#67 Breath Work For BJJ: How to improve your sleep and recovery after hard rolling

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Do you get tired and wired after rolling? You want to go to sleep but the adrenaline has you awake when you need to chill. The only real way to regulate your nervous system is through the breath. If you have a lot going on in your life: kids, bills, your partner, a business and BJJ then you need a practice to calm your body and down regulate the nervous system. Today’s discussion goes deep on exactly how you can improve your health and tolerance for stress by having an easy to follow Breath work routine that you can follow.

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, it’s JT and I’m excited because I’ve just booked my flights and I’m coming to a city near you . I will be in Poland and Germany in July. Then I’ll be in the UK and Scotland in August. Then I’ll be making the trip over to United States and Canada for September. If you would like a Bulletproof of BJ J seminar, contact us, email JT, Bulletproof for bjj.com and book your seminar today

Speaker 2: 0:30

Better listen. Very careful.

Speaker 3: 0:34

A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready,

Speaker 4: 0:39

Essentially at this point, the fight is over .

Speaker 5: 0:44

So you pretty much flow with the goal

Speaker 6: 0:48

Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limit this power.

Speaker 7: 0:54

I’m ready,

Speaker 1: 0:55

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Bulletproof for BJ J podcast. Hi guys. I’m JT. Hey guys. I’m Joey. And we are talking about breath, work for BJJ. How you can improve your recovery by focusing on your breath and performance performance, too, depending on how you’re trying to perform where you’re trying to perform. Mm . Especially post BJJ. The thing is, it happens all the time. Guys, you do a night session. You go really? And then you just, you’re tired and wire, you get exhausted. Joe get exhausted, but you can’t sleep. That’s it. That’s the , the up thing. That’s the problem. And also all you wanna do is go to bed, but you can’t. Yeah. And you just, yeah , God , Joe keeps, he just keeps cross facing me. I’ve gotta stop that. Mm . Yeah, it’s tormenting. But then also you need to get that sleep. You need it. And so the only real way we know how to regulate the nervous system is through breath . And Joe has some pretty solid and strong views on this. There’s there’s other ways

Speaker 7: 1:54

<laugh> of course there is . Yeah, you can . <laugh>

Speaker 1: 2:01

I just sucked a big cone. <laugh>

Speaker 7: 2:03

Just ,

Speaker 1: 2:04

Just Billies . I don’t smoke cones by the way they me up. I don’t mind talking a joint every now and again, but, or a vape, but cans , man know don’t do that back in high school. I mean , I know when , try to go super deep, but I think we, we gotta give a basic rundown of how this works. Have you nervous system, you have two primary different that the nervous system can be in sympathetic parasympathetic. That’s right. And to put that in layman’s tur or simple terms, we have our fight or flight response, and then we have our rest and digest. Yes. Correct. And the real simple way, obviously the fight or flight is designed for action. It’s when you are under like extreme physical stress, potentially you’re about to be attacked by something or you are attacking something or you need to flee. So it’s like, there’s a certain set of physiological things that happen when you’re in that state. Yep . Versus rest and digest, which is, you’ve just had an enormous meal. You’re chilling out on the couch. I have a nap , like after having sex. Yep . That’s when you really feel that rest and digest piece. Right. Unless you’re like in a broom closet or something <laugh> but if it’s it’s like, if it’s like, you’re at home, if you’re climbing out of a window, it’s not your apartment. That’s right. Um , but so you can, if you kind of look at those as two models, you’re like, all right , what’s happening. Physiologically is gonna be very different in both of those places, correct. Or scenarios. And so the vast majority of us, and particularly in the west, but you could say that this is kind of, yeah. You could say this is really a Western thing is that we spend way too much time in the fight or flight place we do. So that’s our sympathetic nervous response. And to simplify it for conversation that is being upregulated. Yeah . And then the rest and digest is down regulated . And I think that’s a nice way to talk about it. It’s just easy. Like one is up and stimulated. One is down and chilled. Yep . The problem is that most of us already spend too much time being upregulated, work stress , not sleeping enough, staying up too late at night, processed foods, over caffeinated, financial stress, all that. And then we play a sport like jujitsu so much adrenaline. That is extremely upregulating. Yeah. And here’s the thing, like it’s not bad to be upregulated. You need to be for jujitsu don’t you do . Definitely. But the problem is you go home and for the quality of your life, you need to down regulate so that you can actually get to sleep and, or your food and digest it and whatever, and wake up feeling good and recovered and healthy the next day. But because you’re upregulated, you can’t. And so that starts this cycle. You wake up tired, pump another coffee. Let’s get on with it back into up regulation , busy day at work, back on the mats, the next night, upregulated again , mad session. Like you feel great afterwards, but that’s the stress hormones. Right? It’s all in there. It’s like keeping you going. Had another. Sleeve coffee kid woke up compounds. Yeah . Yeah. Like this compounds over weeks, months, years to the point where, you know, and if, particularly for people who are chasing that high productivity lifestyle, getting up early, trying to hustle, do all that. Sure . Man, it’s pretty up. You start to rely on a lot of stimulants. Definitely. And, and speaking to that, like I’m, I’m that kind of guy, but the , the big change I made was not training at night. I still go really hard for everything. But I know in myself, even though I do like to go to night sessions, cuz typically that’s when Joe is there and I can attack him, you’ll be tired. I know that his young one kept him up last night. Excellent. I’ll text him and be like, Hey Joe , how you going? Oh man. Terrible night. Last night. Didn’t sleep. You trained tonight . Oh yeah. I see you that bro . <laugh> I’ll have a double espresso just before I get in. And I’ve observed this in people who are not jujitsu people. We are really good at getting up like humans, we, and as adults, how do you get right? Like what’s your best breakfast? What’s your coffee? What is your perfect kind of warm up sequence for your day? Nearly everyone can tell you that, but almost no one, you go, what’s your warm down sequence for your brain. Like how’s your sleep hygiene. How do you unwind before bed? For the best part, most people are like on their phone. You know, they’re staring at tell , look , don’t get me wrong. There is value in doing things that help you zone out. But it doesn’t mean that’s helping you get to sleep per se. You can’t just throw the hand break on when your brain is going a million miles an hour. You know, the , the classic meme girls in bed looking across at the man, like, is he thinking about another woman? And he’s like, how do I pass the guard ? Yeah . You know, like it’s like that, you’re there. You , you know, there’s so much stuff going on. It’s not just the hormones. It’s the thinking. You may not be thinking about work, but you’re thinking about JSU or how many times you got armbar and all this stuff and it’s , it’s just nonstop. You need a process for bringing that back down and breathwork is absolutely essential to making that happen. Speak on it, Joey. All right . So yeah, like JT said, it is one of the most sure fires we know that we can take control of our nervous system. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and so I’ll make a counterpoint to this discussion. People who have mastery of the breath and I’ve trained with a couple of people over the years who do Stanley Tam was one he’s a chigong practitioner. Okay . Chinese guy. I think he was the first black belt in China. Oh wow. He’s under Steve Maxwell. Oh right. And uh , he taught a chigong workshop at our , at our last right . I rolled with him and he just never let himself, you know, he was quite a bit older than me and I was just bringing all the athleticism. He just stayed relaxed and I could hear him just focusing on his breathing and he just played really defensive. And at the end of the training session, I was super gassed and he was just normal. And I was like, there’s something there that I need to, to learn about. Yeah . So if you have really good control of your breath, you can train jujitsu and not actually get into this upregulated state. So what I remember after that, we went to get something to, we hang on, this guy is a breathing master <laugh> well that’s right, right . So my he’s also a black belt . Yeah, yeah, of course . So of course, like this is not gonna be the reality for most. It’s pretty hard if you’re a white belt and , but the point is you can get there with work. Right? Sure. Sure. So let’s assume that for the majority of people listening to this, it’s like, yeah, that’s not me. Like I’m feeling training and I’m gased and I’m sucking in big ones through my mouth and what , yeah . So there’s a couple of main things. When we are looking to use our breath to down regulate the first and main thing is, is that we want to breathe through our nose. There’s different ways to go about it. If we look at the work of Patrick McCune who wrote a book, which I’m reading at the moment , the oxygen advantage, which is a fantastic book, highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about mastering the breath. Very cool. He says the well it’s, he’s, it’s a quote from someone else who says the , uh , the mouth is for eating. The nose is for breathing. Oh , he’s like, you should never breathe through your mouth. Wow. That’s just it. And he’s like, okay, if you are competing in a high intensity sport, yes, you, there is a place for that. But even still, your goal should be to only ever need to breathe through your nose. Wow. And he’s to the point where you should be scaling back the intensity of your training so that you can keep it through the nose. Interesting. Does he advocate for yeah . Your mouth? Yeah. So his basic protocol is, and, and I’m doing this at the moment. Okay. Uh , you tape your mouth at night, your mouth closed. Wow. You sleep on your front or on your side. Okay. I love sleeping on my back, but at , for when you’re sleeping on your back, generally your jaw drops wide open. Okay. So sleep on your side or on your front. Here’s the really interesting thing. The , the whole issue as he puts it is that we are chronically over oxygenated. We breathe too much. Really? Yeah. How interesting, when we suck in air through the mouth, we can actually bring in a lot more volume of air. So like say over a minute, I’m like, I’m sucking in like liters and liters of air versus where , what he’s talking about, which is like the , the ideal breath. It should be barely , barely noticeable and it should be in my nose. So it would be, And he’s like, what’s happening. There is one person is breathing way more than they need to. The other person is breathing in a, in a restricted way. Okay. When you breathe in a restricted way, you actually build up tolerance to carbon dioxide, right? Yeah . Because the carbon dioxide is the gas that’s released when the oxygen crossroad . Yeah. And , and it comes out. Yeah . So he is like, so what happens is, and this is, and I same for me, people who breathe a lot through their mouth will have a low tolerance to carbon dioxide, mouth breathers , mouth back <laugh> . But man , that’s , it’s absolutely me . Um , you will have a low tolerance to carbon dioxide, which essentially means that you will run out of breath very quickly. Right. Whereas people who have a high tolerance for carbon dioxide are people that can hold their breath for a long period of time. Like free divers . Exactly. Yeah. They train that, right? Yep . Not getting stressed out. Cause you get a lot of alarm bells going off. So example under the freak occurrence that Joe does pass my guard and gets your thought and start smothering me. I’m underneath it going , maybe looking for a head arm choke or some don’t freak out. Cause in my head I’m like, there’s there is the alarm bells going off going. I can’t , I can’t breathe. Like I, I know I’ve only got a couple seconds of oxygen under here. I’m not being choked by I’m being smothered. I’ve gotta stay calm if I freak out and like spas and Chuck my arm out, I’m gonna get armbar for sure. So in my head, I can feel those alarm bells going off, but not saying I have great tolerance for CO2, but in my head, I know as a jujitsu person, I’ve gotta stay calm here. Otherwise I’m dead. Yeah. But those alarm bells are going off. Right. Like if you, soon as you feel that panicky feeling like you’re stuck under Mount, maybe you’ve got a large human on top of you. Ah yeah. Stomach’s pressing into your face. You’re like, oh , I can’t get out. I’m that panicky feeling? Yep . It’s hard to overcome. Right. And if you’re doing those big ones where you are like, man, if they apply the pressure on your exhale, oh then you , you are not expanding your, your diaphragm again . Like it’s very hard to get air back into the lungs. So there’s , they’re just, you’re increasing the suffocation. Oh right . You know, so there , yeah . There’s multiple things going on there. But, but I found that a very interesting concept was like, okay, the more tolerance you have for carbon dioxide, the more in control of your breath you can be. And so a lot of his program is about building up this tolerance. Okay . So they have a simple test you use and you use this test and you measure your score. I’m. Like if I take a regular breath and exhale, I can maybe hold my breath for like 16 to 20 seconds. Okay . Before I feel a moderate desire to breathe again. But that’s actually man, that’s that’s okay. Compared to regular people, cuz I’ve played with a little bit it’s that’s yeah . Where you, listen, you look at his kind of stats on it and he’s like anything below 30 seconds there’s problems. Oh wow . He’s like, you want to be building up to like 40 to 60 seconds. Right. And he’s like, we’re not talking about maximum breath holds. We’re talking about when you feel the first signs of air hunger. Wow . Where you’re like, okay, I need to breathe again . Oh . And he’s like, and so that’s, that’s what we’re moving towards in short, the over oxygenation ages, us faster. Ah right. Free radicals breakdown of cells. It basically just adds extra stress to your organism because every time you’re processing oxygen, you’re like running the system. How interesting. That is incredibly interesting. I had never heard anyone related that information in that way. Yeah. But if we are talking about our jujitsu fam out there, they’ve done, they’ve fought to the death. They’ve had a really hard class. It’s now like eight 30, you know, you just get home , you just gotta get home, get a shower. You just gotta get outta there. Right. But then someone starts talk about the USC and you’re like, ah , you kind of wanna hang, but you’re exhausted. And you’re still you can’t cool down. You had that sensation. Like I , I mean, I’m, I’m a kind , I’m a sweaty guy. I can have like a , a cold shower get out and start sweating again. <laugh> right . Like I need half an hour to just stop sweating. What do we do? Like what happens then with post class ? What , what do you advise? So the most practical thing in my opinion is to take five minutes. Yep . We love to couple this with stretching. Of course. But let’s say that’s not even a thing. Let’s just say you want to just try to calm the nervous system down, lie on your back. Yep . Put your feet up on the wall. So like your , your knees. Yep . You know, your hips are, hips are at 90 degrees and your knees are bent. Yep . Get your feet onto a comfortable position on the wall. Line , your back, close your eyes on like closing your eyes is really nice. But if you , if you can’t cuz whatever doesn’t feel right. The gym, you don’t have to one hand on your belly, one hand on your chest. And if you are still really sucking in big ones, that’s okay. Like keep drawing in through your mouth, whatever have you gotta do. But the idea is we wanna start to breathe with the diaphragm and not with the chest. Yes. So the hand on your chest and the hand on your belly are giving you feedback on, am I breathing in my chest? If , in which case, if your hand in the chest is lifting, okay, let’s try and get it into the belly. And as soon as you can take your breath all in and out through the nose. So as soon as you feel comfortable to the main thing here is that we’re not trying to stress ourselves out further. So if I said like, you got a nasal breathe only, and you are like super gassed after roll and you’re trying to, you’re just, upregulating more. Yeah . You’re just so have to , yeah. You have to respect that. You’re you’re at where you’re at. And the whole goal of this is to relax. So once you feel okay with it, try to breathe only through your nose. And only with the hand that’s on your belly lifting up and down gently I’m across di formatic breathing. Can you just make that a little bit clearer in terms of laymen? So like what should someone F feel if they’re trying to understand how to like breathe into their belly ? If that makes sense. Yeah. So when we breathe, we’re using our lungs, right? But we have this upper portion of the lungs that’s really quite attached to the thorax, which is our chest cavity. And what happens is when we do this, this shallow breathing, we get this expansion of the chest where we really wanna be breathing from is the diaphragm. And the diaphragm is a muscle that sits more or less horizontally across your torso from the bottom of the ribcage, through to the back and above. That is your heart and lungs and. And then below it is your stomach and a whole bunch of other stuff. The diaphragm sits kind of upwards concave. And when you contract it, it pushes down. Yep . When pushes down kind of interesting sheet of muscle, when it pushes down, it will force your belly to expand a little bit. Yeah . Now the mistake there with diaphragmatic breathing is trying to forcefully expand your belly, right? Because you can just do that using your abs. Yeah . And I , that’s not what we’re trying to do, but it should be relaxed. I suppose. The simple way to think about it is if breathing and your chest is not expanding and you can feel that there’s a gentle expansion and contraction of, of somewhere in the belly. Yep . You’re good. That’s, you’re doing the diaphragm thing. Cool. And the beauty of that is, is that the diaphragm pulls down on the bottom of the lungs and allows us to feel the lower portions of the lungs with air. Nice. That’s where it , so for people who are a bit chronically stressed and chronically poor breathing, they’re not ever really breathing into the lower portion of the lungs. Right . So by doing this, we instantly kind of send a signal, Hey, this is down regulation, I’m in a relaxed state. So you are , your , your nervous system starts to shift. When you approaching this, do you approach it like a kind of sets and reps thing ? Like I’m gonna do X amount of breaths or do you go, oh , I’m just gonna do this for a certain amount of time. I do time. Okay. Yeah. And to be honest, it doesn’t really matter. Yes. And I’ve encountered many different ways of doing it. You know, there’s like box breathing where it’s like three seconds in hold , three seconds out, three , you know, that kind of thing. Reading the , the oxygen advantage, McEwen talks about that. And he like timed holds and that sort of thing. It doesn’t work for a lot of people because it makes you think you have to do that. But if that doesn’t feel comfortable for you at the time, for whatever reason, then it’s not right. Yep . The whole goal is to relax with it. So really it’s just like, if you set a time, you go do this for five minutes and you can have it as an alarm. So you don’t have to look at it. Then you can just focus on like trying to get the most relaxed rhythm with your breathing that you can. Yeah . And I think that that’s really the goal and , and you know, you could do this for two minutes or 90 seconds and you’d be like. I do feel more relaxed after that. Yeah. Five minutes. Let’s say that’s a bit of a luxury, but taking a bit of time to do that at the end of your session, I believe we’ll put you in a completely different place. Once you get home, you wanna relax, you wanna have your shower, eat some dinner, get to bed, whatever, versus not doing that. Being super stressed out feeling really great. But then you get home. You’re like, man, I’m wide . Yeah. We want to get around that tired wide . It seems maybe strange if you’ve just started jujitsu and you have no idea what breathwork is. There are so many people out there who just focus on this. We’re talking outside the realm of BJ. It’s just breathwork is a , it’s a big field. And people focusing on their breathing is huge in terms of enhancing their performance. So just simply guys, if you can take that time at the end of your session and just try and chip away at that, you don’t have to do it every session, ideally you would. And it will have the compounding positive effects, which is what we’re after that at the end of the week, you’re less sore . You’re better arrested . And so cumulatively, you’re having better weeks, week on week, month on month, et cetera , et cetera , as opposed to the other way, which is the, you know, poor sleep , more caffeine, poorer quality training, working yourself towards injury or illness. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, when you look at it and you think about our physiology, you think about, we spend time developing all these things, our strength and our jujitsu technique can, you know, whatever, like your learning ability and all that. And it’s like, most of us don’t even have control of this basic apparatus of our body, which is our respiratory system. It’s very fascinating. And then if you, you know, if you go a bit deep and you do some of these tests and you’re like, wow , I’m actually really at this. <laugh> yeah. I think it highlights to , well, you know, maybe there’s some low hanging fruit there. I know for me, they’re deaf is yes . So I’m enjoying kind of exploring it now. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Joe . Pleasure, bro . Thank you. Thank you guys. Hey, if you want to get@usbulletproofofbjj.com take free trial, the program, strength , mobility, all that good stuff. And you’ll connect with JT and I use the code BJJ podcast and you’ll get 20% off your subscription. We’ll see you guys over there. Thank you.