Nasal Breathing for Athletes: Benefits for BJJ Performance

And there's this fantastic book that I started reading by James Nestor called Breath. And it's a book, the guy's clearly done his research, but he writes it in a very entertaining kind of way, and I highly recommend it. But one of the things that he talks about is, again, the research suggests that if we can slow down our breathing, we keep the air in our lungs there so we can better sort of perfuse the oxygen out of our lungs and into our muscles. But the interesting part is, again, when we over breathe, we get rid of too much carbon dioxide.

And that's a problem because carbon dioxide is responsible for helping to unload oxygen from the red blood cells. And that's called the Bohr effect. And essentially, when we breathe in through our nose and out through our nose, we don't expel too much carbon dioxide, and that triggers a response in our body to help offload more oxygen from the red blood cells. And while it's in there, because we're breathing a lot slower, like a slower respiratory rate, then it gives time for our muscles to actually upload that oxygen, and we basically get better utilization of oxygen.

And I think this is fascinating. So I started doing this just at rest. For someone who's been a mouth breather my whole life, this has been a complete challenge, mostly because I always felt congested and I even had a deviated septum and a surgery to correct it. But they never talked about the importance of breathing in and out through your nose.

It's our body's natural filtration system. And yet, you know, you just naturally go to your mouth because you think I need to get as much air in and as much air out as possible. So I started doing it at rest. And then, you know, once you're doing it, it actually got easier and easier to do that.

Initially, I could only do it for about a minute. And then, you know, you start to get all day long, anytime you're basically not talking or eating. And then the interesting thing about this, too, is that I started to try and do it while I'm doing yoga. I started doing it while I was doing light cardio exercise.

And then the big challenge came when I started doing it during live rolls. And it's definitely a challenge. And I put this challenge out there to people. If you've never done it before, I highly recommend it.

Essentially, what you want to try and do while you're rolling is just keep your mouth shut. I'm not talking about taping your mouth shut or anything like that while you're rolling. I know it's not bad enough, you know, when you've got a wet gi on you or anything like that. But it's an interesting challenge where you can only breathe through your nose.

And if you breathe through your mouth, you're essentially tapping. And this is like a challenge you're going to do with yourself. You may want to tell your partner that, and I'm going to randomly tap because I breathe through my mouth. But don't interrupt flow.

Just basically, you know, get your breathing back and go right back into nasal breathing. And you'll realize that when we start to breathe through our nose only, a bunch of positive effects happen. And they happen while you're rolling. It's amazing.

Again, number one is that we slow down our respiratory rate. That's important because we don't hyperventilate. And that's a big problem. If you ever hyperventilated while you're rolling, you'll realize that breathing is your weakness.

The other benefits is that, again, we start to moisturize the air and we filter the air so we don't end up getting dry mouth, which is another benefit. And one of the interesting things about, again, nasal breathing is it stimulates the production of nitric oxide in your body. And that's actually a vasodilator. And that's really important for, again, opening our blood vessels and getting as much blood and oxygen to our muscles.

And the last thing that's really, really interesting about nasal breathing is it stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is basically like your calm down scenario. And if we breathe through our mouth and we hyperventilate, that initiates a fight or flight response, which is, again, like it's a vasoconstrictor and we increase our heart rate and we increase our blood pressure. None of these things are conducive to rolling, especially for a long period. It's really good for a, I'm spiking and I need to do an athletic activity really quick, but not good for long term.

And it's definitely not good for your long term health. And I don't propose to actually think that I am any sort of expert on this thing. I highly encourage you to do a little bit of reading and research on your own. James Nestor has that fantastic book called Breath.

There's a bunch of courses out there with breath work. There's, you know, one's courses where people try things like Wim Hof. And what they're doing in that scenario is they're controlling their breathing rate while they add a external stimulus like cold water or whatnot. And they try to sort of control the stress levels in your body.

And the last thing I want to talk about here, which is the sort of ideal breathing rate that you want to go for. It's one thing to talk about just breathing through your nose. And if you're getting started, don't worry about how long it takes to breathe in and how long it takes to breathe out or anything like that. Just keep your mouth shut and try it and see how hard it is and how quickly it gets easier and the benefits that you almost immediately feel.

When you look at research with all sorts of different religions about meditation and you look at different yogic practices, yoga initially, if it's very interesting, was actually to try and induce proper breathing patterns. It's not the yoga that we sort of look at now. And so it's fascinating to kind of see how I've almost come full circle in this whole thing accidentally. But again, when you look at different religions, different meditative practices, they all seem to kind of focus around this five, five and a half second inhale and then a five, five and a half second exhale.

Now, to put that in perspective, I want you to try this right now. Close your mouth and you're going to breathe in through your nose. And out. And you'll immediately feel a nice sense of calming.

Try it out throughout your day. Try it out during yoga practice. Try it out during warm up and definitely give it a try during rolling. And just remember, the only thing you need to remember from today's lesson is keep your mouth shut.

I hope you enjoyed this. Have a good one. I'll see you next time.