Now, breathing and respiration is an enormous topic in and of itself. And in fact, I did an entire episode on breathing and respiration. And this is a topic that my laboratory works on extensively as it relates to anxiety control and some other aspects of mental health, as well as to physical performance.

For today's discussion, I want to just review a few tools that one can incorporate both into workouts and around workouts that can greatly enhance fitness and recovery. The first one is the type of respiration tool that you use between sets of exercise. And again, here, we're talking about resistance training, but we could just as easily be talking about rest between rounds of say high-intensity interval training.

So for instance, between bouts of sprinting on the track or the bike or the treadmill or the rower. A great pattern of breathing to incorporate during rest between sets is something that I've talked about before in other contexts, which is the physiological side. The physiological side is a deep inhale through the nose to maximally or near maximally inflate your lungs.

And then a second, very brief inhale, and it's necessarily brief 'cause your lungs are already pretty full, to maximally inflate your lungs and to make sure that any of the little sacks, the little alveoli of your lungs that have collapsed during the exercise exertion will reinflate. And then a long exhale until lungs empty.

So I'll demonstrate it right now as I've done many times before, but if you haven't seen it or heard it before, it's two inhales followed by an extended exhale and it goes like this. You'll notice that the inhales were through the nose and the exhale was through the mouth.

That's the ideal way to do it for a number of reasons. Check out the episode that I did on respiration physiology, aka breathing, if you want more details on why that is. But two inhales through the nose and a long extended exhale through the mouth, the so-called physiological side, not named by me, but rather named by physiologists in the 1930s, is as far as we know, the fastest way to shift your nervous system from so-called sympathetic drive to more parasympathetic drive, from a state of greater alertness to a state of greater calm.

Now, the reason to do this between sets of resistance training is that the more that you can shift yourself from sympathetic drive to parasympathetic drive, that is from alert to calm in between sets, the more energy and focus you can devote to exertion during your work sets. Okay, so one way to do this that's very convenient and very effective is to consider the last repetition of your set, a physiological side, which is not to say, okay, I want to be very clear, which is not to say that you should do the physiological side during your set.

In fact, I recommend you do not do that, but rather if you're doing six repetitions of a given exercise, and you, let's say, fail on the sixth, or you do that sixth repetition, and you're just close to failure, 'cause again, your work set should be to failure or close to it most of the time, then set down the weight, and then you're going to do the next repetition as the physiological side, meaning you're not going to do the movement, you're going to think of doing a physiological side as the last repetition of every set, not during the last repetition of the resistance training movement, okay?

So the physiological side is something you do at the beginning of the rest period, immediately following a set. If you'd rather think about it that way, because it's more convenient than thinking about it as the last rep of a set, be my guest, whatever works for you, but what you'll quickly find is that if you do a physiological side right after completing your last repetition, you'll calm down much more quickly, your heart rate will come down more quickly, and you'll recover more completely in whatever designated rest period you've allowed yourself, whether or not it's 30 seconds, which would be very short, frankly, or it's a five-minute period of rest between sets.

If you do one, truly, just one physiological side at the beginning of the rest period, you are going to effectively shift your nervous system in the direction you want it to go during those rest periods. And of course, if you're training hard during your work sets, you run zero risk whatsoever of feeling so calm that you don't feel motivated to do your next set.

I promise you that it will allow you to relax more at the beginning of the rest period than you ordinarily would. To shift into a state of rest, there are differing opinions about whether or not you should walk around or stay still during your rest periods. I like to walk around a bit and stay standing.

I'm not one of these people that kind of collapses into a C-shape on the bench in between sets. I like to stand up and, you know, breathe normally, walk around, drink a little water, et cetera. In any case, doing a physiological side at the beginning of each rest interval between work sets of resistance training is a very effective way to enhance your focus and your output during your work sets.

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