recap/history/1775589261845-wO5iES4qjwE.json

{"id":"1775589261845-wO5iES4qjwE","videoId":"wO5iES4qjwE","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO5iES4qjwE","title":"Brian Mackenzie Reveals Single Best Way to Increase Fitness Level without Steroids","type":"youtube","topicCount":11,"segmentCount":108,"createdAt":"2026-04-07T19:14:21.845Z","uploadDate":"20250101","chunks":[{"title":"The Role of CO2 Tolerance in Stress","summary":"Brian explains that CO2 tolerance is the biggest encumbrance to downregulating stress. He notes that modern respiration rates are often unnaturally high due to chronic stress and overbreathing.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Brian Mackenzie, what would you say the number one thing, if you had to—if you had to pick one, that is the biggest encumbrance to people being able to properly downregulate, maybe relieve some stress, consequently improve their performance?","offset":0,"duration":14},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: At a physiological level, uh, it is a tolerance to CO2, which has to do with their nervous system. Um, so, you know, an interesting—I was just on a call with a friend of mine who’s writing a book on, um, walking, and she wanted to go over some stuff with the breathing, and she’s like, \"You know,\" and she’s a DPT, so she’s, you know, a doctorate in physical therapy, so she’s well educated inside the world of, um, you know, all of this stuff.","offset":14,"duration":40},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And she’s like, \"Are our normal respiration rates that the medical community says are 12 to 18 breaths a minute, is that normal?\" And I’m like, \"Well, it’s normal for the culture that we’re in.\" And I’m like, \"But I mean, my respiration rate’s around seven, and I don’t do a tremendous amount of breathwork. However, I’ve done enough and I apply the principles of this stuff into what it is I’m doing.\"","offset":54,"duration":37},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And that just, you know, that is alluding to the fact that most people are so, um, hot—running hot, or stressed, that their nervous system’s pretty, you know, fried. Or, and/or they’ve become so CO2 intolerant. So we respond to carbon dioxide—it’s the large—it’s a big, big, if not the biggest, player in driver for, um, breathing while we’re awake. Um, and it’s not the only one, but it’s one of the main ones.","offset":91,"duration":41},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And when we become sensitive to this, rightfully so, our breathing changes. The dynamics of our breathing change. Um, if our mouth is open, we instantly change our respiration rate, and that’s more to do with, um, baroreception, which is not chemoreception, which is where CO2 fits in—meaning pressure change. But, a lot of people are talking all day long, which is mouth breathing, so my respiration rate’s up.","offset":132,"duration":32},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: A lot of people are very stressed; they just mouth breathe in general. So they go exercise and they’re not doing a whole lot, or they’re walking around and their mouth is open. Um, that all can move towards being, um, you’re offloading excessive CO2 at that point. So when you’re overbreathing, what we’re doing is you offload—you, you get rid of more CO2. You don’t bring on more O2.","offset":164,"duration":29},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: In fact, you and I right now are—uh, we exhale roughly 80% of the oxygen that’s coming in. So we don’t need it, right? We don’t need all that oxygen because there’s enough—there’s plenty. It’s just only when exercise or movement goes up that that changes. So what happens is we change the dissociative curve of what’s going on with our breathing, and when we become a little less—uh, we’re not using oxygen as well and we still continue to get stressed, our breathing goes up.","offset":193,"duration":38},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And so we just kind of—the system self-adjusts and tries to balance itself out in what it does. And part of that process is that our breathing changes. The dynamics of our breathing change, and it just gets easier to breathe like that versus taking, you know—and you don’t need to be taking a full inhale while we’re sitting here. You know, you’re breathing perfectly fine as we’re sitting here.","offset":231,"duration":31},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But the vast majority of people are not.","offset":262,"duration":3}],"startTime":0},{"title":"Thrive Market Sponsor Break","summary":"The host shares a promotional message for Thrive Market, highlighting their healthy pantry staples, snacks, and a discount code for viewers.","entries":[{"text":"Host: While I’m at it, one of the things that I do like about Thrive Market, which I talk about all the time on my channel—and I know you’re thinking, \"Oh, here comes the plug.\" Well, you’re right. Is that Thrive Market doesn’t have a bunch of stuff that has weird added ingredients into it. Like, they adopt a lot of what, sort of, the EU puts into place for their processed foods. So, like, packaged foods at Thrive Market don’t have weird additives, there’s no red dyes and crazy stuff.","offset":265,"duration":36},{"text":"Host: So, at least even if some of the stuff is processed, like maybe some pantry staples and stuff like that, it’s the way that it should be. Processed because you’re processing it, not because you’re adulterating it and turning it into some hyper-palatable nonsense. So, that link that I put down below is for a 30% off discount link for anything from Thrive Market. So when you go ahead and you use Thrive Market, you get 30% off your entire grocery order when you use that link that’s down below.","offset":301,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: They also have frozen meat and seafood options. They’re starting to roll out fresh options for some people; you might not see it reflected on your account or not. But bottom line is, they’ve got really good stuff, and they’ve got canned fish, so they’ve got the tuna, they’ve got Wild Planet sardines and anchovies—I mean, all that stuff if you’re into that and you’re trying to live more Mediterranean.","offset":339,"duration":27},{"text":"Host: But some of the things that I love the most are just being able to get healthier snack options for my kids because I don’t want to just go to regular Vons or Safeway here in California and get something that has a load of garbage and MSG and stuff in it. If I’m going to get them a snack, I want something that I feel like, I don’t know, I don’t feel bad about giving them. So that’s the whole idea behind Thrive Market is being able to bring healthier options to the consumer at a decent price, right?","offset":366,"duration":34},{"text":"Host: So that link down below gets you 30% off plus a free gift. I really do recommend that you check them out. Check them out; they’ve been a sponsor on this channel for over half a decade, and I wouldn’t be recommending them if it wasn’t something that I honestly used myself. So that link is in the top line of the description.","offset":400,"duration":17}],"startTime":265},{"title":"Measuring and Improving Respiration Rates","summary":"Brian discusses the inaccuracies of wearable tech for measuring respiration rates and suggests better methods. He emphasizes that slowing down breathing and increasing CO2 tolerance is low-hanging fruit for improving overall physiological function.","entries":[{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And so that overbreathing thing, the 12 to 18 breaths a minute—a lot of that’s done on data that’s being collected from something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which isn’t exactly the most effective way, or the algorithms off of a lot of the technologies that are on the periphery, which is not very accurate in terms of understanding a respiration rate. So, meaning like if you’re wearing an Oura or a Whoop, your respiration rate is probably not what that is telling you.","offset":417,"duration":44},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, there’s a good chance it’s not. Um, that said, the data with those things is also—but not also, the data with those sort of things are consistent. Meaning, if there’s a change, there’s a change inside that. So they can, you know, they might be inaccurate, they’re just consistently inaccurate, which is—which is a good thing. Um, and they’re different.","offset":461,"duration":33},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But if you—you would want to, if you really wanted to understand respiration rate, since I talked about it, since I brought this up, it’s—you, you would get that—you, you would get something, a strap or something that would actually measure, like, as your ribcage begins to move, the, you know, the depth of that. Or you get on a resting metabolic—you, you do a resting metabolic test assessment, and that’ll actually capture your breathing rate, um, and what’s going on.","offset":494,"duration":46},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And that’s not the be-all end-all here. What is, is that, well, with people who have dysfunctional breath—and that is, by the way, dysfunctional breathing, any—in my opinion, anything above 15 breaths a minute is dysfunctional. Um, you, you have a massive gap in how your physiology’s going to operate, and we can—we can make major changes very quickly. And that would be through things like going for a walk and shutting your mouth, or doing a little breathwork and slowing down your breathing to a degree, or doing some breath hold work, um, that actually helped us increase the CO2 in the system so that we actually were using the oxygen a bit more.","offset":540,"duration":64},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And it’s not just about the oxygen. That CO2—oxygen’s a worthless, destructive molecule without carbon dioxide inside of this system. Um, in fact, it’s largely a destructive—oxygen is very destructive itself, far more destructive than CO2. Um, it’s just how that CO2 is getting used, right? Um, and if I don’t have enough of it in the system, the vasculature constricts more, right?","offset":604,"duration":44},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So if I have more of it in the system, the vasculature opens up, we vasidilate. So we—we—we start to—to train the system as a whole when we actually bring on an adequate amount of that. So I think, you know, to answer your question, CO2 tolerance becomes a very big player in some of the lowest-hanging fruit that people could actually go and understand, and that is simply by just slowing down your breathing a few times a day, maybe.","offset":648,"duration":39},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Doing some breathing protocols that you like, maybe not doing some hyperventilation stuff if you’ve got any issues going on just until you’ve addressed this stuff. Um, and then applying this into your current, you know, movement strategy. Like go for a walk, you know, 20, 30, 45 minutes and shut your mouth and see how you feel after that. And there’ll be a very big difference if it’s the first time you’ve really done something like that.","offset":687,"duration":39}],"startTime":417},{"title":"CO2, the Amygdala, and Anxiety","summary":"Brian details research showing the amygdala's role as a CO2 modulator and its connection to fear and anxiety. He explains how increasing CO2 tolerance can make individuals calmer and less reactive.","entries":[{"text":"Host: What is—what’s happening in the brain when CO2 builds?","offset":726,"duration":4},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: That’s a good question. So, um, a—a very—a good friend of mine, his name’s Dr. Justin Feinstein, did some work around, uh, studying the amygdala. He—uh, he—uh, he originally was doing research around, like, float tank therapy, stuff like that, and people get downregulating, but he—he got curious about this breathing thing. Um, and he ended up studying two sets of twins that had calcified amygdalas, and he was studying people that had anxiety, um, high levels, medical—like medically treated people with anxiety, okay?","offset":730,"duration":67},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, and if you have a calcified amygdala, you’re pretty much—you are a danger to yourself. Um, you don’t interpret fear as well, right? So you’ll put your hand, like, on a stove and not think about that, right? Like it’s—it’s just not something that kind of equates, you know, um. You—you—you just become a little bit of a danger to yourself, right? Um, and he was exposing people with anxiety to bolus hits of carbon dioxide.","offset":797,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And if—he inevitably ended up exposing these two sets of twins to, um, CO2 as well. And the twins had some of the most profound fear that they had ever experienced ever in their lives when exposed to the CO2. And it turns out the amygdala, even though it’s part of the limbic system and has this kind of, like, fear center in it, it also is a modulator of CO2, carbon dioxide.","offset":854,"duration":56},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And when my nervous system—when I’m hot, like if I’m—if I’m upset or I’ve, you know, I’m—I’ve been doing way too much, you know, I worked out a ton, like and in—and I need to recover, you know, I’ve been multiple days and I’ve been training, you know, I get—your nervous system gets a bit fried. You—you will notice that you are more reactive. All of that plays into how CO2 is actually operating as well.","offset":910,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: My nervous system can be running hot, and you can bet your tolerance to CO2 has gone down, meaning you are much more sensitive to that. So the chemoreceptors and everything that’s going on in that brain is now more sensitive to this stuff. However, if I can bring it down enough and I can expose myself to an adequate amount of CO2—let’s just go back into, let’s go back in time, when people used to have panic attacks, what would they do, let’s just say in the 70s and 80s, if somebody was having a panic attack?","offset":963,"duration":58},{"text":"Host: Stop and breathe?","offset":1021,"duration":3},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: They’d hand them a paper bag and tell them to breathe into the paper bag.","offset":1024,"duration":5},{"text":"Host: Oh, that's true.","offset":1029,"duration":2},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Why would they have somebody do that? CO2. Turns out that you can slow things down and calm down a bit more when you add a bit more CO2 into the system. Um, this isn’t necessarily, like, hey, go—go out and buy CO2 tanks and start, you know, huffing CO2. You know, this is like, hey, what’s going on here? What could I toggle or introduce into what I’m doing in order to learn more about why I’m a little sensitive to this?","offset":1031,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: You know, um, it’s—it’s interesting. We’ve—uh, at—at Andy Galpin’s old lab, one of his, uh, students, uh, Preston did a—did a—his thesis on a lot of this on some of this stuff where we’re doing an exhale assess—we do this exhale test where it’s a max exhale. Um, you, you know, inhale and then you exhale as long and slow—the redundancy of that is—as—as possible, right? And he found out that—I’ve been using this assessment for years now, um, and I—I figured this out, but we wanted him to—we wanted somebody else to kind of play with this as well.","offset":1088,"duration":67},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And he found out that the athletes he was testing, those who had a low CO2 tolerance score, so a low exhale assessment, had a—had more anxiety, and that was very much indicative of that. Their state anxiety was predictable by this score, by this test. So I can basically—and that doesn’t mean I’m diagnosing you with anxiety, by the way. That is—that just means from a nervous system standpoint, anxiety sits on the nervous system. Like, anxiousness is a point where you’re beyond, like, it’s a nervous system response.","offset":1155,"duration":64},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, so it’s not every day you’re going to be dealing with this, but you can bet that if you learn to stop overshooting the mark and getting anxious or taking on or worrying too much, you, you know, when you’re in those moments, you’re going to find out if you do an exhale or you try and hold your breath like or test this, like, you—it’s going to be real low. When you get a hold of that and you can remain calm, it’s going to go up.","offset":1219,"duration":52},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, but this is a very trainable thing to a degree that, like, you know, the vast majority of people as a, you know, just kind of a—a blanket statement here, like the vast majority of people if I had them hold their breath aren’t going to hold their breath much longer than 90 seconds, right? CO2 tolerance plays—CO2 tolerance plays a very big role in your ability to hold your breath, right? Part of that is your ability to deal with the pain and the panic that’s starting to shoot up and go off.","offset":1271,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But large majority of that is an adaptive process to this and being able to tolerate more CO2 in the system and get—getting used to that. So the vast majority of people hold their breath for 90 seconds, yet there are human beings holding their breath for seven minutes, no problem. So that’s a large gap, right? And I’m not suggestive that anybody go out and learn to hold their breath for seven minutes, but it could be a cool fun time to go do that.","offset":1324,"duration":46},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But at any rate, you get that breath hold up to two, three, maybe four minutes? I—I can—you can bet you’re going to be a calmer, less reactive person. 100%.","offset":1370,"duration":17}],"startTime":726},{"title":"Inhale vs. Exhale Breath Holds","summary":"Brian breaks down the differences between holding your breath on a full inhale versus an empty exhale. Inhale holds impact blood pressure and parasympathetic response, while exhale holds trigger a faster psychological panic and immediate CO2 response.","entries":[{"text":"Host: What’s the—benefit to doing a hold on full versus a hold on empty?","offset":1387,"duration":6},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: The hold on f—I mean, a—a number of things. Um, you know, within like the yogic world, they’ve—they’ve long started with things with on an exhale hold. Um, I’ve found that the inhale hold is a lot easier to work with people um, just because it allows for you an off switch—like let go. So if I’m holding up top, it’s [exhales] right, to let go versus [inhales sharply]. Right, um, the inhale is typically, um, the problem for people in my—a lot of my work.","offset":1393,"duration":97},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So, meaning, people inhale rather quickly versus the ability to inhale slowly, right? And then there are those of us that, you know, will struggle a bit with an exhale. But that’s largely a CO2 tolerance thing. Um, so the inhale hold is more of a pressure thing. You’re going to see blood pressure, you’re going to see pressure changes as a result of that. People who struggle with bring the—with bringing their parasympathetic nervous system on board—so high-stress people—are going they—they might have some issues with the inhale breath hold, meaning they’ll get—they’ll get woozy real quick.","offset":1490,"duration":66},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, they’ll—um, you know, it—there—there will be a disconnect from the heart to the brain as a result of that because of the pressure changes. Um, but I don’t work to do like maximal like stuff the lung type of stuff and, you know, a lot of this stuff with inhale breath holds, what I have people do is simply to first and like strong urge to breathe, not panic urge to breathe. Um, those seem to have the biggest impacts with people.","offset":1556,"duration":60},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So just repeating, like, an on the minute. Like, hey, I’m going to breathe for a minute or two and then I’m going to hold my breath until a strong urge to breathe and doing that for five or six sets is a very, very big downregulating, um, tool. Now, if somebody’s tuned up that’s pretty anxious, that may not be the thing to do. Um, it may be go the other way to the negative—is you’re working with dead space mostly.","offset":1616,"duration":54},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Now, there’s still some air in there in the lungs on an exhale, but you got to be pretty, pretty damn tuned in like a Mark Healey or like a, you know, yogi from India to get all that air out of your lungs. Um, you know, other than that, you know, let’s just say we just [exhales] and I hold. There’s not as much of a—of a blood pressure change that’s occurring; there’s more of a—we’re kind of working on the immediacy of CO2’s response to the system.","offset":1670,"duration":54},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So you’re going to actually work more on the psyche with a negative breath hold in my opinion, because people aren’t—I mean, if people right now were to go and go ahead and dump all the air you’ve got and hold your breath, see how quickly panic comes on. Now, relax after you heard that and did that, take a few breaths, and then go do it with an inhale. You’re not going to panic as quick.","offset":1724,"duration":37},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah. It’s just not going to happen. So I kind of look at it in terms of, you know, working more on the mental with the negative and working more on the physiological with the positive. However, there are definitely, you know, there’s—some differ—there’s some differences but there’s also much crossover. You hold your breath enough on either end with very few breaths, you’re going to get hypoxic. Um, you’ll—introduce hypoxia, but most people will never reach that point because they’re so CO2—I wouldn’t say so, but they’re CO2 intolerant enough to where CO2 is convincing them to take a breath well before oxygen is going lights out.","offset":1761,"duration":47}],"startTime":1387},{"title":"Hypoxia and Mitochondrial Efficiency","summary":"Brian cites a study comparing an elite triathlete and a freediver to illustrate metabolic efficiency. The freediver's hypoxic training allowed them to produce more ATP using less oxygen.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Is there a—is there a metabolic interplay here as well, like the—of the mitochondria’s ability to kind of function in this hypoxic state?","offset":1808,"duration":9},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yes. Yeah. The beauty of this, and there’s a great paper out there, uh—I forget what it—I—I’m paraphrasing, but it—I think it’s called \"The Tortoise and the Hare\". There’s an actual paper, um, where these guys in Sweden, I believe it was Sweden, they studied, um, two of the people who were at the university were at the time—one was an elite triathlete and one was an elite freediver.","offset":1817,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And they were both competing that year and they wanted to test, well, what’s the difference between mitochondria and the aerobic function of these? And one would have suspected and been correct that the triathlete who’s at an elite level has far greater what we would assume metabolic health and the ability to function aerobically at higher states. Correct. There’s the—the one major caveat here, and this is where hypoxia becomes a very, very potent tool.","offset":1874,"duration":44},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, and there’s much more to hypoxia that we could go into a rabbit hole on. However, um, the breath holding and learning to hold one’s breath and get to hypoxia in particular they found that the freediver is able to use less oxygen with more—for more ATP.","offset":1918,"duration":40},{"text":"Host: Hmm.","offset":1958,"duration":2},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So, they are far more efficient on that end of energy—getting energy off of that electron transport chain than the aerobically inclined athlete. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that, um, you do one of the other; I would suggest you do both.","offset":1960,"duration":34}],"startTime":1808},{"title":"Integrating Breath Holds into Training","summary":"Brian explains how to incorporate breath holds into existing physical training routines, such as holding breath at the end of sprint intervals. This practice can stimulate short-term EPO and red blood cell responses.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Yeah. What about concurrently? I mean, what about literally—this might be more advanced so I mean, disclosure there, but someone that is, um, you know, maybe doing Zone 2, maybe they’re doing their base training—is there some form of benefit to doing occasional holds while actually training?","offset":1994,"duration":24},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Oh, I—yes. I—I have people do this all—yeah. This is part of training regiment like 101 with me. It’s just like, yeah, hey, we’re going to be doing this, you’re also doing this. Like, we’re—we’re targeting these things in many aspects, like most of my clients—","offset":2018,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: So they’re, like, holding their breath while you’re running, kind of?","offset":2035,"duration":1},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, most of my clients don’t just do strength and conditioning and endurance work; they do strength conditioning, endurance work, breath hold work, etc. Like, they’re getting the whole—but, it’s a lot, you know, if I were to start dumping out everything we do, it’s—you know, heat training, cold training, like all of—where’s the time for—well, that’s the thing is the art is in, hey, what—what’s this person’s schedule look like? Where can we insert these things so that they’re actually effective? Because if they’re not—if we can’t, there’s no sense. Like why would we implement this? Like, you know, breath hold is just a very simple thing to implement for anybody.","offset":2036,"duration":59},{"text":"Host: If you were to say—I mean this is a hypothetical situation where you’re going to, you know, hop on an assault bike, let’s say, do a 20-calorie hit on an assault bike and then hop off—is there a benefit at an advanced level to attempting a—a hold during your recovery there?","offset":2095,"duration":15},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Oh yeah, no. No, there’s research that support—well, I—I would go about it, um, in a way of, like—go—do—do a sprint, short sprint, right? Warmed up, going into some sprints. Like, I—what I like—here’s what I like to do, um, is like five minutes very, very—every five minutes you’re hitting anywhere from 6 to 15 seconds, right? Hard. And you could definitely go out to 90 seconds or three minutes if you want for intervals, but by all means hold your breath on the last six seconds.","offset":2110,"duration":56},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Just hold it. Just lock it down. You’ll be able to get through it. Um, hold it and then you’ll start to see you can end up holding it a little bit longer and a little bit longer. That has very big impacts with stuff like this. You may not get—you’re not going to really get hypoxic from stuff like this, like what I was bringing up with the \"The Tortoise and the Hare\". What you’re going to do is you’re going to—you’re going to start getting probably some boosts in EPO and some red blood cell responses short-term, and then long-term you’re going to get some—some of that stuff that’ll hold on.","offset":2166,"duration":52},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, it’s not going to be something I think that I would use for hyp—you know, going to altitude, but it will help for sure—for—100% it will help. Um, it’s not going to be the thing that, you know, you would want to be doing for altitude exposure, though.","offset":2218,"duration":27}],"startTime":1994},{"title":"Nasal vs. Mouth Breathing During Exercise","summary":"Brian discusses the physiological differences between nasal and mouth exhalations, emphasizing that dumping CO2 via mouth breathing alters the dissociative curve. He recommends nasal breathing for moderate exercise but warns against forcing it during high-intensity training.","entries":[{"text":"Host: If we pivot for a second to talk, you know, nasal versus mouth?","offset":2245,"duration":4},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah.","offset":2249,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: I think one of the things that I’ve personally—I’ll just use my own experience here is—um, my ability to inhale through the nose through activity is fine. It’s exhalation through the nose that, um, becomes almost restricted; it’s just harder. It’s just, like, takes more time and by the time all the air is out of my nose, I’m hypox—it’s like I’m, you know, it’s taking so long for the air to physically come out of my nose that then I’m almost going into oxygen debt, right? So—or what feels like it. So then it’s like then you’re almost going into—","offset":2250,"duration":49},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, it's just CO2. That's the carbon dioxide screaming at you there.","offset":2299,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: So it's—is there—I'm sure there's different modalities, but if you're working on quote-unquote \"nasal breathing\", is it okay to exhale through the mouth during activity? So inhale nose, exhale mouth, or is that a completely different response than if you also exhale through the nose?","offset":2309,"duration":23},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Well, if you’re going to—if—so, nose breathing we know is parasympathetic—has more parasympathetic tone. It’s that exhale that’s the most important part of that.","offset":2332,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Okay.","offset":2346,"duration":2},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Here’s why. Anything below moderate levels of exercise, I’m getting the same amount of oxygen in. I do not need to switch over until beyond moderate levels of exercise to [panting] to onboard more oxygen. Okay. It’s the CO2 coming out that is really the player in this game to where [exhales through nose] versus [panting].","offset":2348,"duration":63},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, I just dumped all that CO2. So that in—and so now we start to mess with that dissociative curve that I was kind of talking about, right? Um, and not in all cases, but most cases, like if you’re—if—if you have to mouth breathe at less than moderate levels of exercise, I—you can bet you’re—you’re messing with, uh, aerobic stuff. Yeah, mm-hmm. Maybe not a ton, but enough. And if that’s your goal, then—and that would be my goal if I was somebody who was exercising.","offset":2411,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, I’d use high intensity for high intensity and we get into mouth breathing plenty. I see many, many people who are glued to the concept of nose breathing till the end. Like, it’s just they nose breathe even at high intensity. Um, and you are doing the exact same thing but in an opposite way of overbreathing now. You are literally not able to use oxygen the way it was used in your system’s getting more acidic than it actually needs to.","offset":2464,"duration":47},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So, pH is changing, hydrogen’s not getting dealt with as well. All the—you know, all of this stuff—is—I’ve seen the crossovers in—on the metabolic stuff, you know, where people are limiting themselves. And they lack the ability to sustain higher respiration rates at higher intensities.","offset":2511,"duration":49}],"startTime":2245},{"title":"Regulating Training Intensity and Adaptation","summary":"Brian addresses how to balance different training intensities and adapt to stressors. He advises testing individual adaptations by isolating variables, like adding daily walking, rather than constantly increasing training volume.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Do you, with your training in that case, are you—do you have a pretty clear line of delineation between \"hey, here's—here's my aerobic stuff and here's my high intensity stuff\"? Like not sitting in that kind of—there's some people out there that'll believe that, like, if you train within that gray area, sort of, you know, lactate threshold area, that's like really a sweet spot where you're—and then there's others that are saying like, \"Hey, no, we've got a very clear—it's a very clear line of delineation where we don't sit in that gray area, we either go extreme high intensity or we go lower intensity, and the magic ends up naturally happening by training those two systems.\" I'm just curious your take on that.","offset":2560,"duration":36},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Uh, no. I don’t think any manmade thought on how my body should respond to things should be limited. That doesn’t mean—and—and I’m very, very, very careful to watch what it is I, in particular, inevitably get enamored with. I’ve been enamored with low intensity. I’ve been enamored with high intensity.","offset":2596,"duration":46},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":2642,"duration":1},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And—and I’ve done moderate intensity. Um, you know, I’ve been enamored with that as well. Um, it all plays a critical role. Um, I don’t consider like walking low intensity. No. I consider that the buy-in for you and anybody to manage, uh, any and all activity. Um, you know, that doesn’t mean like I’ve got, you know, like I wouldn’t ask an NFLer to be walking 90 minutes a day because they’re probably at practice and they’re probably getting 10,000 steps in a day anyway.","offset":2643,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So like, you know, I just want them to do like 15, 20 minutes in the morning or something just to clear, you know—get lactate levels down, get cortisol levels down, um, in the morning so that we’re kind of stabilized and ready to go. Um, but, yeah. I—I think the full spectrum, however, I’m very careful to—I would say look—80% of what you’re doing, if you’re—your mouth should be shut.","offset":2696,"duration":51},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But you had—you would be best being mouth open several times a week for very short periods of time.","offset":2747,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: Yeah. And I think being able to—how do you suggest that someone that maybe isn’t as in tune with their body be able to regulate and understand, like, when they need to throttle down their training versus throttle it up? Because I have found that that is a very confusing place for most people, and it’s on both ends of the spectrum, whether it’s an extreme or an elite athlete versus someone that’s a newbie. It’s very difficult to really ascertain, like, okay, when is it time to throttle down? When am I doing—like when your sort of allostatic load is so high already, like do you throttle down your training or do you try to increase your training to deal with it? Like, what’s—how does someone kind of regulate that? What would you suggest to someone?","offset":2757,"duration":50},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Uh, I mean it’s a great question. Um, I—people really need to spend time learning what adaptation looks like with one thing at a time. Um, so, you know, like I brought up the walking thing before with you, right? Like I get people to walk. I want you to just implement that right now. And then, you know, whatever else you’re doing, just keep doing that, but we’re walking.","offset":2807,"duration":46},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: You’re going to find out if you can do the other stuff if you’ve added in walk—you know, 45 minutes to 90 minutes of walking a day, right? Like you will find out if you can continue to have that stuff. Then it’s like, okay, well what’s the goal? You know, I just—I was talking to a buddy of mine who’s down in Australia, um, last week. And I hadn’t seen him in a—in a number of months, um, and we do video chat. And—um, he—it came on and I was like, \"Whoa, somebody put on some weight.\"","offset":2853,"duration":49},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And not—not fat. He definitely put on muscle. Like I was like, \"Damn!\" And he’s like, \"Yeah.\" He goes, \"It’s interesting, I’m only lifting three days a week.\" And he goes, you know—and he’s 35. And he’s like, \"You know what’s interesting is—is that I’m lifting far less than I did when I was in my 20s and I’m putting on more muscle now than I was then.\" Am I getting that interesting? Like, how many of us think we just need to go do more, more, more, more and literally aren’t miss—are missing adaptive processes because we’re just continuing to add in a stressor, be it weightlifting, right, as the example.","offset":2902,"duration":71},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Like I know a lot of people who train six days a week, right, and continue to do it. And there’s a—there’s a sharp ramp up at first with that, and then it just [gestures] peters out and does its thing. And then it’s real hard to make gains. Um, you know, versus like, hey, how about three days a week of that? You know, um, what happens with that? Are people willing to toggle or screw around with things to learn where that—where that is?","offset":2973,"duration":42},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: What can you get away with? What is still creating the gains that you want? What do you want? All right, well let’s put one thing down first. Let’s go after that thing and let’s screw around to find out where that sweet spot is with this. And the reality is, is that’s what life’s about. Being able to creatively figure out what works and what doesn’t so that you’re doing the things you want versus not doing the things you’re not—you don’t want to be doing.","offset":3015,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Like, I’m continuing to work out all the time and do all this stuff that—because I’m doing everything. I’m doing the ice bath, I’m doing the sauna, I’m doing the hyperbaric chamber, I’m doing the hypoxico, I’m doing strength and conditioning. Like, dude, like I get it, because I do all that stuff. However, it all comes in little segments. Like it’s not all going on at the same time. There’s, you know, it’s all adjusted because I’ve been at it for like 25 years and I know when—you can’t do it all at the same time.","offset":3072,"duration":48}],"startTime":2560},{"title":"Finding the True Motivation for Training","summary":"The host and Brian explore the deeper psychological reasons behind wanting a specific body composition, touching on vanity, eating disorders, and self-acceptance. They advocate for letting a good physique be a natural byproduct of a healthy, performance-focused lifestyle.","entries":[{"text":"Host: And it's kind of funny, like, when you ask—if I ask someone, \"Okay, well why do you want to get in shape?\" \"Well, I want to have a six-pack.\" \"Well, why do you want to have a six-pack?\" \"Well, because I think it looks cool.\" \"Well, why do you think it looks cool?\" \"I don't know, because I think my wife will like me more.\" \"Why do you think your wife will like you more?\" \"Good question. Yeah. Maybe I'm afraid she's sleeping with the neighbor.\" \"Why do you think she's sleeping with the neighbor? Because I'm a d—.\"","offset":3120,"duration":27},{"text":"Host: You know what I mean, right? Like it's—it's—maybe that's not the exact situation, but it's kind of, it's like when you start asking these, okay, why are you actually doing this? Why are you actually doing this? And it's—asking those five or six layers of \"why\" someone's doing something to really understand like, okay, well here's, like you're mentioning, this is your driving force behind why you want to do something, so let's just hone in on that. So when you get down to it, it sounds like you actually just need to pressure release and you want to, uh, just feel healthy and feel good in your own skin. You don't necessarily want the six-pack per se, and maybe we need to kind of investigate that a little bit more so that you're not going to the gym destroying yourself. Volume, volume, volume, volume, volume to get shredded because that a, might happen with that quick ramp-up that you talk about, but then you're going to destroy yourself pretty damn quick and then you're going to be right back to square one trying to learn about, \"Okay, well now I want to get mobile because I've spent the last—\"","offset":3147,"duration":61},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, I mean—I mean, there are what—when I hear that, and it’s—it’s happening everywhere, um, I just think about the amount of men and women with eating disorders like that are just trying to look a specific way. Yep. And I say men because there are a lot of men who literally have eating—eating disorders um, and because they want to look a specific way because they don’t like who they are.","offset":3208,"duration":28},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yep. And they don’t—they are not addressing the fundamental—that fundamental layer of why they don’t like who they are and because of the decisions they continue to make or that, you know, they’re insulating themselves around that whole vanity thing, right? Like if I just look the part or if I look like I fit in, I won’t have to be me. Yeah. Why wouldn’t you want to be you? Like, that’s all I—that’s all you should be.","offset":3236,"duration":31},{"text":"Host: Yeah. And it's like the guys that need to put on a certain amount of muscle or need to look a certain way, and I was certainly that way before, right? Because it almost is—makes it as though you don't have to—you can talk the talk without actually walking the walk. And when you ask yourself like, \"Well, did it actually take walking the walk to be able to talk this talk, or could I talk this talk without walking the walk?\" In other words, I think that a lot of people focus on the body composition piece because they're not really willing to look inside and see like why they actually want to focus on the body composition piece.","offset":3267,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, and I mean, you know—you’re not saying and I’m going to be perfectly clear—what I’m not—what I am not saying is that you can’t have that. You can have that. For sure. You can have the abs, you can have the muscle, you can have all that. However, let that be the byproduct of how you feel about yourself and what you’re willing to commit to. Yep. Right? And then watch how that—like I had—I had a guy who literally was like, \"These workouts, you keep sending me these workouts, that like they’re so confusing, but it’s like I’m not used to this. I’m just used to this, like, you know, bodybuilding type, you know, the like sets and reps and d-d-d.\" And I, you know, I like to mix things up a lot and um, you know, and I’m like, \"All right, I—I understand it can be a little confusing and, you know, look, you know, we’ll just—we just want to stick at this, we—you know, keep up with the walking, d-d-d.\"","offset":3320,"duration":59},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And like two months later he’s like, \"You know what’s funny?\" He goes, \"I was b—ing about all that and yet I get more compliments now about what I look like, and I cared more about what I looked like when I was doing the other s— that I was trying to look a specific way and now I actually look better and am getting compliments from people that I wasn’t expecting I was going to get.\" I’m like, \"See? See how that works?\"","offset":3379,"duration":30},{"text":"Host: Yeah. It's wild. I mean, you look at one way of—for me having to take a stop, reverse engineer a little bit and reorient my focus a little bit more. I think at the end of the day, all I ever wanted was the performance side of things and my body to perform the way I wanted it to perform with no arbitrary number. The way I wanted it to perform at that point in time, whether it was to go climb a mountain or to go for a—I'm like, okay, deep down it's always about performing. And the physical aspect was a way of me being able to look in the mirror, see a certain look, and tell myself that I'm performing even if I'm not performing because I have the physique of someone that's performing when in reality that was all just like an image, right? And then when focusing on performance—when I say performance, relative, not like some again, specific number—focusing on performance suddenly all of that falls in line effortlessly without the extra 90% of my energy focused on body composition just by focusing on the sole thing that I'm actually after when it comes down to my training.","offset":3409,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: And also being able to have the energy to give to my wife and give to my family and give to the things that I truly love and enjoy, which actually made training more about empowering and getting stronger and enjoying it versus constant punishment. Yeah. And it's amazing, especially when we talk about the eating disorders with guys, how much of them view their training subconsciously as a punishment versus something that they get to do and something that this amazing body gets to be able to do. And when you empower it like that and you treat it as such, it's amazing, amazing how much it changes.","offset":3471,"duration":79},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Oh, yeah. You nailed it on the head with that. I mean, that’s—that’s it. It’s—yeah. Um, people are not taking the time to look at why they’re doing what they’re doing and understanding that if it—if it’s for these, you know, attachment issues they’re not willing to look at and these material things, it’s going to come apart. Yeah. It will come apart. It might not be for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, but it’s going to. And it ain’t going to be pretty the longer it goes.","offset":3550,"duration":41},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And then it’s going to be so hard to unspool that that it’s, you know, it’s going to be this devastating—more of a devastating process. So it gets harder and harder as it goes. It’s still possible. And I see it. And—and it’s actually quite inspiring um, to see that. But I think people are looking far too much to be motivated into something. Yeah. Instead of just committed to the process, you know?","offset":3591,"duration":43}],"startTime":3120},{"title":"Embracing the Process and Finding Meaning","summary":"The conversation shifts to the philosophy of training, referencing Bruce Lee and the importance of committing to the process rather than illusionary goals. Breath is presented as the ultimate, undeniable feedback mechanism in life and training.","entries":[{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And, you know, Bruce Lee is a very famous quote that, you know, all—all goals are an illusion apart—you know, apart from the—the means is apart from the means, right? And the means is the process. If what you’re doing ain’t about the process, you—you—you’re fooling yourself. We’re all lying to ourselves with this whole thing with—with meaninglessness. Like even I—I don’t kid myself right now with what it is I do. It’s—it’s quite literally meaningless.","offset":3634,"duration":40},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: It—I exist in a world where we’re just all running around doing some bunch of meaningless crap.","offset":3674,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: Hedonic treadmill.","offset":3681,"duration":1},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah. Yeah. To exist in a—like—so, but—but, that doesn’t mean stop doing it. It means why am I doing this thing? Am I passionate about it? Do I care about it? Great! Then that gives me ultimate power of being able to do something very, very creative and powerful with it. And it at the end of the day it’s not going to matter. Like what will matter is who—who I am and what I care about.","offset":3682,"duration":40},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And I think the people that you surround yourself with will be a reflection of that. And then it’s like, uh, coming back to this whole like, hey, what’s the lowest—you know, what are the things that we can look at? Like what—what is it like about CO2 tolerance? Why would I bring that up? And it’s like, well, this is just a gateway into understanding where all this—where you’re at, right? Like an—a door opening in order to bring it down a beat, to toggle that lever down and go, \"Oh, there’s an opportunity here.\" Not, \"Oh my god, this sucks.\" Like, you know, no.","offset":3722,"duration":60},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: The—the process of understanding is lifelong. It will never end. It will not. And the thing with CO2 is it’s never ever ever ever ever going to lie to you. Because weights can even be—I used to say—I used to say like, \"50 pounds is always going to be 50 pounds, that’s the nice thing. Is like the weights will never lie to you.\" Except there’s so many ways to override your system to get through a workout or to push weight that although it is pretty solid at giving you feedback, it’s not as solid as breath. It’s not as solid as the need to breathe.","offset":3782,"duration":60},{"text":"Host: Because that is as—as fundamental and base level as it possibly gets because without that, you will die.","offset":3842,"duration":8},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah. Well, you’re going to. I mean—you’re going to breathe. I mean, the—the reality is is you have to breathe and that’s one of the very few things you have to do. And you can try and stop yourself from doing that; it’s all right. There’s mechanisms in place that’ll take you out, that’ll shut you down, and the first thing that’ll happen when you go unconscious is you’ll start to breathe. And until this life’s over, you know, and then you’ll pass on and, you know, whatever.","offset":3850,"duration":41},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, if you’re not having fun while you’re doing this, you know, if you’re not into the—kind of the core of of why you’re training and the process of that, like it’s just going to be this hamster wheel of just psychoticness living inside of you.","offset":3891,"duration":21},{"text":"Host: It’s the—was the—you’ve heard of the gap theory of happiness?","offset":3912,"duration":3},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah.","offset":3915,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: Yeah. And I don’t know how much, like, Seneca you’ve read or any—any stoic stuff—","offset":3916,"duration":5},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: A little bit.","offset":3921,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: —but, you know, it’s kind of like the gap theory of happiness and, like, I—I think about this a lot when it comes to training. The gap theory of happiness essentially, like, we’re always living in that gap but between, like, the next thing that’s going to—","offset":3922,"duration":15}],"startTime":3634}],"entries":[{"text":"Host: Brian Mackenzie, what would you say the number one thing, if you had to—if you had to pick one, that is the biggest encumbrance to people being able to properly downregulate, maybe relieve some stress, consequently improve their performance?","offset":0,"duration":14},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: At a physiological level, uh, it is a tolerance to CO2, which has to do with their nervous system. Um, so, you know, an interesting—I was just on a call with a friend of mine who’s writing a book on, um, walking, and she wanted to go over some stuff with the breathing, and she’s like, \"You know,\" and she’s a DPT, so she’s, you know, a doctorate in physical therapy, so she’s well educated inside the world of, um, you know, all of this stuff.","offset":14,"duration":40},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And she’s like, \"Are our normal respiration rates that the medical community says are 12 to 18 breaths a minute, is that normal?\" And I’m like, \"Well, it’s normal for the culture that we’re in.\" And I’m like, \"But I mean, my respiration rate’s around seven, and I don’t do a tremendous amount of breathwork. However, I’ve done enough and I apply the principles of this stuff into what it is I’m doing.\"","offset":54,"duration":37},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And that just, you know, that is alluding to the fact that most people are so, um, hot—running hot, or stressed, that their nervous system’s pretty, you know, fried. Or, and/or they’ve become so CO2 intolerant. So we respond to carbon dioxide—it’s the large—it’s a big, big, if not the biggest, player in driver for, um, breathing while we’re awake. Um, and it’s not the only one, but it’s one of the main ones.","offset":91,"duration":41},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And when we become sensitive to this, rightfully so, our breathing changes. The dynamics of our breathing change. Um, if our mouth is open, we instantly change our respiration rate, and that’s more to do with, um, baroreception, which is not chemoreception, which is where CO2 fits in—meaning pressure change. But, a lot of people are talking all day long, which is mouth breathing, so my respiration rate’s up.","offset":132,"duration":32},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: A lot of people are very stressed; they just mouth breathe in general. So they go exercise and they’re not doing a whole lot, or they’re walking around and their mouth is open. Um, that all can move towards being, um, you’re offloading excessive CO2 at that point. So when you’re overbreathing, what we’re doing is you offload—you, you get rid of more CO2. You don’t bring on more O2.","offset":164,"duration":29},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: In fact, you and I right now are—uh, we exhale roughly 80% of the oxygen that’s coming in. So we don’t need it, right? We don’t need all that oxygen because there’s enough—there’s plenty. It’s just only when exercise or movement goes up that that changes. So what happens is we change the dissociative curve of what’s going on with our breathing, and when we become a little less—uh, we’re not using oxygen as well and we still continue to get stressed, our breathing goes up.","offset":193,"duration":38},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And so we just kind of—the system self-adjusts and tries to balance itself out in what it does. And part of that process is that our breathing changes. The dynamics of our breathing change, and it just gets easier to breathe like that versus taking, you know—and you don’t need to be taking a full inhale while we’re sitting here. You know, you’re breathing perfectly fine as we’re sitting here.","offset":231,"duration":31},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But the vast majority of people are not.","offset":262,"duration":3},{"text":"Host: While I’m at it, one of the things that I do like about Thrive Market, which I talk about all the time on my channel—and I know you’re thinking, \"Oh, here comes the plug.\" Well, you’re right. Is that Thrive Market doesn’t have a bunch of stuff that has weird added ingredients into it. Like, they adopt a lot of what, sort of, the EU puts into place for their processed foods. So, like, packaged foods at Thrive Market don’t have weird additives, there’s no red dyes and crazy stuff.","offset":265,"duration":36},{"text":"Host: So, at least even if some of the stuff is processed, like maybe some pantry staples and stuff like that, it’s the way that it should be. Processed because you’re processing it, not because you’re adulterating it and turning it into some hyper-palatable nonsense. So, that link that I put down below is for a 30% off discount link for anything from Thrive Market. So when you go ahead and you use Thrive Market, you get 30% off your entire grocery order when you use that link that’s down below.","offset":301,"duration":38},{"text":"Host: They also have frozen meat and seafood options. They’re starting to roll out fresh options for some people; you might not see it reflected on your account or not. But bottom line is, they’ve got really good stuff, and they’ve got canned fish, so they’ve got the tuna, they’ve got Wild Planet sardines and anchovies—I mean, all that stuff if you’re into that and you’re trying to live more Mediterranean.","offset":339,"duration":27},{"text":"Host: But some of the things that I love the most are just being able to get healthier snack options for my kids because I don’t want to just go to regular Vons or Safeway here in California and get something that has a load of garbage and MSG and stuff in it. If I’m going to get them a snack, I want something that I feel like, I don’t know, I don’t feel bad about giving them. So that’s the whole idea behind Thrive Market is being able to bring healthier options to the consumer at a decent price, right?","offset":366,"duration":34},{"text":"Host: So that link down below gets you 30% off plus a free gift. I really do recommend that you check them out. Check them out; they’ve been a sponsor on this channel for over half a decade, and I wouldn’t be recommending them if it wasn’t something that I honestly used myself. So that link is in the top line of the description.","offset":400,"duration":17},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And so that overbreathing thing, the 12 to 18 breaths a minute—a lot of that’s done on data that’s being collected from something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which isn’t exactly the most effective way, or the algorithms off of a lot of the technologies that are on the periphery, which is not very accurate in terms of understanding a respiration rate. So, meaning like if you’re wearing an Oura or a Whoop, your respiration rate is probably not what that is telling you.","offset":417,"duration":44},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, there’s a good chance it’s not. Um, that said, the data with those things is also—but not also, the data with those sort of things are consistent. Meaning, if there’s a change, there’s a change inside that. So they can, you know, they might be inaccurate, they’re just consistently inaccurate, which is—which is a good thing. Um, and they’re different.","offset":461,"duration":33},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But if you—you would want to, if you really wanted to understand respiration rate, since I talked about it, since I brought this up, it’s—you, you would get that—you, you would get something, a strap or something that would actually measure, like, as your ribcage begins to move, the, you know, the depth of that. Or you get on a resting metabolic—you, you do a resting metabolic test assessment, and that’ll actually capture your breathing rate, um, and what’s going on.","offset":494,"duration":46},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And that’s not the be-all end-all here. What is, is that, well, with people who have dysfunctional breath—and that is, by the way, dysfunctional breathing, any—in my opinion, anything above 15 breaths a minute is dysfunctional. Um, you, you have a massive gap in how your physiology’s going to operate, and we can—we can make major changes very quickly. And that would be through things like going for a walk and shutting your mouth, or doing a little breathwork and slowing down your breathing to a degree, or doing some breath hold work, um, that actually helped us increase the CO2 in the system so that we actually were using the oxygen a bit more.","offset":540,"duration":64},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And it’s not just about the oxygen. That CO2—oxygen’s a worthless, destructive molecule without carbon dioxide inside of this system. Um, in fact, it’s largely a destructive—oxygen is very destructive itself, far more destructive than CO2. Um, it’s just how that CO2 is getting used, right? Um, and if I don’t have enough of it in the system, the vasculature constricts more, right?","offset":604,"duration":44},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So if I have more of it in the system, the vasculature opens up, we vasidilate. So we—we—we start to—to train the system as a whole when we actually bring on an adequate amount of that. So I think, you know, to answer your question, CO2 tolerance becomes a very big player in some of the lowest-hanging fruit that people could actually go and understand, and that is simply by just slowing down your breathing a few times a day, maybe.","offset":648,"duration":39},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Doing some breathing protocols that you like, maybe not doing some hyperventilation stuff if you’ve got any issues going on just until you’ve addressed this stuff. Um, and then applying this into your current, you know, movement strategy. Like go for a walk, you know, 20, 30, 45 minutes and shut your mouth and see how you feel after that. And there’ll be a very big difference if it’s the first time you’ve really done something like that.","offset":687,"duration":39},{"text":"Host: What is—what’s happening in the brain when CO2 builds?","offset":726,"duration":4},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: That’s a good question. So, um, a—a very—a good friend of mine, his name’s Dr. Justin Feinstein, did some work around, uh, studying the amygdala. He—uh, he—uh, he originally was doing research around, like, float tank therapy, stuff like that, and people get downregulating, but he—he got curious about this breathing thing. Um, and he ended up studying two sets of twins that had calcified amygdalas, and he was studying people that had anxiety, um, high levels, medical—like medically treated people with anxiety, okay?","offset":730,"duration":67},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, and if you have a calcified amygdala, you’re pretty much—you are a danger to yourself. Um, you don’t interpret fear as well, right? So you’ll put your hand, like, on a stove and not think about that, right? Like it’s—it’s just not something that kind of equates, you know, um. You—you—you just become a little bit of a danger to yourself, right? Um, and he was exposing people with anxiety to bolus hits of carbon dioxide.","offset":797,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And if—he inevitably ended up exposing these two sets of twins to, um, CO2 as well. And the twins had some of the most profound fear that they had ever experienced ever in their lives when exposed to the CO2. And it turns out the amygdala, even though it’s part of the limbic system and has this kind of, like, fear center in it, it also is a modulator of CO2, carbon dioxide.","offset":854,"duration":56},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And when my nervous system—when I’m hot, like if I’m—if I’m upset or I’ve, you know, I’m—I’ve been doing way too much, you know, I worked out a ton, like and in—and I need to recover, you know, I’ve been multiple days and I’ve been training, you know, I get—your nervous system gets a bit fried. You—you will notice that you are more reactive. All of that plays into how CO2 is actually operating as well.","offset":910,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: My nervous system can be running hot, and you can bet your tolerance to CO2 has gone down, meaning you are much more sensitive to that. So the chemoreceptors and everything that’s going on in that brain is now more sensitive to this stuff. However, if I can bring it down enough and I can expose myself to an adequate amount of CO2—let’s just go back into, let’s go back in time, when people used to have panic attacks, what would they do, let’s just say in the 70s and 80s, if somebody was having a panic attack?","offset":963,"duration":58},{"text":"Host: Stop and breathe?","offset":1021,"duration":3},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: They’d hand them a paper bag and tell them to breathe into the paper bag.","offset":1024,"duration":5},{"text":"Host: Oh, that's true.","offset":1029,"duration":2},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Why would they have somebody do that? CO2. Turns out that you can slow things down and calm down a bit more when you add a bit more CO2 into the system. Um, this isn’t necessarily, like, hey, go—go out and buy CO2 tanks and start, you know, huffing CO2. You know, this is like, hey, what’s going on here? What could I toggle or introduce into what I’m doing in order to learn more about why I’m a little sensitive to this?","offset":1031,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: You know, um, it’s—it’s interesting. We’ve—uh, at—at Andy Galpin’s old lab, one of his, uh, students, uh, Preston did a—did a—his thesis on a lot of this on some of this stuff where we’re doing an exhale assess—we do this exhale test where it’s a max exhale. Um, you, you know, inhale and then you exhale as long and slow—the redundancy of that is—as—as possible, right? And he found out that—I’ve been using this assessment for years now, um, and I—I figured this out, but we wanted him to—we wanted somebody else to kind of play with this as well.","offset":1088,"duration":67},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And he found out that the athletes he was testing, those who had a low CO2 tolerance score, so a low exhale assessment, had a—had more anxiety, and that was very much indicative of that. Their state anxiety was predictable by this score, by this test. So I can basically—and that doesn’t mean I’m diagnosing you with anxiety, by the way. That is—that just means from a nervous system standpoint, anxiety sits on the nervous system. Like, anxiousness is a point where you’re beyond, like, it’s a nervous system response.","offset":1155,"duration":64},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, so it’s not every day you’re going to be dealing with this, but you can bet that if you learn to stop overshooting the mark and getting anxious or taking on or worrying too much, you, you know, when you’re in those moments, you’re going to find out if you do an exhale or you try and hold your breath like or test this, like, you—it’s going to be real low. When you get a hold of that and you can remain calm, it’s going to go up.","offset":1219,"duration":52},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, but this is a very trainable thing to a degree that, like, you know, the vast majority of people as a, you know, just kind of a—a blanket statement here, like the vast majority of people if I had them hold their breath aren’t going to hold their breath much longer than 90 seconds, right? CO2 tolerance plays—CO2 tolerance plays a very big role in your ability to hold your breath, right? Part of that is your ability to deal with the pain and the panic that’s starting to shoot up and go off.","offset":1271,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But large majority of that is an adaptive process to this and being able to tolerate more CO2 in the system and get—getting used to that. So the vast majority of people hold their breath for 90 seconds, yet there are human beings holding their breath for seven minutes, no problem. So that’s a large gap, right? And I’m not suggestive that anybody go out and learn to hold their breath for seven minutes, but it could be a cool fun time to go do that.","offset":1324,"duration":46},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But at any rate, you get that breath hold up to two, three, maybe four minutes? I—I can—you can bet you’re going to be a calmer, less reactive person. 100%.","offset":1370,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: What’s the—benefit to doing a hold on full versus a hold on empty?","offset":1387,"duration":6},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: The hold on f—I mean, a—a number of things. Um, you know, within like the yogic world, they’ve—they’ve long started with things with on an exhale hold. Um, I’ve found that the inhale hold is a lot easier to work with people um, just because it allows for you an off switch—like let go. So if I’m holding up top, it’s [exhales] right, to let go versus [inhales sharply]. Right, um, the inhale is typically, um, the problem for people in my—a lot of my work.","offset":1393,"duration":97},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So, meaning, people inhale rather quickly versus the ability to inhale slowly, right? And then there are those of us that, you know, will struggle a bit with an exhale. But that’s largely a CO2 tolerance thing. Um, so the inhale hold is more of a pressure thing. You’re going to see blood pressure, you’re going to see pressure changes as a result of that. People who struggle with bring the—with bringing their parasympathetic nervous system on board—so high-stress people—are going they—they might have some issues with the inhale breath hold, meaning they’ll get—they’ll get woozy real quick.","offset":1490,"duration":66},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, they’ll—um, you know, it—there—there will be a disconnect from the heart to the brain as a result of that because of the pressure changes. Um, but I don’t work to do like maximal like stuff the lung type of stuff and, you know, a lot of this stuff with inhale breath holds, what I have people do is simply to first and like strong urge to breathe, not panic urge to breathe. Um, those seem to have the biggest impacts with people.","offset":1556,"duration":60},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So just repeating, like, an on the minute. Like, hey, I’m going to breathe for a minute or two and then I’m going to hold my breath until a strong urge to breathe and doing that for five or six sets is a very, very big downregulating, um, tool. Now, if somebody’s tuned up that’s pretty anxious, that may not be the thing to do. Um, it may be go the other way to the negative—is you’re working with dead space mostly.","offset":1616,"duration":54},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Now, there’s still some air in there in the lungs on an exhale, but you got to be pretty, pretty damn tuned in like a Mark Healey or like a, you know, yogi from India to get all that air out of your lungs. Um, you know, other than that, you know, let’s just say we just [exhales] and I hold. There’s not as much of a—of a blood pressure change that’s occurring; there’s more of a—we’re kind of working on the immediacy of CO2’s response to the system.","offset":1670,"duration":54},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So you’re going to actually work more on the psyche with a negative breath hold in my opinion, because people aren’t—I mean, if people right now were to go and go ahead and dump all the air you’ve got and hold your breath, see how quickly panic comes on. Now, relax after you heard that and did that, take a few breaths, and then go do it with an inhale. You’re not going to panic as quick.","offset":1724,"duration":37},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah. It’s just not going to happen. So I kind of look at it in terms of, you know, working more on the mental with the negative and working more on the physiological with the positive. However, there are definitely, you know, there’s—some differ—there’s some differences but there’s also much crossover. You hold your breath enough on either end with very few breaths, you’re going to get hypoxic. Um, you’ll—introduce hypoxia, but most people will never reach that point because they’re so CO2—I wouldn’t say so, but they’re CO2 intolerant enough to where CO2 is convincing them to take a breath well before oxygen is going lights out.","offset":1761,"duration":47},{"text":"Host: Is there a—is there a metabolic interplay here as well, like the—of the mitochondria’s ability to kind of function in this hypoxic state?","offset":1808,"duration":9},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yes. Yeah. The beauty of this, and there’s a great paper out there, uh—I forget what it—I—I’m paraphrasing, but it—I think it’s called \"The Tortoise and the Hare\". There’s an actual paper, um, where these guys in Sweden, I believe it was Sweden, they studied, um, two of the people who were at the university were at the time—one was an elite triathlete and one was an elite freediver.","offset":1817,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And they were both competing that year and they wanted to test, well, what’s the difference between mitochondria and the aerobic function of these? And one would have suspected and been correct that the triathlete who’s at an elite level has far greater what we would assume metabolic health and the ability to function aerobically at higher states. Correct. There’s the—the one major caveat here, and this is where hypoxia becomes a very, very potent tool.","offset":1874,"duration":44},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, and there’s much more to hypoxia that we could go into a rabbit hole on. However, um, the breath holding and learning to hold one’s breath and get to hypoxia in particular they found that the freediver is able to use less oxygen with more—for more ATP.","offset":1918,"duration":40},{"text":"Host: Hmm.","offset":1958,"duration":2},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So, they are far more efficient on that end of energy—getting energy off of that electron transport chain than the aerobically inclined athlete. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that, um, you do one of the other; I would suggest you do both.","offset":1960,"duration":34},{"text":"Host: Yeah. What about concurrently? I mean, what about literally—this might be more advanced so I mean, disclosure there, but someone that is, um, you know, maybe doing Zone 2, maybe they’re doing their base training—is there some form of benefit to doing occasional holds while actually training?","offset":1994,"duration":24},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Oh, I—yes. I—I have people do this all—yeah. This is part of training regiment like 101 with me. It’s just like, yeah, hey, we’re going to be doing this, you’re also doing this. Like, we’re—we’re targeting these things in many aspects, like most of my clients—","offset":2018,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: So they’re, like, holding their breath while you’re running, kind of?","offset":2035,"duration":1},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, most of my clients don’t just do strength and conditioning and endurance work; they do strength conditioning, endurance work, breath hold work, etc. Like, they’re getting the whole—but, it’s a lot, you know, if I were to start dumping out everything we do, it’s—you know, heat training, cold training, like all of—where’s the time for—well, that’s the thing is the art is in, hey, what—what’s this person’s schedule look like? Where can we insert these things so that they’re actually effective? Because if they’re not—if we can’t, there’s no sense. Like why would we implement this? Like, you know, breath hold is just a very simple thing to implement for anybody.","offset":2036,"duration":59},{"text":"Host: If you were to say—I mean this is a hypothetical situation where you’re going to, you know, hop on an assault bike, let’s say, do a 20-calorie hit on an assault bike and then hop off—is there a benefit at an advanced level to attempting a—a hold during your recovery there?","offset":2095,"duration":15},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Oh yeah, no. No, there’s research that support—well, I—I would go about it, um, in a way of, like—go—do—do a sprint, short sprint, right? Warmed up, going into some sprints. Like, I—what I like—here’s what I like to do, um, is like five minutes very, very—every five minutes you’re hitting anywhere from 6 to 15 seconds, right? Hard. And you could definitely go out to 90 seconds or three minutes if you want for intervals, but by all means hold your breath on the last six seconds.","offset":2110,"duration":56},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Just hold it. Just lock it down. You’ll be able to get through it. Um, hold it and then you’ll start to see you can end up holding it a little bit longer and a little bit longer. That has very big impacts with stuff like this. You may not get—you’re not going to really get hypoxic from stuff like this, like what I was bringing up with the \"The Tortoise and the Hare\". What you’re going to do is you’re going to—you’re going to start getting probably some boosts in EPO and some red blood cell responses short-term, and then long-term you’re going to get some—some of that stuff that’ll hold on.","offset":2166,"duration":52},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, it’s not going to be something I think that I would use for hyp—you know, going to altitude, but it will help for sure—for—100% it will help. Um, it’s not going to be the thing that, you know, you would want to be doing for altitude exposure, though.","offset":2218,"duration":27},{"text":"Host: If we pivot for a second to talk, you know, nasal versus mouth?","offset":2245,"duration":4},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah.","offset":2249,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: I think one of the things that I’ve personally—I’ll just use my own experience here is—um, my ability to inhale through the nose through activity is fine. It’s exhalation through the nose that, um, becomes almost restricted; it’s just harder. It’s just, like, takes more time and by the time all the air is out of my nose, I’m hypox—it’s like I’m, you know, it’s taking so long for the air to physically come out of my nose that then I’m almost going into oxygen debt, right? So—or what feels like it. So then it’s like then you’re almost going into—","offset":2250,"duration":49},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, it's just CO2. That's the carbon dioxide screaming at you there.","offset":2299,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: So it's—is there—I'm sure there's different modalities, but if you're working on quote-unquote \"nasal breathing\", is it okay to exhale through the mouth during activity? So inhale nose, exhale mouth, or is that a completely different response than if you also exhale through the nose?","offset":2309,"duration":23},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Well, if you’re going to—if—so, nose breathing we know is parasympathetic—has more parasympathetic tone. It’s that exhale that’s the most important part of that.","offset":2332,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Okay.","offset":2346,"duration":2},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Here’s why. Anything below moderate levels of exercise, I’m getting the same amount of oxygen in. I do not need to switch over until beyond moderate levels of exercise to [panting] to onboard more oxygen. Okay. It’s the CO2 coming out that is really the player in this game to where [exhales through nose] versus [panting].","offset":2348,"duration":63},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, I just dumped all that CO2. So that in—and so now we start to mess with that dissociative curve that I was kind of talking about, right? Um, and not in all cases, but most cases, like if you’re—if—if you have to mouth breathe at less than moderate levels of exercise, I—you can bet you’re—you’re messing with, uh, aerobic stuff. Yeah, mm-hmm. Maybe not a ton, but enough. And if that’s your goal, then—and that would be my goal if I was somebody who was exercising.","offset":2411,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, I’d use high intensity for high intensity and we get into mouth breathing plenty. I see many, many people who are glued to the concept of nose breathing till the end. Like, it’s just they nose breathe even at high intensity. Um, and you are doing the exact same thing but in an opposite way of overbreathing now. You are literally not able to use oxygen the way it was used in your system’s getting more acidic than it actually needs to.","offset":2464,"duration":47},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So, pH is changing, hydrogen’s not getting dealt with as well. All the—you know, all of this stuff—is—I’ve seen the crossovers in—on the metabolic stuff, you know, where people are limiting themselves. And they lack the ability to sustain higher respiration rates at higher intensities.","offset":2511,"duration":49},{"text":"Host: Do you, with your training in that case, are you—do you have a pretty clear line of delineation between \"hey, here's—here's my aerobic stuff and here's my high intensity stuff\"? Like not sitting in that kind of—there's some people out there that'll believe that, like, if you train within that gray area, sort of, you know, lactate threshold area, that's like really a sweet spot where you're—and then there's others that are saying like, \"Hey, no, we've got a very clear—it's a very clear line of delineation where we don't sit in that gray area, we either go extreme high intensity or we go lower intensity, and the magic ends up naturally happening by training those two systems.\" I'm just curious your take on that.","offset":2560,"duration":36},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Uh, no. I don’t think any manmade thought on how my body should respond to things should be limited. That doesn’t mean—and—and I’m very, very, very careful to watch what it is I, in particular, inevitably get enamored with. I’ve been enamored with low intensity. I’ve been enamored with high intensity.","offset":2596,"duration":46},{"text":"Host: Yeah.","offset":2642,"duration":1},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And—and I’ve done moderate intensity. Um, you know, I’ve been enamored with that as well. Um, it all plays a critical role. Um, I don’t consider like walking low intensity. No. I consider that the buy-in for you and anybody to manage, uh, any and all activity. Um, you know, that doesn’t mean like I’ve got, you know, like I wouldn’t ask an NFLer to be walking 90 minutes a day because they’re probably at practice and they’re probably getting 10,000 steps in a day anyway.","offset":2643,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: So like, you know, I just want them to do like 15, 20 minutes in the morning or something just to clear, you know—get lactate levels down, get cortisol levels down, um, in the morning so that we’re kind of stabilized and ready to go. Um, but, yeah. I—I think the full spectrum, however, I’m very careful to—I would say look—80% of what you’re doing, if you’re—your mouth should be shut.","offset":2696,"duration":51},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: But you had—you would be best being mouth open several times a week for very short periods of time.","offset":2747,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: Yeah. And I think being able to—how do you suggest that someone that maybe isn’t as in tune with their body be able to regulate and understand, like, when they need to throttle down their training versus throttle it up? Because I have found that that is a very confusing place for most people, and it’s on both ends of the spectrum, whether it’s an extreme or an elite athlete versus someone that’s a newbie. It’s very difficult to really ascertain, like, okay, when is it time to throttle down? When am I doing—like when your sort of allostatic load is so high already, like do you throttle down your training or do you try to increase your training to deal with it? Like, what’s—how does someone kind of regulate that? What would you suggest to someone?","offset":2757,"duration":50},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Uh, I mean it’s a great question. Um, I—people really need to spend time learning what adaptation looks like with one thing at a time. Um, so, you know, like I brought up the walking thing before with you, right? Like I get people to walk. I want you to just implement that right now. And then, you know, whatever else you’re doing, just keep doing that, but we’re walking.","offset":2807,"duration":46},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: You’re going to find out if you can do the other stuff if you’ve added in walk—you know, 45 minutes to 90 minutes of walking a day, right? Like you will find out if you can continue to have that stuff. Then it’s like, okay, well what’s the goal? You know, I just—I was talking to a buddy of mine who’s down in Australia, um, last week. And I hadn’t seen him in a—in a number of months, um, and we do video chat. And—um, he—it came on and I was like, \"Whoa, somebody put on some weight.\"","offset":2853,"duration":49},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And not—not fat. He definitely put on muscle. Like I was like, \"Damn!\" And he’s like, \"Yeah.\" He goes, \"It’s interesting, I’m only lifting three days a week.\" And he goes, you know—and he’s 35. And he’s like, \"You know what’s interesting is—is that I’m lifting far less than I did when I was in my 20s and I’m putting on more muscle now than I was then.\" Am I getting that interesting? Like, how many of us think we just need to go do more, more, more, more and literally aren’t miss—are missing adaptive processes because we’re just continuing to add in a stressor, be it weightlifting, right, as the example.","offset":2902,"duration":71},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Like I know a lot of people who train six days a week, right, and continue to do it. And there’s a—there’s a sharp ramp up at first with that, and then it just [gestures] peters out and does its thing. And then it’s real hard to make gains. Um, you know, versus like, hey, how about three days a week of that? You know, um, what happens with that? Are people willing to toggle or screw around with things to learn where that—where that is?","offset":2973,"duration":42},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: What can you get away with? What is still creating the gains that you want? What do you want? All right, well let’s put one thing down first. Let’s go after that thing and let’s screw around to find out where that sweet spot is with this. And the reality is, is that’s what life’s about. Being able to creatively figure out what works and what doesn’t so that you’re doing the things you want versus not doing the things you’re not—you don’t want to be doing.","offset":3015,"duration":57},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Like, I’m continuing to work out all the time and do all this stuff that—because I’m doing everything. I’m doing the ice bath, I’m doing the sauna, I’m doing the hyperbaric chamber, I’m doing the hypoxico, I’m doing strength and conditioning. Like, dude, like I get it, because I do all that stuff. However, it all comes in little segments. Like it’s not all going on at the same time. There’s, you know, it’s all adjusted because I’ve been at it for like 25 years and I know when—you can’t do it all at the same time.","offset":3072,"duration":48},{"text":"Host: And it's kind of funny, like, when you ask—if I ask someone, \"Okay, well why do you want to get in shape?\" \"Well, I want to have a six-pack.\" \"Well, why do you want to have a six-pack?\" \"Well, because I think it looks cool.\" \"Well, why do you think it looks cool?\" \"I don't know, because I think my wife will like me more.\" \"Why do you think your wife will like you more?\" \"Good question. Yeah. Maybe I'm afraid she's sleeping with the neighbor.\" \"Why do you think she's sleeping with the neighbor? Because I'm a d—.\"","offset":3120,"duration":27},{"text":"Host: You know what I mean, right? Like it's—it's—maybe that's not the exact situation, but it's kind of, it's like when you start asking these, okay, why are you actually doing this? Why are you actually doing this? And it's—asking those five or six layers of \"why\" someone's doing something to really understand like, okay, well here's, like you're mentioning, this is your driving force behind why you want to do something, so let's just hone in on that. So when you get down to it, it sounds like you actually just need to pressure release and you want to, uh, just feel healthy and feel good in your own skin. You don't necessarily want the six-pack per se, and maybe we need to kind of investigate that a little bit more so that you're not going to the gym destroying yourself. Volume, volume, volume, volume, volume to get shredded because that a, might happen with that quick ramp-up that you talk about, but then you're going to destroy yourself pretty damn quick and then you're going to be right back to square one trying to learn about, \"Okay, well now I want to get mobile because I've spent the last—\"","offset":3147,"duration":61},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, I mean—I mean, there are what—when I hear that, and it’s—it’s happening everywhere, um, I just think about the amount of men and women with eating disorders like that are just trying to look a specific way. Yep. And I say men because there are a lot of men who literally have eating—eating disorders um, and because they want to look a specific way because they don’t like who they are.","offset":3208,"duration":28},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yep. And they don’t—they are not addressing the fundamental—that fundamental layer of why they don’t like who they are and because of the decisions they continue to make or that, you know, they’re insulating themselves around that whole vanity thing, right? Like if I just look the part or if I look like I fit in, I won’t have to be me. Yeah. Why wouldn’t you want to be you? Like, that’s all I—that’s all you should be.","offset":3236,"duration":31},{"text":"Host: Yeah. And it's like the guys that need to put on a certain amount of muscle or need to look a certain way, and I was certainly that way before, right? Because it almost is—makes it as though you don't have to—you can talk the talk without actually walking the walk. And when you ask yourself like, \"Well, did it actually take walking the walk to be able to talk this talk, or could I talk this talk without walking the walk?\" In other words, I think that a lot of people focus on the body composition piece because they're not really willing to look inside and see like why they actually want to focus on the body composition piece.","offset":3267,"duration":53},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah, and I mean, you know—you’re not saying and I’m going to be perfectly clear—what I’m not—what I am not saying is that you can’t have that. You can have that. For sure. You can have the abs, you can have the muscle, you can have all that. However, let that be the byproduct of how you feel about yourself and what you’re willing to commit to. Yep. Right? And then watch how that—like I had—I had a guy who literally was like, \"These workouts, you keep sending me these workouts, that like they’re so confusing, but it’s like I’m not used to this. I’m just used to this, like, you know, bodybuilding type, you know, the like sets and reps and d-d-d.\" And I, you know, I like to mix things up a lot and um, you know, and I’m like, \"All right, I—I understand it can be a little confusing and, you know, look, you know, we’ll just—we just want to stick at this, we—you know, keep up with the walking, d-d-d.\"","offset":3320,"duration":59},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And like two months later he’s like, \"You know what’s funny?\" He goes, \"I was b—ing about all that and yet I get more compliments now about what I look like, and I cared more about what I looked like when I was doing the other s— that I was trying to look a specific way and now I actually look better and am getting compliments from people that I wasn’t expecting I was going to get.\" I’m like, \"See? See how that works?\"","offset":3379,"duration":30},{"text":"Host: Yeah. It's wild. I mean, you look at one way of—for me having to take a stop, reverse engineer a little bit and reorient my focus a little bit more. I think at the end of the day, all I ever wanted was the performance side of things and my body to perform the way I wanted it to perform with no arbitrary number. The way I wanted it to perform at that point in time, whether it was to go climb a mountain or to go for a—I'm like, okay, deep down it's always about performing. And the physical aspect was a way of me being able to look in the mirror, see a certain look, and tell myself that I'm performing even if I'm not performing because I have the physique of someone that's performing when in reality that was all just like an image, right? And then when focusing on performance—when I say performance, relative, not like some again, specific number—focusing on performance suddenly all of that falls in line effortlessly without the extra 90% of my energy focused on body composition just by focusing on the sole thing that I'm actually after when it comes down to my training.","offset":3409,"duration":62},{"text":"Host: And also being able to have the energy to give to my wife and give to my family and give to the things that I truly love and enjoy, which actually made training more about empowering and getting stronger and enjoying it versus constant punishment. Yeah. And it's amazing, especially when we talk about the eating disorders with guys, how much of them view their training subconsciously as a punishment versus something that they get to do and something that this amazing body gets to be able to do. And when you empower it like that and you treat it as such, it's amazing, amazing how much it changes.","offset":3471,"duration":79},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Oh, yeah. You nailed it on the head with that. I mean, that’s—that’s it. It’s—yeah. Um, people are not taking the time to look at why they’re doing what they’re doing and understanding that if it—if it’s for these, you know, attachment issues they’re not willing to look at and these material things, it’s going to come apart. Yeah. It will come apart. It might not be for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, but it’s going to. And it ain’t going to be pretty the longer it goes.","offset":3550,"duration":41},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And then it’s going to be so hard to unspool that that it’s, you know, it’s going to be this devastating—more of a devastating process. So it gets harder and harder as it goes. It’s still possible. And I see it. And—and it’s actually quite inspiring um, to see that. But I think people are looking far too much to be motivated into something. Yeah. Instead of just committed to the process, you know?","offset":3591,"duration":43},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And, you know, Bruce Lee is a very famous quote that, you know, all—all goals are an illusion apart—you know, apart from the—the means is apart from the means, right? And the means is the process. If what you’re doing ain’t about the process, you—you—you’re fooling yourself. We’re all lying to ourselves with this whole thing with—with meaninglessness. Like even I—I don’t kid myself right now with what it is I do. It’s—it’s quite literally meaningless.","offset":3634,"duration":40},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: It—I exist in a world where we’re just all running around doing some bunch of meaningless crap.","offset":3674,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: Hedonic treadmill.","offset":3681,"duration":1},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah. Yeah. To exist in a—like—so, but—but, that doesn’t mean stop doing it. It means why am I doing this thing? Am I passionate about it? Do I care about it? Great! Then that gives me ultimate power of being able to do something very, very creative and powerful with it. And it at the end of the day it’s not going to matter. Like what will matter is who—who I am and what I care about.","offset":3682,"duration":40},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: And I think the people that you surround yourself with will be a reflection of that. And then it’s like, uh, coming back to this whole like, hey, what’s the lowest—you know, what are the things that we can look at? Like what—what is it like about CO2 tolerance? Why would I bring that up? And it’s like, well, this is just a gateway into understanding where all this—where you’re at, right? Like an—a door opening in order to bring it down a beat, to toggle that lever down and go, \"Oh, there’s an opportunity here.\" Not, \"Oh my god, this sucks.\" Like, you know, no.","offset":3722,"duration":60},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: The—the process of understanding is lifelong. It will never end. It will not. And the thing with CO2 is it’s never ever ever ever ever going to lie to you. Because weights can even be—I used to say—I used to say like, \"50 pounds is always going to be 50 pounds, that’s the nice thing. Is like the weights will never lie to you.\" Except there’s so many ways to override your system to get through a workout or to push weight that although it is pretty solid at giving you feedback, it’s not as solid as breath. It’s not as solid as the need to breathe.","offset":3782,"duration":60},{"text":"Host: Because that is as—as fundamental and base level as it possibly gets because without that, you will die.","offset":3842,"duration":8},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah. Well, you’re going to. I mean—you’re going to breathe. I mean, the—the reality is is you have to breathe and that’s one of the very few things you have to do. And you can try and stop yourself from doing that; it’s all right. There’s mechanisms in place that’ll take you out, that’ll shut you down, and the first thing that’ll happen when you go unconscious is you’ll start to breathe. And until this life’s over, you know, and then you’ll pass on and, you know, whatever.","offset":3850,"duration":41},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Um, if you’re not having fun while you’re doing this, you know, if you’re not into the—kind of the core of of why you’re training and the process of that, like it’s just going to be this hamster wheel of just psychoticness living inside of you.","offset":3891,"duration":21},{"text":"Host: It’s the—was the—you’ve heard of the gap theory of happiness?","offset":3912,"duration":3},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: Yeah.","offset":3915,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: Yeah. And I don’t know how much, like, Seneca you’ve read or any—any stoic stuff—","offset":3916,"duration":5},{"text":"Brian Mackenzie: A little bit.","offset":3921,"duration":1},{"text":"Host: —but, you know, it’s kind of like the gap theory of happiness and, like, I—I think about this a lot when it comes to training. The gap theory of happiness essentially, like, we’re always living in that gap but between, like, the next thing that’s going to—","offset":3922,"duration":15}],"logs":[{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Downloading audio from YouTube...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Trying download with browser cookies (ad-free)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"2.4","message":"⚠ Cookie download failed: WARNING: [youtube] [jsc] Error solving n challenge request using \"deno\" provider: Error running deno process (returncode: 1): \u001b[0m\u001b[1m\u001b[31merror\u001b[0m: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read prope","detail":null},{"elapsed":"2.4","message":"Retrying without cookies...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.4","message":"⚠ Downloaded without cookies — audio may contain ads","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.4","message":"Audio downloaded (32.4 MB) in 26.4s","detail":"File size: 32.4 MB"},{"elapsed":"26.4","message":"Video title: Brian Mackenzie Reveals Single Best Way to Increase Fitness Level without Steroids","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.5","message":"Audio duration: 50:35 (50.6 min)","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.5","message":"Large audio (32.4 MB) — will use chunked transcription with gemini-3-flash-preview","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.5","message":"Skipping full-file attempt — using chunked transcription for 50.6 min audio","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.9","message":"Split audio into 2 chunks for transcription","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.9","message":"Transcribing chunk 1/2 (starts at 0:00)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"26.9","message":"Uploading audio to Gemini File API...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"32.1","message":"Audio uploaded in 5.3s","detail":"File ref: files/jcpngmvytrx3"},{"elapsed":"32.1","message":"Audio processed in 0.0s. 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