Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep. # 16 Breathwork Secrets for Winning in Life and Sports with Sean Pritchard
Discover how breathwork and mindset can revolutionize your life with insights from Sean Pritchard, the visionary founder of INHABIT Mind and Body. Sean's inspiring journey from a college athlete to a leader in breathwork and mindset training reveals how subtle changes can have profound effects on performance and well-being. Through a unique blend of athletic training and mindfulness, Sean addresses common dysfunctional breathing patterns and shares how they impact stress, sleep, and energy levels. Join us as Sean discusses how optimizing breath can enhance focus, creativity, and performance, whether you're a professional athlete like Steph Curry or a career-driven parent.
In this episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast, we uncover the potential of breathwork to transform not just athletic performance but personal and professional wellness. Sean shares captivating success stories, including a New Jersey boys' high school soccer team that reached an undefeated season through these techniques. We also explore how these practices are making waves in corporate settings, offering a tangible link between mental state and performance. The conversation is peppered with pop culture references, such as the humorous breathing advice from "Bull Durham," adding a light-hearted touch to the discussion. Tune in to learn how simple shifts in breathing and mindset can empower you to focus on effort, attitude, and response, meeting challenges in sports and life head-on.
INHABIT
Sean Pritchard
sean@inhabitmindbody.com
inhabitmindbody.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, and welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbors Podcast. I am your host, Doug Drohan, and the owner of the Bergen Neighbors Media Group. I am really thrilled to have our guest today from Inhabit Mind and Body, Sean Pritchard. Sean, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Doug, thanks so much for having me, man. How are you yeah?
Speaker 2:So, sean, actually we spoke because you were doing, I guess, a seminar, if you want to call it that, at the high school, the local high school, northern Valley, otapan. But the cool thing about Sean is that he's a former college athlete. He spent a decade coaching soccer teams and also working as a personal trainer. But he decided that there was more to training and sports than just the physical aspect of it and he found it in habit to really help people to understand how to properly breathe, how to use kind of mind and body to improve not only their I guess their training for sports, but it also goes beyond that. It goes into business performance, skills, self-care and a host of other things that we'll get into right now. Does that kind of sum it up, Sean? Yeah, it skills, self-care and a host of other things that we'll get into right now. Does that kind of sum it up, sean?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it does, Doug. Nice work, man. That does sum it up and yeah, they're really the three areas that we focus on through our training methodology which, as you said, it's focused largely on breath work and also mindset training is that we focus on sports teams. So, from youth to professional level. We work with schools lucky enough to support Harrington Park Shout out to all the great people over there and other schools in the Bergen County, New Jersey area. And then we also work with corporate, and that can be from startups, folks that are just doing their series A round, just getting going, wanting to put some good wellness practices in place to help their employees to be successful, all the way to large investment banks like Houlihan Loki. So, yeah, it's been a great journey so far, man.
Speaker 2:That's great. So you help people that struggle with stress, poor sleep which is usually what any parent or any professional deals with as well as low energy. So what is it about breathing? Like you know, you talk about your breathing pattern. I have to say I don't think that's the first thing people think about when they want to improve their sleep or their energy levels.
Speaker 3:So how does?
Speaker 2:your breathing pattern impact that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so check this out. So new research shows that around 75% of adults have dysfunctional breathing. And what that looks like, doug, is folks are breathing from the secondary muscles, so the upper chest, the shoulders and the neck. They're also breathing using the mouth, and then they're actually taking in too much air, and what we found is that it's very binary the way that you breathe. If you're breathing more from the mouth and the upper chest and taking in too much air, you're going to be more engaging that sympathetic side of the nervous system, so you're going to be releasing unnecessary cortisol, unnecessary adrenaline.
Speaker 3:And what I do is I'm like a mechanic in ways. I go in and I help people to make these small tune-ups to their engine and help to optimize the way that their body and brain are working through the breath. And so we take around 20,000 breaths every day. But what I'd like to say is not all breaths are created equal. So if you can improve oxygen delivery to the 20 trillion plus cells that are in your body, which proper breathing does you have macro improvements to drive your energy. You can improve sleep through things like mouth taping I don't know if folks are familiar with that, but that's a big one, and then you also. There are cerebral components to this too, just having more focus, more creativity. So I work with a whole host of individuals on these challenges.
Speaker 2:Now, you might be too young to be influenced by this, but while you're talking about breathing and I'm thinking about sports I just remembered the scene from Bull Dorm where Susan Sarandon gives Tim Robbins some advice and tells him to breathe through his eyes. So I want you to breathe through your eyelids like a lava lizard. And he's like what? But you know that's she. You know he's a pitcher and he's dealing with the stress of being in a game and he's not doing well, and she wants him to breathe through his eyelids. So, but you weren't influenced by that movie. I guess that's not what drove you into this, this field, no no, but now you've piqued my curiosity.
Speaker 2:I'm oh yeah yeah, I mean, that's one of the best baseball movies ever.
Speaker 3:You know, wait, what's it called? Again no, no, how do you spell it?
Speaker 2:say it again bull b, like you know, like the, you know toro and durham, uh, d-u-r-h-a-m. Kevin Costner, tim Robbins, susan Sarandon. It's a classic, is it 80s?
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, I was born in 91. All right.
Speaker 2:Have you ever seen Wizard of Oz or the Godfather? There's plenty of movies that predated me that I've seen.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 3:I certainly love movies before my time, but that one I haven't seen. You've piqued my curiosity. I love all things peak performance, and the concept of breathing through your eyelids to really lock in is hilarious, but also seems effective in some ways did you get into this, um, this field?
Speaker 2:Obviously you know I read a bit of your bio being an athlete and a personal trainer but what kind of unlocked your um kind of journey to start inhabit?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, great question. Uh, so it's. It's really two things. So the first thing I'll I'll share is that when I was, when I was 15, um, I, I grew up here in in Ramsey, new Jersey. Uh, so in Jersey, guy and um, I had a really good uh high school soccer team that I w that I was on. Um, we had just uh been knocked out of the county tournament by Bergen Catholic. This was in 2007.
Speaker 3:And, um, the previous summers I had been working at in Golden goal, um, which is a soccer park and lacrosse park in upstate New York that my dad had constructed and founded, with some other guys, and, uh, I would spend my summers man out there on the turf, a hundred degrees, watching my, uh, my old man just riff these sessions and he was just the impact that he was having with kids, with team building, with mental skills. Um, it was, uh, it was incredible. And so, uh, here we are, we just get knocked out of the counties. And I'm talking to my coach, my other captains, I'm like, look like we, we got to bring him in. Um, he, he's going to be able to bring us together. Put some really good foundational mental toughness strategies, get our team culture tight and lo and behold man, he came in, he did, he did five sessions and we got five wins and we got our. We lifted our first uh state state championship as a school in a hundred years and I.
Speaker 3:I saw that happen. I didn't even get chills talking about that. It's very, very deep and emotional, um, and I saw that happen as a 15 year old and I was like, okay, this, this stuff works.
Speaker 3:You know I had seen with him, you know he had got me on John Wooden and some of these other uh, great, great coaches, um you know Phil Knight, and, and I started to see that the mind was just incredibly powerful as it relates to sports, and so that was my early introduction to that. And then, uh, when I was playing college soccer at Montclair state, I was, uh, I was struggling with my mental health. I was struggling with depression and anxiety, and I saw just firsthand how difficult life gets managing schoolwork, relationships, um, you know, work and all that stuff. When your mental health is on the rocks, it just becomes a chore every day. And so with that, though you know, I like to say that you know my pain became my purpose. In that moment, I just went deep, man, and I really started to understand meditation, understand breath work, understand habit creation and why I started to fall into this space, and that was really my, my opening man. Those two moments were pretty seminal in my existence.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Yeah, you know, I interview a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs and there's often that that story arc of the struggle and then the the triumph, you know, and the trials and tribulations that got you to where you are. And triumph, you know, and the trials and tribulations that got you to where you are. And then you know it's just because you climbed one mountain doesn't mean you're going to you'll never have another peak or valley in your career, in your life. So but it's great to see you know the people that I talked to, including yourself, how they maybe face a challenge like this but then find the positive and grow from it. And in your case you found it in habit, which is amazing, which I guess your dad is also part of the team.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, he is. I just brought him on, actually recently, as my co-founder. I had founded the company a little over four years ago and he had helped me with the training methodology, being a mental skills and team building expert, and I was really focused on, uh, meditation and breath work, um and uh, visualization those were my big lanes and also physical exercise, um. But the the mental skills um side and team building side, he's just, he's amazing. He's really really good at it. So brought him on and that's been special to be able to collaborate and yeah, we're working with teams right now, helping them go deep into the state tournaments and their respective sports here in New Jersey and schools and otherwise. It's really fun to collaborate with him.
Speaker 2:So do you run into any resistance with coaches or teams? Because I'm thinking about the amount of time that is that's demanded for an athlete and a student athlete my son's 11. Okay, so we're not quite high school level yet, but he's playing on club baseball, soccer, you know flag football. We tried another club team. So if you have all these practices and then on top of that you say, oh, by the way, we're going to meet today to work on our breathing, or we're going to work with Sean and we're going to learn about visualization, where are you going to fit that into your training program and is this something that has been a bit of a learning process? Obviously, as you talk about the success, I think any coach who's looking for that edge, or any manager in a company who's looking for that edge and sees the results you're getting. Okay, now, aside from our two days a week or three days a week practices, we're going to have to build in another session of breathing or meditation or mindfulness.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's interesting, man, because one of the things that I talk about early on is that this work gives you more capacity for your schedule. So it makes you feel because it's true is that because your focus is better, because your stress levels are lower, your energy levels are higher, your ability to manage the rest of the schedule becomes better. So, for example, I do a lot of work with working moms and sometimes three, four kids. Both them and their husband are career driven and they're just looking to have more capacity, and so that's a great client, that that that all support. So it's just that the mental side of that is huge.
Speaker 3:But it's funny because you just mentioned, uh, your 11 year old son, Um.
Speaker 3:I just started working with, uh, an AAU basketball player, um, and also a baseball player, that's 12, and and we have him, we meet, meet once a week for 30 minutes, and then I have videos in the app that are anywhere from seven to 10 minutes long that he does on his own, Um, and to be able to build that habit and um, it's it's what I like to talk about it, as is, it's the one thing that impacts all things.
Speaker 3:So, if you can get your breathing locked in and your mindset locked in, um, not only is it going to make you feel like you have capacity, but your um, your performance just goes up. So, uh, just a quick story here. Um, I do a lot of work with with high school teams. I mentioned me and my dad. There's a program in Ramsey, um, the Ramsey boys team and girls team, and we worked very closely with last year and, uh, on the boy side, uh, using this methodology, they were the only team in New Jersey, uh, not to lose a game, and we won States and counties, um, with this.
Speaker 3:So the proof is we're getting to a point now, um, and you know, especially as we're working with higher athletes in the professional level, that I mean you look at Steph Curry like Steph Curry has got a breathing coach. So if you, if you reverse engineer with the best they're doing, they're spending time on this. So, uh, it's becoming easier to have conversations with parents that are serious, that want to take the next step, if their kids are feeling stressed, if they're looking for elevation, not just in sport, cause I'll be candid with you, man we look at whether you're doing public speaking, you're about to take a quiz or a test, or peak performance is peak performance, and regardless of what the event is, there are clear steps and things that you can do to get yourself ready to thrive in any moment. So that's a lot of what I work on with kids.
Speaker 2:So tell me more about your. So when you say you have a session, do they come to your office? Do you go to uh breath and introductory program.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, uh, it is virtual, um, we, we do them all over zoom. So grateful for that tool. It's, it's, it's really helpful. And the program, how it works, is first we get benchmarks, because we're very data driven, so there are two different, uh, breathing um measurements that we'll take. One is called a bolt score, which is the blood oxygen level test, and that's a simple breath hold test. And then there's another, a longer breath hold test that we look at as well and that helps us to understand how optimal someone's breathing is. And then what we do from there is we program the 10 weeks with exercises and sessions that help them to get their breathing more optimal.
Speaker 3:Um, and then the key thing, though, is that it's not just about breathing. I think sometimes, yes, it's, it's a huge skill, and I think it's the platform of what any mate, any athlete and human should really strive to just get down. But then we bring in the mindset pieces of okay, uh, for example, I teach kids about ear uh, which is controlling the controllable. So E, a, r, ear three things in life that you can control, and in sports is your effort, your attitude and your response.
Speaker 3:So a lot of times, in youth sports, for example, you'll have kids that will freak out about what the ref just called, or that their coach didn't put them in in this specific play, or that the parents are being loud in some dimension, or that the other team played the best game of their lives and you just lost that day. So we want to make sure that we're focusing on the right things and that we're controlling the controllables and really nail down that, because then exactly how that ties into life, you know life doesn't always work out the way that you want. You don't always. You can't control all outcomes, you know, it's just not so. I just love working with youth sports, um athletes, because I just think that sports are such great arenas to practice life and these like simulated environments where you know kids may get, you know, heard and they may have challenges for sure, but it's not like the intensity of you know it can be, it can be controlled in some ways, you know, with giving them the right experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's amazing. I mean I think, listen, I, my wife, is at a pretty big firm, she's in HR. They, they read Simon Sinek, they read about Angela Duckworth and grit and you know your higher why and Patrick Lencioni and all these guys that are really you know they've written books for different reasons but you know big corporate America is, is, is kind of adopting it because they, they understand that. You know there's so much of your performance as a company and as an individual is tied to your mental state and there's something we always say as entrepreneurs every day.
Speaker 2:You got to get your head right and you know, when you were talking about breathing, you could tell from my voice that I'm more of a guy that breathes from up here, right in my neck, and I play guitar and I sing, not professionally, just as a hobby, and one time I took a singing lesson.
Speaker 2:He's like dude, you gotta you know it's gotta be from down here. You're all up here in your chest and in your throat and that you know that's an obvious thing for singing where it's about breathing patterns, but you can see how that can. You know that's an obvious thing for singing where it's about breathing patterns, but you can see how that, can you know just through simple biology, how that could permeate throughout your entire well-being. So you know it's amazing. So not only do you, you know you have your virtual business and your client base that spans moms and corporations and students and athletes, but you also have an app and you have a podcast. So you're obviously a well, I guess, structured business with many tent poles, as I like to say. So, real, briefly, tell us a little bit about your app and then tell us about your podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so so the app is called the inhabit app, and what it is is it's a culmination of videos that are laid out in a few different categories, so everything from meditation, stretching, we also have a lot on breathing. So not only proper breathing technique, so how do you rewire your breathing if you are looking to improve how you're breathing on a daily basis, but also how do you leverage things like intermittent hypoxic training? And what that is, doug, is it's a. It's a breath hold methodology that helps people to elevate their CO2 tolerance, and basically what that means is that, as you get higher CO2 tolerance, that means that you can withstand higher amounts of CO2 in the body before your chemoreceptors in your brain say that hey, doug, it's really time to breathe. And that measurement what we found in the breathing world is that that's essential, and so if you can raise your CO2 tolerance, you can actually deliver more oxygen to the cells, and this is through something called the Bohr effect. So we teach people how to do that over there.
Speaker 3:And then, yeah, my podcast, the Inhabit podcast. We have about eight episodes that are coming out now. We don't have too many out right now, but we got a lot in the chamber that we've recorded that we're going to be pumping out, which I love. I love to do. Exactly what we're doing here, buddy, is just talk about life and business, and I learned so much from my guests, so that's always just scratches an itch. That's super fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So that's. That's exactly the reason why I started this, because, you know, not only is it great to learn about what you're doing and for you to get kind of the word out to our listeners, but I think there's also things that other business owners can learn from each other. You know how they overcome struggles, what they've done, not only mentally, but the tactical things like marketing and business and things like that. So what's the best way for people to reach you, to contact you, to learn more about your company?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can find us on Instagram, which is Inhabit Mind Body at Inhabit Mind Body, or you can shoot me an email, sean, at Inhabit Mind Body. Love to meet new folks. And one thing I'll say, doug, just to close on, is that one of the things that we strive to create education on in the market is that breathwork is more than just a coping skill. I think there's a lot of information and training out there as people look at how do I go from a 10 to a five in a moment, you know, and be able to de-stress, and there's tons of value on that and we do talk about that and we train our clients in that, because it's valuable to have that information.
Speaker 3:But the much bigger thing that we help people with is the proactive micro training on a daily basis that creates the right habit neurologically that helps people to be in a better space mentally and physically, thus making stress lower throughout or over time. And that's the thing that I think people miss a little bit is that, um, this is a a way of of being that if it's trained on a small level each day and we help people do that, it can make these large macro changes mentally and physically. But it's a beautiful process that is not just an emergency break. It's a way that in the good moments you can breathe. In the bad moments, of course, you can too to get yourself down, but it's just an essential part of helping each human, because I always think about it like we were given the car but we never went to driver's ed to really learn how to power it, and so a lot of what I help people with is just getting the fuel and the mechanics right so that the car runs a bit better.
Speaker 2:That's great. That's great. All right, sean. Well, thanks again for joining us and being a guest on our podcast, and I'll talk to you in about 15 seconds. Stay here.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me Doug All right, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpbergen. com. That's gnpbergen. com or gnpbergen. com, or call 201-298-8325.