How To Breathe Properly - Brian Mackenzie - #121

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. Before I get into today's episode, I wanted to give a thank you to Michaela Peterson and Jordan Peterson for giving me a shout out, giving Modern Wisdom a shout out on this week's episode of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. As you can imagine, that caused a bit of a spike in downloads, so many of you that are listening maybe because of that, to you, welcome. And to everyone who's been here for the last one million downloads and the last year and a half, you got some new friends. Onto today's episode, I'm sitting down with Brian Mackenzie, the man behind Power Speed Endurance and Art of Breath. Today we're talking about breathing, everyone does it. Some people that do sport need to do it a little bit more, and almost all of us are probably doing it pretty wrong. Brian is, he's like patient zero for understanding breath work. So yeah, today's packed with some really interesting insights about this. Hopefully we'll change your day to day breath use and your consideration of how it can contribute to training and performance. It's really cool. Enjoy. Here is Brian Mackenzie.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Brian Mackenzie, the man behind Power Speed Endurance. And today we are talking about something that you will all be familiar with, but are probably doing a little bit wrong, breathing. Brian, welcome to the show.

**Brian Mackenzie** (1:42)
Thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
It's gonna be awesome. I'm really excited to speak about this sort of stuff today. We've been talking about endurance a lot recently. We had Alex Hutchinson, writer for Runners World, on analyzing Eliud Kipchoge's recent performance. We've had the Brian Carroll from Poweraxe Strength on talking about squatting over a thousand pounds. And all of this is enabled by a lot of different things, but I guess principally one of those is breath work, right?

**Brian Mackenzie** (2:09)
Yeah, well, physiology and all chemistry is regulated through our breath. So anything and everything. I mean, I've known Alex for quite some time. We've kind of gone, we've gone back and forth over the years. He's a great, he's fucking kid, man. I like him a lot. I don't know your other, the other guy. But to squat a thousand pounds is to understand some things.

**Chris Williamson** (2:36)
He really does. He really does understand some things. I mean, Kelly Sturrett, we just released an episode with him today. We've had Dr. Stu McGill on. So, you know, we've had a lot of these guys. And when they talk about this, even, you know, Kelly and Stu, people that are really, really kind of at the top of their game, very well respected in their fields, it's rare that I hear someone bring up breathwork. Why do you think that is?

**Brian Mackenzie** (2:59)
Did Kelly?

**Chris Williamson** (3:00)
Kelly didn't. Kelly didn't. No, we were talking a bit about the game changers. We're talking about the game changers documentary and veganism. We went off on a rabbit hole down that.

**Brian Mackenzie** (3:09)
Oh, really?

**Chris Williamson** (3:10)
Yeah, that was fun. That was fun.

**Brian Mackenzie** (3:12)
No, I know Kelly's very much into the breathwork at this point. I mean, I've introduced it to him, so I know he uses it inside of his 101s and 102 courses now, so from his work. But at any rate, Kelly's been a very close compadre of mine for a very long time.
So we've kind of grown up in the end of each other, but it's interesting how I stumbled on to the breathwork and why, even though I was introduced to it quite some time ago, and it just didn't take. And I understand why it didn't take, because it was never explained in a way that made sense to, especially a guy who was participating in strength and conditioning, was all about performance. Yeah, so I entered into this world of yoga many years ago and had a yoga practice because I was a triathlete who was getting tight. And when you get tight, you need to loosen up. And so I went to yoga, and I ended up enjoying yoga real, like, a ton. And I chased around a yogi in Ostanga that was really good at what she was doing, but I just never paid attention to the fact that we were in, we were utilizing a breath practice at the foundation of this practice. Like, we were controlling our breathing, we were told to control our breathing, we were told to control our breathing in specific patterns. You know, this went on and on. And I was like, you know, I just remember it blowing over to a large degree. And that in and of itself is kind of how we all behave to a large degree. And I'll connect all this through this talk. So, like, so that it makes sense for everybody else. You know, but I largely just paid attention to the fact that I needed to get more flexible or more mobile at the time. And then I drifted away from yoga for a little bit, really got hardcore into endurance training, obviously wrote a couple of books on that and came to a pretty good understanding of some ways to tweak things for people who were busy and who were injured.