June 20, 2025 • 47 mins
In this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy, and Smart Podcast, host Dr. Karen Litzy welcomes Campbell Will, an integrative physiotherapist and breathwork educator, to discuss the significant impact of breath on health and performance. Campbell shares his journey from traditional physiotherapy to specializing in breath work, highlighting the role of proper breathing in enhancing performance and reducing stress. He emphasizes the importance of shifting the focus from disease to health and how breath can serve as a powerful tool for achieving balance and well-being. Tune in to discover valuable insights on how breathwork can transform your approach to health and self-regulation.
Time Stamps:
[00:02:19] Importance of breath in health.
[00:06:13] Defining breathwork and its impact.
[00:06:54] Breathwork and nervous system health.
[00:10:03] Breathing and emotional state.
[00:13:45] Breathing's impact on health.
[00:18:01] Dysfunctional breathing effects.
[00:20:59] Dysfunctional breathing and posture.
[00:26:01] Breathwork and assessment importance.
[00:29:47] Breathing as a present anchor.
[00:31:41] Nervous system and breathwork.
[00:34:18] Nervous system's role in healing.
[00:39:15] Breath awareness and self-empowerment.
[00:41:40] Awareness as a foundational piece.
[00:45:03] Vulnerability in professional practice.
More About Campbell Will:
Campbell Will is an integrative physiotherapist with a primary focus on the role of the breath on human health and performance. His experience spans ICUs, neurosurgical wards, elite athletes and private practice. Across this spread of clinical settings he noticed a widely unaddressed commonality; breathing. When done correctly, it elevates and enhances performance. When done poorly, it drives dysfunction.
Campbell utilises his diverse background and experience to help practitioners shift their focus from disease and dysfunction to health, happiness and freedom. His holistic, multidisciplinary approach focuses on restoring balance to body, mind, emotions and energy. Campbell views the breath as a tool accessible to all, providing the foundation for optimal health and well-being.
Resources from this Episode:
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Healthy, Wealthy, and Smart Podcast. I
am your host, Dr. Karen Litzy, owner of Karen Litzy Physical Therapy
located in the heart of New York City. And on today's episode,
we are going to be talking about breath work and how
the role of breathing can impact stress, self-regulation, dysfunctional
(00:23):
breathing, and so much more. So to help
with that today, my guest, Campbell Will, is an
integrative physiotherapist and breath work educator focused
on the impact of breath on human health and performance. With
experience ranging from ICUs to working with elite athletes, Campbell
has seen firsthand how proper breathing enhances performance, while
(00:45):
dysfunctional breathing drives stress and dysfunction. He
helps both practitioners and individuals shift their focus from
disease to health using breath as a powerful tool for
balance and wellbeing. So Campbell, welcome to
Now, before we get into that, because we're both physiotherapists, I
(01:07):
would love for you to tell the listeners a little bit more about you
and how you sort of found that breath work
Yeah, it was one of those funny things. Correct me if I'm
wrong, but I think in the US, like the physical therapy, there's less kind
of emphasis on kind of respiratory physical therapy. In Australia,
a big part of the training, you know, we work in hospitals. And
(01:30):
so my first job out of graduating physiotherapy was
kind of a leave cover role in an inpatient medical setting. So I
was working in ICUs and neurosurgery. And
there, you know, especially in something like ICU, breathing plays
a big role. So my job in ICU is really to go in and look at mobilization and
respiration, you know, lungs clear, breathing, can we get the mobilizing? And
(01:52):
so my introduction to breath is very clinical, but
it was very much at that kind of pointy end of things, right? I was really working
at kind of end of life or, you know, critical care. And
it was so interesting to me that most of these people in ICU would
say to me, oh, you're the first person to talk to me about breathing. And
that always like struck me as like a little bit of a, wait a minute, you know, like
(02:14):
end of life or critical care. And I'm the first person to talk about it. Shouldn't
be this, shouldn't this be the first thing that you're taught? You know, like it's
really, the more I understood it over the years, the more I
saw it as just this hugely missing piece. And
even if I think about my, you know, the five years of schooling to become a physio,
like we had one lecture on the diaphragm and it was kind of a neural injuries.
(02:35):
it wasn't really on like its role in emotional regulation and
energy management and the vagus nerve and all these wonderful things. And
so I kept kind of just like coming up against this idea of we're
not really talking about this core foundation of
what keeps people healthy and happy. And so I just saw
it across all these kind of clinical settings. And around that same time,
(02:56):
I kind of stumbled across the Wim Hof method. And so this was probably seven or eight
years ago. And I thought, this crazy Dutch guy, like summoning mountains
in the snow, and there's something here, you know, and I kind of jumped into
that practice more as a personal exploration. But I saw
pretty immediate impacts, you know, like, I lost a bit of weight, I
had more energy, I was sleeping better, just like I felt better. And
(03:16):
that, you know, piqued my interest a little bit. And so I started kind
of exploring what was the underlying mechanism, like,
why was this breathing stuff really kind of showing up for me? And I
went and studied with women, I climbed the mountain in the snow, and I did the
training. And that definitely opened the door, probably more
like kick the door off the hinges, to just kind of introduce me
(03:38):
to the potential for breath. But for a
long time after that, it's interesting. I always used to keep like breathwork
as like my dirty little secret. As we were talking about just a moment ago,
there's some pretty strong clinical boundaries and
lanes or pathways that we have to stay in as clinicians and breathwork
very much felt outside of that. You know, I had manual therapy and
(03:59):
exercise prescription, but breathwork was still kind of woo a
little bit. And I, I had this fear of integrating it into my clinical work.
Um, and so for a long time, I kind of kept these two worlds pretty separate. Like I was my
clinical put my clinical hat on be the physio. And then I
was exploring the potential for this stuff on the side, but
there was a moment where I had a patient come in, you know, like an
(04:20):
acute flare of chronic back pain. And he was just, Climbing
the walls, you know, like everything I did made it worse. Every position
I tried, every touch. And I was just like, a little bit freaking
out on the inside. Yeah. What, what am I going to do here? And
kind of last ditch effort. I was like, I'll just, I'll take this guy through a couple of breathing
exercises. I literally have nothing else I could try. And
(04:41):
in the space of five minutes, there was a different person looking at me, you know, and he was
looking at me like, what was that? You know, and all
we've done is kind of just like, slow down his nervous system, take
him out of that, you know, threat response, where there's a lot of tension, there's
a lot of focus on the pain, a lot of exclusion of other sensory information, and
just kind of like modulated the system a little bit. And the
(05:01):
direct response of his kind of pain experience changed. And
so that for me was kind of like the second catalyst of maybe
this does not need to be kind of like an add on, but more of
like a core pillar that I'm inviting my patients to
consider. And from then, I'm hard
pressed not to introduce it to almost all the clients I
(05:22):
see. Of course, there's a bit of a time and place. If
someone rolled their ankle playing football, I'm probably not going to jump
straight into breathwork. Particularly my persistent pain,
my anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, Just
where there's a lot of stuff going on, I find it starting with this, as
I kind of like, let's give you the tools that are going to help you navigate the
(05:43):
journey ahead, rather than kind of using it as a last ditch resort
at the end when nothing else has worked. I think it's way better to like, let's
start here and build this as a foundation and that's going to support us on the kind
Yeah. And when, when you're talking about
breathwork, can you define what that is? Cause a lot of people might
be like, well, everybody breathes like, okay,
(06:05):
what, so can you explain, um, in more detail
Yes. Wonderful question. Um, I explained it like this.
So like, firstly, let's just, If we had to define breathwork, everything
we do is breathwork, right? If we just define breathwork as
a line of communication, essentially between, you know, the
(06:27):
world and our nervous system, it is one that we have great influence over.
Right now, Karen, I could ask you to breathe faster or slower or deeper or shallower, hold
your breath. But that is going to create a very predictable response
in your brain and nervous system built through a couple of million years of
evolution, right? And we now kind of have a better understanding of
what those inputs can do. The breathwork for me is kind of
(06:48):
establishing that line of communication and being able to kind
of influence my system. But if we take the word breathwork and
then we kind of put that on a continuum, at one end we
have kind of corrective or restorative breathwork, and the other end
we have kind of the experiential breathwork. a lot of
what people see on social media, a lot of what people are talking about
(07:09):
is this experiential breathwork, right? Bunch of people in a
room, hyperventilating, lots of lights and sounds and crying, that's
like a really small slice of the pie in my mind. And that's really,
in my opinion, only appropriate for those that have the capacity to
do it. We go to the other end of that spectrum and we look at is
someone breathing in a way that supports the function of their nervous system
(07:30):
or hinders it, right? It could be from back pain, it could
be from posture, it could be from pregnancy. But if someone has developed some
non-optimal breathing patterns, that is going to continue to
inform their nervous system, right, about the state of the world. And so
if someone's breathing shallow and fast all the time, the
nervous system is kind of perceiving stress and threat, right? And it's going to
(07:50):
allocate resources to run away, fight or fly. And
it's going to deallocate resources to longevity and
repair and restoration. And so kind of first before we
talk about like using breathwork, it's really establishing how someone's
breathing, the environmental inputs, you know, does someone
sit at a desk eight hours a day? Are they on their phone five hours a day? Have they
(08:10):
had a back injury that maybe have developed some compensatory patterns
and kind of like working to restore their breathing to its optimal state.
before you even talk about, you know, intentional use
of breath, right? I much more
work on that kind of corrective side because there's a huge prevalence of
dysfunctional breathing. It's just unfortunately not very
(08:32):
well-defined, right? We don't have like a clear clinical, you
know, like a clinical pattern or something. What is dysfunctional
breathing? You know, cause it's something we're doing 23,000 times
a day, you know, like we could say, Oh, mouth breathing, you know, but
is it when their mouth breathing a hundred percent of the time or 80% of the time, like
we lack this clear, specific kind of diagnostic criteria. So
(08:54):
I actually think it's even a bigger problem than we, you
know, identify just because we lack, you know, those clear definitions.
And so when you are, and I might be getting ahead
of myself here, but when let's
say I come to you, And I
have a history, which I do, of chronic neck pain, right?
(09:18):
So I come to you curious about
breath work, right? So can
you kind of lay out what that looks like to the audience? Because
a lot of clinicians listening to this, and I think it's
important for them to get a sense of what does a session
look like or feel like, and
(09:43):
Yeah, wonderful. So I kind of have formulated a
bit of a methodology in terms of the assessment and treatment. And
when we consider breathing, what I think, you know, to
our fault as humans, we're really kind of like reductionist. We
isolate it all the way down to its single component and we're like, oh yeah, it works on
this. And so when I look at breath, I really want
(10:03):
to kind of look through these four kind of core pillars. And
this is the order in which I would assess and treat. So the first
is biomechanics, right? So I'm actually looking at how you
breathe, what muscles are you using? What strategy do you have, right? Are
you a breath holder? Do you hyperventilate, right? What's happening when
I put you in a certain position? You know, if I put you in a different position, does your breath
(10:24):
strategy change? And that's part of the biomechanical assessment. But
the second piece is physiological. When we look
at breathing, we're really looking at cellular metabolism as
much as we are kind of mechanical ventilation, right? Like
your energy, the state of your nervous system, your
metabolism, all these things are influenced by the way you breathe. And so we can assess
(10:46):
how tolerant or sensitive you are to carbon dioxide. You know,
that can be looked at in relation to things like heart rate, variability, it
is heart rate. So like, let's get a physiological picture of what's going
on. The third pillar being the nervous system. Your
breath is both effects and reflects your
nervous system. If you've been, you know, chronically stressed for the
(11:07):
last decade, that's going to show up in your breathing. But it's also
keeping your nervous system in that state, right? You might have learned to breathe
shallow and fast through a period of stress. But because breathing is
so adaptive, you may now just breathe shallow and far, independent
of external circumstances. And your nervous system continues to
get that input. And then the final piece is this kind of
(11:28):
relationship between breathing and emotional state. Most
of us already know this, right? What happens when you're super frustrated? Right.
What is the link between how you're breathing and the emotional state that may
be driving plenty of your actions? So for me, kind of
(11:49):
establishing, if you're like, I've got this chronic neck pain, you know, is
this, what is the energy driving my pursuit to
change that, right? Like, it could be frustration, you
know? But is breath kind of intertwined in
this kind of overarching energetic or emotional state that
is kind of showing up to like, why are you pursuing this? And
(12:11):
so through that kind of mechanics, physiology, nervous system, emotions, we
would assess and then prescribe, right? Like come up with an intervention. It's
like, oh, well, here's your breathing strategy. Your CO2 tolerance is
a little bit low. It seems like you're chronically in a bit of a hyper aroused
state. and the emotions that may be driving a lot of your actions are here. So
like, can we now kind of like extract from that what is
(12:32):
the plan to kind of correct and restore your breathing and
work on what it is that we've identified to support you on your goal of like alleviating
Yeah. Yeah. And so looking through those four pillars, so
you may look at changing someone's posture or you
may look at, you know, teaching different breathing strategies.
(12:52):
So if you're using your, um, accessory muscles,
scalenes and things a bit too much for breathing, it may be sort of
Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's kind of a, this idea that I
love is we're trying to train or retrain your autopilot. right? Everything
is largely unconscious, right? 90 to 95 to
(13:14):
99% of the time for some people it's just happening in the background. Who
taught you autopilot, right? If you grew up in a very stressful environment,
if you had bouts of back pain over the last 10 years, you know, if you've had a
couple of kids, like all these things will inform your autopilot. And
I don't think enough time is being spent on like, is your autopilot serving
you? Or is it perhaps picked up a couple of bad habits
(13:35):
over the years and it may not be kind of perpetuating a
problem. And so I, I wouldn't, I mean, I rarely find
breathing as they cause, right. As much
as a hugely contributing factor, but it seems
to be one of those really critical pieces that if we don't address it, it, it
becomes the constraint through the system kind of progressing. You
(13:57):
know, we could do all of the, the other things, like, let's talk
about your neck as an example, right? Like we could give you all the positional exercise,
postural exercise, you know, we could change your emotion. But if
you breathe with your neck 23,000 times a day, there's no way we're
going to fix that through 30 minutes of targeted exercise. Like
we have to change the way you breathe. Right. And so that's where it's like,
how do we get in and kind of recode, right. And change the autopilot so
(14:21):
that we stop perhaps relying on that compensatory pattern. And that
Right. And that makes perfect sense. And I
think a lot of physical therapists may intuitively understand
that, but it's so nice the way that you laid that out
in those four pillars to make it a little more concrete, you
(14:43):
know, um, and I'm sure a lot more goes into that.
And when it comes to the nervous system, you know, if you look at
the, if the, the, those nerves that wire together
fire together. So I usually tell people like when
it comes to, let's say chronic pain, it's like your brain
has gotten really good. at that
(15:04):
output of pain, whether say for
me, my neck, right? And so I always tell people like, if
you want to get good at tennis, your tennis serve, what will
you do to get better? You'll practice it again and again
and again. And I think to your points is same with breath
work. It might not be conscious, but subconsciously it's
(15:26):
practicing it again and again and again to either compensate
for your pain, for your stress,
for your posture, et cetera, lack of strength, et cetera,
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. And I think the one thing I'd love to add
to that, is we often will frame it around kind
of like the dysfunction or the pathology of the disorder that someone may present
(15:49):
with and it's very there but I also think what
I've more kind of come to the conclusion in maybe
the last couple of years it's like everyone should be doing breath work
because of the environment that we've designed as humans. We
didn't used to sit at a gym eight hours a day like that has a direct impact
on your breathing right? It's way harder to use your diaphragm when
(16:10):
your rib cage is folded over and your abdominal contents
are compressed. So like how many people are sitting? As I
sit up straight. The
current statistics, we look at how much time do people spend on their phone every
day, right? A study came out that showed up to 30% reduction
in lung capacity when we're on a phone. We suppress our sigh when
(16:31):
we're on a phone. So we're not just like, oh, how did
this injury or dysfunction? It's like you're a 21st century human. I
can guarantee you don't have great breathing because
what it means to be a 21st century human. You're hyper connected. You're overstimulated. You're
probably underslept and under resourced. Right. You may be back
pain. Statistically, eight and 10 adults in the US will experience back pain.
(16:54):
Very hard for that not to impact breathing. So we have all these kind
of like perfect storm. that will impact breathing,
the tricky part is it often doesn't show up as breathing for people. Most
people don't come to me being like, hey, I've got poor breathing and I need your help.
It's like anxiety, you know, my reactivity, my
fatigue, I can't sleep, I can't let go of my stress. And
(17:17):
so my job is then to kind of help connect these dots and
draw it back to, well, what can we do about that? we can start to
change the channel, you know, on the system and on your function and
your physiology, that maybe increases your capacity to
tolerate stress or increases your capacity to generate energy. So
much more kind of working under that paradigm that
21st century environment isn't great for us. You know,
(17:40):
we've kind of engineered our own demise in
a way there. So what can we do to mitigate that, right? Because
it's hard to not be affected by
your environment. In fact, it's impossible not. So we have to consider what
does that do to breathing? And then how can we work against that
(18:01):
Absolutely. And as we've been speaking, we've
been kind of throwing around the term dysfunctional. So could
you talk a little bit more about what
dysfunctional breathing is and how it shows
Yes. I would argue the, well, let's
(18:22):
put it this way. So if we just take the kind of like the clinical diagnosis side
of things, right? Respiratory rate is a really easy thing for any
clinician to measure. I'm not sure
when you went through medical textbooks, but currently respiratory rate, normal
respiratory rate is 12 to 20 breaths a minute. But you go back
100 years, and it was more like 8 to 12. And
(18:43):
you go back 200 years, and it was more like 6 to 10. You
know, you go back to traditional Chinese medicine, they all talk about six breaths
a minute. So respiratory rate is kind of a direct reflection of
the state of our nervous system. we keep moving the goalposts, right?
If a patient comes in and they're breathing 18 times a minute, that's far from
normal in my experience, but it is not flagged because
(19:05):
it's within a normal range. But normal is everyone is
overly stressed and highly sympathetic. And it's like, even
that kind of terminology I struggle with, because I would
argue that breathing more than 15 times a minute is erring
on the dysfunctional side, right? Like that's changing physiology.
It's changing how well I can get oxygen to my cells. It's changing my heart rate,
(19:27):
my blood pressure, my brain waves. And so it's really direct impact,
but we fail to recognize it as an issue because we just keep
making these goalposts further away. So in my mind,
when I look at dysfunctional breathing, number one is kind of like, what
is breathing telling me about someone's state? And the higher
that respiratory rate, right? The lower their heart rate variability, the
(19:48):
higher their stress, the less of their recovery. We
know that that is going to be a big deterrent to progress if
we can't get them out of that nervous system state. The
second is I would kind of talk about like these more unconscious
but opportunistic forms of breath, right? I hold my
breath when I'm having a difficult conversation. I hold my
(20:10):
breath when I'm trying to get the key in the door. I hold my breath when I'm reading my
emails. That is disrupting my physiology and
it's changing the state of my nervous system. And a lot of the more recent research is
showing that is completely unconscious. People aren't like, oh, let
me hold my breath. It happens, which
changes oxygen, carbon dioxide levels, and it creates its
(20:31):
own version of stress in our body. But if I'm not aware that
it's doing that, I might be like, oh, my job is stressing me out. Is
it? Or do you unconsciously hold your breath every time you take a breath? And
so kind of looking to someone's breath is like, what story is it
telling, right? So we've got kind of the picture of the nervous system. We've
got a little bit more of a picture about how they're perhaps navigating the
(20:52):
world, like how do they deal with stress? And then the final piece
I would look at, right, is really
kind of coming back to posture. Most people, you know, a
healthy diaphragm range of motion, it's like eight to 10 centimeters. I
have assessed thousands of diaphragms and most people's moving like three to four
centimeters, you know, why? Well, I sit at a death gate
(21:13):
hours and I've hurt my back five times and I've had three kids, you
know, it's like, so looking more at the biomechanical postural side
of things, because we can't really separate breathing and posture
right now. I asked you to get a little bit taller
and open your chest. You don't need to do anything to your breathing, but it
will change, right? It's going to the shape of your body. And
(21:33):
so it gives us this big kind of leverage point as well as to look at
someone's posture and the way they hold their body and move through space. as
to like, what is their breathing having to do to kind of fit that posture? And
so I kind of look at dysfunctional breathing, I'm kind
of zooming out and being like, is it preventing progress? You
know, at the level of the nervous system? Is it holding you in a certain state?
(21:55):
Is it reducing your capacity to generate energy because you breathe really
shallow and you can't tolerate enough carbon dioxide? You know,
is it part of this emotional breath loop, right?
Like the breath holding pattern, the trauma, the compensatory strategies
that people develop as a result of pain. As a physical therapist,
this will resonate so much. You watch your patients with back
(22:17):
pain. What do they do when they roll over on the plinth or
get out of the car? They hold their breath. When they pick up groceries, hold
their breath. When they roll over in bed, hold their breath. So often
that is just a learned strategy, right? Like whilst my
back hurts, I learn to hold my breath when I pick up heavy stuff. But
my back pain might get better, but I don't undo that
(22:38):
compensatory pattern. I think it's a lot where it's like, yeah, I
hurt my back five years ago and it was six months of hell, but
now I'm all better. But that person still holds their breath every time they stand up
from a chair and get out of the car, but they don't know they're
doing it. And so that idea of dysfunctional breathing, we
have to, I guess, have a little bit more nuance as to where the dysfunction is
showing up. But it can be so prevalent just because of those kind of
(23:03):
And from what I'm gathering, when
you're working with people as
a physiotherapist or as a breathwork therapist, you're
not just having them lie on the ground and breathe, right?
So it sounds to me like you're incorporating some
(23:24):
functional movements, whether it's exercise movements, et cetera. So can
Yeah. That's such a good point because I think you like probably most it's like breathwork. All
Yeah. Like I think you're laying on the ground and you're, you
know, like doing like all these different kinds of breathing, you
So I, I usually have to disappoint a lot of my clients where they're, they're
(23:47):
expecting, like, we're going to do breathwork, you know? And that to me is
kind of like, once we have developed the capacity, for
breathwork to be effective, sure, we might do some breathwork. But
until then, it's much more the same kind of assessment treatment
model, right? Let's say we've found out
that you have a really shallow upper chest breathing pattern. Well,
(24:08):
is that because your diaphragm is tight or weak? Your ribcage
is stiff and immobile, right? So do
we need to then go and prescribe you some thoracic rotation and some
extensions to give you a little bit more mobility so your breath can
actually increase its volume and your breathing rate
can come down, right? Maybe we get in and your diaphragm is
(24:29):
just like so locked up and tight. And you tell me, well, I've had three C-sections
and I had back pain before that. And I work at a desk job. It's like no
amount of giving you breathing exercises is going to override the
fact that your diaphragm probably hasn't been moving through its full
range of motion for a decade. So breathwork in that sense might
be giving you a self diaphragm mobilization, giving
(24:49):
you some stretches to do for your diaphragm, and then perhaps some
targeted kind of like positional breathing, right?
Let's lay you down on prone and see if we can get you to breathe into your belly and your back
and start to turn back on the function of your diaphragm. All
of those things being breathwork in my mind, but It
highlights the need for assessment, right? Like there's no point
(25:11):
that you and I do in a session, I go, go and do these breathing exercises. if
I haven't assessed where your dysfunction might lie, that's kind of
just like throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks, right? Like, sure,
you'll probably feel a bit better if you breathe slowly for five minutes every day, you know, like,
that's where there's a little bit of like, it's forgiving,
you know, but if we actually spend a bit of time and assess what
(25:33):
you actually need, then we can provide you with a far more kind
of targeted approach that's going to like bring your breathing back
to a functional optimal state. And then we could
do breath work, right? Like now we can do
this, the really cool kind of like expand
your capacity and use breath to get into an altered state
(25:54):
of consciousness. And like there's all this wonderful stuff around identity and
belief and emotion and energy. But I find a lot of people jumping to
that, doing it on top of dysfunctional reading. You
know, I'm already hyperventilating all day, and then I'm going and
doing 30 minutes of hyperventilation because someone's going to help. It's
Right, right. No, I mean, you're so right. The
(26:17):
assessment, the evaluation is everything. And
so I think it's important for people listening as we're talking about breath
work, maybe you don't have to like jump into
a breath class at the gym, but instead maybe
go to someone and have them evaluate you
so that to your point, you're not adding hyperventilation
(26:40):
on top of hyperventilation or stress on top of stress. Um,
and where does meditation fall in all of
this? Cause I'm sure that's a question that you get a lot. Like, can't I just go to
Yeah. Great question. And just like, because we've had this conversation, right.
If we kind of backstep a little bit, just sitting and breathing, isn't
(27:01):
going to change the length of your diaphragm. Isn't going to change your habitual patterns. It's
not going to change the length tension relationship with your muscles. Like Yeah,
you'll get benefits from meditation. But if you're continuing to breathe 23,000 times
a day, in a way that signals stress to your nervous system,
how effective is the meditation going to be? So a
huge element of breathwork is this kind of meditative piece
(27:24):
where it's like directed focus. It's very hard to
self assess your breathing if you can't pay attention. You know, so like,
I find that the act of breath awareness becomes
meditation, at least for me personally, but I find a lot of my
clients and students feel the same way that instead of just like clearing
my mind and doing nothing, it's like, can you witness the entry and
(27:45):
the exit of the air, right? Without trying to change it, without trying
to fix it, right? Start to learn about your own breath,
right? Like start to engage in that conversation. that becomes very
meditative, because we are excluding the
other stuff. I'm less thinking, more feeling. I'm noticing certain
sensory elements. And so people will often come out of
(28:06):
doing something like breath awareness, feeling like, oh, I got to this kind of
Yeah. I remember being at like a meditation, like
a one day retreat here in the city with Sharon Salzberg, who
is a big, I'm sure you've heard of her. She's a big, you
know, kind of meditation guru. She's here in New York City and
(28:28):
she was taking everyone through and she's like, She said kind
of exactly what you just said. And she was
like, so I'm gonna give you all a little
hint, a little takeaway. She's like, you can use it.
You can tell other people about it. I don't need, you know, attribution.
She's like, when you breathe in, just say
(28:49):
to yourself, breath. And when you breathe out,
say breath. It
doesn't have to get any more complicated than that. You know, just
notice when you're breathing in and notice when you breathe out and
just say breath and breath versus a mantra or,
you know, a million other things, or to your point, clearing your
(29:10):
mind. She's like, just say breath. And
I do that like when I fly, cause
I'm a bit of an anxious flyer. So when I'm sitting on the plane, I
breathe in and I say breath and I breathe in, I just notice my breath.
you know, and notice how things are moving. Now, obviously I have the
(29:30):
added advantage of being a physical therapist and kind of understanding the
biomechanical side of it, but I always
remembered that. And for me, that's been the most helpful thing when
it comes to breathing is just say breath and notice when
And to me, it's so fascinating. I always like introduce this
idea, right? Like breathing can only ever be done in the present, right?
(29:54):
Like you can't breathe in the future, you can't breathe in the past. It's so
often like, what's giving me anxiety or why am I upset? It's
like thing that happened or thing that might happen. And
so when I then come back to breath and I notice it
coming, it's like, I have to be here, like present. And
it becomes this kind of anchor, right? Like where it draws you back to like
(30:15):
right now, I'm probably safe. I'm
probably okay. I'm worried about this thing that might happen in the future. We
But as soon as we kind of come back to this thing that's only ever happening
in the present moment, it does anchor us there. And so
(30:35):
I found it's such a nice gateway for me
personally. I tried with a lot of different meditation styles, but
just like really being observant of like, oh, here comes
an inhale and like, as far as it wants. Oh, it ended. Oh, there
goes the exhale. It's like that's only ever happening right now.
And so if I can be observant of it, if I can be aware of it, I
(30:56):
am present, like by nature of the fact that I'm aware of the thing that's happening in
the present. And so, like, if not, you know,
like meditation is many things, but if not just like being present or mindfulness
is maybe a better term there, then it's a wonderful way to do that,
Right, oh yeah, I love that explanation, that's great. Now,
(31:18):
as we start to kind of wrap things up, is there anything
as we've gone through and had this great conversation that's gotten me
more curious now about learning more
about this so I can help my own patients, is
there anything that we didn't cover that
(31:41):
I would have to say the nervous system, you know, we talked a lot about breath and I'm
more kind of, you know, I've been immersed in this world of breathwork now
for kind of six or seven years. And the more I'm more
coming to the conclusion that like breath is simply an entry point to
the nervous system. It's. maybe the lowest hanging fruit
in terms of like requires no equipment. We're all doing it low
(32:02):
value. It's cheap. It's like, it's almost immediate
in its impact. And so with that, but like, what
is the outcome is it's all working at the level of the
autonomic nervous system. But that seems to be the
driver of a lot of my stress, my
thoughts, my feelings, my story, my emotions, right. Are all
kind of stemming from like, what state am I in? You know, when we're feeling
(32:25):
super anxious, we're usually not at the same time feeling incredibly grateful,
right? Like the state of my nervous system is giving me access to
a certain bandwidth of emotion and story and narrative. And
so my ability to kind of change that hinges on the impact that I
can have on the nervous system. And this more like
systems level or systems thinking approach was
(32:46):
really like the biggest catalyst for me in the last kind of five years,
which I've shifted is away from, you know, someone presents with these
symptoms and we take those symptoms to classify it
as a diagnosis. And then that diagnosis informs a treatment plan. How
most of us, you know, particularly physios are taught, right? Like pain here
or this pattern, right? We call it that. And then we treat it this way. But
(33:08):
this idea of shifting away from kind of symptom oriented treatment more
towards this kind of model of like health creation or supporting the
system to do what it's innately able to do so much
of that has kind of been unlocked with my client work by addressing
the nervous system, you know. And whether that's through
breath or other strategies, that could be a technological detox.
(33:29):
I could be getting off my phone an hour before I go to bed. It could be getting sunlight. It
could be moving through nature. It's not just breathing, but I
find these are these inputs that are impacting the nervous system. And
that seems to be this undercurrent of a lot
of the stress-based dysfunction we see today. And I categorize that
as false stress, anxiety, chronic pain, chronic
(33:50):
fatigue. a lot of kind of like autoimmune conditions
have this huge stress component. But most of
what people are taught in terms of stress is stress avoidance or stress management
kind of reinforces the idea that stress is bad. And so like,
is there a different way we can start to kind of increase the capacity of
the nervous system rather than avoid the stressor? And
(34:13):
that's been a big game changer. So like when I'm talking about breath, I'm
kind of talking about this entry point to get at the nervous system. And
so, you know, for clinicians, practitioners is really considering like
the nervous system, whether someone's coming in with, you know, back pain or
knee pain or a specific injury, like what role is
their nervous system playing here? because it kind
(34:36):
of informs everything else. And if we can't change the level of the
nervous system, we're kind of walking up the down escalator is
the analogy that we might get there, but it's going to be a hard slog. Whereas
if we shift at the level of the nervous system, it
often kind of sets in motion a cascade, right? It's like domino effect
where things get a little bit easier because it's just this kind
(35:02):
Regardless of whether they're coming in for a knee injury or an ankle injury
or back or neck, et cetera, et cetera. Um, they don't have to
Yeah. And I think that's important to remember as well. And
Right now it's, it's such a, a
(35:25):
simple filter, right? Like, and again, I don't need to, now
like, oh, I need to become like a nervous system practitioner. But
it's just that consideration, you know, from the language that someone's
using to their posture, to how they're talking, to are
they jumpy and reactive and they tell you that they're really wide and they can't switch
off at night. You know, it's like I think physios have such a wonderful
(35:46):
opportunity to have a bit more of a broad kind
of holistic, integrative approach. Totally. Yeah.
We mentioned at the start that they kind of like stay in your lane idea that
Well, you know, I'm not allowed to talk about those things, but I think that broader
perspective of like the inputs to this person's nervous system, are
there some things we can tweak there that are really
(36:09):
high leverage, right? Like it's not hard to get someone
to maybe spend half an hour when they wake up in the morning before they
turn their phone on and get stuck in to maybe do some slow breaths
and move their body and get some sunlight, you know, to not
lay in bed at night, doom scrolling Instagram as they fall
asleep, you know, like, low, really simple chain.
(36:29):
You're not saying it's easy, but could be really high leverage into that
person's pain presentation, right? Like our pain sensitivity changes
dramatically based on the state we're in, right? Like everyone's pain gets worse
A hundred percent. Yeah. That's just, that's physiology for you.
Right. Um, and, and I also think especially
physical therapists is we're in such a unique position because
(36:52):
we actually spend time with our patients. Because
oftentimes when people go to the doctor, I don't know what it's like in Australia, you're
in the US now, so you can relate, but you're
lucky if you get 15 minutes. Whereas a physical
therapist, you may see them once a week, twice a week, maybe
(37:16):
Right. So imagine how much of an influence you can have
on that patient. First
of all, on your patient's nervous system, just from your
interaction, right? And then to add
some of the wonderful breathwork ideas
that you're sharing today could be, it's
(37:39):
Yeah. And it's, I can't stress how much of like
a high leverage thing it is because like those small changes, you know, like
I've seen, you know, just breath awareness is a great example. You
encourage all your patients just to, Hey, when your pain is bad,
notice how you're breathing versus when your pain is not bad. Notice how you're breathing. There'll
be like, Oh, it feels different. Right. And if whilst
(38:00):
you're in pain, you breathe like you weren't, you
know, simple example, but that it puts
them into a state of curiosity. I wonder how my breath does change
based on my pain, or my stress levels, or my experience of
anxiety, or how I've slept the night before. makes
us a little bit more of like the detective, you know, and it's
(38:22):
putting people to a state of curiosity and self-observation that
isn't focused necessarily on their symptoms, as much as
just this thing that's happening all the time. Right. Breath's quite
neutral for a lot of people. Like, we don't really have a
belief around it, right? There's not a lot of dogma. It's just like, well, just
notice how it's different when you're feeling super overwhelmed versus when
you're present. Because what's happening there
(38:45):
is you're observing the kind of signal, right? Like, oh, well, My
breathing feels slow and I can feel the movement of my diaphragm and
there's a gentle pause at the end. Like what would happen if I practiced that
intentionally? Magical things tend to happen because
it's a nervous system input, right? Like we're, we're both reflecting
the state that we're in and we're affecting it. And that's really
(39:06):
simple to invite people just to notice how their breathing changes based on
how they feel. There are symptoms that are experiencing and
just collecting a little bit more data, which then informs, OK,
I notice I hold my breath a lot when I'm stressed. Cool.
The next time you're in a stressful environment, what if we paid a little bit more attention? Don't
let yourself go offline. Count in your head. Breathe in for four. Breathe out for four. Breathe in.
(39:27):
Don't hold my breath. what happened to my experience of stress? It
probably changed. And so it really becomes a tool
of self-empowerment because we're getting the information from ourselves
about ourselves to use for ourselves. But
so often people need a bit of a prompt of like, hey, have you considered breathing? because
most people are like breathing, doing that all the time. Do it
(39:49):
every day. And so that little invitation to
the clinicians and practitioners listening is just inviting awareness of
your own breath, but perhaps just inviting your patients or clients to
take note of what's happening with their breath. It often opens up
this door that unfolds quite organically. You
might not need to be a breath expert to just say to someone, hey, I've
(40:10):
noticed you hold your breath when you do this. Did you know you're doing
that? what would happen if we didn't hold our breath when we did that, right?
The pacing pattern, the tension patterns, all these things start to change from that really
Yeah, and that's a really powerful takeaway for everyone
listening. And I love that. And now I'm going
to start asking my patients that question. So
(40:32):
it's great. So again, the powerful takeaway
that I'm speaking about is, how
do you notice your breath when you're relaxed? And can
you notice your breath when you're stressed, when you're having that pain? And
then again, bring the patient in and exploring that
with them using some, I mean, I can tell you're using some motivational
(40:56):
interviewing techniques there as well to
really get the patient to take ownership of it and
to be able to provide
And so often it becomes such a, you know, like particularly our
(41:19):
There's so much that's like feels out of our control. Yeah. You know, what
we're doing here is like, Hey, there's one thing that you can always control. You
know, it doesn't matter what's going out on out there. Right. But
if you don't have the awareness of like, Hey, I'm, I'm breathing really rapidly
or it's up in my chest or the interoception, it's
(41:40):
Kind of teach this model in the practitioner program of awareness, control,
optimization. Awareness being this kind of like foundational piece
that we cannot skip over. Once we have the awareness, we
can start to make those little tweaks and I can start to use my breath and
then we can kind of talk about optimization. Yeah. First I
have to understand like where I'm veering off course or what
(42:00):
might be holding me, you know, stuck in this position. then I can do
Right, right. And it's not taking away our
prescription exercise or maybe our manual techniques,
right? It's not replacing, it's just another
entity to look at to help your patients in
(42:22):
a wide variety of situations and
I love that you said that, you know, I say to people like it's, it's not another tool
as much as it's a new lens. What I'm
looking at changes when the way I look at things changes, you
know, so like I, I've, I for so long
kind of positioned Breathwork as this add on, right, as the next tool. but
(42:45):
I found that that's not really how I was working with it and how I was using it.
And this idea of like a lens that I'm looking through, you know,
then just informs, like, I might still use manual therapy or
exercise prescription, but like, even then, you know, it's like, I'm mobilizing
a joint and someone starts holding their breath. That's telling me a lot. Right.
Person's guarding and protecting. Why? You know, it might not even
(43:05):
be the point that they've come in to talk to you about, but if we get
that bracing or that breath holding, it's like, oh, maybe there's an opportunity for
exploration here. So it can become an assessment tool,
Perfect. Perfect. And on that note, I'm
going to ask you, where can people find you if they
(43:26):
want to learn more about you, they want to work with you, or whether
they may, maybe they're a patient or they're a therapist who
wants to learn more about what you do and how they
Yeah, the pace I spend most time is definitely Instagram.
So I'm at BreathBodyTherapy. And if there are practitioners that
are kind of interested in this lens, just pop me a message and
(43:48):
be like, hey, I listened to the podcast with Dr. Karen and we can
kind of talk through what that model looks like. But yeah, we run a practitioner program
three, four times a year. And then I do also work with a handful of
individuals as well. For the practitioners looking for
a new lens, feel free to reach out and we kind of explore options.
Perfect. And for the listeners, Campbell also
(44:09):
has a little, I'm just going to say that little kind of free, a
little gift, let's say for the listeners. So
fundamentals of breath, the self paced breath correction program.
If you use the coupon code breath 20, you'll get 20% off. I'll
have all of the links for that and for all of
the ways for people to get in touch with you in the show notes. So whatever you
(44:32):
are listening to on right now, just scroll on
down into the show notes and one click will
take you to all of that and you'll get all of that information. So,
Campbell, thank you so much. I have one last question. It's
one I ask everyone. Knowing where you are now in your life and career, what
(44:54):
It's such a good question. I would, can I
I would honestly unlearn a lot, a lot of what was taught in
terms of, you know, like physiotherapy, right? Like in
terms of the structure and the way that I
was taught to deliver information and, and kind of create almost
(45:16):
a separation or a gap between myself as the practitioner and the client
that I'm teaching. And I would share more of what I'm
using as a human rather than what I'm telling you to do as a professional.
I found this idea of you make your mess your message, you know, like I've
struggled with back pain and every time I kind of invite
my patients in instead of like, oh, I'm telling you what to do. I'm
(45:38):
telling you what I'm doing and maybe it'll help you because it sounds like we're in
a similar situation. the uptake of that information, it
just is very different. And so for so long, I kind of put on
the front of like, I'm a physiotherapist, I shouldn't have back pain. So
I'm going to pretend I don't, you know, because I'm putting on this front of
like, I should put it all together, you know, it's like, who am I to tell you
to treat your back pain if I got back pain? Turns out I'm human, you
(46:01):
know, and that bringing the humanness into my work as a
clinician, just it made everything so much more relatable and
we're on the same page and so I wish I spent less time trying to
you know pretend. To be perfect. Yeah like how good
I know things and how you know like and just more authentic more vulnerable of
like here's what I'm doing you know and here's how it's working for me
(46:23):
Oh, that's great advice. Thank you so much, Campbell, for
coming on the podcast, sharing all of this great information. Again,
if you want to learn more about Campbell and his work, go to breathbodytherapy.com. Uh,
Loved it. And everyone thanks so much for tuning in. Have a great couple
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Healthy, Wealthy, and Smart Podcast. I
am your host, Dr. Karen Litzy, owner of Karen Litzy Physical Therapy
located in the heart of New York City. And on today's episode,
we are going to be talking about breath work and how
the role of breathing can impact stress, self-regulation, dysfunctional
(00:23):
breathing, and so much more. So to help
with that today, my guest, Campbell Will, is an
integrative physiotherapist and breath work educator focused
on the impact of breath on human health and performance. With
experience ranging from ICUs to working with elite athletes, Campbell
has seen firsthand how proper breathing enhances performance, while
(00:45):
dysfunctional breathing drives stress and dysfunction. He
helps both practitioners and individuals shift their focus from
disease to health using breath as a powerful tool for
balance and wellbeing. So Campbell, welcome to
Now, before we get into that, because we're both physiotherapists, I
(01:07):
would love for you to tell the listeners a little bit more about you
and how you sort of found that breath work
Yeah, it was one of those funny things. Correct me if I'm
wrong, but I think in the US, like the physical therapy, there's less kind
of emphasis on kind of respiratory physical therapy. In Australia,
a big part of the training, you know, we work in hospitals. And
(01:30):
so my first job out of graduating physiotherapy was
kind of a leave cover role in an inpatient medical setting. So I
was working in ICUs and neurosurgery. And
there, you know, especially in something like ICU, breathing plays
a big role. So my job in ICU is really to go in and look at mobilization and
respiration, you know, lungs clear, breathing, can we get the mobilizing? And
(01:52):
so my introduction to breath is very clinical, but
it was very much at that kind of pointy end of things, right? I was really working
at kind of end of life or, you know, critical care. And
it was so interesting to me that most of these people in ICU would
say to me, oh, you're the first person to talk to me about breathing. And
that always like struck me as like a little bit of a, wait a minute, you know, like
(02:14):
end of life or critical care. And I'm the first person to talk about it. Shouldn't
be this, shouldn't this be the first thing that you're taught? You know, like it's
really, the more I understood it over the years, the more I
saw it as just this hugely missing piece. And
even if I think about my, you know, the five years of schooling to become a physio,
like we had one lecture on the diaphragm and it was kind of a neural injuries.
(02:35):
it wasn't really on like its role in emotional regulation and
energy management and the vagus nerve and all these wonderful things. And
so I kept kind of just like coming up against this idea of we're
not really talking about this core foundation of
what keeps people healthy and happy. And so I just saw
it across all these kind of clinical settings. And around that same time,
(02:56):
I kind of stumbled across the Wim Hof method. And so this was probably seven or eight
years ago. And I thought, this crazy Dutch guy, like summoning mountains
in the snow, and there's something here, you know, and I kind of jumped into
that practice more as a personal exploration. But I saw
pretty immediate impacts, you know, like, I lost a bit of weight, I
had more energy, I was sleeping better, just like I felt better. And
(03:16):
that, you know, piqued my interest a little bit. And so I started kind
of exploring what was the underlying mechanism, like,
why was this breathing stuff really kind of showing up for me? And I
went and studied with women, I climbed the mountain in the snow, and I did the
training. And that definitely opened the door, probably more
like kick the door off the hinges, to just kind of introduce me
(03:38):
to the potential for breath. But for a
long time after that, it's interesting. I always used to keep like breathwork
as like my dirty little secret. As we were talking about just a moment ago,
there's some pretty strong clinical boundaries and
lanes or pathways that we have to stay in as clinicians and breathwork
very much felt outside of that. You know, I had manual therapy and
(03:59):
exercise prescription, but breathwork was still kind of woo a
little bit. And I, I had this fear of integrating it into my clinical work.
Um, and so for a long time, I kind of kept these two worlds pretty separate. Like I was my
clinical put my clinical hat on be the physio. And then I
was exploring the potential for this stuff on the side, but
there was a moment where I had a patient come in, you know, like an
(04:20):
acute flare of chronic back pain. And he was just, Climbing
the walls, you know, like everything I did made it worse. Every position
I tried, every touch. And I was just like, a little bit freaking
out on the inside. Yeah. What, what am I going to do here? And
kind of last ditch effort. I was like, I'll just, I'll take this guy through a couple of breathing
exercises. I literally have nothing else I could try. And
(04:41):
in the space of five minutes, there was a different person looking at me, you know, and he was
looking at me like, what was that? You know, and all
we've done is kind of just like, slow down his nervous system, take
him out of that, you know, threat response, where there's a lot of tension, there's
a lot of focus on the pain, a lot of exclusion of other sensory information, and
just kind of like modulated the system a little bit. And the
(05:01):
direct response of his kind of pain experience changed. And
so that for me was kind of like the second catalyst of maybe
this does not need to be kind of like an add on, but more of
like a core pillar that I'm inviting my patients to
consider. And from then, I'm hard
pressed not to introduce it to almost all the clients I
(05:22):
see. Of course, there's a bit of a time and place. If
someone rolled their ankle playing football, I'm probably not going to jump
straight into breathwork. Particularly my persistent pain,
my anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, Just
where there's a lot of stuff going on, I find it starting with this, as
I kind of like, let's give you the tools that are going to help you navigate the
(05:43):
journey ahead, rather than kind of using it as a last ditch resort
at the end when nothing else has worked. I think it's way better to like, let's
start here and build this as a foundation and that's going to support us on the kind
Yeah. And when, when you're talking about
breathwork, can you define what that is? Cause a lot of people might
be like, well, everybody breathes like, okay,
(06:05):
what, so can you explain, um, in more detail
Yes. Wonderful question. Um, I explained it like this.
So like, firstly, let's just, If we had to define breathwork, everything
we do is breathwork, right? If we just define breathwork as
a line of communication, essentially between, you know, the
(06:27):
world and our nervous system, it is one that we have great influence over.
Right now, Karen, I could ask you to breathe faster or slower or deeper or shallower, hold
your breath. But that is going to create a very predictable response
in your brain and nervous system built through a couple of million years of
evolution, right? And we now kind of have a better understanding of
what those inputs can do. The breathwork for me is kind of
(06:48):
establishing that line of communication and being able to kind
of influence my system. But if we take the word breathwork and
then we kind of put that on a continuum, at one end we
have kind of corrective or restorative breathwork, and the other end
we have kind of the experiential breathwork. a lot of
what people see on social media, a lot of what people are talking about
(07:09):
is this experiential breathwork, right? Bunch of people in a
room, hyperventilating, lots of lights and sounds and crying, that's
like a really small slice of the pie in my mind. And that's really,
in my opinion, only appropriate for those that have the capacity to
do it. We go to the other end of that spectrum and we look at is
someone breathing in a way that supports the function of their nervous system
(07:30):
or hinders it, right? It could be from back pain, it could
be from posture, it could be from pregnancy. But if someone has developed some
non-optimal breathing patterns, that is going to continue to
inform their nervous system, right, about the state of the world. And so
if someone's breathing shallow and fast all the time, the
nervous system is kind of perceiving stress and threat, right? And it's going to
(07:50):
allocate resources to run away, fight or fly. And
it's going to deallocate resources to longevity and
repair and restoration. And so kind of first before we
talk about like using breathwork, it's really establishing how someone's
breathing, the environmental inputs, you know, does someone
sit at a desk eight hours a day? Are they on their phone five hours a day? Have they
(08:10):
had a back injury that maybe have developed some compensatory patterns
and kind of like working to restore their breathing to its optimal state.
before you even talk about, you know, intentional use
of breath, right? I much more
work on that kind of corrective side because there's a huge prevalence of
dysfunctional breathing. It's just unfortunately not very
(08:32):
well-defined, right? We don't have like a clear clinical, you
know, like a clinical pattern or something. What is dysfunctional
breathing? You know, cause it's something we're doing 23,000 times
a day, you know, like we could say, Oh, mouth breathing, you know, but
is it when their mouth breathing a hundred percent of the time or 80% of the time, like
we lack this clear, specific kind of diagnostic criteria. So
(08:54):
I actually think it's even a bigger problem than we, you
know, identify just because we lack, you know, those clear definitions.
And so when you are, and I might be getting ahead
of myself here, but when let's
say I come to you, And I
have a history, which I do, of chronic neck pain, right?
(09:18):
So I come to you curious about
breath work, right? So can
you kind of lay out what that looks like to the audience? Because
a lot of clinicians listening to this, and I think it's
important for them to get a sense of what does a session
look like or feel like, and
(09:43):
Yeah, wonderful. So I kind of have formulated a
bit of a methodology in terms of the assessment and treatment. And
when we consider breathing, what I think, you know, to
our fault as humans, we're really kind of like reductionist. We
isolate it all the way down to its single component and we're like, oh yeah, it works on
this. And so when I look at breath, I really want
(10:03):
to kind of look through these four kind of core pillars. And
this is the order in which I would assess and treat. So the first
is biomechanics, right? So I'm actually looking at how you
breathe, what muscles are you using? What strategy do you have, right? Are
you a breath holder? Do you hyperventilate, right? What's happening when
I put you in a certain position? You know, if I put you in a different position, does your breath
(10:24):
strategy change? And that's part of the biomechanical assessment. But
the second piece is physiological. When we look
at breathing, we're really looking at cellular metabolism as
much as we are kind of mechanical ventilation, right? Like
your energy, the state of your nervous system, your
metabolism, all these things are influenced by the way you breathe. And so we can assess
(10:46):
how tolerant or sensitive you are to carbon dioxide. You know,
that can be looked at in relation to things like heart rate, variability, it
is heart rate. So like, let's get a physiological picture of what's going
on. The third pillar being the nervous system. Your
breath is both effects and reflects your
nervous system. If you've been, you know, chronically stressed for the
(11:07):
last decade, that's going to show up in your breathing. But it's also
keeping your nervous system in that state, right? You might have learned to breathe
shallow and fast through a period of stress. But because breathing is
so adaptive, you may now just breathe shallow and far, independent
of external circumstances. And your nervous system continues to
get that input. And then the final piece is this kind of
(11:28):
relationship between breathing and emotional state. Most
of us already know this, right? What happens when you're super frustrated? Right.
What is the link between how you're breathing and the emotional state that may
be driving plenty of your actions? So for me, kind of
(11:49):
establishing, if you're like, I've got this chronic neck pain, you know, is
this, what is the energy driving my pursuit to
change that, right? Like, it could be frustration, you
know? But is breath kind of intertwined in
this kind of overarching energetic or emotional state that
is kind of showing up to like, why are you pursuing this? And
(12:11):
so through that kind of mechanics, physiology, nervous system, emotions, we
would assess and then prescribe, right? Like come up with an intervention. It's
like, oh, well, here's your breathing strategy. Your CO2 tolerance is
a little bit low. It seems like you're chronically in a bit of a hyper aroused
state. and the emotions that may be driving a lot of your actions are here. So
like, can we now kind of like extract from that what is
(12:32):
the plan to kind of correct and restore your breathing and
work on what it is that we've identified to support you on your goal of like alleviating
Yeah. Yeah. And so looking through those four pillars, so
you may look at changing someone's posture or you
may look at, you know, teaching different breathing strategies.
(12:52):
So if you're using your, um, accessory muscles,
scalenes and things a bit too much for breathing, it may be sort of
Yeah, exactly. Right. And it's kind of a, this idea that I
love is we're trying to train or retrain your autopilot. right? Everything
is largely unconscious, right? 90 to 95 to
(13:14):
99% of the time for some people it's just happening in the background. Who
taught you autopilot, right? If you grew up in a very stressful environment,
if you had bouts of back pain over the last 10 years, you know, if you've had a
couple of kids, like all these things will inform your autopilot. And
I don't think enough time is being spent on like, is your autopilot serving
you? Or is it perhaps picked up a couple of bad habits
(13:35):
over the years and it may not be kind of perpetuating a
problem. And so I, I wouldn't, I mean, I rarely find
breathing as they cause, right. As much
as a hugely contributing factor, but it seems
to be one of those really critical pieces that if we don't address it, it, it
becomes the constraint through the system kind of progressing. You
(13:57):
know, we could do all of the, the other things, like, let's talk
about your neck as an example, right? Like we could give you all the positional exercise,
postural exercise, you know, we could change your emotion. But if
you breathe with your neck 23,000 times a day, there's no way we're
going to fix that through 30 minutes of targeted exercise. Like
we have to change the way you breathe. Right. And so that's where it's like,
how do we get in and kind of recode, right. And change the autopilot so
(14:21):
that we stop perhaps relying on that compensatory pattern. And that
Right. And that makes perfect sense. And I
think a lot of physical therapists may intuitively understand
that, but it's so nice the way that you laid that out
in those four pillars to make it a little more concrete, you
(14:43):
know, um, and I'm sure a lot more goes into that.
And when it comes to the nervous system, you know, if you look at
the, if the, the, those nerves that wire together
fire together. So I usually tell people like when
it comes to, let's say chronic pain, it's like your brain
has gotten really good. at that
(15:04):
output of pain, whether say for
me, my neck, right? And so I always tell people like, if
you want to get good at tennis, your tennis serve, what will
you do to get better? You'll practice it again and again
and again. And I think to your points is same with breath
work. It might not be conscious, but subconsciously it's
(15:26):
practicing it again and again and again to either compensate
for your pain, for your stress,
for your posture, et cetera, lack of strength, et cetera,
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. And I think the one thing I'd love to add
to that, is we often will frame it around kind
of like the dysfunction or the pathology of the disorder that someone may present
(15:49):
with and it's very there but I also think what
I've more kind of come to the conclusion in maybe
the last couple of years it's like everyone should be doing breath work
because of the environment that we've designed as humans. We
didn't used to sit at a gym eight hours a day like that has a direct impact
on your breathing right? It's way harder to use your diaphragm when
(16:10):
your rib cage is folded over and your abdominal contents
are compressed. So like how many people are sitting? As I
sit up straight. The
current statistics, we look at how much time do people spend on their phone every
day, right? A study came out that showed up to 30% reduction
in lung capacity when we're on a phone. We suppress our sigh when
(16:31):
we're on a phone. So we're not just like, oh, how did
this injury or dysfunction? It's like you're a 21st century human. I
can guarantee you don't have great breathing because
what it means to be a 21st century human. You're hyper connected. You're overstimulated. You're
probably underslept and under resourced. Right. You may be back
pain. Statistically, eight and 10 adults in the US will experience back pain.
(16:54):
Very hard for that not to impact breathing. So we have all these kind
of like perfect storm. that will impact breathing,
the tricky part is it often doesn't show up as breathing for people. Most
people don't come to me being like, hey, I've got poor breathing and I need your help.
It's like anxiety, you know, my reactivity, my
fatigue, I can't sleep, I can't let go of my stress. And
(17:17):
so my job is then to kind of help connect these dots and
draw it back to, well, what can we do about that? we can start to
change the channel, you know, on the system and on your function and
your physiology, that maybe increases your capacity to
tolerate stress or increases your capacity to generate energy. So
much more kind of working under that paradigm that
21st century environment isn't great for us. You know,
(17:40):
we've kind of engineered our own demise in
a way there. So what can we do to mitigate that, right? Because
it's hard to not be affected by
your environment. In fact, it's impossible not. So we have to consider what
does that do to breathing? And then how can we work against that
(18:01):
Absolutely. And as we've been speaking, we've
been kind of throwing around the term dysfunctional. So could
you talk a little bit more about what
dysfunctional breathing is and how it shows
Yes. I would argue the, well, let's
(18:22):
put it this way. So if we just take the kind of like the clinical diagnosis side
of things, right? Respiratory rate is a really easy thing for any
clinician to measure. I'm not sure
when you went through medical textbooks, but currently respiratory rate, normal
respiratory rate is 12 to 20 breaths a minute. But you go back
100 years, and it was more like 8 to 12. And
(18:43):
you go back 200 years, and it was more like 6 to 10. You
know, you go back to traditional Chinese medicine, they all talk about six breaths
a minute. So respiratory rate is kind of a direct reflection of
the state of our nervous system. we keep moving the goalposts, right?
If a patient comes in and they're breathing 18 times a minute, that's far from
normal in my experience, but it is not flagged because
(19:05):
it's within a normal range. But normal is everyone is
overly stressed and highly sympathetic. And it's like, even
that kind of terminology I struggle with, because I would
argue that breathing more than 15 times a minute is erring
on the dysfunctional side, right? Like that's changing physiology.
It's changing how well I can get oxygen to my cells. It's changing my heart rate,
(19:27):
my blood pressure, my brain waves. And so it's really direct impact,
but we fail to recognize it as an issue because we just keep
making these goalposts further away. So in my mind,
when I look at dysfunctional breathing, number one is kind of like, what
is breathing telling me about someone's state? And the higher
that respiratory rate, right? The lower their heart rate variability, the
(19:48):
higher their stress, the less of their recovery. We
know that that is going to be a big deterrent to progress if
we can't get them out of that nervous system state. The
second is I would kind of talk about like these more unconscious
but opportunistic forms of breath, right? I hold my
breath when I'm having a difficult conversation. I hold my
(20:10):
breath when I'm trying to get the key in the door. I hold my breath when I'm reading my
emails. That is disrupting my physiology and
it's changing the state of my nervous system. And a lot of the more recent research is
showing that is completely unconscious. People aren't like, oh, let
me hold my breath. It happens, which
changes oxygen, carbon dioxide levels, and it creates its
(20:31):
own version of stress in our body. But if I'm not aware that
it's doing that, I might be like, oh, my job is stressing me out. Is
it? Or do you unconsciously hold your breath every time you take a breath? And
so kind of looking to someone's breath is like, what story is it
telling, right? So we've got kind of the picture of the nervous system. We've
got a little bit more of a picture about how they're perhaps navigating the
(20:52):
world, like how do they deal with stress? And then the final piece
I would look at, right, is really
kind of coming back to posture. Most people, you know, a
healthy diaphragm range of motion, it's like eight to 10 centimeters. I
have assessed thousands of diaphragms and most people's moving like three to four
centimeters, you know, why? Well, I sit at a death gate
(21:13):
hours and I've hurt my back five times and I've had three kids, you
know, it's like, so looking more at the biomechanical postural side
of things, because we can't really separate breathing and posture
right now. I asked you to get a little bit taller
and open your chest. You don't need to do anything to your breathing, but it
will change, right? It's going to the shape of your body. And
(21:33):
so it gives us this big kind of leverage point as well as to look at
someone's posture and the way they hold their body and move through space. as
to like, what is their breathing having to do to kind of fit that posture? And
so I kind of look at dysfunctional breathing, I'm kind
of zooming out and being like, is it preventing progress? You
know, at the level of the nervous system? Is it holding you in a certain state?
(21:55):
Is it reducing your capacity to generate energy because you breathe really
shallow and you can't tolerate enough carbon dioxide? You know,
is it part of this emotional breath loop, right?
Like the breath holding pattern, the trauma, the compensatory strategies
that people develop as a result of pain. As a physical therapist,
this will resonate so much. You watch your patients with back
(22:17):
pain. What do they do when they roll over on the plinth or
get out of the car? They hold their breath. When they pick up groceries, hold
their breath. When they roll over in bed, hold their breath. So often
that is just a learned strategy, right? Like whilst my
back hurts, I learn to hold my breath when I pick up heavy stuff. But
my back pain might get better, but I don't undo that
(22:38):
compensatory pattern. I think it's a lot where it's like, yeah, I
hurt my back five years ago and it was six months of hell, but
now I'm all better. But that person still holds their breath every time they stand up
from a chair and get out of the car, but they don't know they're
doing it. And so that idea of dysfunctional breathing, we
have to, I guess, have a little bit more nuance as to where the dysfunction is
showing up. But it can be so prevalent just because of those kind of
(23:03):
And from what I'm gathering, when
you're working with people as
a physiotherapist or as a breathwork therapist, you're
not just having them lie on the ground and breathe, right?
So it sounds to me like you're incorporating some
(23:24):
functional movements, whether it's exercise movements, et cetera. So can
Yeah. That's such a good point because I think you like probably most it's like breathwork. All
Yeah. Like I think you're laying on the ground and you're, you
know, like doing like all these different kinds of breathing, you
So I, I usually have to disappoint a lot of my clients where they're, they're
(23:47):
expecting, like, we're going to do breathwork, you know? And that to me is
kind of like, once we have developed the capacity, for
breathwork to be effective, sure, we might do some breathwork. But
until then, it's much more the same kind of assessment treatment
model, right? Let's say we've found out
that you have a really shallow upper chest breathing pattern. Well,
(24:08):
is that because your diaphragm is tight or weak? Your ribcage
is stiff and immobile, right? So do
we need to then go and prescribe you some thoracic rotation and some
extensions to give you a little bit more mobility so your breath can
actually increase its volume and your breathing rate
can come down, right? Maybe we get in and your diaphragm is
(24:29):
just like so locked up and tight. And you tell me, well, I've had three C-sections
and I had back pain before that. And I work at a desk job. It's like no
amount of giving you breathing exercises is going to override the
fact that your diaphragm probably hasn't been moving through its full
range of motion for a decade. So breathwork in that sense might
be giving you a self diaphragm mobilization, giving
(24:49):
you some stretches to do for your diaphragm, and then perhaps some
targeted kind of like positional breathing, right?
Let's lay you down on prone and see if we can get you to breathe into your belly and your back
and start to turn back on the function of your diaphragm. All
of those things being breathwork in my mind, but It
highlights the need for assessment, right? Like there's no point
(25:11):
that you and I do in a session, I go, go and do these breathing exercises. if
I haven't assessed where your dysfunction might lie, that's kind of
just like throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks, right? Like, sure,
you'll probably feel a bit better if you breathe slowly for five minutes every day, you know, like,
that's where there's a little bit of like, it's forgiving,
you know, but if we actually spend a bit of time and assess what
(25:33):
you actually need, then we can provide you with a far more kind
of targeted approach that's going to like bring your breathing back
to a functional optimal state. And then we could
do breath work, right? Like now we can do
this, the really cool kind of like expand
your capacity and use breath to get into an altered state
(25:54):
of consciousness. And like there's all this wonderful stuff around identity and
belief and emotion and energy. But I find a lot of people jumping to
that, doing it on top of dysfunctional reading. You
know, I'm already hyperventilating all day, and then I'm going and
doing 30 minutes of hyperventilation because someone's going to help. It's
Right, right. No, I mean, you're so right. The
(26:17):
assessment, the evaluation is everything. And
so I think it's important for people listening as we're talking about breath
work, maybe you don't have to like jump into
a breath class at the gym, but instead maybe
go to someone and have them evaluate you
so that to your point, you're not adding hyperventilation
(26:40):
on top of hyperventilation or stress on top of stress. Um,
and where does meditation fall in all of
this? Cause I'm sure that's a question that you get a lot. Like, can't I just go to
Yeah. Great question. And just like, because we've had this conversation, right.
If we kind of backstep a little bit, just sitting and breathing, isn't
(27:01):
going to change the length of your diaphragm. Isn't going to change your habitual patterns. It's
not going to change the length tension relationship with your muscles. Like Yeah,
you'll get benefits from meditation. But if you're continuing to breathe 23,000 times
a day, in a way that signals stress to your nervous system,
how effective is the meditation going to be? So a
huge element of breathwork is this kind of meditative piece
(27:24):
where it's like directed focus. It's very hard to
self assess your breathing if you can't pay attention. You know, so like,
I find that the act of breath awareness becomes
meditation, at least for me personally, but I find a lot of my
clients and students feel the same way that instead of just like clearing
my mind and doing nothing, it's like, can you witness the entry and
(27:45):
the exit of the air, right? Without trying to change it, without trying
to fix it, right? Start to learn about your own breath,
right? Like start to engage in that conversation. that becomes very
meditative, because we are excluding the
other stuff. I'm less thinking, more feeling. I'm noticing certain
sensory elements. And so people will often come out of
(28:06):
doing something like breath awareness, feeling like, oh, I got to this kind of
Yeah. I remember being at like a meditation, like
a one day retreat here in the city with Sharon Salzberg, who
is a big, I'm sure you've heard of her. She's a big, you
know, kind of meditation guru. She's here in New York City and
(28:28):
she was taking everyone through and she's like, She said kind
of exactly what you just said. And she was
like, so I'm gonna give you all a little
hint, a little takeaway. She's like, you can use it.
You can tell other people about it. I don't need, you know, attribution.
She's like, when you breathe in, just say
(28:49):
to yourself, breath. And when you breathe out,
say breath. It
doesn't have to get any more complicated than that. You know, just
notice when you're breathing in and notice when you breathe out and
just say breath and breath versus a mantra or,
you know, a million other things, or to your point, clearing your
(29:10):
mind. She's like, just say breath. And
I do that like when I fly, cause
I'm a bit of an anxious flyer. So when I'm sitting on the plane, I
breathe in and I say breath and I breathe in, I just notice my breath.
you know, and notice how things are moving. Now, obviously I have the
(29:30):
added advantage of being a physical therapist and kind of understanding the
biomechanical side of it, but I always
remembered that. And for me, that's been the most helpful thing when
it comes to breathing is just say breath and notice when
And to me, it's so fascinating. I always like introduce this
idea, right? Like breathing can only ever be done in the present, right?
(29:54):
Like you can't breathe in the future, you can't breathe in the past. It's so
often like, what's giving me anxiety or why am I upset? It's
like thing that happened or thing that might happen. And
so when I then come back to breath and I notice it
coming, it's like, I have to be here, like present. And
it becomes this kind of anchor, right? Like where it draws you back to like
(30:15):
right now, I'm probably safe. I'm
probably okay. I'm worried about this thing that might happen in the future. We
But as soon as we kind of come back to this thing that's only ever happening
in the present moment, it does anchor us there. And so
(30:35):
I found it's such a nice gateway for me
personally. I tried with a lot of different meditation styles, but
just like really being observant of like, oh, here comes
an inhale and like, as far as it wants. Oh, it ended. Oh, there
goes the exhale. It's like that's only ever happening right now.
And so if I can be observant of it, if I can be aware of it, I
(30:56):
am present, like by nature of the fact that I'm aware of the thing that's happening in
the present. And so, like, if not, you know,
like meditation is many things, but if not just like being present or mindfulness
is maybe a better term there, then it's a wonderful way to do that,
Right, oh yeah, I love that explanation, that's great. Now,
(31:18):
as we start to kind of wrap things up, is there anything
as we've gone through and had this great conversation that's gotten me
more curious now about learning more
about this so I can help my own patients, is
there anything that we didn't cover that
(31:41):
I would have to say the nervous system, you know, we talked a lot about breath and I'm
more kind of, you know, I've been immersed in this world of breathwork now
for kind of six or seven years. And the more I'm more
coming to the conclusion that like breath is simply an entry point to
the nervous system. It's. maybe the lowest hanging fruit
in terms of like requires no equipment. We're all doing it low
(32:02):
value. It's cheap. It's like, it's almost immediate
in its impact. And so with that, but like, what
is the outcome is it's all working at the level of the
autonomic nervous system. But that seems to be the
driver of a lot of my stress, my
thoughts, my feelings, my story, my emotions, right. Are all
kind of stemming from like, what state am I in? You know, when we're feeling
(32:25):
super anxious, we're usually not at the same time feeling incredibly grateful,
right? Like the state of my nervous system is giving me access to
a certain bandwidth of emotion and story and narrative. And
so my ability to kind of change that hinges on the impact that I
can have on the nervous system. And this more like
systems level or systems thinking approach was
(32:46):
really like the biggest catalyst for me in the last kind of five years,
which I've shifted is away from, you know, someone presents with these
symptoms and we take those symptoms to classify it
as a diagnosis. And then that diagnosis informs a treatment plan. How
most of us, you know, particularly physios are taught, right? Like pain here
or this pattern, right? We call it that. And then we treat it this way. But
(33:08):
this idea of shifting away from kind of symptom oriented treatment more
towards this kind of model of like health creation or supporting the
system to do what it's innately able to do so much
of that has kind of been unlocked with my client work by addressing
the nervous system, you know. And whether that's through
breath or other strategies, that could be a technological detox.
(33:29):
I could be getting off my phone an hour before I go to bed. It could be getting sunlight. It
could be moving through nature. It's not just breathing, but I
find these are these inputs that are impacting the nervous system. And
that seems to be this undercurrent of a lot
of the stress-based dysfunction we see today. And I categorize that
as false stress, anxiety, chronic pain, chronic
(33:50):
fatigue. a lot of kind of like autoimmune conditions
have this huge stress component. But most of
what people are taught in terms of stress is stress avoidance or stress management
kind of reinforces the idea that stress is bad. And so like,
is there a different way we can start to kind of increase the capacity of
the nervous system rather than avoid the stressor? And
(34:13):
that's been a big game changer. So like when I'm talking about breath, I'm
kind of talking about this entry point to get at the nervous system. And
so, you know, for clinicians, practitioners is really considering like
the nervous system, whether someone's coming in with, you know, back pain or
knee pain or a specific injury, like what role is
their nervous system playing here? because it kind
(34:36):
of informs everything else. And if we can't change the level of the
nervous system, we're kind of walking up the down escalator is
the analogy that we might get there, but it's going to be a hard slog. Whereas
if we shift at the level of the nervous system, it
often kind of sets in motion a cascade, right? It's like domino effect
where things get a little bit easier because it's just this kind
(35:02):
Regardless of whether they're coming in for a knee injury or an ankle injury
or back or neck, et cetera, et cetera. Um, they don't have to
Yeah. And I think that's important to remember as well. And
Right now it's, it's such a, a
(35:25):
simple filter, right? Like, and again, I don't need to, now
like, oh, I need to become like a nervous system practitioner. But
it's just that consideration, you know, from the language that someone's
using to their posture, to how they're talking, to are
they jumpy and reactive and they tell you that they're really wide and they can't switch
off at night. You know, it's like I think physios have such a wonderful
(35:46):
opportunity to have a bit more of a broad kind
of holistic, integrative approach. Totally. Yeah.
We mentioned at the start that they kind of like stay in your lane idea that
Well, you know, I'm not allowed to talk about those things, but I think that broader
perspective of like the inputs to this person's nervous system, are
there some things we can tweak there that are really
(36:09):
high leverage, right? Like it's not hard to get someone
to maybe spend half an hour when they wake up in the morning before they
turn their phone on and get stuck in to maybe do some slow breaths
and move their body and get some sunlight, you know, to not
lay in bed at night, doom scrolling Instagram as they fall
asleep, you know, like, low, really simple chain.
(36:29):
You're not saying it's easy, but could be really high leverage into that
person's pain presentation, right? Like our pain sensitivity changes
dramatically based on the state we're in, right? Like everyone's pain gets worse
A hundred percent. Yeah. That's just, that's physiology for you.
Right. Um, and, and I also think especially
physical therapists is we're in such a unique position because
(36:52):
we actually spend time with our patients. Because
oftentimes when people go to the doctor, I don't know what it's like in Australia, you're
in the US now, so you can relate, but you're
lucky if you get 15 minutes. Whereas a physical
therapist, you may see them once a week, twice a week, maybe
(37:16):
Right. So imagine how much of an influence you can have
on that patient. First
of all, on your patient's nervous system, just from your
interaction, right? And then to add
some of the wonderful breathwork ideas
that you're sharing today could be, it's
(37:39):
Yeah. And it's, I can't stress how much of like
a high leverage thing it is because like those small changes, you know, like
I've seen, you know, just breath awareness is a great example. You
encourage all your patients just to, Hey, when your pain is bad,
notice how you're breathing versus when your pain is not bad. Notice how you're breathing. There'll
be like, Oh, it feels different. Right. And if whilst
(38:00):
you're in pain, you breathe like you weren't, you
know, simple example, but that it puts
them into a state of curiosity. I wonder how my breath does change
based on my pain, or my stress levels, or my experience of
anxiety, or how I've slept the night before. makes
us a little bit more of like the detective, you know, and it's
(38:22):
putting people to a state of curiosity and self-observation that
isn't focused necessarily on their symptoms, as much as
just this thing that's happening all the time. Right. Breath's quite
neutral for a lot of people. Like, we don't really have a
belief around it, right? There's not a lot of dogma. It's just like, well, just
notice how it's different when you're feeling super overwhelmed versus when
you're present. Because what's happening there
(38:45):
is you're observing the kind of signal, right? Like, oh, well, My
breathing feels slow and I can feel the movement of my diaphragm and
there's a gentle pause at the end. Like what would happen if I practiced that
intentionally? Magical things tend to happen because
it's a nervous system input, right? Like we're, we're both reflecting
the state that we're in and we're affecting it. And that's really
(39:06):
simple to invite people just to notice how their breathing changes based on
how they feel. There are symptoms that are experiencing and
just collecting a little bit more data, which then informs, OK,
I notice I hold my breath a lot when I'm stressed. Cool.
The next time you're in a stressful environment, what if we paid a little bit more attention? Don't
let yourself go offline. Count in your head. Breathe in for four. Breathe out for four. Breathe in.
(39:27):
Don't hold my breath. what happened to my experience of stress? It
probably changed. And so it really becomes a tool
of self-empowerment because we're getting the information from ourselves
about ourselves to use for ourselves. But
so often people need a bit of a prompt of like, hey, have you considered breathing? because
most people are like breathing, doing that all the time. Do it
(39:49):
every day. And so that little invitation to
the clinicians and practitioners listening is just inviting awareness of
your own breath, but perhaps just inviting your patients or clients to
take note of what's happening with their breath. It often opens up
this door that unfolds quite organically. You
might not need to be a breath expert to just say to someone, hey, I've
(40:10):
noticed you hold your breath when you do this. Did you know you're doing
that? what would happen if we didn't hold our breath when we did that, right?
The pacing pattern, the tension patterns, all these things start to change from that really
Yeah, and that's a really powerful takeaway for everyone
listening. And I love that. And now I'm going
to start asking my patients that question. So
(40:32):
it's great. So again, the powerful takeaway
that I'm speaking about is, how
do you notice your breath when you're relaxed? And can
you notice your breath when you're stressed, when you're having that pain? And
then again, bring the patient in and exploring that
with them using some, I mean, I can tell you're using some motivational
(40:56):
interviewing techniques there as well to
really get the patient to take ownership of it and
to be able to provide
And so often it becomes such a, you know, like particularly our
(41:19):
There's so much that's like feels out of our control. Yeah. You know, what
we're doing here is like, Hey, there's one thing that you can always control. You
know, it doesn't matter what's going out on out there. Right. But
if you don't have the awareness of like, Hey, I'm, I'm breathing really rapidly
or it's up in my chest or the interoception, it's
(41:40):
Kind of teach this model in the practitioner program of awareness, control,
optimization. Awareness being this kind of like foundational piece
that we cannot skip over. Once we have the awareness, we
can start to make those little tweaks and I can start to use my breath and
then we can kind of talk about optimization. Yeah. First I
have to understand like where I'm veering off course or what
(42:00):
might be holding me, you know, stuck in this position. then I can do
Right, right. And it's not taking away our
prescription exercise or maybe our manual techniques,
right? It's not replacing, it's just another
entity to look at to help your patients in
(42:22):
a wide variety of situations and
I love that you said that, you know, I say to people like it's, it's not another tool
as much as it's a new lens. What I'm
looking at changes when the way I look at things changes, you
know, so like I, I've, I for so long
kind of positioned Breathwork as this add on, right, as the next tool. but
(42:45):
I found that that's not really how I was working with it and how I was using it.
And this idea of like a lens that I'm looking through, you know,
then just informs, like, I might still use manual therapy or
exercise prescription, but like, even then, you know, it's like, I'm mobilizing
a joint and someone starts holding their breath. That's telling me a lot. Right.
Person's guarding and protecting. Why? You know, it might not even
(43:05):
be the point that they've come in to talk to you about, but if we get
that bracing or that breath holding, it's like, oh, maybe there's an opportunity for
exploration here. So it can become an assessment tool,
Perfect. Perfect. And on that note, I'm
going to ask you, where can people find you if they
(43:26):
want to learn more about you, they want to work with you, or whether
they may, maybe they're a patient or they're a therapist who
wants to learn more about what you do and how they
Yeah, the pace I spend most time is definitely Instagram.
So I'm at BreathBodyTherapy. And if there are practitioners that
are kind of interested in this lens, just pop me a message and
(43:48):
be like, hey, I listened to the podcast with Dr. Karen and we can
kind of talk through what that model looks like. But yeah, we run a practitioner program
three, four times a year. And then I do also work with a handful of
individuals as well. For the practitioners looking for
a new lens, feel free to reach out and we kind of explore options.
Perfect. And for the listeners, Campbell also
(44:09):
has a little, I'm just going to say that little kind of free, a
little gift, let's say for the listeners. So
fundamentals of breath, the self paced breath correction program.
If you use the coupon code breath 20, you'll get 20% off. I'll
have all of the links for that and for all of
the ways for people to get in touch with you in the show notes. So whatever you
(44:32):
are listening to on right now, just scroll on
down into the show notes and one click will
take you to all of that and you'll get all of that information. So,
Campbell, thank you so much. I have one last question. It's
one I ask everyone. Knowing where you are now in your life and career, what
(44:54):
It's such a good question. I would, can I
I would honestly unlearn a lot, a lot of what was taught in
terms of, you know, like physiotherapy, right? Like in
terms of the structure and the way that I
was taught to deliver information and, and kind of create almost
(45:16):
a separation or a gap between myself as the practitioner and the client
that I'm teaching. And I would share more of what I'm
using as a human rather than what I'm telling you to do as a professional.
I found this idea of you make your mess your message, you know, like I've
struggled with back pain and every time I kind of invite
my patients in instead of like, oh, I'm telling you what to do. I'm
(45:38):
telling you what I'm doing and maybe it'll help you because it sounds like we're in
a similar situation. the uptake of that information, it
just is very different. And so for so long, I kind of put on
the front of like, I'm a physiotherapist, I shouldn't have back pain. So
I'm going to pretend I don't, you know, because I'm putting on this front of
like, I should put it all together, you know, it's like, who am I to tell you
to treat your back pain if I got back pain? Turns out I'm human, you
(46:01):
know, and that bringing the humanness into my work as a
clinician, just it made everything so much more relatable and
we're on the same page and so I wish I spent less time trying to
you know pretend. To be perfect. Yeah like how good
I know things and how you know like and just more authentic more vulnerable of
like here's what I'm doing you know and here's how it's working for me
(46:23):
Oh, that's great advice. Thank you so much, Campbell, for
coming on the podcast, sharing all of this great information. Again,
if you want to learn more about Campbell and his work, go to breathbodytherapy.com. Uh,
Loved it. And everyone thanks so much for tuning in. Have a great couple
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