What My Own Breath Is Teaching Me

Notes from the fundamentals of functional breathing

I've spent years coaching people through movement, stress, and habit change without ever seriously examining the one thing every single one of us does around 20,000 times a day. I started the Oxygen Advantage certification for a fairly practical reason at first, wanting a real, evidence based way to bring breathwork into my coaching and into the recovery content I'm building for Elevate. But underneath that, if I'm honest, was a more personal one, I wanted to actually understand how my own breathing pattern was affecting how I felt day to day, not just read about it in theory.

What I didn't expect going in was how much of this course would turn the lens back on my own breathing before I ever thought about applying it to a client.

The First Thing That Changed How I Think About Breathing

Most people, myself included before this course, assume breathing is mostly about oxygen. Bigger breath, more oxygen, better. That's not really how it works.

One of the first tools I learned was the BOLT score, the Body Oxygen Level Test. You exhale normally, pinch your nose, and time how long it takes before you feel a genuine urge to breathe again, not until you're desperate, just the first real signal. What that number actually measures isn't lung capacity or how much air you can hold. It measures how sensitive your body is to rising carbon dioxide, how calmly your nervous system tolerates it before it panics and demands another breath.

A low score doesn't mean weak lungs. It means a nervous system that reacts to a small, normal shift in carbon dioxide as if something is wrong.

It's Not About Getting More Air

This was the part that actually surprised me. Carbon dioxide isn't just something we exhale as waste, it plays a real role in how efficiently oxygen actually reaches the tissue that needs it, and in signaling the nervous system toward calm or toward alert. Breathing too much, taking in more air than the body is actually asking for, lowers carbon dioxide in a way that can leave someone feeling breathless or on edge, even while they're technically getting plenty of oxygen.

That reframed something for me. The goal was never to breathe bigger. It was to breathe in a way the body can actually tolerate calmly.

Why the Nose Matters More Than I Realized

Nasal breathing isn't just a nice habit, it filters, warms, and humidifies air before it reaches the lungs, and it's directly tied to that same BOLT score. The lower someone's tolerance to carbon dioxide, the harder it becomes to keep breathing through the nose once activity picks up, even something as mild as a brisk walk. Watching for that shift, the point where nose breathing gives way to the mouth, has become one of the simplest ways I now think about matching effort to actual capacity, for myself and eventually for the people I coach.

Turning the Lens on My Own Breathing

I'll be honest about where this actually got real for me, rather than staying theoretical. This past while, I've been moving through some real anxiety, and what stood out was that my breath wasn't grounding me the way I've always relied on it to in years past. Something that used to work for me had quietly stopped working, and I didn't fully understand why.

It became obvious once I finished the first module and actually started tracking where my breath was going, not assuming, actually noticing. It was living almost entirely in my chest. All of that energy, all of that tension, sitting right up top instead of settling lower, and without question, it was feeding the anxiety rather than easing it.

Once I started noticing that consistently throughout the day, not forcing anything, just paying attention, things genuinely began to shift. That was the moment this stopped being coursework for me and became something I could actually feel working in real time.

Where This Is Actually Heading

I'm still early in this training, this reflects the fundamentals, not the full certification. But it's already shifting how I think about the stress and recovery side of coaching, breathing sits right alongside sleep, movement, and habit work as something that quietly shapes how someone's whole day actually feels, not just how they perform in a workout.

As this training goes further, I'll be bringing more of it directly into coaching, and I'll keep sharing what I'm learning here as it develops, including the mistakes and the things that surprise me, not just the finished version.

One Thing Worth Trying Today

Not a technique, just an observation. At some point today, notice whether you're breathing through your nose or your mouth without trying to change it. Notice whether your shoulders are doing the work or whether the breath is moving lower, into your belly and ribs. That's it. Awareness tends to shift the pattern before any deliberate effort does.

If you want to go a little deeper, I put together a short guide on what to actually notice in your own breathing, check it out here.

Wellbeing for now, and the decades to come.

Sincerely,

ian