The Oxygen Advantage: The Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques for a Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter You

by Patrick McKeown

Overall fitness and sports performance is usually limited by the lungs—not by the legs, the arms, or even the mind.

We assume that the body reflexively knows how much air it needs at all times, but unfortunately this is not the case. Over the centuries we have altered our environment so dramatically that many of us have forgotten our innate way of breathing. The process of breathing has been warped by chronic stress, sedentary lifestyles, unhealthy diets, overheated homes, and lack of fitness. All of these contribute to poor breathing habits. These in turn contribute to lethargy, weight gain, sleeping problems, respiratory conditions, and heart disease.

Modern living gradually increases the amount of air we breathe, and while getting more oxygen into our lungs might seem like a good idea, it is in fact light breathing that is a testament to good health and fitness.

The biggest obstacle to your health and fitness is a rarely identified problem: chronic overbreathing. We can breathe two to three times more air than required without knowing it. To help determine if you are overbreathing, see how many of these questions you answer “yes” to:

Chronic overbreathing leads to loss of health, poor fitness, and compromised performance and also contributes to many ailments including anxiety, asthma, fatigue, insomnia, heart problems, and even obesity.

Overbreathing causes the narrowing of airways, limiting your body’s ability to oxygenate, and the constriction of blood vessels, leading to reduced blood flow to the heart and other organs and muscles. These systemic impacts affect your health profoundly, whether you’re a professional athlete or your main exercise is walking up the stairs of your house.

Here’s the paradox: The amount of oxygen your muscles, organs, and tissues are able to use is not entirely dependent on the amount of oxygen in your blood. Our red blood cells are saturated with between 95 and 99 percent oxygen, and that’s plenty for even the most strenuous exercise. (A few of my clients with serious pulmonary disease have a lower oxygen saturation level, but this is very rare.) What determines how much of this oxygen your body can use is actually the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood.

Most people learn that carbon dioxide is just a waste gas that we exhale from our lungs, but it is not a waste gas. It is the key variable that allows the release of oxygen from the red blood cells to be metabolized by the body.

Discovered over a hundred years ago, the Bohr Effect explains the release of oxygen to working muscles and organs.

The crux of it is this: How we breathe determines the levels of carbon dioxide present in our blood. When we breathe correctly, we have a sufficient amount of carbon dioxide, and our breathing is quiet, controlled, and rhythmic. If we are overbreathing, our breathing is heavy, more intense, and erratic, and we exhale too much carbon dioxide, leaving our body literally gasping for oxygen.

At high altitude the air is thin, which results in reduced atmospheric pressure of oxygen. The body adapts to this environment by increasing

the number of red blood cells. Think of red blood cells as your very own Popeye’s spinach, only they come from your body instead of out of a can. Upping the presence of red blood cells translates into improved oxygen delivery to the muscles, a reduction of lactic acid buildup, and stronger overall performance, including longer endurance and a lower risk of inflammation and injury. But of course the catch is that high-altitude training is not available to most of us—which brings me to the goal of this book. You don’t need to go to the mountain. The mountain can come to you.

By learning how to simulate high-altitude training, you will increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of your bloodstream, allowing your red blood cells to fuel new capabilities. Additionally, it will help you to sustain sharper psychological focus during physical activity as you become less conscious of the act of breathing.

Holding the breath until you feel the first natural desire to breathe provides useful information on how soon the first sensations of breathlessness take place and is a very useful tool for the evaluation of breathlessness. Other breath-hold tests tend to focus on the maximum time you can hold your breath, but this measurement is not objective as it can be influenced by willpower and determination.

Read the instructions carefully first and have a timer on hand. You can measure your BOLT now:

BOLT Score and Breathing Volume At this point, it can be useful to perform the following experiment: • Sit down with a pen and paper.

Bring your attention to your breathing and follow both the rate and depth of each breath. • As you observe your breathing, draw the rate and depth across the sheet of paper. • Do this for about half a minute or so, then check how your drawing relates to your BOLT score and the illustrations on the following page.

1. Stop Losses of Carbon Dioxide • Breathe through your nose, day and night. • Stop sighing; instead, swallow or suppress the sigh.

• Avoid taking big breaths when yawning or talking.

• Observe your breathing throughout the day. Good breathing during rest should not be seen or heard.

2. Improve Tolerance of Carbon Dioxide

A sustained need for air over the course of 10 to 12 minutes resets the receptors in the brain to tolerate a higher concentration of carbon

dioxide. Steps 1 and 2 are necessary to increase BOLT score from 10 to 20 seconds.

3. Simulate High-Altitud...

dioxide. Breathing less than you feel you need to during physical training is an excellent method of conditioning the body to tolerate a higher concentration of carbon dioxide, while at the same time subjecting the body to a reduced concentration of oxygen.

A strong air shortage is necessary to increase your BOLT score from 20 to 40 seconds. Please note the following important points about increasing your BOLT score: • You will feel better each time your BOLT score increases by 5 seconds. • The general progression is for a BOLT score to increase by 3 to 4 seconds during the first 2 to 3 weeks. When your BOLT score reaches 20 seconds, it is normal for the progression of your BOLT increase to slow down. It is not uncommon for a BOLT score to remain “stuck” at 20 seconds for 8 to 10 weeks. In order to increase a BOLT score from 20 to 40 seconds, it is necessary to perform physical exercise while incorporating the techniques in this book.

• The most accurate BOLT score is taken first thing after waking.

• Your goal is to maintain a morning BOLT score of 40 seconds for a period of 6 months.

BOLT score of 10 to 20 seconds:

• Nose unblocking exercise • Nose-breathe at all times • Avoiding sighing and taking big breaths • Breathe Light to Breathe Right during rest and physical exercise

When you undergo the Oxygen Advantage program, you may experience a body detoxification.

mouth breathing is synonymous with emergency, activating the same fight-or-flight response that our ancestors experienced but these days usually without the accompanying physical exercise to allow our operating systems to revert to normal. From the perspective of breathing physiology, mouth breathing activates use of the upper chest, while nasal breathing results in abdominal breathing.

To help deal with stress, the instruction to take a deep breath is actually correct, but a truly deep breath is abdominal, gentle and quiet; the exact opposite of the big breaths usually taken in an attempt to calm down.

Dentists and orthodontists have also documented these profound facial changes as a result of habitual mouth breathing: narrow jaws, crooked teeth, sunken cheekbones, and smaller nasal cavities. While orthodontic treatment and the wearing of braces are epidemic among modern-day teenagers, it was normal for our ancestors to have wide faces with perfectly shaped teeth. In the 1930s, a dentist by the name of Dr. Weston Price investigated the cause of facial changes and crooked teeth in various countries and civilizations. One of his observations while visiting Gaelic people living on the Hebridean islands off the coast of Scotland was that children became mouth breathers after parents switched from their natural diet of seafood and oatmeal to the modernized diet of “angel food cake, white bread and many white flour commodities, marmalade, canned vegetables, sweetened fruit juices, jams, and confections.”

Processed foods are mucus and acid forming. Throughout evolution, our diet consisted of 95 percent alkaline-forming

and 5 percent acid-forming foods. Nowadays the reverse is true: Our diet is 95 percent acid- and 5 percent alkaline-forming foods. Acid-forming foods—such as processed products, dairy, meat, bread, sugar, coffee, and tea—stimulate breathing.

On the other hand, alkaline-forming foods such as fruit and vegetables, along with plain water, are easy for the body to process; they are “breathing-friendly” foods.

In his nineteenth-century travels in North America, the artist George Catlin noticed that the Native American mothers paid a lot of attention to their infants’ breathing. If at any time the baby opened its mouth to breathe, the mother would gently press the baby’s lips together to ensure continued nasal breathing. Catlin also noted that the rate of sickness and illness among the native Indian people was very low in comparison with European settlers. In his aptly titled 1882 book Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life, Catlin wrote, “When I have seen a poor Indian woman in the wilderness, lowering her infant from the breast, and pressing its lips together as it falls asleep . . . I have said to myself, ‘Glorious education! Such a mother deserves to be the nurse of Emperors.’” In comparison, Catlin described how the babies of the European settlers slept with their mouths open, gasping for breath in stuffy, hot, and unventilated rooms.

it is not easy for most animals to breathe through their mouths. The same is true for humans at birth, but after a few months the windpipe drops down to just below the back of the tongue in order to allow the baby to breathe through both its mouth and nose. Charles Darwin was puzzled by this adaptation in humans: how, unlike most animals, the openings for carrying food to the stomach and air to the lungs are placed side by side. This parallel position seems fairly impractical, as it increases the risk of food going down the wrong way, requiring the development of a complicated swallowing mechanism. The cause for this is likely to do with our ability to speak and to enable us to swim, since both actions require voluntary control over breathing.

As air enters through the nose, it is swirled through scrolled, spongy bones called turbinates, which condition and guide inhaled air into a

steady, regular pattern. The internal nose, with its cul de sacs, valves, and turbinates, regulates the direction and velocity of the air to maximize exposure to a network of small arteries and veins and to the mucous blanket in order to warm, humidify, and sterilize the air before it is drawn to the lungs.

the nose performs at least thirty functions, all of which are important supplements to the roles played by the lungs, heart, and other organs. The large amount of space in the skull devoted to the nasal cavity provides an indication of the importance of the functions of the nose. To attain a higher BOLT score and improved sports performance, it is imperative that nasal breathing is practiced at all times during rest. If your BOLT score is less than 20 seconds, the only way to avoid overbreathing during exercise is to breathe through the nose at all times, even while training. An exception to nasal breathing can be made f...

Below is a brief list of the functions of nasal breathing: • Nose breathing imposes approximately 50 percent more

resistance to the airstream in normal individuals than does mouth breathing, resulting in 10 to 20 percent more O2 uptake. • Nasal breathing warms and humidifies incoming air.

Nasal breathing removes a significant amount of germs and bacteria from the air you breathe in. • Nasal breathing during physical exercise allows for a work intensity great enough to produce an aerobic training effect as based on heart rate and percentage of VO2 max. • As discussed in the next section, the nose is a reservoir for nitric oxide, an essential gas for the maintenance of good health.

Now compare the benefits above with the effects of mouth breathing: • Mouth-breathing children are at greater risk of developing forward head posture, and reduced respiratory strength. • Breathing through the mouth contributes to general dehydration (mouth breathing during sleep results in waking up with a dry mouth). • A dry mouth also increases acidification of the mouth and results in more dental cavities and gum disease. • Mouth breathing causes bad breath due to altered bacterial

flora. • Breathing through the mouth has been proven to significantly increase the number of occurrences of snoring and obstructive sleep apnea.

In 1992, nitric oxide was proclaimed Molecule of the Year by the journal Science and was described as a startlingly simple molecule that unites neuroscience, physiology, and immunology and revises scientists’ understanding of how cells communicate and defend themselves.

When I first began to read about the benefits of nitric oxide, I was astounded as to how one simple gas could influence all major systems and organs, help keep us free from disease including cancer, promote a longer life, and even perform better in bed.

When it comes to nasal breathing and breath-hold exercises, nitric oxide plays an important role. Nitric oxide is produced inside the nasal cavity and the lining of the thousands of miles of blood vessels throughout the body.