Israel Adesanya's Coach Teaches You How To Breathe For A BIG Gas Tank w/ Dave Wood (SSOF Ep 57)

James de Lacey2:52

I talked about this, I don't know how many podcasts ago. I kind of first got introduced to some of that breathing around using breathing to kind of charge up and then also breathing to downregulate when I was working in Romania. And we had someone come across and use various breathing modalities. You could use it pregame to charge yourself up if you needed to, or you can use it to bring yourself down.

But do you want maybe dive into maybe a couple of just examples of how you would use that breathing, maybe even just throughout the day, and then maybe some examples before, after, during training that someone could potentially use to change state of readiness?

Dave Wood3:49

Most people find it relatively easy to switch on, and it's the opposite. They find it more difficult to elicit the calm state. The first thing is again, we breathe 20 to 30,000 times a day, so you want to make sure that you're breathing in a mechanically efficient way.

And what we see very often, and this is in elite level athletes as well, is that their breathing mechanics are off. And so they're taking that into a dynamic situation, adding load to it. And if you just think about two athletes, same level of intensity, one is breathing at 40 times a minute and the other is breathing at 20 times a minute. One breathing at 20 times a minute is going to have much better endurance, much better mental focus, and a better ability to recover in between rounds, or even if we take fighting when you're fighting.

So the first part is really we program around getting these guys and girls better access to the diaphragm and strengthening it. Then we can start introducing protocols like cadence breathing. Now this is just when you assign different numbers to the inhale, hold, exhale, and hold part of the breathing cycle. And what we can do is we can focus on an exhale phase that is longer than an inhale phase.

And what this does over time—we do this over 20 minutes—so we have this 20-minute breathing flow with these athletes lying down and they follow this breathing cadence. And by prolonging the exhale, it doesn't really matter if your mind wanders off and you're a bit agitated and you're finding it hard to switch off. If you can just focus on following this breathing cadence and prolonging your exhale, that will create a calm state in your body.

And the reason for that is when you prolong the exhale phase of the breathing cycle, it creates more parasympathetic tone, and that's the division of your autonomic nervous system that is associated with rest and recovery. And it's really simple. A common cadence that we use is a 6-8-4-6: in six, hold, eight out, four hold.

And there's a whole lot of nuance in there around how to get relaxed. It is easy, but it's also difficult. If you take someone who's been living their life in an upregulated state, constantly on the go, and then you put them in a quiet place and tell them to try and focus on this breathing or to try and relax their body, it can be actually kind of agitating. And so it all depends on the person.

For some people, you actually need to create some controlled stress in order to calm them. So sometimes we would get them doing a faster breathing pattern that would elicit stress, they control it, and then we would go into a calming breathing pattern. This is accessible to anyone, man. It's so easy, and there's so many great protocols to implement, say after training when you're in an upregulated state. Lie down, how quickly can you shift into a calm state? That's training your nervous system. That's training your ability to better manage your energy output.

And then you take that into dynamic situations. The pool is just a place where we focus on a bunch of things. One is we focus on recovery, but the other thing is we focus on creating stress and seeing people's patterns of behavior when they're in stressful situations. And these are hardwired patterns and they will always come out in stress and pressure moments. And you can see those in the pool. And then you would just debrief that and it makes people much more aware of what they're doing and then take that and apply it into sport or life or whatever.

James de Lacey8:05

Nice. And before we dive further down into that, I wanted to come back a little bit into the breathing mechanics you talked about. I know it might be a little difficult to kind of just explain over audio or for people listening, but I guess you mentioned obviously people living in upregulated state with their breathing and things like that.

So what are you looking for with someone who is, say, upregulated often and they're breathing a certain way? And then how are you trying to get them to breathe to, I guess for a better lack of a better term, breathe properly?

Dave Wood8:31

The first thing I want to say is this stuff—really the underlying mechanisms are quite in-depth around breathing—but the actual exercises are very simple, and they should be. And I think in this space, in this breathing space, we like to sort of make it quite mysterious and convoluted. It's not. It's very simple.

And the pattern that we see very often is what we call an accessory muscle breathing pattern, which is where the athlete or the person shifts their breathing into their upper chest, shoulders, neck muscles. These are the accessory muscles of breathing that you want to be using when you're in high-intensity workload. And they will shift up into that type of breathing even at rest. This can be a pattern, but normally during even light exercise. And often they're not even aware of it, and they're not aware of how that impacts their performance.

So first of all, it's about awareness. It's about even just having a visual representation of what the diaphragm looks like, how it moves, what happens when you inhale. When you inhale, the diaphragm drops down into the abdominal cavity and pushes the rib cage laterally. So you have to, in order to be able to improve your breathing mechanics, you have to have good visual representation. That's that mind-muscle connection, right?

Most people don't even have a visual representation of their diaphragm. And when we think of breathing, we often think of the lungs as being up here into the upper chest. Actually, the densest part of lung tissue is in your lower, in your mid-back.

And your with your posterior rib cages. And so what we're looking for is 360° of expansion of the rib cage: front, side, and back. You think of a dog lying on its side or a cat—how do they breathe at rest? They don't breathe vertically, they breathe laterally.

And so you can just do this test yourself: take three of your deepest breaths, and if you notice you're shifting into a vertical pattern of breathing where your shoulders are lifting up and your chest is lifting up, that is very shallow. And then you can just put your hands on your side by your rib cage, just below your chest, and you can focus on inhaling through your nose, relaxing the chest and shoulders, and expanding laterally. And this can be incredibly difficult for someone who has an ingrained neural pattern of breathing through to their upper chest.

Actually, you can take someone that comes into the gym—even an elite level athlete—and their mechanics are all off, and you just make them aware, show them some simple exercises, program them. You have to do something a thousand times for it to become autonomic. And you can change the way that someone breathes, which again has a massive effect on endurance, mental focus, recovery, and just overall health.

James de Lacey11:28

It's funny because it reminds me of when I was growing up, I used to play a musical instrument and you actually get taught exactly that: how to breathe. Because obviously when you're playing an instrument, you're going to be able to bring in enough air to be able to play. So exactly that: 360 expansion, the diaphragm, all of that. So it's interesting parallels between that and, I guess, sports breathing.

Dave Wood11:54

I think there's a lot of confusion around breathing because of the terminology. Things like "breathe into your belly." If I say to you, "breathe into your belly," what does that mean for you? What are you going to do?

James de Lacey11:54

Push my stomach out.

Dave Wood12:19

All you're going to do is when you breathe in, you're going to push your stomach out. That's just pushing your stomach in and out. It's probably the most full cue for breathing. The when you breathe in, the diaphragm drops down, increases intra-abdominal pressure—so the pressure inside your abdominal cavity, because that's a closed cavity—and as you breathe in and the diaphragm moves down, the abdominal organs push out a little bit. That's where we get this stomach extension on the inhale, but it shouldn't be a focus.

The focus should be on breathing in through your nose, relaxing your chest and shoulders, and expanding laterally. The focus should be on having a good mind-muscle connection through to your diaphragm. Again: what does it look like when I inhale? What does it look like when I exhale? Where does it sit in my body? All these things are so important. Specific exercises that target—just if you're building your quad strength, you would target different parts of your quad—we have the same exercises that target the posterior portion of your diaphragm, lateral portion of your diaphragm.

We have exercises for people that find it really difficult to dissociate from these accessory muscles, the vertical style of breathing, where we can lengthen these accessory muscles and isolate that primary muscle of breathing: your diaphragm.

James de Lacey13:19

Interesting. Are you able to dive into a few examples of those that you mentioned? I don't know how much you can share, but—

Dave Wood13:19

It's all good, there's no secrets.

James de Lacey13:19

Perfect.

Dave Wood13:48

If you were to get into child pose—you know yoga pose, child pose?

Down on your knees, and your arms are out in front and you're reaching out in front while you're sitting back down onto your heels. That is going to lengthen some of these accessory muscles to breathe in your shoulders, some of these upper chest muscles. And it actually makes it quite difficult to recruit those muscles on the inhale.

And so now you focus into your back, where your posterior rib cages and the lateral aspect of your rib cage, when you inhale. And you take your time with it: time under tension, a slow, purposeful inhale where you're focusing on expanding the posterior rib cage. If that makes sense, breathing when you're doing this should be soft, wide, light, and expensive. And it can feel really restricted when you get someone in this position. It can feel really restricted because if you've been breathing into your upper chest a lot, these accessory muscles, intercostal muscles in between the rib cage, get really tight—especially around the posterior rib cage.

Don't it. Just jump into child pose, reach out in front, sit back onto your heels, and breathe into your back. And you'll notice straight away. You've got to remember, with a lot of these big muscle groups—chest and shoulder—especially for fighting, you want to be using those for fighting: throwing punches, clinching, and all the rest of that stuff. If you are taxing them with the way that you breathe, they're going to fatigue much earlier in the fight.

And a lot of the times when we see a fighter reach their sort of hitting the wall in the rooming, gassing out, we think, "Oh, cardio, the conditioning." And actually, a lot of the time they have reached their breathing capacity. They have diaphragmatic fatigue. And once that happens, it's a survival thing: blood flow will be taken or prioritized from the legs to the diaphragm. And then your legs start feeling heavy, and breathing pattern becomes very fast, and this agitates the mind.

Over-breathing has all sorts of negative effects on performance. If you're breathing too fast, it blows off too much CO2. So when you breathe in, you breathe in oxygen. Obviously, when you breathe out, you breathe out CO2. You're hyperventilating, breathing too fast, blowing off too much CO2—it has a whole lot of physiological consequences.

James de Lacey16:40

Are you then trying—is there anything you're trying to do to strengthen the diaphragm, then, since you mentioned diaphragmatic fatigue? Or is it just about managing your breathing so you don't get to that point?

Dave Wood16:40

Best thing you can do is get really good breathing mechanics and then take that into all your training. Now you're actually putting your diaphragm under load and having better rate control, having better awareness of your rate of breathing when you're exercising and training. Because without any awareness, it's very likely that you're over-breathing, and that becomes a pattern—that becomes an ingrained pattern during light intensity, medium intensity, and high intensity. Over-breathing, even over-breathing at rest.

And so we work a lot on rate control: matching the intensity of your breathing to the intensity of the exercise is really important. Something you can train. All of these things strengthen your diaphragm. Then we have very specific exercises where we work on the outside edges of your inhale capacity and the outside edges of your exhale capacity.

James de Lacey17:39

Interesting. Do you want to dive into some examples of those too?

Dave Wood17:39

A really simple one—we have a whole bunch—but a really simple one would be to get a timer and aim for, say, you might start on an 8-second inhale and a 12-second exhale. And those numbers increase, right? 10-second inhale, 14-second exhale. 12-second inhale, 14-second inhale—16-second inhale. And as you improve your breathing capacity, your ability to expand the rib cage, that becomes easier to those numbers. So you just increase the numbers.

That's why it's so important: time under tension, slow inhale over eight seconds where you're really focusing on the mechanics of breathing and getting that 360° of rib cage expansion.

James de Lacey18:16

Gotcha. And then you mentioned matching the breathing rate to the exercise. So how much are you instructing nose breathing over mouth breathing? Is that something that you're looking at, or is that just something you're letting naturally happen where the mouth breathing takes over once the intensity increases?

Dave Wood18:50

It should be nasal breathing during rest, recovery, and light exercise. But it's hard to nasal breathe during high intensity exercise. It is possible—you really have to train hard to get there and improve your CO2 tolerance. But there's definitely a place for mouth breathing, right? Especially in fighting, that high intensity exercise, short belts of high intensity—you're going to have to use your mouth, and that's not bad.

What is bad is breathing too fast. It doesn't matter if you're using your nose or your mouth—if you're breathing too fast for the given level of intensity of exercise, that's going to tax your energy.

James de Lacey19:22

Have you worked with—I guess it's probably more prevalent within—actually, it's prevalent in many populations—but the idea of maybe nose blockages, deviated septums, things like that. People that can't breathe well through their nose. Is there—does anything change for you regarding any of these exercises, breathing exercises? Or is that something that gets worked through, or something that needs to be seen from an actual doctor, medical professional, something like that first before undertaking some of these, I guess?

Dave Wood19:56

It depends on the level of severity, but most of these fighters got a deviated septum, which impacts their breathing. You know, if something's broken, you should probably get it fixed. But it's not always—especially in that sport. There's going to be more resistance to air flow, which is going to make it more challenging.

But I think the exercises remain the same. The principles remain the same: rate control, nasal breathing during rest, recovery, light exercise. They can still do that. There's a little bit more resistance there, but they can still do it and they can adapt to it.

What ends up happening is because once you break your nose there's more resistance there, they stop using it and that is not a good idea. That's when they start getting those bad habits. If you take a couple of breaths through your mouth now just without thinking about it, take a couple of breaths in and out through your mouth, whereabouts in your body is it associated with?

James de Lacey20:57

Up here. Up chest.

Dave Wood21:27

Now take the same breath and just slide down a little bit through your nose and what do you notice?

James de Lacey21:27

How much lower it was.

Dave Wood21:27

How much lower in your body it is, whatever that means for anyone listening. But you're right and you feel more resistance to air flow because it's a smaller hole. And so that is pulling the air into the base of your lungs where we want the oxygen, right? You're also when you breathe through your nose you're picking up a gas called nitric oxide released from the paranasal sinuses which is a vasodilator, dilates blood vessels and promotes blood flow. You don't get that when you breathe through your mouth.

If you think just in terms of, go look at an anatomy book, anatomy physiology book. When you look at the mouth there will be no mention in there at all about using the mouth for breathing because it's not designed for breathing. You have teeth, salivary glands and tongue and it's connected, it's part of your digestive system. The nose, the breathing part of your respiratory system.

And if you can take an athlete and first of all you have to realize that, and I'm sure people listening who have no awareness of this now can sort of start to see that there's a system there. We're just made up of a whole lot of body systems, human body, whole lot of body systems, cardiovascular system, nervous system, digestive system, and then we got this breathing system. It's just sitting there waiting to be turbo touched. It's waiting to be trained, specifically to be trained.

And if there is a deficit sitting in one body system it'll have a ripple-on effect through every other body system. And some of the athletes that we get come into the gym for this training are some of the fittest athletes you can imagine, right? And they have terrible breathing. How's that possible? It's like you can't be the fittest athlete and have terrible breathing.

Yes you can. You're just putting a lot of pressure on these other systems. You're putting a lot of pressure on your nervous system, on your cardiovascular system. You're going to need longer recovery times. It's going to start impacting things like your sleep, injury.

And so yeah, it's possible but there's a better way to do it. And so if you're not training, specifically training your breathing, you're not optimizing performance 100%.

James de Lacey23:17

Nice. And I want to come into the practical side too, but I wanted to ask you first, respiratory trainers, what's your take on them for just general I guess breathing training and performance in that breath work world?

Dave Wood23:50

I think like with most things people straight away look for these things out in the periphery, right? External ways to improve performance. And I think they're great, but you got to get the basics of the system right first. The breathing mechanics, rate control, your ability to use your breathing to calm state and that stuff is right. When we start we're way back over here and that stuff is way over here. That's my opinion on it.

If you're just starting and you get one of those devices and you're off on that, you're probably just adding load to imbalance. Great tool to add into this whole thing of respiratory muscle training. And for the people listening as well to try one more thing on that is what you're actually doing with these devices is adding load to the inhale and exhale, right? Or nasal breathing during light to moderate exercise, most people will add more than enough load without adding the...

So just do that instead. Save your money.

James de Lacey24:53

Yeah, I think there's a place for them. Nice. And I want to try bring this and try get some I guess a lot of practical stuff for the listeners as well. But you mentioned obviously you want to take these breathing patterns into your training and to a fight. So I guess how does someone go about starting doing this and then how do they go about transferring what they're doing to what they're doing within their training?

Dave Wood25:27

Yeah, great question. First of all man, it's just about awareness. Anyone listening to this who hasn't really been aware of it or sort of dabbled in a little bit, you got to be aware. Awareness alone, just making someone aware of their breathing alone will have a massive impact. Because breathing is part of, innervated by your autonomic nervous system, you don't need to think about it. I mean you're breathing 20, 30,000 times a day, you don't need to think about those breaths. But the breathing is unique in that you can take conscious control of it.

I don't think there's anything else in the autonomic nervous system that you can actually take, that's innervated by the autonomic nervous system that you can take conscious control of, and breathing is that thing, right? So yeah, the first thing is just awareness. And then the second thing is like anything, just start with the basics. Start at rest with learning how to better access your diaphragm, improving your breathing mechanics, the way you breathe just at rest.

Then start taking that over into your training, have more awareness of your breathing in between bouts of, you might be doing a two-minute bout hitting the bag and then you have a one minute break.

Well what should you be focusing on in that one minute? What do you have in between rounds in the ring to recover fast? What do you have access to? Your breath. While you're breathing you got access to the coach, you got access to an ice pack and some water. And so the fastest way is by learning to take control of some of these intricate body systems that are designed to regulate stress and pressure and to assist in recovering faster. And breathing is the main one.

And so you can start training in between bouts of exercise to use your breathing to recover faster. Again, this comes back to first of all controlling the rate, making sure that you're breathing in a mechanically efficient way. And then from there there's CO2 tolerance training, there's so much in there to unpack. But I think for most people just the basics.

James de Lacey28:02

No, for sure. I mean that's always the best place to start, isn't it? I wanted to go into as well, there was some, I guess one of the things is most people probably exposed to this world from Wim Hof I think, because that was the big thing that went mainstream around his breathing. If someone was going down that road, would that be suitable for someone to use to almost get started in this world as a guide, or is that something that's a little too far removed?

Dave Wood28:29

Well with the Wim Hof breathing you're going to be hyperventilating.

James de Lacey28:29

So you're doing the opposite then.

Dave Wood28:29

Yeah, his motto is just breathe, I think he says. And so not a lot of emphasis on how you breathe. And I think the Wim Hof method is incredible, right? And he's brought so much awareness to just people's breathing. And he's really put it on the map in some respects. So there's their time and place for it.

I think as a starting point, if you already have really good breathing mechanics and awareness of your breathing and rate control and all those things and then you're adding that, then great. But what are you adding it for? Are you adding it to improve your breathing capacity with the Wim Hof stuff? I don't know. Or are you adding it for stress resilience or to... yeah, it all depends.

James de Lacey29:14

No, fair enough. And regarding, you mentioned obviously between rounds, so using your breathing to recover, I know maybe doing intervals in the gym or between a fight, do you have specific recovery postures that you like fighters or any of your other athletes to work with, or is it just based on them?

Dave Wood29:37

Nope, it's all based on them. Obviously you don't want to be slumped over, but most fighters might do that in between rounds because they're trying to optimize their breathing. In between rounds you hear it all the time, the coach says breathe, breathe, and they're focusing on their breathing. But often I'm watching that and it's not the best style of breathing, but it's always going to be the focus when you're under the pump. You're always going to focus on your breathing instinctively.

And so I mean a really good position is just sitting upright, slightly inclined forward. You're going to be able to open up into your diaphragm better. But I don't really tell them how to sit between. I think it's a good question because I think once you have really good awareness of your breathing, what it does is especially in that red zone, it makes you not sacrifice your breathing for the exercise. Do you know what I mean by that?

For example, you might see someone on the air bike and they're in that red zone flopping around all over the place. Well, you're not going to have good access to your...

Diaphragm, your breathing's definitely going to be impacted. And so once you teach the importance of this, you see these guys and girls on the airbike and they're not flopping all over the place because they're trying to maintain their technique and skill. And part of that is just with training the stuff, you're going to get more awareness around posture.

James de Lacey31:38

I think what's interesting as well from a practical standpoint is when you hit that red line when you're absolutely just, you've done a hard round whatever it is and your breathing rate's increased dramatically, you're trying to bring it down and all you can focus on is trying to bring it down. But you're not sure, maybe should I try start breathing through my nose straight away? Should I start trying to slow my breath down by breathing in longer or breathing out longer?

Is there, I don't want to say a protocol, but is there something that someone could focus on to help bring their heart rate or their breathing rate down without being confused about what they should do?

Dave Wood31:59

It's a good question. But first of all, it doesn't, when you go back to the corner you're probably going to be mouth breathing and that doesn't matter because you can still have, I mean you still have really good breathing mechanics when you use your mouth if you train it like that.

There's a guy I don't know if you've heard of him, Brian Mackenzie. Brian McKenzie has come up with something called breathing gears where you use a breathing gear system to sort of match the, again match the intensity of your breathing to the intensity of the exercise. So if anyone's listening go have a look at that and he puts it all out there and that's something you can start implementing to recover faster.

But we train, with athletes I work with we really train this stuff into everything that we're doing so but it just becomes that it is subconscious. They don't even need to think about it. They go back to the corner, they go through their breathing that, it's already trained. And so because they're training it all the time, it just happens naturally.

James de Lacey33:00

I want to actually come back to the pool as well around what you're doing. I know you mentioned a few things at the beginning around a little bit about the pool, but I wanted to dive into maybe why, why do the breathing in the pool versus doing it on land? What I guess what extra are you getting out of doing something in there versus outside?

Dave Wood33:34

Yeah, the pool, the pool is like, it is about the breathing and we're looking to improve someone's breathing capacity by using the pool. But if you were doing that you'd have to use the pool three, four times a week to have a real effect on CO2 tolerance and improving someone's breathing capacity.

This is like, the pool, there's so many different facets to the training in the pool. And a big one over everything else is recovery. So getting them in the pool, you have 360 degrees of compression in the pool from the water. That's like doing your recovery in one of those compression, full body compression things. We have recovery protocols where the water's very calming.

It's just like floating on the water or walking in the water, it's so calming. And so we have a whole bunch of different protocols to shift these athletes into a calm state by using the water and meditation. So that's one part of it.

The other part of it is, we want to be able to put them in a stressful environment. So underneath the water the stress comes in really fast because there's air hunger and we want them to start utilizing some of the skills that we've taught them around top-down and bottom-up control of stress. Top-down being using the mind to control stress and bottom-up being able to use their bodies to control stress. And the breathing there again is a big one.

And so part of that is getting them in there and looking for those, engraining patterns of behavior when the stress comes in. And engraining pattern behavior when stress and pressure comes in is to over breathe, to shift the breathing up into the chest. So you can show someone, it's all right talking to someone, but to be able to show them in a practical setting is very powerful.

And then the other part of the pool training is mental focus. So we have drills to improve their ability to focus which in a fight is incredibly important. And so the pool becomes just this practical setting where you can even in one session work on recovery, stress tolerance, their mental game, their focus in one session.

And sometimes the athletes will come in and they're just taxed. You might have something in mind that you're going to train in the pool, adding a little bit of load, but they come in and they're fried. And so then you would just focus on the recovery aspects of the pool training. There's no point in adding any more load to an athlete who is overloaded in terms of their training, because all you're doing is you're loading up their nervous system and you're keeping them in that sympathetic dominance state which is terrible for recovery, terrible for their sleep, predisposes them to injury.

It's easy to get athletes in the pool and smash them but it's not what it's about. And in fact a lot of what we're trying to do in the pool is for them to be able to shift into a really calm state and prolong the easy phase of their breath hold. And we actually very, very seldom go into the difficult phase of the breath hold. I mean, on the spectrum, but rarely do we push it to the point where their eyeballs are popping out. There's no point, there's absolutely no point.

These are already people that are very good at biting down and pushing, very good at just biting down, going to a dark place. But the real definition of strength is knowing when to push and when to pull back and when to focus on recovery. A lot of the training in the pool is strength training for the nervous system, for their ability to shift into a calm state.

And for a lot of that's way harder than, you get someone, go and punch the bag for two minutes as hard as you can. He go and sit down over there for two minutes and focus your mind, just hard.

James de Lacey37:38

I know the second one's definitely harder. I know I'm all over the damn place, all over the damn place too. But I want to jump into one more practical, practical thing here for maybe fighters who get very nervous before competition. Because we've talked about recovery stuff, breathing things they can do maybe at home, but maybe before a fight they're in the locker room, maybe they're in the stadium or whatever it is and they need to do something to try and bring themselves down and I don't know a short period of time, whatever it is. Do you have anything in place that they could use to do that?

Dave Wood38:05

Yes, lots of things. The first thing is to understand that that's normal. What tends to happen when the pressure comes in, it's normally secondary to a thought, an emotion, and we tend to push that away. Right? Because why would we want a negative thought or an emotion that elicits a stress state?

The first thing is to embrace those feelings, those thoughts, the apprehension, the tension, the fear, the self-doubt. Bring it in and change the language. That is the most powerful way to intersect psychological stress. And this is a, this is something that you train, right? No point being, going to get five minutes out and be calm if you haven't trained it. This is why meditation is so powerful. Right? Because you're improving your ability to focus. And if you can't focus, your mind is going to be agitated in those high stress, high pressure moments.

Being able to focus bridges the gap between stress, pressure, fear, apprehension, tension, and excitement. Being able to convert that into excitement. Now the key thing here in the moment is your language, your internal dialogue, everything. Hey, I'm having a negative thought, bring it in. So first change the language. Hey, I'm good here. This is what I've trained for. I'm ready to go. This thought is normal. This feeling is just me getting ready for battle. So straight away you're taking control, right?

And then there's just some other simple things in these dynamic, in these moments. Just conscious control of your breathing, just sitting down doing a couple of breathing cycles where you prolong the exhale. You're doing the opposite of what would happen with the body stress cycle, which is to upregulate your breathing. When you're breathing a soft, quiet, light, long exhale, you're telling your body to be calm. You're taking control of your body, intercepting your state in real time, your physical and mental state.

These are simple things. These are not difficult things, these are simple things. But the key is you have to train it. Can't just say, I want to be calm under pressure. Just, you got to train it.

And repeat exposure is so important. So if you want to get good at, I mean you look at these guys that have had 50, 100, 150 fights, they go in there and they just seem so calm. Right? Repeat exposure. They've worked it out as they've gone along. They've just kept putting themselves in the fire over and over again. What a great analogy.

For life, what these guys and girls are doing is such a great analogy for life. They are going towards stress, pressure, fear, apprehension, tension. They have self-doubt, they have negative thoughts, they get overwhelmed, but they keep going towards it. Now in life, we have a massive problem with people that have a negative relationship with stress and they avoid it, and they just want to be comfortable all the time. You'll adapt to that, you will adapt to that, and that is called complacent adaptation. That's a terrible place to be.

But it is difficult for some people who have a negative relationship with stress because of things that they've been through in life, where they have been exposed to stress and things haven't gone well for them, then they start avoiding it. That's a big part of my work is working with those people, not just in sport, but just again, man, it's just moms and dads, professionals, whatever.

James de Lacey41:49

So how are you then breaking that cycle for people like that who maybe have that negative association with stress?

Dave Wood42:20

Getting them to understand what's going on. I deal with so many clients who jump on and they say, "Hey, I've been to see the psychologist and the doctor," and I ask them, "Has anyone ever explained to you what the stress cycle looks like in your body? Has anyone ever explained to you how the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, has anyone ever explained all of these underlying mechanisms to you?" And man, nine times out of ten, it's no.

I don't understand why we're not explaining this stuff. You can't take control if you don't understand. And so with the clients I work with, I explain it. Also, they have a very good visual representation of what stress and pressure looks like physically and mentally, how the body responds to stress, controlled and uncontrolled. Give them a different perspective, a different look at it.

Actually, these people that have chronic stress and things like anxiety, they have just trained the part of their nervous system, the sympathetic division of their autonomic nervous system, just to switch on like that. Actually, it's strength. They just fire it on like that. What they're struggling with is they get stuck there. And so we teach them how to, like grabbing a dimmer switch, being able to turn it up and turn it back down. And so give them some—you've got to give people control. And this is where the breathing is a big part of this.

Teaching people how to use their breathing to elicit a calm state. Teaching people that when they're upregulated, when they're in those moments where they feel stress and pressure and anxiety, whatever, what is actually happening to the breathing, what is happening to the muscular system. Often it tenses up, right? Just relax. So it's all these things that it's all about giving the person control.

And that's like the cold water. You get someone that has a negative connotation with stress, they're avoiding it, they might have, again, anxiety or depression or whatever, and you get them in the cold water and you teach them how to take control of the breathing, how to take control of their mind, and they're able to do that in there and actually be calm. That has huge ripple-on effects. You then take that and apply to everything in life. And remember that people with anxiety and uncontrolled chronic stress, a lot of the time they feel like they have no control.

Being able to control that stressful environment—there's no more noxious stimulus than one degree, two, three degree cold water—is so powerful to them. They need three things. These people need three things. They need to understand the underlying mechanisms, they need the skills, and then they need practical applications. That's how we learn. I keep saying this on every podcast. We need those three things.

And so the people that come to me, I give them all three things. But that first, man, it all starts with understanding.

James de Lacey45:07

No, that's an awesome way to finish off this podcast too, Dave. But for people who want to find you, follow you, see what you're doing, learn more from you, where can they do that?

Dave Wood45:07

Through my Instagram, Integrated Training. Integrated Training. We have four pillars of our training: movement, mental game, performance breathing, and recovery. Also, go to our website, www.integratedtraining.co.nz.

James de Lacey45:07

Perfect. I'll link all that up too along—send us a message, whatever.

Perfect. I'll link all that up in the description too when this goes out in a couple of weeks. But thanks for coming on, Dave, really appreciate it. Appreciate what you're doing.

Dave Wood45:46

Thank you very much for having me on.

James de Lacey45:46

And thank you for listening. Alright.