The Science of Fitness Podcast

Why Breathwork is The Missing Link In Your Training

• Science of Fitness

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Most people think recovery is an ice bath or a day off. We make the case that the most accessible recovery tool is already with you: a diaphragm-led breath that can steady your heart, calm your nervous system, and teach your body to move better under load.

We break down how breathing sits at the crossroads of mechanics and neurology. You’ll learn why shallow, chesty breaths keep you wired, why longer exhales can lower heart rate and lift HRV, and how rib cage motion links to spinal loading in squats and deadlifts. We share simple self-assessments—hand on chest and belly, lower rib expansion tests—and show how to cue the diaphragm so the pelvis, abdominal wall, and thoracic spine share the work. Expect practical frameworks, not fluff: short protocols you can use before bed to fall asleep faster, between sets to downshift arousal, and at your desk to release neck tension and headaches.

We also tackle the debate around “just lift heavier” versus so-called stabiliser work. Our view is clear: build strength, but earn it with awareness. Low-threshold drills, Pilates-inspired control, and breath-led positioning prepare you for heavier, more complex movements with fewer setbacks. The result is a training week that feels more balanced—high output when you need it, and genuine recovery when you don’t. Along the way, we connect evidence on paced breathing and HRV with real gym outcomes: better posture, fewer niggles, improved sleep, and more confident lifting.

Ready to try it yourself? Start with five rounds of three seconds in and five seconds out, then layer those cues into your next session. If you’re in Brisbane, drop into our breathing class to experience it live. If this resonated, subscribe, share it with a training partner, and leave a review telling us which drill helped you most.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Science of Fitness Podcast, where we aim to inspire you to live a healthier and more fulfilling life as we share evidence and anecdotes on all things relating to health, fitness, performance, business, and wellness. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Science of Fitness Podcast. And on today's episode, we're going into part two of our solo series. As discussed most recently in the last episode, we uh well, I'm just attempting to do this series in a way to try and just sort of set the size some of the information that we tend to discuss and share in amongst the gym. And more importantly, I find myself putting into our email, weekly email series. Um, and the whole idea behind this is just to sort of give you a bit more of an understanding of our approach and ethos as to how we approach training and working with our clients and even training ourselves uh here at Science of Fitness. And so today's episode, I want to dive into what is breathing and breath work, and in particular, the breathing awareness and foundations of breath work and why it's such an important part as to what we do here at Science of Fitness. It is actually one of the integral sort of parts of our group fitness program. Uh we run a breathing class twice a week for our members and for guests that want to drop in casually. And it's a really important little piece of the puzzle in terms of applying a bit of a yin to the yang of our services. We, you know, have people run around and do group fitness and high-intensity training. We have athletes that, you know, are doing sort of high performance programs, we have older populations and people doing a lot of strength work. And so we really, you know, are servicing that hard training end of the spectrum. But what we now know through evidence and sort of as the industry evolves is we need to assist people in the way they recover. And the way we breathe is a critical part of helping us recover, and most importantly, helping us make use of the big rock in recovery, which really is your sleep. And so being able to breathe well helps you manage your nervous system, which then in turn will help you downregulate and hopefully get higher quality sleep. And that's a really crude summary of uh of most of what I'm gonna talk about on this episode. Um, and so to sort of change the structure up, um, I've reached out to the team and that's both staff and a couple of members, and said, like, please provide 10 key questions that you want answered in relation to breathing, breath work, the awareness and movement components of it. Um, and and you know, I'll put them into the episode and structure them. So I'm pretty much gonna do a solo QA um and I'll read out the question and then sort of organically answer it as we go. Um, so to kick things off, why did breathing become such a key pillar of soft's training approach? Well, as I just said, um, for a long time we've been able to provide high-quality training and sort of um high-intensity sort of exercise um, you know, modalities to our members and to athletes and to people that come and sort of work with us. But a big component of the other side of that is the recovery side. And, you know, there's no point really training hard if you struggle to come down from that training stimulus and to recover effectively. Uh, you're not going to get the training effect that you want. And it's uh it's a critical piece of that puzzle. Now, we don't provide the um ice bars and saunas and all those sort of recovery modalities that are now um really making their way uh into the health and fitness world. And so, you know, for us it was actually trying to access some pretty organic ways in terms of helping people stimulate recovery processes. And first and foremost, the way you breathe is the easiest way to, you know, start to move the body from a certain neurological state to the opposite direction. And then on top of that recovery side of things or being able to provide some down regulatory type um, you know, classes or offerings, there's also the movement mechanics side. And I think organically that's where it really started for me as a practitioner is finding people that really struggled with managing their body when they were lifting weights, or you know, they struggled maybe with back pain when moving. Um, it came back to how they actually move their body and use their deeper abdominals and their core muscles for lack of a better term. And so the whole breathing process mechanically is a really key component for people to understand how to recruit their deep abdominals and actually have a safe and healthy uh core sort of structure and strength. And as a result, you then start to dive into the mechanics of the diaphragm, the pelvic floor, the transverse abdominals, the external and internal obliques, and the rectus abdominals, and how they're all related. Coincidentally, the function of the diaphragm, the function of our respiratory muscles in and amongst our intercostals and in and around our spine, shoulder blades and neck, they all play a key sort of role in influencing our thoracic mobility and extension flexion strategies, which then can influence how we load our spine. And so you sort of just pull on this thread that just keeps going. Uh, as I said, you know, just before, it's also a really useful tool, breathing and breath work, to help manage your nervous system and to move from a pretty, you know, sedated type state to an elevated state, and vice versa, come down from that high. And uh, and our breath and the way we breathe are critical pieces of this puzzle. Uh and they all sort of co-contribute. So it's sort of stumbled upon just working with bodies and trying to help them move mechanically. Breathing itself is a movement, and it's really where our movement journey starts when we're born. And often I take people back to their breath when trying to teach them or help them move better. And then as a result, you sort of build your movement layers from a really solid um foundation and a great deal of awareness. Uh, and then as we sort of tapped into the breathing and the movement side of things, realized there's that neurological component. And so we started offering workshops and people found that it really helped them sleep that night and helped them calm their brain down. And and so then we started looking at integrating it more effectively into our program. And um that's really sort of how breathing has become a core part of what we do, and um, it's a really important part that all of our team know uh about, and I encourage them to practice it and learn about it as well. Um, so on to the second question: how does poor breathing influence posture, pain, or energy? Well, if we lean on the um the evidence first, uh there's a systematic review, um meter analysis titled Pace Breathing, Meta Analysis and Systematic Review, and it found that pace breathing significantly improved heart rate variability metrics relative to spontaneous breathing. So obviously you've got to exercise the control when trying to generate these studies and um the invariable or the variable breathing that comes with as opposed to your pace breathing is going to serve as a nice control. And so when we see that pace breathing, i.e. a specific cyclical type breath of three seconds in, five seconds out, or three seconds in, three seconds out, it influences heart rate variability. Well, there's a mechanical component as to how that happens. And to explain it very briefly, when we inhale, our diaphragm slides down. That changes obviously the space available for our lungs. Air moves from area of high pressure to low pressure because of that change in volume or space in our lungs. The air is going to move into our lungs. But what also happens is that connective tissue in and around our lungs, moved by our diaphragm, also influences the space in the heart. And so suddenly the space in your heart increases ever so slightly. That slight increase obviously changes the pressure in the heart as well. So the brain senses the change in that pressure, sends a signal to the heart to speed up. And so when we breathe in, our heart rate actually increases. When we exhale, the diaphragm squeezes up, reducing the space in the lungs, forcing air out as we increase the pressure in that smaller volume of the lungs. Likewise, the space in the heart decreases. And again, much less than the lungs, but there is a change in space or therefore pressure. And so the brain senses that change in the heart and sends a signal to slow the heart down. And a really sort of obvious and organic way that this happens is when we get a shock or a fright, we tend to gasp and breathe in, and it's an immediate upregulation. And then when we are relieved, it's a sigh of relief, and we exhale for downregulation. And so using our breath in itself is a great way to influence our heart rate. And then as a result, when we start to measure our heart rate variability, that's essentially the time between uh heartbeats, our breath is going to influence our heart rate variability. Now, if you're exercising and your heart rates increase, then your respiratory rates increase because you've got metabolic byproducts, your heart rate's going to be higher and the variability between heartbeats is going to be less. And so therefore you're going to have a lower heart rate variability. When you're at rest or really recovering, be it after eating or on the couch, relaxing, or you know, when you're sleeping, if you have a lower resting heart rate, generally the heart rate variability is going to be higher. And so what we now know is that heart rate variability is indicative or sort of a nice metric that we can associate with our neural state. Sympathetic state tends to see a higher heart rate and lower heart rate variability. And then our parasympathetic state sees a lower heart rate and a higher heart rate variability. Now, where the mechanical element becomes critical with this is the movement of your diaphragm. And this is something that I'll sort of speak to later in this episode. But if your respiratory strategy from a movement perspective is quite shallow and high and frequent and up into your chest, your diaphragm, the intercostals and the lower part of your lungs won't move or you know have as much activity, and therefore we won't get that sort of tissue and structural influence on the heart. And therefore, you're probably going to have a lower heart rate variability. Now, other factors contribute to heart rate variability, including hydration. Um, you know, there's hormonal factors, uh, the list could go on, but strictly and crudely speaking about breathing alone, it can have a major influence on your heart rate variability. And it's quite funny because when we dive into our breathing class and go into the mechanical focuses, and this is anecdotal, a lot of the people that tend to come to the class that night that measure their heart rate variability, they say it's much higher, and resting heart rate seems to be lower. And for the majority of the session, I'm cueing and encouraging people to maximize the range of motion available at the rib cage, the diaphragm, the abdomen, and essentially all the muscles and bones and joints with which are involved in our breathing strategy. And so, you know, how does breathing influence posture, pain, or energy? Well, you've got this neurological component and this sort of structural component that sit really close together in terms of that heart rate variability, the depth, and then length of our inhale and exhale, and therefore then the muscles that we use to breathe. And so if we are quite narrow through our sternum and shallow in our breath and sort of narrow through our rib cage, our respiratory rate is going to be higher. And then as a result, our um heart rate variability, our heart rate, and our whole sympathetic drive is going to be elevated slightly. If we chronically expose ourselves to that, it can sometimes be quite problematic for people from migraines and overuse of neck muscles because we tend to respire upwards through to just a more elevated neural state, which can be associated with chronic stress and chronic exposure, exposure to stressed states, which then has a whole sort of cascading effect on hormones, sort of concentration, cognition, um, and then really pain and and then pain receptors, um, which you know is a really interesting factor as well. Um, to go even further on the evidence is another meta meta-analysis on uh of breath work on stress and mental health, and it found a small to a medium effect size for reducing stress compared to controls. Um, and this was published in the Cognitive Psychology News Journal. And so understanding that breath work can have an effect on stress and mental health through these mechanical and therefore neurological components is a really important factor to understand that yes, there's a physical element and that connects directly to the neurological element. Coincidentally, there's also a chemical element, and they sort of connect that whole sort of triangle of mechanical, physical, musculoskeletal, neurological, cognitive, psychological, and then biochemical and gas exchange. And so once we start to really consider all three factors as a whole, we can really start to have, you know, hopefully positive effects on people's mental health, people's physical health, and then even, you know, the sort of biochemical elements of health. And so, to go to question number three, what's the simplest way someone can assess their own breathing habits? Uh personally, I sort of specialize in movement and movement mechanics, and so I like people to really sort of look at the movement because it's quite obvious. Um, and a really simple drill you can do as you listen to this is placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly, and then take a nice big inhale. And what I want you to observe when you just did that is where did you breathe? Did you breathe up into that top hand that was on your chest? Did you feel you pulled yourself up to breathe, or did you breathe down into that bottom hand and soften your stomach and breathe to the base of your ribcage? Now it's not to say that you should breathe to your belly and that's where the air goes, but as a nice sort of cue, it encourages the diaphragm to draw down and to expand. And so that mechanically is a sort of really simple way to assess the way you breathe. Um, a second option is sitting up straight and putting your hands on the base of your rib cage, and then where your hands are, you can feel it's sort of the base of your fingers, so pinky fingers, the soft tissue of your abdomen, sitting up nice and straight, and then take a nice big inhale to where your hands are, both wide and out into the base of that rib cage and using your diaphragm. And you'll feel you'll be able to take a bigger inhale and then exhale, and more importantly, it'll pull you upright and you'll be a little bit more taller and feel you sit up straight. But there's a difference between taking that breath up to your collarbone, your shoulders, and your chest, as opposed to breathing down and wide to the base of your ribs and really using your diaphragm and trying to draw air into the base of your lungs. And so that's a really simple way that you can assess the mechanics with which you breathe. Um, in terms of going into the actual respiration rate, um, there's a couple of layers, and some of the funny sort of anecdotal stories that people say is I often catch myself holding my breath when I'm sitting at the computer, or I tend to find myself breathing with my mouth open, or um I tend to find myself quite sort of elevated in my neck and shoulders. Um, and those are all different layers that might be contributing to, you know, poor mechanical strategies or poor breathing strategies, and really easy and simple to assess. And so what I encourage in that situation is say someone's driving at a red traffic light, it's pinching the shoulder blades together, sitting up straight, and then just taking that breath down and wide to the base of the rib cage, um, and just encouraging that sort of longer spine and then expansion through the bases of the ribs and drawing that breath down to the base of the lungs. Um, if someone's sitting at work, you know, it's sort of setting a little reminder or a little alarm, or when you do catch yourself hunch forward, shallow breathing, it's taking a moment to just have three breaths, pause, whether it's in through your mouth or nose, I'm actually indifferent. I want you to focus on the physical element of it. Um, and then the last part is obviously then assessing the mouse or no mouth or nose breathing, preferably, particularly when at rest, we're breathing through our nose. It's a much you know more narrow canal to breathe, and therefore the respiratory muscles have to kind of work harder to draw that breath in, and they take a little bit longer to draw that breath in, and a little bit longer to exhale and let that breath slide back out. So, a couple of simple mechanical ways, and then that's going to influence the biochemical sort of process with which we're breathing in terms of the breathing and rate and therefore the gas exchange, and then ultimately influence our nervous system as well. Um, so going on to question number four, how does breathing connect to the nervous system and recovery? Well, as I just spoke about, it has a direct relationship with your HRV, your heart rate variability, um, and it has a mechanical effect on our lungs and our heart, which then is going to have a neurological effect as well. And so, you know, if we want to think about recovery and sleep and being able to sleep effectively, if you're lying in bed and, you know, you feel you can't actually sleep, take yourself out of bed, go and sit on the floor and lounge or sort of in a different room, and actually just take some time to lengthen out your exhale. So you can inhale for a count of two or three seconds and exhale for a count of three to five seconds, and maybe even pause at the base of that exhale. We know extended exhales, slowing down our respiratory rate, has the effect of slowing down or calming down our nervous system and moving from that sympathetic or uh sort of aroused state to that parasympathetic, that more rested and digesting sort of state. And so, you know, if we're lying in bed and can't sleep, there could be a you know neurological thing, it could be a psychological thing, and you're thinking about problems that you need to solve at work or in life. Um, being able to lengthen out your exhale takes your consciousness and pours it into your body and back to the insular part of our brain and our actual physical, and it really sort of improves our you know mindfulness or awareness in that moment there and then. And as a result, you're gonna see one, hopefully, that heart rate decrease if it is slightly elevated. But more importantly, you're gonna calm down that nervous system. And then as you get through a couple of reps, you'll notice maybe consciously you drift away, and it's being able to observe that you go back to thinking about whatever it might have been. Can you bring your concentration back to just your breath? Can you stay in that moment, count for three seconds in, count for five seconds out, pause for two seconds and repeat? And once you get through three to five to ten reps and start to sort of feel a bit of a pattern build, you'll actually start to feel that whole body and nervous system calm down. And therefore, hopefully as a result, you'll be able to lie in bed and just be able to sort of fall asleep and actually go into that recovery type state that you're hoping to be in. Um, and I recommend people that really struggle with falling asleep do this before they go to bed. It's shut off all the screens, it's dim the lights and just sit on the floor and be a little bit of a weirdo and just take a moment, even sit at the foot of your bed and just take a moment to do three breaths, five breaths, ten breaths with that extended exhale focus. Um, and generally it's going to have a nice calming effect on your nervous system. Moving to question number five. What does awareness actually mean in movement coaching or um I guess in our job? At the end of the day, it's sort of it can get quite frustrating for people to hear the words awareness or mindfulness or you know presence. But the beautiful thing about our body and our mind is that we have this wonderful consciousness, which you know, few species have the luxury of, I guess, enjoying or you know, being the subject of. But we can control where our mind is and where our thoughts go. And so the beauty about breathing or training in any way, shape, or form, particularly if it's quite intentional, is you can turn your consciousness inside or insular or to your body. And as a result, that's gonna improve your brain and body awareness and its relationship for lack of a better term. And so, you know, when it comes to awareness, I'm often going to be working with people, be it athletes, be it people in rehab, and I'm gonna encourage them to really concentrate on how something feels. And as I said, everyone that I work with, I'll start with just assessing their ability to control their breath and recruit their deep abdominals and move through their rib cage and thoracic spine, and then look to add layers of complexity movement-wise after that. Um, but that awareness of where is your rib cage in this movement? What is your respiratory strategy, be it in a high intensity session, be it in recovery bouts of those high-intensity sessions, can you get that breath in through your nose and extend your exhale? Are you aware of how you're breathing in those moments? That's a very hard thing to do and it's a very worthwhile thing to practice. And then more so into our strength work, it's having people really consciously aware of where their body is and how their body is moving and all the layers that are contributing to that movement, be it a squat. I want people to be really aware of their rib cage and their abdominal position because that's really going to give them control over where their spine might be if it's under load. Um, and more importantly, how they manage that load through a really stable and secure system. Uh, and then right back to our actually our actual breath work. It's a very calming thing. It actually stimulates our insular lobe, our central nervous system into that sort of parasympathetic state. When we turn our cognitive attention to our breath, to our heart rate, when we actually turn our conscious focus insular, it calms the body down. And so awareness is something that is totally worth practicing. And it's something that a lot of people aren't going to be very good at initially. But once you visit it a couple of times, like any skill, you're going to get better and better and better at controlling the muscles, turning them on when you need them to turn on, and more importantly, actually being able to relax them when you need to. And it's one of the biggest problems that I see people have is they come in here and they actually lack the ability to take a deep breath in to their abdomen, soften their stomach muscles, let them go for a moment, and then exhale and hold no tension in their abdomen or their diaphragm. And that awareness and that control of those muscles is critical. And it's really funny because listening to this, everybody has the ability to contract their bicep on demand and relax it. We get to see our bicep. It's a muscle that's talked about or looked at or interacted with often through the day. I want to encourage you to be able to do the same thing with your abdomen, with your diaphragm, with the muscles in and around your shoulders and your lower back and down your hips. And that's the awareness that's worth practicing. If you're training and visiting the mechanical strategies of contracting and relaxing these muscles as you lift weights or do your strength training, you're going to have a better ability to do that anyway. But being able to turn our consciousness to our body, to the musculoskeletal system, particularly, is the awareness that I encourage people to develop and continually assess as they go. So, question number six: how do Pilates, breath work, and slower modalities uh complement strength training? It's uh it's it's it's one of the sort of more controversial or maybe argued about areas uh in strength training because at the end of the day, the literature is quite hard to sort of um develop in a robust way to say that you do or don't need to concentrate on that. There's a lot of good evidence pointing to people saying, just lift the goddamn weight, don't overdo it or overcomplicate it when it comes to you know just trying to get stronger or build muscle mass. Um, and don't worry about focusing on the little stabilizer muscles or little sort of recruitment strategies. And then other end of the spectrum, as we sort of, you know, just visited, there's a lot of literature to say that it's a wonderful way to calm down your nervous system and actually help your muscles and your body, you know, improve its awareness and therefore its ability to move. So, where do I stand with it? Um, at the end of the day, I I want people to be able to move really well. Um, I'm a little less or a little indifferent about how much weight can you put on the bar personally. Like there's sort of a threshold, and I want you to get better and improve, but I want to mitigate the risk as best as possible in terms of making people strong when I'm working with them. Um, at the end of the day, a lot of people struggle with exercise because they are dealing with pain and with injury and with niggles. And so if we can take a little bit of time to improve their neurological awareness of their body by using breath work, by using Pilates, by using awareness techniques, for lack of a better term, which involve smaller, lower threshold movements just to get them to feel and understand at least where their body is in space, we tend to see people then organize their body a little bit better under, you know, more complex movement strategies like a squat, um, your lunge, your deadlifts, and all those big movements that actually yield the highest return. And so I like to use the Pilates and the breath work and all that isolated sort of awareness stuff to as a sort of prep preparation within someone's program or within the initial phases of their program to really step them up to a more complex environment of heavier, higher weights uh and more complex movements, um, but ultimately giving them the capacity to do that really well and feel really confident doing that. Because ultimately that's the most important thing is someone feels safe when they are training and trying to improve and put stress on the system. Um, from a research perspective, there is newer research supporting the idea that breathing cues, awareness and control under the foundation level of fitness underlie, sorry, the foundation level of fitness rather than just simple add-ons. So, you know, it's not like, oh, if you've got the time, do some breath work at the end. As I said, it's a key component as to building layers and complexity under system that can move really well. So um it's totally worth investing in, but at the same time, you know, don't pour all your eggs into that one basket and sort of say, that's it, that's all I'm gonna do, because you still need to put stress on the system for it to actually adapt in a way that you might want it to adapt, be it getting stronger, fitter, um, and actually improving from a performance perspective. So um, question number seven, why do we tend to resist slowing down um even when it would make us better? It's an interesting question. I think, you know, sort of a series of unintended circumstances in the world that we live in, everything's about moving forward and you know, continuing to grow and doing more and pushing your system. And so um, you know, stopping and sitting on the floor and just breathing for 30 minutes or doing some meditation or some mindfulness practice um seems quite redundant and pretty slow. So um, you know, I think psychologically people put that in a later basket. Me, myself, I do it all the time as well. I don't make enough time for it. Um, but just understanding the neural state or the cognitive state you might be in, or the recovery or fatigue state you might be in, that for me should be the proxy as to going, I might need to actually invest a little bit more time. Um and so with what you're doing work professionally or you know, be it family or be it in your training, you feel like you're really fatigued and struggling to recover and not actually getting through it. That's where I look at slowing down as a really useful mechanism. And it doesn't need to be a you know holiday where you, you know, have five or six or seven days off. Using these little tools like 30 minutes of breathing or, you know, meditative work or even just taking a couple of moments to do five breaths in for three, out for five, and doing that sporadically for three or four periods through a day is going to be invaluable in terms of actually returning you back to that state of, okay, I need to up the ante in terms of my work capacity and the output I'm doing. And you can handle those paces because at the end of the day, what goes up must come down. And these basic laws of physics kind of apply to the way our body functions and and our productivity in terms of training and even professional output. And so, you know, we resist slowing down because we think we need to get more done, but ultimately, if we don't slow down, we probably won't get more done. And that's probably why people resist it and ultimately why we shouldn't resist it. And so going to question number eight, what's an example of a sort of client experience that uh that began simply by learning breathing or moving well? Um, you know, I can sit and provide anecdotal stories to people, and you know, they'll probably attach it to it and then think that that applies to them. Um, therefore, you know, making evidence redundant at the end of the day. Um, no one individual responds the same. Uh, but at the same time, we have a lot in common. Um, and in particular, the way we breathe is something that's critical. Um, and all of us do it. And so, you know, from an anecdotal perspective, um, just teaching people uh the relationship of these really silly, intimate, isolated, downregulatory breathing techniques, and then connecting the dots between that and their ability to lift weights really well or their ability to run really well and how they do relate to each other, be it going into a recovery state and actually recovering from the hard work, or being mechanically a little bit more sound in those sort of straining mode, uh training modalities. Um, that for me is sort of the biggest return. And um it's probably where people get the biggest transformation for lack of a better term, is when they are able to connect the dots and understand that the breathing and the rib cage and the abdomens and and and all those connective pieces actually work in hand to complement both our ability to improve our outputs during training or during sort of high-intensity stress sort of moments, um, just as much as they actually pull us into our recovery state. And so, you know, if anyone listening to this is sort of looking how to do us, does this apply to me, um, start with the slowing down, start with the awareness of your breathing and the breath work and the strategies with which you do approach uh your breathing, and then really take some time to learn how they integrate themselves into the way you run, the way you lift weights, maybe the way you swim, or any form of training uh you might do there. Um, question number number nine: how can listeners integrate two to three minutes of breathing or awareness into their day? Um, I think that's probably uh one of the most important things people can understand is it doesn't require a couple of candles to be lit and you know, wind chimes and all sorts of ideal environments for breathing and breath work to create an effect. It's really simple. It can be as a matter of three reps. Um, but taking two or three minutes um in your day to actually just observe one, how you're breathing and you know, neurally, how is your body feeling? Are you tight through the neck and shoulders? Um, have you been bracing or tensing your abdomen? Are you a little bit sore through the hips or lower back? Um, and then more importantly, what can you can you do about it? And for me, my favorite one is that two seconds in, three seconds out of breath. And being really deliberate with your diaphragm when you do that, feeling your abdomen soften in your diaphragm draw in or waist narrow as you exhale, that is such a simple you know, cue and such a simple thing to do. You can do it in any environment, even middle of a meeting. And then just carry on the discussion. Um we naturally do a cyclical sigh anyway, and so just consciously doing one, you're gonna find that it just helps bring you into the moment, bring you into the room, and you know, engage a little bit better in that moment. So if you can actually sit there and do five reps for a week every single day of three, two or three seconds in, three to five seconds out, just do five reps. And if you're finding that's pretty useful and you want to make it a little bit more complex, go to 10 and then go to 15, and then maybe go to 20 reps. And over a couple of weeks, you'll be able to observe your ability to cognitively stay engaged with the activity in that sense being your breath. And what you want to observe is does your mind drift away? Do you stop counting? Do you lose concentration? And then can you bring your consciousness back to your body and just start again and see if you can find three reps, see if you can find a fourth, a fifth, a tenth. And so the system sort of goes. So you don't need to complicate it, it doesn't need to be over the top. Even just park the car at the end of a long day when you get home, take a moment, two or three breaths, extend that exhale, and then carry on. Um, it'll make a big difference, and it's really that um accessible and that simple. Um and then going to question number 10 what happens when breath awareness and movement finally align? Well, you don't um, you know, come to light and have this wonderful moment, and that's it. Box ticked, you never have to go back there. Um, when they finally align, you might just feel a little bit better. Um, but they don't stay aligned. Um, it's not something that once it's locked in, great. It's a practice and it's something that needs to be visited all the time. And it's a skill. And I think that's a really important way for people to consider it is when you play the guitar, if you go surfing, no matter what the skill might be, if you do it often, you're gonna get better at it. Same rules apply to your breathing and your awareness and you know, your neural control of your body. Um, when you regularly visit the skill, you're going to be able to develop your capacity to do the skill better. Um, and so once you feel, oh, I'm feeling a little bit more centered or a little bit more aligned or a little bit more aware of my body, fantastic. You're gonna have moments in your life where you drift away from it. You'll get busy, you'll go away, you'll be out of a normal routine. It's just being able to observe that and understand when that does happen and then draw, bring your attention back and just again, accessibly make it very simple. But I think the most beautiful thing about a skill is once you visit it and once you obtain it at a foundational level, it's actually easier to revisit it and get back into it next time and time again, time and time again. So um, you know, ultimately the more you do it, the better you get at it. But, you know, it's not going to sort of one and done or a box tick type of process. It's something that constantly needs to be managed and constantly needs to be visited. And you're going to know your body and understand that there's going to be periods in life where it's a lot more relevant. Um, and then there's going to be periods in life where it's a lot more accessible. Unfortunately, when it's relevant and when it's accessible, tend to contradict themselves. When we're most busy or most stressed, we tend to put you know our breathing or our alignment or slowing down in the I'll do it later basket. And that's probably when we need it the most. So just having that awareness of what's going on and what's happening day to day is probably the best advice I can provide in that sense. So yeah, that sort of concludes our 10 questions and hopefully it gives people a little bit more of an understanding from a strategic perspective as to how you can include this in your life and more so, I guess, where we're coming from in terms of how we include it in people's training and within the process of people's training. Um, I guess a little anecdote for you to understand how um influential this stuff is and how you're probably already doing it every time you jump in an ice bath, your tension has to turn to your breath. You extend your exhale, you control your neural response to that extremely stressful change in temperature. When you're getting hands-on massage or someone's doing a deep tissue manipulation and getting into your muscles and your soft tissue, generally the therapist will say, breathe, relax, breathe, relax, and we tend to exhale. Um, generally, when we get tired and we start to yawn, we tend to take that air in and have a bit more of an exaggerated, extended exhale. So all these things are going to be happening in your life and are probably a part of your recovery routine, your training routine as you go. And so, you know, being a little bit more conscious and deliberate and integrating them into your life a little bit more, um, it's already probably there. So you'll just be adding a little bit more intentional, um, I suppose, practice to it. Um, and I couldn't recommend it enough. So thanks for tuning in this time. If you want to come and try a breathing class out and you find yourself um in Brisbane at any time, you're more than welcome to come and uh drop in. Um simply just visit our website as to when we host those sessions. Um and at some point, one day I'm gonna uh intentionally put together a little three-minute, five-minute, and thirty-minute recording of you know a breathing session that you guys can listen to. So um hopefully I can get something in the pipeline for early next year. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening to today's episode. For more regular insights into soft, be sure to check us out on Instagram or Facebook, or visit our website at science of fitness.com.au. Once again, we thank you for tuning in to the Science of Fitness Podcast.