The Best Way to Breathe When Lifting Weights | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | So, is there a general rule of thumb for how to breathe during repetitions, during work,
00:00:09.720 | for strength, maybe even strength versus hypertrophy, in a way that maximizes oxygen input to the
00:00:16.520 | system, you know, keeps you alert and conscious, but that also protects the body by creating
00:00:23.160 | some rigidity in the system, right?
00:00:25.200 | So certainly being, with all your air exhaled, the body is a very different beast in terms
00:00:31.040 | of stability than with the body full of air versus, you know, breathing during the repetition
00:00:35.400 | movement.
00:00:36.400 | There's a maneuver that has long been labeled the Valsalva technique, so what that really
00:00:43.400 | means is you're trying to use air to create intra-abdominal pressure, and what you're
00:00:47.360 | really trying to do is create a cylinder around your spine.
00:00:51.400 | The real issue you have to play here is regulation of blood pressure and spinal stability.
00:00:57.480 | Now you should be able to breathe and brace.
00:01:00.040 | What I mean by that is you should be able to create total intra-abdominal pressure,
00:01:04.240 | regulate spine control while breathing.
00:01:06.960 | It's just very hard for a lot of people to do.
00:01:08.660 | It's a skill you should absolutely work on.
00:01:11.160 | You can actually, you can do this and you can go around, like I do this trick in class
00:01:14.360 | and students can come and I can push any part of my entire abdomen, it's super tight and
00:01:19.840 | I can talk.
00:01:20.840 | It's going to be a little bit labor, you can hear a little bit of a difference, but
00:01:23.000 | you should be able to do that.
00:01:24.420 | If you have to like hunch down and you can't even muster a breath and it takes that to
00:01:29.440 | create pressure, you're not actually, you don't really understand the abdominal control
00:01:34.080 | necessary to create that stability.
00:01:36.960 | So step number one is that's the goal.
00:01:39.440 | Now with the blood pressure thing, we have to be careful because a standard blood pressure
00:01:43.200 | ideally, if we sat around right now, it was probably something like 120 over 80 systolic
00:01:48.800 | versus diastolic.
00:01:49.800 | That's a normal number, right?
00:01:51.640 | High blood pressure is something over that.
00:01:53.920 | Well, with an acute bout of exercise, you can see that number reaches high as like 450
00:01:58.240 | over 350, which effectively means you have total blood occlusion, right?
00:02:02.120 | Your blood pressure is so high, blood is not moving anywhere and so in the middle of a
00:02:04.680 | very heavy set, especially complex movements, especially when they're loaded on your body,
00:02:09.280 | this could be an overhead press or squat variations, anything like that.
00:02:14.520 | Blood pressure is going to be a problem.
00:02:15.640 | And the reason why that matters is that's what's going to make you pass out.
00:02:18.280 | It's not the fact that you ran out of oxygen in three seconds.
00:02:21.160 | It's the fact that blood pressure got so high, you blacked out.
00:02:24.080 | And so we're going to have to play this game of releasing a little bit of the pressure
00:02:27.120 | so we can actually get blood to move a little bit, making sure that we don't lose spinal
00:02:32.280 | stability so we can finish our workout.
00:02:34.840 | That's really the question you asked, right?
00:02:36.400 | How do I play this game of, oh, I have several hundred pounds on my back or my chest and
00:02:41.120 | I don't want to exhale, right, so that I don't lose spinal stability, but at the same time,
00:02:45.760 | I don't want to pass out, right, which is a problem.
00:02:48.480 | So kind of a couple of rules of thumb.
00:02:50.800 | If you're going to be doing something in which you can complete the entire exercise without
00:02:54.840 | a breath and it is of a maximal or close to load, that's probably your best strategy.
00:02:59.880 | So in that particular case, you'll see a lot of breathing techniques where you're going
00:03:03.200 | to take a very large inhale.
00:03:05.160 | Ideally, this is done through the abdomen, not the shoulders.
00:03:08.460 | So we shouldn't see clavicles rising during this thing.
00:03:11.600 | You'll see a common mistake of the bars on their back and you see people do this like
00:03:14.660 | big inhale thing and all they do is elevate their clavicles.
00:03:18.360 | That's not necessarily going to increase pressure through the abdomen, which is what you're
00:03:21.520 | looking for.
00:03:22.520 | So you want to be thinking about belly moving out in all four areas, in front of you, to
00:03:26.400 | your left and right, and to your back.
00:03:28.620 | That's that quadrant sort of idea of stabilizing your spine.
00:03:32.200 | You can do that independent of your clavicles moving.
00:03:35.200 | Your shoulders don't need to rise for that.
00:03:37.160 | You don't really need the oxygen for metabolic purposes.
00:03:40.720 | You're just using the air for a brace.
00:03:43.880 | That's really all you're after.
00:03:44.880 | - So you're trying to visualize your torso as more or less a cylinder.
00:03:49.680 | And you're trying to fill it with air.
00:03:52.160 | The logic being that if I were to push down onto a, say, a full unopened can of soda water,
00:03:59.280 | for all you sugar folks out there, soda water, and then push as hard as I could, it's going
00:04:06.000 | to be hard for me to crush that can.
00:04:08.160 | But if the can were empty or if it were a little bit kinked in the middle, then I could
00:04:12.700 | likely crush that can.
00:04:13.800 | - Yeah, what you're really doing is you have your spinal erectors in the back, right?
00:04:17.360 | And then a whole series of abdominal exercises.
00:04:19.480 | And you actually have some neural control, somatic control, of contracting those.
00:04:24.360 | But you don't have muscles on the inside that you can do.
00:04:28.120 | So you're basically bringing in air and saying, "I'll use air to push from the inside out,
00:04:31.880 | and I'll use muscles to push from the outside in to create this brace.
00:04:35.360 | And I don't want over-compression with the muscles."
00:04:38.000 | This is, if you see people that have just enormous spinal erectors, sometimes that's
00:04:43.500 | an indicator of actually a poor breathing or bracing strategy because they're using
00:04:48.540 | spinal erectors to create all their compression and not actually using the inside enough.
00:04:52.220 | That's not always the case, but sort of like a thing to think about.
00:04:54.900 | So over-compression through the spinal erectors is not necessarily ideal.
00:04:59.740 | If you want it, the best scenario is a little bit of a brace of both.
00:05:03.380 | So we use some air to push this side, we use some musculature to press that way.
00:05:06.780 | And then that spine is just nicely held in position.
00:05:11.120 | Again, not in a position where I've locked down my diaphragm and I can't get any air
00:05:14.960 | out.
00:05:15.960 | I should be able to get that brace pattern and then be able to speak.
00:05:19.080 | In fact, like I'm doing it right now.
00:05:20.400 | And you'll see like a little bit of a, if you're really paying attention to my voice,
00:05:23.720 | you can hear a little bit of a subtle difference, but I should be able to do this for quite
00:05:26.600 | a long time.
00:05:27.600 | Right?
00:05:28.600 | Like I could take a maximum rep right here in this position, whether I'm overhead pressing,
00:05:32.800 | doing some sort of row, like anything and feel very braced in the entire quadrant.
00:05:38.780 | This is very helpful.
00:05:40.180 | I'm going to work on it, but can we say that an effective way to start off in terms of
00:05:46.820 | breathing during repetitions would be to take a gulp of air during the lowering phase, the
00:05:52.980 | eccentric phase, and then to exhale during the concentric exertion phase?
00:05:57.860 | I ask that because that's what I've been doing for a while and it makes me feel safe.
00:06:02.220 | I don't know if I am and it allows me to exhale as I exert the hardest portion of the exercise.
00:06:10.520 | And perhaps I also borrowed that from martial arts where one tends, most often is trained
00:06:15.400 | to exhale on the strike.
00:06:18.580 | If you're going to be doing, again, the number of repetitions can be completed without a
00:06:22.780 | breath.
00:06:23.780 | A lot of times you're better off saving that exhalation until you complete, but you don't
00:06:28.180 | have to.
00:06:29.180 | I have an unassumably heavy set of hack squats or even leg extensions and given that I already
00:06:33.480 | can't leg extension my body weight, maybe this is why.
00:06:39.820 | The idea of holding my breath for an entire compound set brings to mind, you know, like
00:06:47.200 | where's my insurance card, who's going to drive me to the hospital, this kind of thing.
00:06:52.720 | In all seriousness, what if I want to breathe during the set?
00:06:56.160 | So I'll clarify, I'm generally meaning if you're doing like a one rep max or something
00:07:02.660 | like that.
00:07:03.660 | - Okay.
00:07:04.660 | Well then certainly I could hold my breath for a one repetition maximum.
00:07:06.060 | - That, you know, maybe like a double or something like that, depending on what you're doing,
00:07:09.900 | like maybe a triple, a bench press, you can probably do three and get away with it.
00:07:14.220 | A squat, it gets harder, deadlift.
00:07:15.860 | So it kind of depends on the exercise.
00:07:17.540 | You want to take that breath though prior to the eccentric portion, not during.
00:07:22.880 | So breathe in, lock, we're set, and now start our movement pattern wherever it's going to
00:07:28.340 | be.
00:07:29.340 | Exhaling on the concentric portion during it, it is fine.
00:07:32.740 | It's no problem, especially if you're not extremely heavy.
00:07:36.580 | - And what are your thoughts on grunting and screaming?
00:07:39.020 | - Yeah, fine.
00:07:40.020 | I don't care.
00:07:41.020 | - I don't tend to do that.
00:07:42.020 | I'm occasionally known to squeal or whimper, but I do it very quietly.
00:07:46.940 | - I think of you and I think squeal, whimper, absolutely.
00:07:50.700 | If you're going to be doing multiple repetitions, what we actually do for the NFL Combine is
00:07:55.780 | we teach them a very specific exhale strategy.
00:07:57.640 | So there's one test that they do, which is they bench press 225 pounds for as many reps
00:08:01.300 | as possible.
00:08:02.300 | A lot of these people will get 25 to 40 repetitions.
00:08:05.300 | So we have a very specific breathing pattern.
00:08:06.740 | It would be something like, if we think that they're going to do around 25 reps, say that's
00:08:10.580 | like our goal, we might say, okay, do the first 10 without a breath and then exhale,
00:08:16.340 | reset and then do five breath and then you might do five breath, three breath, two breath
00:08:21.900 | and then one breath per rep until we can't get any more.
00:08:25.000 | So we'll have very specific strategies for them.
00:08:27.920 | So what I would say is think about how many you're going to complete and then breathe
00:08:31.980 | according to that.
00:08:33.820 | And it tends to increase in frequency as the number gets closer to failure, because you're
00:08:37.820 | going to want that air a little bit, but you just want to make sure that when you're breathing
00:08:43.300 | back in, you're in a safe spot.
00:08:45.940 | So you don't want to be catching that like re-breath when the weight's on you.
00:08:50.480 | You want to be in a locked out position or away from you when you're standing.
00:08:54.100 | So it tends to be like at the end of the exercise, not in the middle of it, which is going to
00:08:58.940 | be a recipe for problems if you take your breath then.
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