Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less.

They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.

Last night, Olsson snored for three minutes while I clocked in at six, a 4,000 percent decrease from ten days ago. Our sleep apnea, which disappeared the first night of nasal breathing, has remained nonexistent. My blood pressure this morning was 20 points lower than its highest point at the beginning of the experiment; on average I’ve dropped 10 p

Collectively, I’m calling these potent techniques Breathing+, because they build on the foundation of practices I described earlier in this book, and because many require extra focus and offer extra rewards. Some involve breathing really fast for a very long time; others require breathing very slow for even longer. A few entail not breathing at all

The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less.

Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2 max, is the best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness. Training the body to breathe less actually increases VO2 max, which can not only boost athletic stam

The bike experiment is a repeat of several studies conducted 20 years earlier by Dr. John Douillard, a trainer to elite athletes, from tennis star Billie Jean King to triathletes to the New Jersey Nets. In the 1990s, Douillard became convinced that mouthbreathing was hurting his clients. To prove it, he gathered a group of professional cyclists, ri

Finding the best heart rate for exercise is easy: subtract your age from 180. The result is the maximum your body can withstand to stay in the aerobic state. Long bouts of training and exercise can happen below this rate but never above it, otherwise the body will risk going too deep into the anaerobic zone for too long. Instead of feeling invigora

I’d read a report from the Mayo Clinic which found that chronic insomnia, long assumed to be a psychological problem, is often a breathing problem. The millions of Americans who have a chronic insomnia disorder and who are, right now, like me, staring out bedroom windows, or at TVs, phones, or ceilings, can’t sleep because they can’t breathe.