So, is there a general rule of thumb for how to breathe during repetitions, during work, for strength, maybe even strength versus hypertrophy, in a way that maximizes oxygen input to the system, you know, keeps you alert and conscious, but that also protects the body by creating some rigidity in the system, right?

So certainly being, with all your air exhaled, the body is a very different beast in terms of stability than with the body full of air versus, you know, breathing during the repetition movement. There's a maneuver that has long been labeled the Valsalva technique, so what that really means is you're trying to use air to create intra-abdominal pressure, and what you're really trying to do is create a cylinder around your spine.

The real issue you have to play here is regulation of blood pressure and spinal stability. Now you should be able to breathe and brace. What I mean by that is you should be able to create total intra-abdominal pressure, regulate spine control while breathing. It's just very hard for a lot of people to do.

It's a skill you should absolutely work on. You can actually, you can do this and you can go around, like I do this trick in class and students can come and I can push any part of my entire abdomen, it's super tight and I can talk. It's going to be a little bit labor, you can hear a little bit of a difference, but you should be able to do that.

If you have to like hunch down and you can't even muster a breath and it takes that to create pressure, you're not actually, you don't really understand the abdominal control necessary to create that stability. So step number one is that's the goal. Now with the blood pressure thing, we have to be careful because a standard blood pressure ideally, if we sat around right now, it was probably something like 120 over 80 systolic versus diastolic.

That's a normal number, right? High blood pressure is something over that. Well, with an acute bout of exercise, you can see that number reaches high as like 450 over 350, which effectively means you have total blood occlusion, right? Your blood pressure is so high, blood is not moving anywhere and so in the middle of a very heavy set, especially complex movements, especially when they're loaded on your body, this could be an overhead press or squat variations, anything like that.

Blood pressure is going to be a problem. And the reason why that matters is that's what's going to make you pass out. It's not the fact that you ran out of oxygen in three seconds. It's the fact that blood pressure got so high, you blacked out. And so we're going to have to play this game of releasing a little bit of the pressure so we can actually get blood to move a little bit, making sure that we don't lose spinal stability so we can finish our workout.

That's really the question you asked, right? How do I play this game of, oh, I have several hundred pounds on my back or my chest and I don't want to exhale, right, so that I don't lose spinal stability, but at the same time, I don't want to pass out, right, which is a problem.

So kind of a couple of rules of thumb. If you're going to be doing something in which you can complete the entire exercise without a breath and it is of a maximal or close to load, that's probably your best strategy. So in that particular case, you'll see a lot of breathing techniques where you're going to take a very large inhale.

Ideally, this is done through the abdomen, not the shoulders. So we shouldn't see clavicles rising during this thing. You'll see a common mistake of the bars on their back and you see people do this like big inhale thing and all they do is elevate their clavicles. That's not necessarily going to increase pressure through the abdomen, which is what you're looking for.

So you want to be thinking about belly moving out in all four areas, in front of you, to your left and right, and to your back. That's that quadrant sort of idea of stabilizing your spine. You can do that independent of your clavicles moving. Your shoulders don't need to rise for that.

You don't really need the oxygen for metabolic purposes. You're just using the air for a brace. That's really all you're after. - So you're trying to visualize your torso as more or less a cylinder. And you're trying to fill it with air. The logic being that if I were to push down onto a, say, a full unopened can of soda water, for all you sugar folks out there, soda water, and then push as hard as I could, it's going to be hard for me to crush that can.

But if the can were empty or if it were a little bit kinked in the middle, then I could likely crush that can. - Yeah, what you're really doing is you have your spinal erectors in the back, right? And then a whole series of abdominal exercises. And you actually have some neural control, somatic control, of contracting those.

But you don't have muscles on the inside that you can do. So you're basically bringing in air and saying, "I'll use air to push from the inside out, and I'll use muscles to push from the outside in to create this brace. And I don't want over-compression with the muscles." This is, if you see people that have just enormous spinal erectors, sometimes that's an indicator of actually a poor breathing or bracing strategy because they're using spinal erectors to create all their compression and not actually using the inside enough.

That's not always the case, but sort of like a thing to think about. So over-compression through the spinal erectors is not necessarily ideal. If you want it, the best scenario is a little bit of a brace of both. So we use some air to push this side, we use some musculature to press that way.

And then that spine is just nicely held in position. Again, not in a position where I've locked down my diaphragm and I can't get any air out. I should be able to get that brace pattern and then be able to speak. In fact, like I'm doing it right now.

And you'll see like a little bit of a, if you're really paying attention to my voice, you can hear a little bit of a subtle difference, but I should be able to do this for quite a long time. Right? Like I could take a maximum rep right here in this position, whether I'm overhead pressing, doing some sort of row, like anything and feel very braced in the entire quadrant.

This is very helpful. I'm going to work on it, but can we say that an effective way to start off in terms of breathing during repetitions would be to take a gulp of air during the lowering phase, the eccentric phase, and then to exhale during the concentric exertion phase?

I ask that because that's what I've been doing for a while and it makes me feel safe. I don't know if I am and it allows me to exhale as I exert the hardest portion of the exercise. And perhaps I also borrowed that from martial arts where one tends, most often is trained to exhale on the strike.

If you're going to be doing, again, the number of repetitions can be completed without a breath. A lot of times you're better off saving that exhalation until you complete, but you don't have to. I have an unassumably heavy set of hack squats or even leg extensions and given that I already can't leg extension my body weight, maybe this is why.

The idea of holding my breath for an entire compound set brings to mind, you know, like where's my insurance card, who's going to drive me to the hospital, this kind of thing. In all seriousness, what if I want to breathe during the set? So I'll clarify, I'm generally meaning if you're doing like a one rep max or something like that.

- Okay. Well then certainly I could hold my breath for a one repetition maximum. - That, you know, maybe like a double or something like that, depending on what you're doing, like maybe a triple, a bench press, you can probably do three and get away with it. A squat, it gets harder, deadlift.

So it kind of depends on the exercise. You want to take that breath though prior to the eccentric portion, not during. So breathe in, lock, we're set, and now start our movement pattern wherever it's going to be. Exhaling on the concentric portion during it, it is fine. It's no problem, especially if you're not extremely heavy.

- And what are your thoughts on grunting and screaming? - Yeah, fine. I don't care. - I don't tend to do that. I'm occasionally known to squeal or whimper, but I do it very quietly. - I think of you and I think squeal, whimper, absolutely. If you're going to be doing multiple repetitions, what we actually do for the NFL Combine is we teach them a very specific exhale strategy.

So there's one test that they do, which is they bench press 225 pounds for as many reps as possible. A lot of these people will get 25 to 40 repetitions. So we have a very specific breathing pattern. It would be something like, if we think that they're going to do around 25 reps, say that's like our goal, we might say, okay, do the first 10 without a breath and then exhale, reset and then do five breath and then you might do five breath, three breath, two breath and then one breath per rep until we can't get any more.

So we'll have very specific strategies for them. So what I would say is think about how many you're going to complete and then breathe according to that. And it tends to increase in frequency as the number gets closer to failure, because you're going to want that air a little bit, but you just want to make sure that when you're breathing back in, you're in a safe spot.

So you don't want to be catching that like re-breath when the weight's on you. You want to be in a locked out position or away from you when you're standing. So it tends to be like at the end of the exercise, not in the middle of it, which is going to be a recipe for problems if you take your breath then.