Recoveryinterview

NASAL VS MOUTH BREATHING FOR CYCLING | ROADMAN PODCAST

with James Nestor — Author of 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art'; journalist and researcher specializing in respiratory science and breathing practices

47:37·28 April 2022

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JAMES NESTOR

Author of 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art'; journalist and researcher specializing in respiratory science and breathing practices

PROFILE →

James Nestor is the journalist-author whose New York Times bestseller Breath turned nasal breathing from a niche performance hack into a mainstream conversation. His Stanford 10-day mouth-breathing experiment — and the immediate spikes in blood pressure and snoring that followed switching pathways — gave the protocol the kind of headline data that makes coaches actually try it. For cyclists trying to extract the last 1–2% of aerobic efficiency, his work matters because it documents that the breath itself, not the legs, is often the limiting factor at submaximal intensity.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

James Nestor's Stanford 10-day mouth-breathing study: blood pressure shot up 25 points within hours of switching from nasal to mouth breathing. He went from zero to four hours of snoring overnight.
Roughly 60% of the population breathes through the mouth at night. Mouth-taping (small piece of tape over the mouth) trains nasal breathing during sleep — Nestor says ENT and dental specialists have been prescribing it for decades.
The data-without-action problem: people are wearing five wearables but not changing behaviour. Anthony's frustration with his own Aura ring data is the universal modern fitness paradox — measurement without prescription.
Breathing is measurable in seconds. Count breaths per minute, watch blood pressure changes, track HRV after a session of slow nasal breathing. The infrastructure exists; the awareness lags.
Elite trainers Nestor talked to (NFL, NHL, pro cyclists) are using nasal-breathing protocols quietly because they don't want to tell competitors what works. The performance edge is real and being kept private.

TOPICS

James Nestor blocked his nose for 10 days at Stanford and his blood pressure shot up 25 points within hours. He started snoring the same night, from zero to four hours, just by switching the pathway he was breathing through. If you're a cyclist and you haven't thought about how you breathe, this episode of the Roadman Cycling podcast is the one to start with.

Key Takeaways

Nestor's Stanford experiment with Anders Olsen is the clearest evidence I've seen that mouth breathing isn't a minor inefficiency, it's actively doing damage. Blood pressure up 25 points, snoring starting within hours, sleep quality tanking within days. The 60% of us who mouth breathe at night are running that experiment on ourselves every single night. The fix is free. A small piece of tape on your lips. I tried it for a week and my resting heart rate dropped three beats. Nestor has been doing it every night for years.

The performance side is what got my attention as a cyclist. Allison McConnell's research in the 90s showed 3 to 4% time trial improvements from inspiratory muscle training over a few weeks. Nestor and Olsen couldn't get their heart rates to 136 bpm while nasal breathing at eight breaths per minute, the body was just too efficient. Elite coaches have known about this for years and kept it quiet. Nestor told me directly. Why would I tell my competitors what's working? Start with a pulse oximeter, costs about ten euro, and watch what happens to your numbers when you switch from mouth to nasal breathing on the bike. The data is right there on your wrist.

James Nestor, author of 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art', participated in a 10-day controlled experiment at Stanford University measuring the physiological effects of exclusive mouth breathing versus nasal breathing. His blood pressure increased by 25 points within hours of switching to mouth breathing, and he developed snoring within the first night despite having no prior history of snoring. Co-participant Anders Olsen progressed from zero to six to seven hours of snoring per night by day 10. Researcher Allison McConnell's studies on inspiratory muscle training in cyclists, conducted in the 1990s, demonstrated 3 to 4% improvements in time trial performance over several weeks of training. Stanford researcher Christian Gimenez spent approximately 50 years studying the developmental and respiratory effects of mouth breathing. Nestor cites Ann Kearney's Stanford research showing nasal passages can close completely within two months to two years when not used, and reopen progressively when nasal breathing is resumed, due to the erectile tissue lining of the nasal passages responding to use. Patrick McKeown's oxygen advantage protocols, used with Navy SEALs and elite athletes, are cited as further applied evidence of performance gains from nasal breathing.

If your heart rate is running high on the bike and you're not sure why, the episode on five fixable reasons your heart rate is elevated covers a lot of the same territory from a different angle. And the Dr. Sellers breathing episode goes deeper into the mechanics of why your legs aren't always the limiter.

CLAIMS FROM THIS EPISODE

Each tagged with the strength of evidence behind it.

STUDY
James Nestor participated in a Stanford-affiliated study where 10 days of forced mouth-only breathing produced an approximately 25-point rise in blood pressure within hours and triggered onset of approximately 4 hours per night of snoring from a baseline of zero.
Source: James Nestor, "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art", Stanford research collaboration
STUDY
Approximately 60% of the population breathes through the mouth at night — a rate associated with elevated blood pressure, snoring, and reduced sleep quality, addressable through mouth-taping protocols prescribed by ENT and dental specialists.
Source: James Nestor, citing respiratory research
PRO PRACTICE
Mouth-taping (a small adhesive strip over the lips during sleep) is a multi-decade clinical practice prescribed by ENT and dental professionals to train nasal breathing during sleep — not a recent social-media trend, despite its current viral spread.
Source: James Nestor, citing ENT and dental clinical protocols
ANECDOTE
Elite professional sport teams (NFL, NHL, pro cycling) are quietly implementing structured nasal breathing and respiratory training protocols for performance gains but deliberately avoid public disclosure to retain competitive advantage.
Source: James Nestor, citing his interviews with elite trainers

KEY QUOTES

“if you change the way you breathe you change the way your heart functions you change the way your brain functions within a few seconds this is measurable i've been in the labs i've measured it myself”
James Nestor — Author of 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art'; journalist and researcher specializing in respiratory science

“within a few hours of obstruction i started snoring and i had not snored before okay we took uh weeks and weeks of baseline the other person in the study anders olsen had the same exact thing within a few days i was snoring about four hours throughout the night from zero to four hours just by changing the pathway through which i breathe”
James Nestor — Author of 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art'; journalist and researcher specializing in respiratory science

“about 60 percent of the population does your mouth breathers at night very bad and once you learn to breathe through your nose uh the benefits become pretty apparent very quickly”
James Nestor — Author of 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art'; journalist and researcher specializing in respiratory science

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT10 SECTIONS

Mouth Taping Goes Viral

The elite trainers i've talked to these people are working with top nfl stars they're working with hockey stars they're working with cyclists they're working with runners they said why do i want to go out and tell all my competitors that this is what you do in order to get your athletes in top shape james nesser welcome to the road man cycling podcasts thanks a lot for having me james i'm uh interested to hear uh kind of the i suppose my girlfriend is probably more interested to hear why i have pieces of sticky tape stuck onto my bedside locker if anyone doesn't know what i'm talking about do you get these pictures of people that tape their mouth now at night and afterwards they discard the used tape by just sticking it to the bedside locker well i have no idea what you're doing with that tape so i can't mouth taping i can speak to that a little bit and yeah this is the one thing i've heard more from people than than anything else and what this is just to let people know who aren't already doing it hopefully by the end of the podcast you will be doing it is this is placing a little piece of tape on your mouth at night to keep you from breathing through your mouth which is something about 60 percent of the population does your mouth breathers at night very bad and once you learn to breathe through your nose uh the benefits become pretty apparent very quickly we're gonna get deep into all of that but i just feel like where everyone's looking for this what is my trending bit what is like we had the ice bucket challenge which went crazy over here where people threw a bucket of voice over their head and then they nominated uh two or three of their friends to also throw buckets of voice over their head and it was to raise awareness for mental health but this went completely viral here but i feel like i've friends who are professional cyclists and they've sent me pictures of a bedside locker with the pieces of sticky tape that they've used to tape their mouth i think this has the potential to be a sort of a viral meme image for you i think you need to look into that well i'm i'm a shame that if i die if that's what i'm remembered for it's going to be a pretty sad day uh to be clear this was not my idea this was something that uh ents and dennis have been prescribing for decades i just happened to write about it so i blame them and james congratulations an amazing book i'm sure at this point you're probably sick of talking about it but i think it's it's an important contribution to definitely everything that we stand for here in the podcast the mantra for the podcast is health happiness and longevity and when i look at pillars of health i feel like that breeding and the body of work that you've contributed to breeding it's now up there with equal importance with matt walker and like why we sleep and you know the fundamental principles of movement and some of the traditions we've learned from blue zones it's such a seminal piece of work now how has your life changed since writing it well first of all thank you very much i mean i love all those books i love all those researchers i've been a big fan of them uh for years and years so i am just a journalist that's that's all i am i'm a filter uh matt walker is a researcher he went out and researched and explained his research in his book so uh the real credit goes to these people who have been working away uh sometimes in vain uh almost all of them anonymously for decades and decades trying to get this message out so i was just lucky enough to stumble upon it at the right time i guess so since the book has come out it's been out for god uh about two years now i i literally uh have been on a extended book tour ever since amazing um so that the moment that i get very tired of this stuff and i'm not excited to spread the word i'm gonna stop maybe that moment's coming up pretty soon but i still get pumped up mostly because i keep hearing from people that the simplest things these things are free they're available to everyone everywhere at all times and they have completely transformed people's health and so that is really what keeps me going here well i think about the podcast sometimes and you know with our time difference it's quite late when we're recording here in the evening in ireland and oftentimes it's like oh my god another podcast but i i ground myself with diary and then i bring it back and go the wide

Why Wearables Ignore Breathing

Metrics are brilliant on the number of downloads and it's been exploding over the last few months but i think we lose sometimes what those metrics mean and i'm sure you've done this with your book sales as well like the depth metric is so important you can fundamentally change somebody's life with a message that's delivered to them at the right moment in their life and i think you know me less or so with the podcast you more so with the book really have the potential to do that i think you're right with people so obsessed with data and metrics and those are important for as a diagnosis to diagnostic rather to let just people know what's going on and i think of that regards to wearables people now have five different wearables and they're collecting all this data but it's like what are you doing with that data how is that changing your life for for the better and so it it ultimately comes down to each individual and what they're getting out of these practices and that's why it's hard to offer a blanket prescription to everyone hey breathe this same way everybody and you're all going to be healthy for forever more no that's that's wrong but i think it's acknowledging how breathing is is a essential function it is a pillar of health it's not just about eating and exercise if you're doing those two things but if you're breathing dysfunctionally you're never ever going to be healthy and this is just something i still don't hear that many people talking about that's starting to change a little bit but the research has been there for decades is the conversation slightly muted on breeding it because it's difficult to measure and you touched on data there we've have like a proliferation of data monitoring from whoop to order ring apple watch and you know many in between that we can measure i actually have a little bit of a problem with some of those measurements because it's like yeah sure i'm getting a bunch of data from my aura ring which i'm wearing at the moment but it's like what do i do with that it's not very prescriptive but we don't measure breathing at all with these devices is that a frustration or an annoyance or do you see innovation coming down the path well breathing is actually extremely easy to measure you can measure it your breaths for a minute by yourself you can use a device to do that as well you can measure how changing your breathing will affect your blood pressure how it will affect your heart rate variability over time how it will affect your athletic performance and your sleep quality so we can measure all these things i'm not going to name specific wearables by by their their brand name but but i will tell you i have all this stuff at my house and the vast majority of them are very inaccurate when it comes to respiratory rates and very inaccurate in in other areas of of important details and they're selling these things as medical grade and they are not i promise you they they aren't they're a very good gauge to have a general overview on your health but anything deeper than that they they are not very accurate so the second thing is beyond breathing being easy to measure and that's what i love about it if you don't believe what i'm saying about changing your respiratory rate about changing the way in which you take in air about calming yourself and how that affects your heart rate your blood pressure so many other metrics then you can see it yourself with all of these wearables you have around the house but i think the main thing why people have been hesitant to really adopt these practices is because it's so simple so modern humans really like to make things complex think about diet now i'll have to take that supplement with that food i have to take this supplement i need to eat at this time of the day it doesn't need to be that difficult our ancestors got by just fine you know but i think the pandemic shown such a light on this culture of instant gratification that we have versus you know time and memorial what has worked people are always looking for a quick fix for stuff you know something about mary i love the scene where they're looking for seven minute abs and that was like a parody comedy scene at the time but that's what we've become as a culture where we're looking for a vitamin pill we're looking for an injection we're looking for something to replace 365 24 7 good habits and practices like sleep movement hydration breath work good food exercise there's no ninja hacks here it's just how you're meant to live yes and no i i have to say that there is one thing that will allow you to more

Breathing Changes the Body Fast

Quickly change your level of anxiety your panic your asthma your mood and that is breathing more than any diet change more than exercise diet and exercise take a while to really take effect okay it could be weeks could be even months but if you change the way you breathe you change the way your heart functions you change the way your brain functions within a few seconds this is measurable i've been in the labs i've measured it myself so it this is a quick ninja hack but the thing is people want to do a one and done and then go back to their bad habits so this can fix that that problem you have in the moment but then you have to make healthy breathing a habit just like you can't eat a bunch of spinach and say i'm good for the week and now i'm just going to drive down double burgers and fries you have to make healthy eating a habit that you carry with you but i know you looked at and you talked about it was probably an unexpected side effect or side consequence of writing the book that you end up studying like historic ancient skulls i wouldn't imagine you set out thinking that was the patch you were going to go on but was there a point in history or did you get to track a point in history where we went from good breeding practices to bad breeding practices yeah i can tell you exactly when it happened people say well how is that possible you can't go back in time and look at people's respiratory rates yeah but you can look at their skulls and you can look at what has happened to their noses and you can look at what has happened to their mouths which is what i spent months and months all over the world doing the fact is if you take a modern skull and compare it to an ancient skull these skulls look like different species we have lost so much space in our sinus passages we've lost so much space in our mouths this is why we have crooked teeth this is why we have chronic obstruction this is why so many people have sleep apnea is because our faces our skulls have literally changed so yeah i i remember talking to my editor and she said well how's the research going this was years ago i said oh it's going great you know i'm looking at all these skulls i went to paris i looked at school she's like this is a book about breathing like what the hell are you doing i said i think it's going to make sense to you i think she was apprehensive but the reason i did that is you have to look at the core issue of respiratory dysfunction if you're going to understand it if you're going to change it and you really have to go to the past you have to go to our bone structure and how that's changed and can you speculate as to what caused us to shift the way we breathe um i can't speculate i could tell you absolute facts about even better of exactly what happened you know some people have written and said you know it's a very interesting hypothesis that you have about how our faces have changed this is not a hypothesis okay this is a measurable fact anyone can see this for for themselves so here's what happened industrial foods came into the food supply so for the first time in the history of of life on this planet an animal could eat food that wasn't natural that wasn't fresh that was pulverized that was soft that was canned that was bottled and that's what we did so starting in the industrial age we our diet shifted and because of this shift in our diets our faces shrunk in a single generation 50 of a population had crooked teeth and they never had crooked teeth before because their mouths had grown so small you can trace the exact moment when this happened there are other drivers to this but i'll just i'll just stay there on a sec i can tell you you're waiting to say something so i'll shut up yeah no it's just as you're talking the the pieces are coming together for me i know you've been on the joe rogan experience podcast and i had ben o'brien who was also on the podcast with joe rogan he was on me a couple of weeks ago and he was saying to me like get out and get yourself some like wild meat some wild elk he's like it's not the same as your farm-fed your grain-fed factory grown meat he's like it's different so i got my wild elk and i cooked it up and it's hard to chew like it's an it's a workout like my jaw i'm like i've got a lactate acid in my jaw this

How Soft Food Reshaped Our Skulls

Is hard it's different it's you know normal steak you could call it with a spoon you need a power tool to get through this yeah and that's that's a great example and all of the foods were like that for the entire time we were evolving for for millions and millions of years until a very clear point in time when we went from chewing from about two to three hours a day grinding i mean imagine chewing raw roots raw potatoes raw carrots all day and then having meat like that elephant meat tiger me you're you're chomping all day long and that masticatory stress allowed us to build proper jaws and open our mouths and open our sinus passages so this is is is not a hypothesis they've done scientific studies where they've taken pigs and gave them the same food that food was very soft for one group of pigs and very hard for the other group the same thing happened so it's easily testable our lifestyle of convenience just doesn't serve us in so many ways that's like a common thread that i'm starting to pull at through this podcast the more people you talk to it's this lifestyle of comfort we're not really very well adapted to it well what i've learned and you can spruce this up with a bunch of different analogies and different comparisons but it all comes down to this the further we've moved away from the natural environment in which we've evolved we've gotten sicker and sicker and sicker and the more closely we go and reintegrate into that natural environment the healthier we get so this is not some woo-woo new age thing this is looking at how our bodies have adapted to live and to exist so now we have these things that it's take ten thousand steps a day okay that's the exercise you need it's great advice guess what our ancestors didn't need a pedometer they walked six miles every single day anyway now we have different devices to chew these silicone patches you chew on jaws or size our ancestors didn't need that because they chewed food you know turn off lights at night to allow yourself to get better sleep well we didn't have lights until 100 you know 20 years ago so the more we can remove these modern industrial influences the more our bodies can come back to a state of balance it doesn't matter if we're talking about food or breathing or exercise or sleep or whatever i remember when i was in school you used to tease like the kid who was a bit slow in the class you tease him and you call him a milk breeder like that was a proper insult it was an old-school insult i'm sure there's kids listening to the podcast going oh my god you guys are lame in school but you actually replicated being a mouth breeder for you taped up did you stuff up your nose or how did you block up your nose yeah so of all the insults that kids call each other this one actually has merit you do not want to be a mouth breather it affects how you look it affects your respiratory health it affects how you think it affects how you sleep and more so we've known this for decades down at stanford which is very close to my house here in san francisco this researcher by the name of christian gimeneau had been studying it for about 50 years been looking at different sleep apnea different ways of breathing how they affected kids development and he'd done a ton of studies into mouth breathing nasal breathing so this was a known thing but what people didn't know or at least the researchers i was talking to what they didn't know is how quickly that damage from mouth breathing came on right did it happen after a number of years a number of decades or what no one had done a human test of this we've done monkey tests don't read those studies they're absolutely awful and they they destroyed these monkeys health you know within a matter of months just mouth breathing so the longest amount that we were allowed to do the study for was 10 days mouth breathing so we had crap silicon and tape and other crap up our noses so we're just breathing through our mouths for 10 days it was me and one other person we had to pay for the study that's the maximum amount of people allowed to do this this experiment and it was 10 days of mouth breathing versus 10 days of nasal breathing and we we gathered every little speck of data you could imagine and looked at the data sets between those two and how soon during the 10 days did you start noticing uh visible deterioration in some of your health markers it was within a number of hours actually my blood pressure shot up about 25 points higher than

Mouth Breathing Experiment at Stanford

I've ever seen it before and i thought oh i just had a stressful day we're at stanford for eight hours did four different blood draws you know it was awful and then that night i started snoring so so within a few hours of obstruction i started snoring and i had not snored before okay we took uh weeks and weeks of baseline the other person in the study anders olsen had the same exact thing within a few days i was snoring about four hours throughout the night from zero to four hours just by changing the pathway through which i breathe nanders was snoring for about almost the entire night six six or seven hours so you know we didn't do this experiment to as like some jackass stunt right we were looking at the number of people who are chronically obstructed people with chronic sinusitis about 15 percent of the population chronically inflamed turbinates about 50 of the population so so much of the population is cruising around mouth breathing and they don't realize that a lot of the problems they're having are tied to the pathway through which the breathing air we were able to experience this and able to measure it as it came on and as it went away so blood pressure was adversely affected snoring sleep do you have did you have sleep data from it were you sleeping differently are we sleeping you know not as much time in restorative sleep much more shallow much less deep sleep um i i woke up every single day absolutely exhausted even though technically i was asleep for eight hours we took video of it we were looking we wore continuous blood glucose monitors didn't see a lot of difference from that we know that later on over months you will see a difference which is why sleep apnea is directly linked to adult onset diabetes who know who knew that how you breathe would affect whether or not you get diabetes but but that likely needs to happen over months and months or years and years we just don't know you can't run human trials for years and have one group of people obstructed in the other group uh breathing through their noses so this was as close as we could get to that yeah you say you can't run those human trials i was reading some shocking stuff recently you know it was world war one on conscientious dissenters they ran trials on this that's not a long time ago and they were running very unethical experiments on conscientiousness enters through the war in allied countries yeah the ones where they would deprive them of uh of about half of the calories they needed yeah and and uh but i i guess i could should have said you can't run these trials now a hundred years ago i mean the stuff i was seeing with orphans all these kids putting in orphanages they were running these crazy trials on vitamin d levels and seeing what would happen to these kids after months of being denied regular vitamin d and how it would destroy their their teeth how it would destroy their health you just can't do that nowadays but you can in the in the past and that that's what some of the research that i was looking at looking at respiratory problems and different subjecting people to different ways of breathing were from from past studies but this was one that i just wanted to personally experience as a journalist what it was like to be a mouth breather you know like 50 percent of kids up to 50 percent of kids are mouth breathers more than 60 of us breathe through our mouths at night and i wanted to feel that and i wanted to record what happened and that's why we did the experiment from a cycling perspective i would have loved to test your vo2 your maximum oxygen uptake pre-test pre-blocking the nasal passage on post blocking it and seeing the effect we had so many different metrics we wanted to i don't know after 10 days if it would have had a huge difference we were looking at blood as well we were looking at there were a lot more um we had a lot more cortisol at the end of the mouth breathing um but i'm hoping actually to do another one of these so many people have written in and said i will volunteer for any experiment you want to do i just good luck finding funny for this yeah like no pharmaceutical company is going to fund this you know so if there's some some rich person out there that wants to fund this uh we can put it together we'll run it at stanford so your experiment was quite binary it's like a nasal passage is completely blocked or not blocked at all but i feel like most of the listeners myself included uh i broke my nose when i was playing soccer

Testing Your Own Airway

As a 15 16 year old i had it fixed but even if i look straight at the camera you can see it's not perfectly fixed i don't know how much uh impairment i have but i would bet it's a number greater than zero is there a way to determine if somebody has impairments in their nasal passage yeah great question um it turns out that most of us the vast majority of us have some sort of impairment but what we do is we just figure it out we work around it just like other people have impairments uh maybe with their ability to read but they they're able to get through life just fine or some people maybe their left uh foot is uh you know half an inch shorter than the right foot but but we compensate so you can take cat scans you can look at your sinus passages you can do some other tests that don't require you going into a lab uh interesting study to do not study but interesting thing to do is do the friedman tongue scale test which is go to a mirror and look at your tongue when your tongue is relaxed and if you can see clearly to your throat then that's a sign that you are less apt to suffer from airway issues and sleep apnea if you can't see your throat at all when your tongue is relaxed on the bottom of your mouth you're much more likely to suffer from airway issues and sleep apnea and other sleep disorder breathing this is not a perfect test to get a perfect test you need to go do an ear nose and throat surgeon they can take a cat scan they can look at all your sinus passages i will say though having talked to dozens and dozens of these people usually what will happen not usually sometimes what will happen is uh ent we'll see oh you have this obstruction here you broke your nose at this time this is why you can't breathe we need to rush you into surgery the vast majority of people do not need surgery they need to start breathing through their noses more our noses will start to open up and acclimate and this is exactly what happened to me it's what happened with ann kearney down at stanford who was slated for nasal surgery it's what's happened with thousands and thousands of other people the nose is a use it or lose it organ the more we use it the more we are able to breathe more easily and in in a more healthy way well that was going to be my question my obviously my experience is very anecdotal study group of one but when i've been taping my do you tape your mouth at nighttime still every single night so i was went through periods where read the book fanatically taped my mouth for a period of time and you know maybe i went away on holidays or whatever the catalyst was i went through a period where i stopped taping my milk for a while and then i went back to doing it and when i returned to resumed taping my my mouth again i felt the difficulty breathing through the nose it was almost like i can't get the amount of oxygen i need to get here and i really had to concentrate and it was a very conscious process of actually trying to breed but i noticed after as little as a half an hour of me actually focusing on it it felt like i was getting control over it felt like the nasal passage was expanding and i was able to get more air in and if you fast forward that or four or five nights of just disciplines milk taping it's like i'm back to breeding at above normal capacity is that is there any sense in that or is that just me imagining it isn't the body an amazing thing uh there's absolute sense to that so our nasal passages are covered with erectile tissue it's the right same erectile tissue as you know where and it works in the same way so this erectile tissue can engorge with blood um to obstruct your nasal passages or it can open up so when you start breathing through your nose more those tissues will respond and they will start to open up and kearney i just mentioned her down at stanford did a study where she was looking at people with laryngectomies who had a little hole throw drilled in their throat because they had some sort of cancer or problems with their mouths within two months to two years their noses were 100 percent blocked up 100 when they weren't using it so she used that as an inspiration to start breathing through her nose more she knew the nose could close she also knew it could start to open up so the reason why after a half an hour things

Training Yourself to Nose Breathe

Got easier is you were sending more signals to your nose to dilate to open up it's just like working out something else it's almost like stretching and then you're more flexible so i bet the next night was easier and the night after that was easier and i've had your same experience with mouth tape is i never thought i'd have to be using this stuff my whole life but i am just not blessed with with that big pronatic chin or facial structure and every time i put my head on pillow my mouth opens so so i'm stuck with that but but i'll keep using it because i know the difference it makes my sleep quality and so much more how's the milk tape going with the beard i work it out just fine i can't validate it with a beard it's like well i'll show you you know so everyone's got their own style of mouth taping i don't i don't care how you do it you know that whatever works for you is fine i use a very small piece of tape and tape just my lips okay at the center of my lips that's all i need some people like a fat strip across their mouth that's cool i don't care um but just using that small piece of tape just trains me throughout the night when i go unconscious and my muscles relax this trains me to keep my mouth shut and let me tell you whenever i've been traveling and i've forgotten my tape and i said ah screw it i'm just gonna breathe through my mouth and i feel it so much the next morning my mouth is is dry it's filled with film i don't sleep as well i know that from a wearable and and it's just something that now if i show up at a hotel i don't have it i have to go to a drugstore and buy something that that closely resembles the tape i have at home i feel like the audience out there that are single or in their tinder dating phases it's a difficult one to explain maybe on the first couple of dates with somebody sleeping over as to why you're taping your mouth at night well if someone's if you're just dating someone you're not sleeping too much anyways definitely ditch ditch the mouth tape um for for those those situations you could use the duct tape for other stuff yeah yeah or yeah use it to have it have fun with it whatever you want to do but but maybe that's something a lot you know i've been married a while my wife knows i do so much other weird crap that she's just completely unfazed by this now and she sees how much better off i am in the morning i think she's grateful for it so is there a fundamental difference in the way the nose is filter on oxygen versus how the melt is filtering oxygen because i'm just thinking if i'm at a a bike race or if i'm running full gas and i'm for like i'm above lactate thresholds or i'm at that point where the effort is unsustainable and i'm frantically trying to get in as much air as i can when i when i envisage myself in that position and i vividly imagine that now i'm thinking of deep panic melt breeding trying to fill my lungs with as much oxygen as i can is there a difference in i suppose a the capacity that i can take oxygen between males and note and beat equality uh yes to both of those in in such a big way you have to think about the the lungs the lungs are the only organ beyond the skin a teeny bit that is able to extract oxygen from the from the air right so you need to get air into your lungs if you're breathing at a very fast rate and you're breathing shallow which is the only way you're going to be able to breathe if you're breathing 50 60 breaths a minute yeah the vast majority of that air is not making it to the lungs what you're doing is you're taking air into the mouth into the throat and the bronchi but it's not making it to the area where it can extract oxygen further that air is going in and out so fast that your lungs don't have time for it they don't have the pressure they need to extract oxygen efficiently it's equivalent to being at a stop light and just revving your motor right we have this huge piston in our chest it's our diaphragm this is just like revving it for for no use so that is one of the least efficient ways of riding a bike and one of the least efficient ways of breathing the more you train yourself to breathe fewer breaths but deeper controlled breaths through your nose you will be able to get way

Inspiratory Muscle Training for Cyclists

More oxygen for way less effort and if you're a competitor that's what it's all about it's running efficiently i have been amazed by how adamantly people have been training in every other area oh i'm going to eat 200 calories of that and right before the race i'm going to have this little glucose bump and i'm going to do this but they're not paying attention to their breathing we get the majority of our energy through our breath and you have to be doing that efficiently if you're going to be running efficiently pro-cycling is one of the most data-driven sports in the world every single variable you can imagine is measured when you look at indoor cycling you know air pressure is measured uh density humidity coefficient of frontal drag it's the most scientific sport you can imagine it's like moneyball on steroids you know steroids is not a good pawn to use when it comes to cycling but it's it's uh moneyball accelerated but i feel like breeding is one of the unexplored frontiers i did have this uh really basic breeding device like it was power breeds do you remember them they were out like five six years ago is there yeah is there companies like that coming to the market with breeding training tools so that is an inspiratory muscle trainer i'm looking for mine it was on my desk here somewhere um but there are dozens and dozens of those and what they do is they they train the muscles they specifically are training the diaphragm okay to allow you to breathe more so if you think about respiratory efficiency you want to be breathing deeper but if your lungs aren't that big if you aren't very flexible in your chest and intercostals you're not able to get the maximum amount of oxygen in there so you really need to focus on the fuel tank the fuel tank is is the lungs so inspiratory muscle training works incredibly well and that data goes back for decades and decades look at allison mcconnell's research in the 90s with cyclists doing inspiratory muscle training after a number of weeks and having these enormous gains so their time trials increased by four percent three to four percent which is as as you know that that is an enormous difference and they were able to push so much harder before they reach that level of exhaustion so the power breathe works uh aerofit works um so many other devices work but it it it's not the device you need to rely on it's it's yourself and listening to yourself and building a training for for each of these pieces of equipment that that suits your needs that's going to get you where you want to go some people buy the power breathe try it for two weeks say i i don't feel too much i'm going to throw this thing out well it takes about you know four to eight weeks in order to to really start seeing some of the benefits from from doing these things why do you think it's not as sexy as other areas of performance after i read your book i was like well this is it like this is gonna kick off now and it's all anybody is gonna talk about and it doesn't seem like we've kicked on from that you'd be surprised man i mean the the elite trainers i've talked to here here's the reality people don't like to share their secrets for for fitness right and the elite trainers i've talked to these people are working with top nfl stars they're working with hockey stars they're working with cyclists they're working with runners they said why do i want to go out and tell all my competitors that this is what you do in order to get your athletes in top shape they like to keep these secrets themselves and we've had these secrets around for decades and decades and decades and specifically people weren't talking about it now the cat's more or less out of the bag if you look at patrick mcewen's work with oxygen advantage this guy is working with navy seals he's working with every imaginable athlete and he's showing huge gains in in performance and decreased time of recovery across the board so the science is there it just you know with breathing it especially with athletes it can really take a while before you see that that huge impact and if you're looking at someone who is predominantly a mouth breather when they're competing their performance will go down as they're converting to nasal breathing and it will stay down for a number of weeks to even a number of months before they start to crest back up but once they convert to nasal breathing the science is very clear that performance will improve recovery times will decrease and they'll they'll be better overall it just takes a long time a lot of people are very impatient and would you melt

When Mouth Breathing Is a Tool

Type during interval training or is there protocols around that here here and there you know uh when i'm talking about mouth breathing and nasal breathing i'm talking about habitual breathing so okay i just took a mouth breath right who cares when you laugh you're breathing through your mouth when you're hitting like upper zone four zone five sometimes you default to mouth breathing that mouth breathing at that time can be a tool it is a conscious tool you use to restart your respiratory system okay and it's very effective in those stages but for the vast majority of the time especially if you're in zone two if you're just jogging if you're cruising around if you're walking all of the breaths should be through the nose and and uh in and out through through the nose to get there takes a very long time which is why especially professional athletes really need someone to to train them but i would suggest people do i bet a lot of your listeners have a stationary bike get a pulse oximeter they cost about 10 bucks now and see how little breathing you need to keep your oxygen levels up i think you will be astounded of how hard you can push and how little you need to breathe in order to keep your oxygen levels up to 96 percent 97 and that's a good way of convincing yourself um that you're breathing too much and it seems from my again my anecdotal experience on it that your heart rate is lower on your milk breed on my stationary we use it's called what bike just a stationary bike but it measures heart rate and power at the same time so power is like the application of how how hard we're pressing down on the pedals it's measured in what but so i was just whole do you remember these old experiments i don't even sure if you call them experiments like you'd have an old football manager and make you do a lap around the fields but wouldn't let you spit the water out and that was like their way of training you to breathe properly so i would try that occasionally on my indoor bike so i do 10 minutes in zone 2 normal breeding and then 10 minutes holding water in my mouth and you can notice your heart rate is much lower your average heart rate across that second 10 minute block with the water in your mouth absolutely and this isn't some placebo effect this is your body responding to allowing to performing at a more efficient level so when we were at doing the stanford test we had a pulse oximeter on uh we we tested this mouth breathing in nasal breathing and we're just trying to get to to 136 bpm which is not not very hard right it it is so much harder when you're nasal breathing and if if you nasal breathe in a cycle in a clear rhythm we're trying to nasal breathe you know heart rate 136 nasal breathe about eight breaths per minute in a cycle and we could not get our heart rates up to even one 136 and so that's just showing you if if you're able to put out that that output on that bike and still have your heart rate so low just imagine all the energy you're saving to push it even harder right to get your heart rate higher you have all that energy in reserve and that's how you're going to win races so if somebody's listening uh to the podcast right now and they're like okay i want to start on this journey towards breathing through the nose breathing more mindfully increasing my performance on health through breathing what's some like real tangible getting started tips for them i i would buy a pulse oximeter because a lot of people what what they respond to when they say i can't breathe when you start training someone to breathe very slowly they say well obviously i'm not getting enough oxygen i'm going to die once you put a pulse oximeter on it's no longer your brain thinking this you are looking at a real-time uh readout of data and you will see that by breathing very slow there is plenty of oxygen in your bloodstream what you are responding to is an increase of carbon dioxide this is something that almost everyone gets wrong right now if you hold your breath and you feel that nagging need to breathe it's not oxygen it's an increase of co2 the more tolerant you get of more co2 in your body the better you are going to be at performing that's what they're finding right now so you need oxygen of course but you also need a healthy balance of oxygen and co2 so i would get that pulse ox on and i would work out you can put your heart rate up to you know 130 135 whatever and play around with your

A Daily Breathing Practice

Breathing start breathing through your mouth and don't pay attention to your breathing and and look the pulse ox and calculate your efficiency and also calculate your distance on the bike right then switch to nasal breathing and breathe any way you want then switch to nasal breathing in very clear cycles in a rhythmic pattern think of your breath like a circle okay so it's not it's just just imagine that circle and i think you will see that you were able to go a distance uh much quicker and you're able to recover much faster when you're allowing your body to operate at the state of efficiency some other people like to do you know three revolutions for an inhale longer exhales five revolutions for an exhale you can experiment with all that later what that's doing is the longer you exhale the more relaxed you're going to get and and the more you're going to stay in a parasympathetic state but for the right at the beginning get that pulse ox experiment with your breathing over time collector i have a feeling your listeners are data freaks just like we are collect your data see what happens and acknowledge that this stuff can take a while for people with serious nasal breathing issues it can take a long time and do you have a daily practice or a daily ritual for your breeding ex apart from the type in your mouth at nighttime well everyone thinks since i wrote this book on breath i just sit around in a you know a towel and breathe all day but i i wish i had that life it sounds sounds amazing um i don't so uh that's not to say i don't i didn't adopt a number of these these things you can only see so many people transformed by this stuff before you start wanting to do it yourself so i breathe for about 15 minutes in in the morning i have a practice i do pretty vigorous kundalini like practice that gets me going throughout the day but the most impactful thing for you isn't that 15 minute workout it's how you carry yourself throughout the day i'm never breathing through my mouth while i'm working while i'm exercising i'm never breathing through my mouth at night and that to me is is what is really going to make the biggest difference for people that's not to say those those practices aren't effective wim hof breathing it's freaking great i love it sudarshan kriya love it kundalini pranayama all awesome but again it's about carrying these healthy habits with you all the time in order to get the most benefit and is there early effects on often when we're coaching athletes when you get them an early win it's so easy to get them to buy into a system because they're like oh this is the vehicle everyone's looking for a result and when they get that early wind they're like oh my god this is the vehicle i've been searching for is there an early win they can look out for and say oh actually this is working now i'm on the right path i i wish the answer was yes maybe the the thing you should be looking for is that early loss and how big that early loss is and then once you have that early loss you can build up from there knowing that once you reach that crescendo that plateau you will be better you will be performing better you will recover better so in the meantime in order to convince people that this stuff isn't crazy collect the data show them their heart rate variability breathing through their nose and through their mouth show them if if they don't have obstruction issues and other structural issues in their noses how much more efficiently they can ride a bike how much more relaxed they are show them the distance they're able to to ride within a certain amount of time nasal breathing versus mouth breathing i can't tell you how that's going to work out for each person because everyone's different some people acclimate very quickly to this within a couple weeks they're up and rolling cool other people it's going to take a long time if you're noticing someone has seems to really have problems breathing through their noses they should probably see a professional get a scan to make sure it's it's not some serious structural issue that's really holding them back james the book is absolutely brilliant i must have gifted it to 10 15 people it's some that everybody should check out i'm going to leave a link to the book in the show notes for today's episode james nestor thank you for joining me on the roadman cyclone podcast thanks a lot for having me

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Should cyclists breathe through their nose or mouth when riding?+

James Nestor argues that nasal breathing should be the default for cyclists, even at moderate intensities. Nasal breathing filters and humidifies air, regulates CO2 tolerance, and supports better oxygen delivery to working muscles. Mouth breathing is a fallback for extreme efforts, not a habit to rely on across an entire ride.

What is CO2 tolerance and why does it matter for cycling performance?+

CO2 tolerance is the body's ability to stay calm and efficient at higher carbon dioxide levels before triggering the urge to breathe harder. Cyclists with poor CO2 tolerance tend to overbreathe and under-recover, limiting sustainable power output. Nasal breathing training, as discussed by James Nestor, gradually raises this tolerance and allows the body to extract more oxygen per breath.

Does mouth taping actually work for better sleep and recovery?+

James Nestor recommends mouth taping as a simple, free intervention to enforce nasal breathing during sleep. Around 60 percent of the population breathes through the mouth at night, which fragments sleep quality and slows recovery. A small strip of surgical or medical tape across the lips is sufficient, and Nestor considers it one of the highest-return habits a cyclist can adopt for overnight recovery.

Are fitness tracker respiratory rate readings accurate?+

No. Despite marketing claims of medical-grade precision, most consumer wearables measure respiratory rate poorly compared to clinical standards. James Nestor highlights this in the episode as a significant gap between what devices promise and what they actually deliver. Cyclists relying on wearable data to monitor breathing patterns should treat those figures as rough estimates rather than reliable measurements.

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