Breathwork for Wellbeing, Longevity, and High Performance | Brian Mackenzie

Michael Gervais (0:01)

How can something as simple as your breath unlock greater resilience, enhance performance, and transform how you navigate high stress moments? Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade in training a high performance psychologist. And our guest today is Brian Mackenzie, a human performance expert and a pioneer in the field of breathwork, endurance and stress adaptation. He's the founder of Shift Adapt, where his innovative training blends breathing protocols, movement and mindset strategies to optimize health, performance and resilience for athletes and everyday individuals alike. And he's back for the second time on this podcast. I love how his mind works. I love our friendship. I hope you love this conversation as well. So with that, let's dive right into this incredible conversation with Brian Mackenzie.

Okay, Brian, this is like a real treat for me. It was 2018 was the last time we saw each other on this podcast, and a lot's happened since then. In 2018, you broke your neck.

Brian Mackenzie (1:18)

Pretty close to that, yeah.

Michael Gervais (1:19)

Yeah. Okay, so what I want to do is bring that story back forward for folks that were part of your journey in our community at that point, and then just like, how did that go? What have you learned? How are you different? But let's just ground our community in what happened in 2018

Brian Mackenzie (1:41)

So Memorial Day weekend, I was with my sister and her kids, and her brood of kids, she has four, and we went to a playground down the street, and we got into a game of tag, and the ground was hot, the playground was where everything was happening, so you had to be on the playground. Anyway, my nephew was chasing me on the ground, and I found a ladder, went up a ladder, shot up the ladder, it was a spiraling ladder, got to the top, which was about eight feet off the ground, 178 feet off the ground, and I went to go stand up to go across the top, because the ladder met a plank that goes across the top that you could walk across. But this was a jungle gym, it wasn't an adult jungle gym, so I didn't notice that the gap was not very big, and so when I went to go stand up, I was going full speed, and took a bar directly into my skull, which compressed my spinal cord, and at C3-4, I had a spinal contusion. I was shut off immediately, so I went lights out. I remember vividly dropping, hitting my butt, and then everything was gone, but lights went on, and like all these sparks kind of went off, and I woke up on the floor, on the ground, with this astroturf, and apparently, I had done a back flip off of that. After I hit it, I fell off backwards, and I landed, and I couldn't move, so I was like, oh.

At first, I kind of was like, oh, I'm not moving. I can't feel my hands. You know, after I was like, what am I doing down here? I'm like, oh, no, I did something, and then I would say within 30 seconds, I had understood that I probably broke my neck, but I also knew there were four kids that were there, and I didn't want to freak out, even though I was kind of like, oh, like there's a new life that's about to start. For you. Yeah, for me.

Michael Gervais (3:50)

A parallel, a quadriplegic life.

Brian Mackenzie (3:52)

Yeah, at the moment, a quadriplegic. That changed in the ambulance ride. I started getting neurogenic pain in my arms, and the EMT was, he was good, because he was like, look, I'm not a doc, and I can't tell you what's going to happen, but this is a good sign. I'm like, this is pretty painful. And he goes, oh yeah, because that's a good sign. That means things are starting to come back. However, like don't run with that. Like I'm going to, you know, we're cutting off all your clothes still. And I mean, they cut everything off, strap me down, took me in. My legs came back, I think at like 30 hours. However, everything was like, it was like a three and a half week process to learn to walk again. And I had no idea, and nobody had any idea how much of that was going to come back with what had happened to the cord. Because it definitely got pinched and you could see the bruising all the way in. So, you know, it was a sketchy process, went into an emergency surgery within 10 days. They wanted to do it at the hospital, but I wouldn't let them because I had, I had insurance at Stanford Medicine at the time. So I was like, I'm going to go to Stanford and Andrew Huberman, who everybody kind of knows at this point. Nobody knew at that point, but he was a, he was, I had been doing research with him. And I had reached out to him about neurosurgeons. And he got me, he got me in contact with three, found the top guy, the number one guy at Stanford. So I ended up going meeting this guy. And I knew instantly when I met the guy that this was going to be the surgeon. So that happened, the surgery happened. And then, you know, I worked on recovery and kind of played a new game for a while.