You will see this exercise in the breathing for calm and focus section of the course. A 5:20:10 (inhale:hold:exhale) restricts your breathing to around 2 breath cycles per minute. See the questions below and comment with your answers. I will be posting a follow up to this post. 1. Could this exercise be used as a calming breathing practice? 2. What do you think will happen in terms of arterial oxygenation saturation? Oxygen saturation (SpO2) is a measurement of how much oxygen your blood is carrying as a percentage of the maximum it could carry. It is a reading out of 100%. Normal Sp02 is between 95-98% and can be recorded on a simple pulse oximeter. 3. If one day you find this exercise easy (no stress or air huger) and another day you find it more difficult, what is that a reflection of? 4. This is an exercise I would regularly use at the start of a recovery session with athletes we train (see pic below). Why would I start with this? what am I trying to learn about the state of the athlete with this exercise? FYI - Generally 2 things result in a low Sp02 readings below 95% - An inability of the lungs to inhale and send oxygen to all cells and tissues - An inability of the bloodstream to circulate to the lungs, collect oxygen, and transport it around the body Try performing a 5:20:10 for 2 minutes and see how you feel. Use the breathing pacer. Rip in with some answers or questions

Over the next few months we will be adding some more videos to the breathing course. This is a bonus exercise for those who have already enrolled in the course. It will likely eventually end up in the breathing for calm and focus section of the course. The cool thing about this exercise is that it really challenges your ability to shift into a calm state. The essence of performance is your ability to control you energy and shift rapidly between energised and relaxed states and vice versa. The goal should be to build up to a 1 minute breath hold in the easy phase only. If you can already do this just keep extending the time out. Read the attached PDF and all will make sense. This is a great exercise to use with clients you are training to improve their ability to better manage their energy but to also stay clam and focused. I will often do this exercise prior to working on some cadence breathing. If you get to 1 minute in the easy phase let us know Cheers Dave

Hello people This is a video from the breathing mechanics section. You will see at minute 10.00 there is an advanced progression of the exercise where the goal is to get to a 16 second inhale and a 18 second exhale. You simply start with a 6 second inhale and 8 second exhale using the breathing pacer app to programme the numbers. Move through the progressions at your own pace until you can perform a 16 second inhale and 18 second exhale. This may take several weeks (maybe even longer) and that's all good. Performing the other breathing mechanics exercises (daily) will help you achieve this. Remember, 10-15 minutes a day of breathing machines work will go a long way to achieving this. The added benefit of doing this daily is that you train consistency and discipline which are both very important mental skills. Why do you want to achieve this? When it comes time to apply the breathing mechanics work to the dynamic breathing training section of the course you will need to have really good rate and depth control. By working on your inhale and exhale capacity you will see that you will be far better equipped to control the rate and depth of your breathing during physical exertion PLUS it will allow you to control you breathing to recover faster. Toward the end of the exhale it is totally fine to fill the upper chest with air - in-fact that's exactly what you want to do. Start low and move up toward the end of the inhale. Let us know how you go with this. https://youtu.be/mD6oG-u391Y?si=dpNFlUCFq0xVwX2G