniques, and that my drop in SAO₂ is related to poor recovering breathing application, if I see a direct increase in my HR when compared to my baseline (and concurrently when compared to my decrease in SAO₂ each interval). But, not the case. Instead my HR decreases as oxygen levels decrease and, overall, I am performing the extra workload at a lower HR demand. Supplementary data to the rescue.

I am not experiencing a CO₂ fault, a concerning O₂ decrease, and my heart rate overall is decreasing. The connections are starting to pan out between application of diaphragmatic breathing and performance increase. However, those of you who have dug deeper may blow the whistle here and throw out the “bull shit” flag for me using CO₂ as an indicative measure to sew my story together, given the output time of my interval. By this I am referencing that efforts under 2min, but over :15-:30 access the fast glycolysis pathway of the Anaerobic system. This is that powerhouse system that uses a molecule of glucose to make a pair of ATP, some energy, and our friend lactic acid. Don’t hate on lactic acid, it’s just misunderstood… it’s actually the hydrogen ions (H+) that are reducing the affectivity of our muscles. Furthermore the accumulation of these ions in the blood slow down metabolism due to enzyme activity reduction. Slower metabolism = lower HR need. If I look at my results under this lens, I could say that I just had more glucose ready to get busy on my re-test day and that, no matter how I breathed, the results were going to improve because no oxygen was required for the pathway (i.e. Anaerobic = no oxygen).

Put down the pasta bowl you just whipped up in prideful celebration of proving carbs rule dominion over diaphragms. A brilliant scientist, Dr. Andy Galpin (while on our podcast), said it best:

“the metabolic pathways are much more like a paint brush of many colors, rather than an on and off function” (roughly translated)

I know for a fact that my heart rate stayed over 99 beats a minute throughout. This means, according to science, I stayed in tachycardia. Suddenly my fast glycolysis system was not being recovered, but I was sustaining a high stress to my system during a short recovery. Care to guess what efforts of over 2min but under 20min (my 18min test was no accident… it was informed preparation) fall under in the metabolic game of thrones? Slow glycolysis, an Aerobic function aka with oxygen. In slow glycolysis, lactic acid isn’t the waste product of the cycle, CO₂ and water are via a combustion reaction. C0₂ levels rise, oxygen is used up, heart rate is down…. Hmmmm, could it possibly be that my breathing is keeping my slow glycolysis pathway active because of the sufficient levels of oxygen entering my body due to proper breathing dynamics? Consider this a bit… if your body knows it can’t get enough oxygen, do you think it’s going to lean on a highly oxygen driven energy system? And if my body knows it’s going to get more oxygen during the actual effort to run slow glycolysis in the background, then it can naturally, and confidently, secure the fast glycolysis pathway to perform at top output because it doesn’t have to continue running the non-renewable energy resource of local glucose in the muscles to recover. My body is becoming metabolically more adaptive. I can run the lactic acid levels and hydrogen ion levels up higher each interval because my proper gas exchange is going to run the recovery. Success is served.

Not every test will have these results. Not every test will succeed. You may have seen completely different responses to the stimulus than I did, but that doesn’t constitute a failure. If you are keto and you popped… perhaps you need to look at your protein and fat intakes more closely because your gluconeogenesis (producing glucose from non-carb substances) is not performing sufficiently. Perhaps you only saw increased performance, but at a cost of a higher heart rate. This is where inspection of your anaerobic threshold should be considered. You may have a low HR split to transition into fast glycolysis and need to recover longer from the heart rate spike of the workload.

Don’t become overwhelmed. One bite at a time is the best way to eat this elephant. The first bite was how to organize the data, the second bite was how to read it, the third was how to connect it… and, next, you need to apply it. Stay tuned, ladies and gents… this ride is only just beginning.