Oxygen Advantage

“You cannot study this without trying, so you have to get into the water.” On this edition of the Oxygen Advantage® Podcast, Patrick and Daniel are joined by research scientist, cold immersion specialist and author of new book ‘Winter Swimming: The Nordic Way Towards a Healthier and Happier Life’, Dr. Susanna Søberg PhD. A scientific researcher, Susanna’s studies originally focused on metabolism and more specifically, brown fat, the body’s healthy fat that helps regulate temperature. As part of the research she started looking at how the brown fat reacts to various cold situations such as cold air on your skin or entering a cold room. This eventually led her to look at cold water immersion and ice swimming, a well-known pastime pursuit in her own home of Denmark and throughout Scandinavia. After facing her fear and entering the water, Susanna soon learned the importance of breathing when putting the body into such an extreme environment. She says that there are big health advantages to cold water immersion and that everyone taking part could benefit greatly from learning to breathe calmly and lightly during cold water immersion. Susanna takes Patrick and Daniel through how cold temperatures affect people differently, how important controlling your breathing is in dealing with the cold, how commonly cold water immersion is used around the world for health benefits and much more. Winter Swimming: The Nordic Way Towards a Healthier and Happier Life is available from all good book stores.For more information on breathing for health and performance, visit the Oxygen Advantage® website.Check out Spotify or your local podcast provider to listen to more of the OA Podcast. https://open.spotify.com/show/5XTS4B3ODaEfsbNOBmYb6d

“When you understand the principles of what you’re actually doing with your nervous system, it’s just a lot more straightforward.”This week on the OA Podcast, Patrick and Daniel speak with yoga master, TEDx Speaker, podcaster, writer, and entrepreneur extraordinaire Lucas Rockwood.Lucas is the successful founder of YOGABODY and since the earliest days of his love affair with yoga he has made it his goal to find out the relationship between yoga and breathing and he admits, it has not been an easy road to walk.Yoga was the saviour of Lucas who was a very unhealthy twenty something in 2002. He worked a job he hated, was abusing drugs and alcohol and only fuelled himself with quick and easy junk food. Something had to change, and for Lucas that change came after a challenging but rewarding yoga class.Since then, he has travelled the world to work with master yogis and continues his journey to clearly define the breathing exercises for yoga. He notes that the main focus in yoga classes is on the poses and, while essential, this can often mean participants are lacking in the specifics of how to breathe for various postures.It a goal of his to educate the yoga community about the importance of the specific breath for the right posture.

“If you are terrified of vulnerability, best of luck having mental toughness.”This week on the OA podcast Patrick and Daniel are joined by author, coach and mentor Todd Herman who trains and educates professional athletes, leaders, and public figures on performance, strategy, mind-set, and execution.Starting a peak performance and coaching service in 1997, Todd has been closely involved in the field ever since. Despite struggles starting his business, the Canadian was able to build a strong, successful company and built a very large collection of clients across the sporting world, even to the point where he was working with different people in over 85 separate sports.Leveraging this expertise into developing his own method for boosting athletic performance and into releasing his bestselling book ‘The Alter Ego Effect’, Todd has seen his success just grow from there.He speaks to Patrick and Daniel about how he has started to bring breath work into his teaching and how he helps give athletes the tools they need to prepare mentally and find consistency.

“There are three main physiological targets that you can hit when you do any sort of training session; Aerobic Target, Anaerobic Target and Neuromuscular Target.”This week on the OA podcast Patrick and Daniel are joined by author, consultant and expert in high intensity training, Dr. Paul Laursen to talk about his work.An avid sportsman throughout his life, Dr. Laursen describes himself as a “failed athlete” who had taken a deep interest in sports from an early age. He was able to leverage that love of sports into his successful career in medicine and sports science, specialising in High Intensity Training for his PHD.While in a professor at Edith Cowen University in Perth, Australia, he met and carried out many clinical studies on Interval Training with his long term colleague Martin Buchheit. Following the successful publication of many papers and a large review of their work they co-wrote the very successful ‘Science and Application of High Intensity Interval Training’.Dr. Laursen outlines some of the reasoning and methods behind his research and explains how he has started to put more of a focus in his work on breathing to see if performance can be improved at high intensity through targeting and conditioning the respiratory muscles.

James Cannings “Kids are growing up and are now coming into the workforce. And in another ten years they're gonna make up a big part of that workforce and they're angry.”In this week’s episode, Patrick and Daniel are joined by James Cannings, Sustainability Officer for advertising firm MSQ. James was the co-founder of MMT digital which he grew from a staff of 3 to over 100.The company was acquired by MSQ where James now serves as Sustainability Officer. While much of his focus is on external environmental sustainability, he also points to the importance of internal sustainability as regards our own health and wellbeing.James explains how he is role is a much newer one to the corporate world and is constantly evolving. Currently his focus is on environmental sustainability but he admits he has a “deep fascination” with broader sustainability across the supply chain, the workforce and beyond. He points out that the future for sustainability may be very positive thanks to a younger generation that are more concerned about their health and wellbeing and have seen what previous generations have done to the environment.James also takes us through his own internal sustainability journey as he turned to yoga and better eating in his 30s as the pressure of selling his company lead to poor health and eating habits. It's a journey he says he could not have made without the help of his wife Em.For more on the Oxygen Advantage visit www.oxygenadvantage.com.Or check out Season 1 of the podcast athttps://open.spotify.com/show/5XTS4B3ODaEfsbNOBmYb6d.

“I was not curious anymore.”This week on the OA Podcast, Patrick and Daniel speak with retired Danish footballer Allan Gaarde to talk about how breathing helped bring back focus, motivation and fitness to his life after a career in football.Allan enjoyed a 14-year career as a player in the beautiful game before transitioning back to the sport post-retirement as Sporting Director of top flight Danish club Aalborg BK. After leaving this post in 2019, Allan found himself ‘tired all the time’, having let a lot of his physical fitness fall by the wayside. He explains how breathing techniques brought additional motivation back into his life and helped him find a healthy balance.

“I love to work hard, but for me it was more about making sure I could fortify myself.”In this week’s episode, Patrick and Daniel are joined by elite Australian CrossFit athlete and author James Newbury to discuss his life and career and the benefits that breathing techniques have provided him.Four times named Australia’s fittest man, James first discovered breathing techniques in 2016 “passively” and after his first rookie year competing in CrossFit, he looked into breathing more deeply to improve his performance, endurance and recovery.“And it just flourished from there,” he explains. He says his methods were questioned initially by fellow competitors when he would utilise breathing techniques prior to events but after his times improved and he moved up the rankings he says this way of thinking started to change.James explains how he has managed to remain positive despite a massive setback which hit him following an excellent season in 2019. He outlines how during mountain bike training for an Iron Man triathlon, he crashed his bike into a tree and suffered a punctured lung, mild concussion and a broken back. He tells Patrick and Daniel how he dealt with this setback and how he was able to motivate his recovery through breathing and mental fortitude and actually take part in that Iron Man triathlon only five weeks later.

“Stress is not just ok, stress is essential.”This week on the OA Podcast, Patrick and Daniel are joined by Swedish Army Captain Niclas Wisén to speak about how breathing has become an essential part of his life both in and out of the military. A psychologist and captain in the Swedish Armed Forces with over 10 years’ experience, Niclas has been involved in the training and selection of new recruits for much of his time in the military. During this time, he has incorporated breathing as a way of improving performance and coping with stress. He outlines how things like Stress Inoculation Training (SIT) and various breathing techniques can help physically and psychologically in many facets of a soldier’s everyday life and during the rigors of military performance.

“I would have loved to have discovered [breathing/mindfulness] when I was 25… This would have made a difference for me, for everything else that I did.”In this week’s episode of the Oxygen Advantage podcast, Patrick and Daniel are joined by former NHL professional, two time Stanley Cup winner and Olympic runner-up Johnny Oduya. Making is way through the Swedish professional scene, Johnny made it to the National Hockey League (NHL), the world leader in ice hockey in his early 20s, reaching an apex in the 2013 and 2015 seasons when he won the league’s highest honour, the Stanley Cup with the Chicago Blackhawks.Despite his renown as an elite level ice hockey player, the Swede has taken a huge interest in mindfulness and breathing in recent years, leading to the opening of his own ‘HALE’ studios in Sweden. He takes Daniel and Patrick on his journey to finding focus and how important mental focus is for athletes.

“It was my breathing outside the water that influenced my breathing inside the water.”This week, Patrick and Daniel are joined by multiple World Champion free-diver Karoline Meyer to talk about how breath control has benefited her life and career diving to incredible, World Record-breaking depths, without breathing equipment.The Brazilian national takes us through her training regime and explains how she began using breath control as part of her dive training. She outlines the kinds of complex physical and psychological training and breath control techniques she has utilised to make her a leader in the field.