Fundamentals Part I: Breathing

It's the first day of master class. It's the beginning of our journey together. Before we get into the meat of the matter, the specifics of the training (i.e. the contingent propositions), first we've gotta lay the foundation.
As an aside, it's interesting to note our use of the word found: the date a business began is said to be the date it was founded. A building used for casting metal (especially in the case of bells) is known as a foundry. Metaphorically, we use the word foundation to conceptually indicate the basic and essential parts of a structure: the substructure that must be laid for the structure to be built. What relates these different meanings? Our word foundation derives, through the Old French (presumably from the Norman conquest) from the Latin fundere- to melt, cast, or pour out- and the Latin fundare- to lay the bottom of something. Here we use the word in both its senses: as the first step that begins the journey of a thousand miles, and as the outpouring of primal energy that eventually solidifies into an intelligent and complete fitness program. But enough dickering around about the meaning behind it; let's turn to the foundation itself.

Here at Exertive Dynamics we believe in a very simple, but often neglected, principle of human psychology and physiology: gene expression. We believe wholesale in the idea that human beings are built preprogrammed with a variety of useful physical states, a legacy from our evolutionary past, that allow us to deal with various situations in efficient ways. Whether it's a heightened adrenal/cortisol state that allows us to achieve maximal speed and strength when facing a predator or solving a math problem; or a diurnal variation that allows us to minimize physical strength, alpha brain activity, stress, and anti-inflammatory responses in the interest of quality rest and muscle growth; we think that taking advantage of these genetic (or epigenetic) states is the most intelligent and efficient application to achieve the desired ends of any regimen, fitness or otherwise. Work smart, not hard. Quality over quantity; the value is not in repetition, but in repeating restrained, focused, thought-out movements without variation until perfection is achieved. But the question persists: in what way can we activate these desirable states, and avoid the less desirable ones?

Ancient traditions have the answer. Remember, an athletic or religious practice wouldn't survive for thousands of years unless there was some sort of reason behind it. But does that mean we should swallow the claims of yogis and philosophers wholesale? Absolutely not. Luckily, empirical science has come to the rescue: there are plenty of verifiable studies that demonstrate the benefits of various practices of more or less rigorous nature. We naturally prefer practices that have well-documented, statistically significant results. But somewhere along the way, we tend to fuck it up. We turn important contextual observations into dogma, we create iron-clad, anchored systems, and then we eventually fall into a despondency when the emotional high and safety of our psychic prop wears off, and we either turn into the guy at the bar lamenting the difficulties of doing x, y, or z , or we over-respond and become even more dogmatic and couched in our own presumptions. Why do you think gyms try to get you to sign a contract? Because they know most people will quit after six weeks. Why do you think professional athletes and writers can persist for twenty or thirty years, become world-renowned, and still do things wrong? You guessed it. One of those wonderful pre-programmed states, intended to bolster our fortitude and faith but often turned against us, is our resistance to change and our ability to easily resolve dissonance, either by utterly abandoning our position or by over-asserting what we already believed.

This leads into an entire interesting foray into the fields of biology, genetics, systems theory, and why neoteny (the persistence of juvenile traits into adulthood) may be the reason behind human awesomeness in comparison to our larger, stronger, bigger-brained, more apish cousins like Homo Sapiens Neanderthal. Luckily (or perhaps unfortunately) for you, we're not going to go into that here; I just don't have the space, and I've been blathering about enough, albeit related, peripheral insight into of this whole 'foundation' thing.
So what's the first step, in constructing a happy, fit, mentally-stable reality? What's the most basic and foundational physical ability with which to start mastering your body and environment? Let's go back to philosophy and religion for a clue. Did you know that the Greek word pneuma (as in pneumonia and pneumatic) means both spirit and breath? And further, the Greek word soul (yes, people, spirit and soul are different) psyche, ALSO comes from a root meaning to blow, to cool, to breathe? And in case you think this is some sort of crazy Mediterranean anachronism, it's the same in Latin, where spirit is spiritus, and soul is anima. And it's not just in Indo-European languages. In fact, it's the same in every language of which I'm aware: the word spirit means breath, and if there's a word for soul, that often means breath too.

Obviously, we westerners disdain breathing correctly as we disdain pooping correctly: the niceties of existence are ignored as infantile by our now oh-so-rational minds. But in certain disciplines, it can't be disdained. In weightlifting, for example, especially Olympic lifting and Powerlifting, if you want to execute the movement correctly, correct breathing (inhaling on eccentric, exhaling on concentric contraction) is absolutely baseline and essential. Same goes for swimmers, boxers, track and field athletes, and even snipers, as I'm sure the Call Of Duty generation can attest. But is that all there is to it? A few minutes practice timing the breath, understanding the expansion of the chest cavity in relation to your sport, and maybe some abdominal breathing? The answer is a resounding hell no.

Yoga, that all-embracing religious and physical regimen, has a nice little discipline called pranayama. Depending on how you interpret that, it either means “manipulation of the spirit (prana)” or “stopping/controlling the breath (prana)”. In my personal opinion, it probably means both: these ancient yogis and siddhus, abandoning successful careers to have their learned debates in the forest, were good at nothing if not developing double entendres and playing with words. And, luckily for us, the New Age bent of the past couple decades means that there's some decent research on the effects of various pranayama exercises.

For one, some Indian doctors had a theory that the Diurnal cycle of hunting/rest probably correlated to the left nostril/right nostril cycle, which in turn probably correlated to right brain/left brain predominance (ever notice how one nostril or sinus is a lot more clear than the other, and this switches slowly over the course of about 8 hours?). That's a fascinating theory, obviously, but it's far from proven. But what the kind Indian doctors DID do was an experiment at a yoga camp, where they established that kids who did alternate nostril or single nostril exercises over the course of a few weeks had improved grip strength compared to control(which was kids who just did breath awareness or mudra, hand gestures). That's nice, you say, but a relatively informal grip-strength experiment with Indian kids is hardly conclusive proof. But American researchers duplicated the results with a fairly large sample of 25-40 year old males. In addition to this, pranayama has been shown to have an effect on everything from anxiety to metabolic syndrome to cancer, and in particular applications for athletes: Raju et al. (1994) found that “The results in both phases showed that the subjects who practised pranayama could achieve higher work rates with reduced oxygen consumption per unit work and without increase in blood lactate levels.“ Tell me you wouldn't want that for YOUR workout? Also, and most interestingly for us hormonally-compromised western couch potatoes, breath exercises have been shown to mediate the balance of the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (resting and rebuilding) systems, and in addition, to decrease overall cortisol (stress-hormone) levels, while improving cortisol responses to specific stimuli, such as a math problem. Now if that doesn't tweak your American get-rich-quick/get-a-beach-body-with-these-7-simple-foods appetite, I don't know what will. You can improve mental concentration, physical performance, and even do things like Wim Hof that defy science (for 'science', read: conventional wisdom), all from a measly twenty or thirty minutes a day of practice. But be forewarned: pranayama is not the laid-back, introspective mindfulness meditation you may be used to; even though it includes very little body movement, it feels like a hard session of yoga or a medium intensity workout more than anything else. That's right, a breath workout. Is it any wonder that people can use their breath to modulate their hormones, increase blood oxygenation, improve performance, and help protect against disease?

Maybe I should take a little space to explain WHY I think this works. Have you ever heard that whole bear-in-the-woods analogy? No, not the one about where the bear does his business. The example- I believe it's given to us by Stephen Jay Gould (if I'm wrong, correct me in the comments below)- of behavioral responses to fear. You're walking through the forest, whistling a tune, and all of a sudden you see a big-ass brown bear, furry and mangy, muscles rippling, eyeing you down. You immediately turn and run, if your instincts have anything to do with it. The question is, are you afraid, and so you run, or do you run, and then become afraid? Modern empirical evidence tends to suggest the latter. Well, that sounds like some scholastic quibbling, says the reader. Who gives a flying fornication about a difference in microseconds between bodily response and emotional state? Ho-hum. But the theory is much more applicable to real life, and pervasive in its various applications, then you might think. How do you think a few dropouts turned Internet Porn into the hegemonic monster it is today? That's right: your brain can't tell what's real; a physiological response is to a physiological state, which is in itself a response to a stimuli. In other words, you see naked chick, you start breathing heavy, blood goes to your, um, nether regions, et cetera. This creates a feedback loop that turns your mild arousal into full-on adrenaline, horny caveman debauchery; and before you know it, you've worn out your God-given alpha-male sex sensitivity and you're watching donkeys and women do terrible things. But that's another topic for another time.

The point here is that the various physiological states you enter into, which reflect large changes in hormone profile, muscle tone, heartbeat, brain activity, and what have you, almost always involve a change in, you guessed it, rate and depth of breathing. So by manipulating the breath you can replicate various stimuli, and make your hormones do situational things that are normally barred to you. You see this all the time with powerlifters, since your muscles (and CNS) have governors, feedback loop mechanisms that keep you from lifting too much. The well-known bilateral deficit and lowering strength (that you're 40% stronger on the eccentric, or lowering, part of the movement) are examples of this; if you're not familiar with them, hey, Google's your friend. The mechanism that's localized in your muscles is called the Golgi Tendon Organ or GTO (not to be confused with the Golgi bodies, or with the car, for that matter), and it's basically a chain of neurons that receives impulses from your muscle fibers and sends a signal back through the system that enforces muscle relaxation before you can lift heavy enough to damage your tendons. Ever wonder why soccer moms can pick up cars when their kids are trapped under them, but couldn't bench 80 pounds on a good day? That's because we're all a lot stronger than our bodies let us be, except when the governors are overriden, by a sort of Presidential veto. You see guys at powerlifting meets psyche themselves up, breathing deeply, yelling, flexing, and doing a whole bunch of positive thinking, in order to lift ridiculous weights that their bodies don't want to lift, for fear of damaging our tender homo sapiens ligaments and bones. You see the same thing with karate and kung fu guys, don't you? Bruce Lee demonstrated this in his films, and Sonny Chiba took it to a high art in Street Fighter. Generations of inspired kids have been doing the trademark crazy-eyed slow exhale “oooooooooh” ever since.

But is this oriental nonsense, or is it something we can employ to gain a greater competitive advantage and 'overclock' our body's performance? I had anticipated this. “Donny,” you say, “This is all well and good. I [lift weights/do MMA/do ballet/dance/prance/play competitive table tennis]; I'm not looking for a massive religious excursion, or to repeat 16 Wahay Gurus or Hail Marys, and I don't care about kiai or PK, the hidden potentials of man, or allegories about bears; I just want to perform better. K?” I hear you. So, without further ado, I'll present a couple basic exercises. A couple are practice exercises; they're to develop long term benefits like we talked about earlier. One, which I call katsu (the Zen yell), is a foundation for the dynamic tension and isometrics we'll describe later, which are at the heart of our program, and add extreme value in terms of volume, breaking strength plateaus, blood oxygenation, and CNS development, as well as being an effective and simple way to increase your punching power, lifting power, or manly hip thrusts. So even if you decide you don't want to bother with the pranayama stuff, that one is a necessity. If you decide you DO want to practice pranayama, there's plenty of great resources on the web; I will tell you that I personally do several Kriyas daily, including the great Sodarshan, increasing parameters (usually time) on a regular basis, as you would in a strength program.






Abdominal Breathing-
You should breathe abdominally as much as possible. Not only is it a more deep and satisfying breath, but it in itself will diminish your resting cortisol and make you feel much calmer and in control. The way to do this is simple: let your stomach, preferably the lower part right above your pelvis, puff out when you breathe, rather than your chest.



Alternate Nostril Breathing-
This is a super basic way to start pranayama, and carries with it some of the best benefits (reference that whole hunter/gatherer diurnal cycle theory). There is another idea, only briefly mentioned earlier, that breathing through a certain nostril will activate a certain hemisphere of the brain (in case you didn't know, the left-hemisphere controls the right side of your body, and the right-hemisphere controls the left side; therefore, you want to breathe with your left nostril to activate your right brain and vice versa). Read online if you want to know the characteristics that differentiate between the two halves. To do the exercises, first decide if you want to focus on one nostril, the other nostril, or do the complete movement and involve both. In the first two cases, simply assume a comfortable position, press the opposite nostril with your thumb or pinky, and begin breathing deeply and abdominally. In the later case, you want to breath in first through the right (pinky over left), then out through the left (thumb over right), then in through the left, then out through the right, then repeat. Do this for about 20 minutes a day, or whatever portion of your 20-30 minute pranayama session you damn well feel like.


Breath stoppage-
Another important exercise is controlling breath stoppage, and speed of inhale and exhale. This is obviously going to improve blood oxygenation and diaphragm control, as well as probably helping out with you using greater lung volume for things like running. A simple kriya to do this is: Breathe in deeply (abdominally) for 5 seconds, hold the breath for 5 seconds, exhale for 5 seconds, and when your lungs are emptied, hold your 'breath' for 5 seconds before repeating. Do this for 10-20 minutes a day, or whatever portion of your session you want.



Katsu-
Now to the good stuff. Be forewarned that there isn't a lot of proof to this, despite it being so widespread in martial arts cinema; most people probably assume its an affectation, or even worse, nonsense like the Dim Mak (matter of fact, a more accurate term for this is Kiai, which I have avoided due to possibly conflation with the 'magic' Kiai that is demonstrably bullshit). So it isn't practiced in its pure form outside of karate practitioners, monks, asian healers, and some athletes (who just happen to have figured it out, like they figured out the very-similar weightlifting breath). Now, make no mistake, this is powerful. I can't stress that enough. It also taxes your CNS and boosts the shit out of your blood pressure, so if you have some sort of related condition, I'd have to advise avoiding it for the time being. But it also raises your strength immensely. When I first read about it as a teenager, in some backwater Karate forum, I practiced it for a few days, and didn't think much of it, except in a dynamic tension/adding a heavy challenge to Charles Atlas sort of way. And then, one day, I noticed a dent in the fiberglass body of my mom's car. After exerting myself heavily trying to push it out from the inside (i.e. from the inside of the trunk), I remembered my new breath technique, and thought, “Hey, what the hell. No one's watching.” I cleared my mind and lungs, breathed in deeply, and started the slow exhale as I pushed, and holy fuck, the dent popped right out. I was amazed, you can imagine; I thought for a second I'd gone Super Saiyjin. Don't laugh, I was a 90's kid. But in the years that have followed I've only become a more deep believer in the tradition, which seems to pop up everywhere from movies to screaming-therapy. Note: you don't actually have to yell, or make any “Hi-ya!” or “Kiai!” sound, but the exhale is itself pretty intense and noticeable, as the aforementioned Sonny Chiba performance. 

How to do it: There's a spot a 2-3 inches below your navel, and about 2 inches in. It's called hara or tanden in Japanese, and it's your center of balance in judo and aikido, and supposedly the generator for you're body's ki or mystical energy. I don't particularly believe in mystical energy, but I do believe in the tanden. What you want to do is inhale slowly and very deep, expanding that spot and relaxing your abdominal muscles. Next, exhale even more slowly (about twice as long as the inhale; this is important), while tightening your abdominal muscles, pushing the air out. If you do it right, you'll know: your lungs will be fully contracted, you'll squeeze the last bit of air out of your mouth, your blood pressure will shoot up and your muscles and veins will be flush and expanded. In order to make use of this, yell or no yell, practice timing it exactly with an exertive force, such as a punch, throw, or lift. After a little practice you'll see your performance jump right up the improvement curve in a way you didn't know was possible. No need to thank me.


That's it for Part One: Fundamentals- Breathing; stay tuned for next time, as we continue to lay the groundwork for a unique and thoroughly awesome approach to fitness and practical performance.