Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. A little different music to start us off here. That is Jeremy Wilstein sitting right next to me playing his handpan. And this is going to get us in the mood for this episode. We just all got out of the water in the Columbia River and did some breath work this morning, a big group of us here at Chelan for the U.S. Nationals. And we've been doing this. We did a bunch of this last year at U.S. Nationals, and he and I recorded this show, and my microphones were all messed up, so we lost that one and wanted to do it again. Jeremy is an icon in our paragliding tribe here in the U.S., and he got into breath work and cold plunge stuff, kind of the Wim Hof method, about eight years ago, and he's been sharing it with our community and how it helps.
You need to be calm when you need to be calm, or when you need more energy, you can use it to get more energy, but it really affects performance and safety and all kinds of physiological things where you can really kind of take control of what's going on in your life. So it makes you better on the ground and in the air. Very powerful and really very easy things you can do to literally change your mindset and physiology.
It's a great talk, and we had a lot of fun with this, the second time around. You're going to hear some road noise in the background. I'm sorry about that. It's very windy outside, and we had to do this in the camper, and we're pretty close to a road, so there's a little bit of side noise, but just ignore it and enjoy this great talk with a really good friend of mine, Jeremy Wilstein.
Hey, Jer.
Gavin, how are we doing?
Good. We're going to get to do this round two. We did it exactly a year ago. A year ago, here in Chelan, and my microphones were screwy, and we nailed it, so we're going to try to nail round two. Perfect.
Did a really nice session with you here at the beach a little while ago with a bunch of the pilots here. Those of you listening, we're in Chelan for U.S. Nationals. We've got a weather day. It's really windy, so we're inside. You're going to hear some road noise going back and forth, but it's the best we could do. Jeremy, tell me what you got into. All these years ago. Last year was seven years ago, so now it's eight years ago. Breathing, Wim Hof. What is it? What's the physiology of it? Why are we talking about it?
Yeah, perfect. Well, thanks for having me on the show, Gavin, and like you said, we're re-recording a year later.
So yeah, my background is I've been flying paragliders for 10, 11 years, and about eight years ago now, I was actually on a van trip. I was traveling down in New Zealand, and I was out surfing one day, and I met a local out on the water, and I needed some help because my van had some rust on it, so I couldn't get my warrant of fitness, is what they call it down in New Zealand, to register my van. And so I was asking the surfer, and he said, oh, I got a buddy with a car shop. He can help you out with that. Perfect. And he goes, then he invites me to, you can come stay at my farm tonight. You're cool. Let's, you know, you can park your van. And so when I got up there, I met his girlfriend who owned a yoga studio on the North Island in New Zealand, and I got talking with them, and they're like, hey, you should, you should come stay for this.
There's a Wim Hof event. And I'm like, what is Wim Hof? They're like, oh, man, this guy like climbs Mount Everest in shorts and no shirt, and you can like, you know, sit in ice water for two hours and do all this crazy stuff. And I'm like, okay, that, that sounds crazy. But, you know, I'm living in a van at this time. So I'm like, all right, well, I'll stick around for a couple more days. Check it out. And so I went to this, this workshop is about a three hour workshop. And the Wim Hof method has three pillars, it's breath work, it's cold exposure, and it's mindset training. I was like, yeah, let's, let's go check this out. So we did some breathing practices there. And then we got in a bucket of cold water, and we did some other exercises, and I was jazzed up. And I left that thing, going and practicing myself.
Because the breath work, especially gave me this sense of autonomy over my thoughts and my actions and allowed me to regulate my nervous system. Kind of from the inside out, no longer was I looking for external validation or sources to change how I feel I could, I could produce it myself. Yeah.
She is very anxious about a lot of things that I don't think are things that you should be anxious about. Like most anxiousness. Yeah, exactly. You know, if we needed to go to the airport, it didn't matter if we left four hours early, she was racing to the airport. And one day I said, Hey, Mom, let's just, we got time to go to the airport. Give me 10 minutes. And I guided her through a breath work session for 10 minutes. And she got up and she was like a different person. She started doing the laundry. She started doing the things that were really her horrible habits. these other things until the point where i said okay mom we got to go to the airport and so there was this just this direct correlation and it was almost like this magic that changes your physiology to whatever state you'd like to get into and so i kept showing my friends and family and then at some point i was like maybe i should just become an instructor and so this started as a total passion project and i put over a thousand people into ice plunges and done workshops and breathwork things and um you know i'm i've sold real estate for 13 years and this was kind of my side gig just having fun with it and it's really transformed my life and um you know i love sharing with the paragliding community because here we are a group of you know psychos that think we're birds and at times we are um but paragliding you can agree is such a mental sport you know i mean and we have to react very quickly and we have to react in calm manner or else the situation can you know cascade and get totally out of control so i think training the mind is some of the most important things in paragliding not only to perform well but to stay safe to um and also to enjoy your time on the ground when you're not paragliding so you breath work cold plunging the wim hof method has been super powerful in my progression as a pilot and um i just i i love sharing with people yeah
let's dive into that because when you first approached me you sent this great email which we just reviewed uh and a couple of the things grabbed me in that that i hadn't thought of when i when i think of breath work and uh you know mindfulness i guess would be a way to put that but you said you know this can really impact performance and safety and you just said that dive into that how how can we literally change how we are our we can literally change our ability in the air and also our calmness in the air it's just and it's quick it's amazing yeah
yeah so the science with breath work is so we are a big electrical system we send impulses from the air and we send impulses from the air from the body to the brain from the brain down to the body to move to feel to act whatever it is and our our central nervous system is our electrical system and we have multiple parts of it for the term fight or flight or sympathetic nervous system running from the bear that big collapse you have that big collapse you recover it you may be shaking a little bit scared or jacked up however you want to respond to it that's our sympathetic nervous system kicking on dump a bunch of adrenaline cortisol into our system and we have this hormonal release and like if we make it out okay then we're good we're stoked you know it's like it feels good telling the buddies yeah if that experience stays with you and you have almost a fear injury over that it's a recurring it's it's stress it's it's a chronic stress that you're experiencing on the other side of the tone we have our parasympathetic nervous system which is more rest and relaxation rest and digestion and
that um you know if that is firing too much it manifests itself as being lethargic or unmotivated and you know not want to get off the couch and do whatever so on both sides of the uh sympathetic or the parasympathetic nervous system if we have too much of one or the other it creates issues but if we have spikes in one part of the nervous system like we have that collapse we recover we're like yeah we're good we're we're safe again then it's awesome it's like it's a it's building our resilience but in our modern day if we have the term chronic stress or we have this low level sympathetic nervous system response maybe you're sitting in traffic maybe your kids are crying you're stressed about work if we have that constantly constantly constantly chronic stress
it creates really big detrimental health effects okay so one way to get out of that is to have spikes and are either a sympathetic or parasympathetic and then we come down to a baseline equilibrium of our nervous system so a good way to think about it is if you're feeling anxious or you're feeling like a little uneasy and you go out for a run or you go for a bike ride or you go for a long paragliding flight you come and land and you're content you're like oh my god beers with my buddy like there's nothing else i'd rather do contentment that is the balance of our nervous system and it doesn't take going for a run or hiking or paragliding we can achieve that state through just laying in our bed or laying on the ground and doing 10 minutes of breath work so those weather days or the days you can't get out or there's just on inabilities you now have a tool to control how you feel in the comfort of your home or you know what you're doing and so that's the balance of our nervous system and it's really important to know where you're
going to
be and where you're going to be in the future so with the breath work the power of it is we can manipulate our nervous system to achieve the state we would like to go to so if we're up on launch maybe it's before a race maybe it's just before a flight and you've got these jittery nervousness that happens you can sit down and do three or four five minutes of a certain type of breathing that we'll get into a little bit later and it will pretty quickly calm your nervous system and you can feel that calm happening likewise if you take a big lapse in the air and you're still on this big flight but you're just feeling super anxious we can breathe in a certain way while we're flying that will physiologically calm us down not even mentally it's like we will calm down um
and on the other side of the coin if you're feeling lethargic you're feeling unmotivated you're like god i love flying but like for some reason i just not into it yeah we can breathe a certain way to you know amp that up or get ready so the cool part is that you have the ability to control your physiology you have the ability to determine how you feel and it's really powerful because it puts the power back into ourselves we're no longer looking at external factors to fix our issues we're like i'm gonna fix i'm gonna go within do a certain type of breath work and i'm gonna change the state i'm into the state i'd like to like to go to um what
i liked about it i mean in the i've done with you last year and then this morning here everybody says the same thing it's it's immediate and it's easy you know you you get the benefits instantly you lay down you start doing it and you're i mean we did a session for this recording a year ago where you know you can do things you can do it in certain ways where it's almost hallucinogenic i mean you come out of this just in this bliss state which is really quite good cool okay
yeah i see why you're so into it yeah
no it's a uh wim hof method uh one of wim's quotes is getting high on your own supply right so it's like that's
definitely a wim hof yeah so
when we mix you know like this morning uh we collected some people from the from camp we had determined you know me and you were going to go out and do a breath session and it's like hey guys want to come hey guys want to come in i think there was ended up being 10 of us or something and uh guided through some different breathwork techniques and then we jumped in the columbia river together as a tribe or a crew and experienced voluntary discomfort and i want to highlight the word voluntary discomfort we are putting ourselves with the with doing a cold plunge and doing this breathwork practice because we sometimes do long breath retentions we are voluntarily putting ourselves into discomfort
and by doing that we build resilience with our body we build this determination all right i'm going to do something hard for example i'm going to go it's this morning it's a little windy it's a little chilly here in chelan which usually doesn't happen but we went and jumped in the columbia that's probably high 40s and we floated down together as a 10 of us and everybody's like oh it's cold you know it's like getting all excited and jacked up and then we get out of the water we walk back up and then we we circle up and start doing the breathwork and then we go to the lake and we go down and it's like tribal movement this horse stance and huon and han and just building the camaraderie within it and in a very short amount of time you feel warm and you feel connected and you feel connected at a deeper level than you
know when we go to these paragliding events and we go fly we always want to you know tell everybody about our flight this is what my claps and this and i was like calling this line and it's and it's all of a sudden and i'm like I'm it's really cool you know like that's what we like to but at some level you know there's ability to go deeper with people and talk about things that um maybe aren't paraglider related but maybe that need to be chatted about for one party's sake or the other party's sake so i think i think we have something really special in the u.s community especially the comp scene and i think sharing these experiences that are not exactly flying but at a flying event really adds another layer and strength to that to that bond i
would say it it's kind of building connective tissue it's making the ligaments and tendons stronger somehow you know that are between all of us it's like you said it's allowing us it's allowing men especially who are not i'm not typically a very emotionally intelligent person i would say i'm not very emotionally available and it allows us to be more vulnerable more open to a man hug it's nice getting a hug
totally and you know the you take paragliding it's probably i don't know the exact numbers but you know probably 90 85 now it's shifting as participants are are men yeah and you know there's a smaller percentage of women here and we know that women are intelligent more emotionally emotionally available and intelligent and so we have this my majority group in this sport that we don't really get balanced out by the emotional intelligence of women even though man the numbers of women are fantastic in sport it's so fun to see um so we've got this sport where there we
we've got a core group that's not so emotionally intelligent or maybe just don't have the tools or the ability to go there or feel like they're not there or they're not there or they're not there or they're not there or they're not comfortable going there and then don't have an easy way to see how to go there with somebody okay so i think intuitively even as as guys we can feel when there's something going on with our body we can feel oh that you know my friend just seems a little off on launch for my friend it feels like he's dealing with something but we don't really know how to ask and we feel like i just won't say anything and i don't think that's the best method you
know i think there's a decent bit of mental health issues in this in the community in the world it's not just the paragliding community but here we are talking about paragliding so let's let's talk about that yeah okay um you know we we've had loss we've had trauma we've had injuries there's things with family there's things with friends outside of flying and sometimes we use flying as the escape so you know we're on the ground and we're like feeling all sad and depressed and we're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die but then we go flying and we we forget about that we're we're in the moment of what's happening and it feels really good and then we then we land and maybe we have like some weather days or we can't go flying or we got these work commitments and we kind of turn this like real kind of asshole on the ground because we think that this external thing of going flying is what's going to solve all our things and
if we can you know we can practice work for example we're going into a cold body of water water it doesn't take as much time as flying but it allows us to go
inward and like feel and and sense our own thoughts and feelings and you can also get to that state by talking to your buddies about something that is going on you know and if you don't know how to ask i think a suggestion i've used that seemed to work pretty well is if you know you have a buddy up on launch or you have a buddy that you feel like there's something going on with him you can approach him and say hey man it seems like something's a little off and i just want to tell you that hey last week i was up on launch and i was feeling a little off and i was just like having you know me and my wife had a fight or something happened with my kid and
so i just i don't know if that's what it is but i'm here if if you want to talk about something
and then you just got to shut up and sit there you know and allow that to transpire and maybe and the thing is that friend might say no no i'm fine okay but he's probably gonna if there's if he's not fine he's probably gonna come back to you later text you later and be like hey man i appreciate you this is what actually is going on so i think within the community normalizing the sense of like especially as guys like hey let's let's talk about deeper things besides you know our flight and how we did that i mean that's fun we can do that but if you see something and you can tell something's going on with somebody like let's just approach it
you
talked about this morning you were talking about how the importance of the way you breathe to transport hemoglobin and carbon dioxide and all these things i'd love to for you to revisit that just what's going on physiologically how how important it is to breathe through your nose and how that relates to performance and how that relates to your health and how that relates to your performance how that relates to uh being able high altitude training training in general why we feel so much better when we return to the coast some of that stuff yeah
all right so we'll dip into the science a little bit science nerds out there um and we'll kind of we'll keep this pretty pretty basic yeah so when we inhale we inhale air which is a mixture of oxygen and other molecules and when we inhale the air comes in it goes into our lungs and then it diffuses into our blood goes in these alveoli sacs at the end of our all these millions and millions of sacs at the end of our lungs our lungs aren't two bags they're millions and millions of small little bags okay so we inhale the air that has oxygen in it it diffuses into our blood and the oxygen molecule of oxygen will attach to our red blood cell and
in essence the glue that binds it is is called hemoglobin okay so that you can think of it too as like you know the oxygen's a little kid getting on a school bus and the red blood cell is the school bus and the hemoglobin is the seat belt okay the oxygen jumps on the bus the bus transports the oxygen to different parts of our body to be utilized in our muscles in ourselves okay then the bus stops at the you know the bus stop which is our muscle in our cell the oxygen gets to the blood cell and then the blood cell gets to the blood cell gets off and the carbon dioxide gets on and the bus drives back to our to our lungs and then that that carbon dioxide goes back into our lungs and then we expire the carbon dioxide back to the air that's in essence respiration okay now
there's this common myth that when you feel this if you do a breath hold and you feel this strong urge to take a breath and it's because there's a lack of oxygen in your system it's actually a lack of oxygen in your system and it's a lack of oxygen actually the opposite it's it's the buildup of carbon dioxide within our system which causes us to take a breath okay so when we relate this to performance and athletics we can increase the performance by building our carbon dioxide tolerance so doing long breath holds we train our body to be able to withstand the buildup of carbon dioxide within our body
because when we breathe in oxygen that oxygen through combustion produces energy and the byproduct of energy is carbon dioxide and water and then we expel that okay that's why when you're running an endurance race you got to pee because
you're burning right and the one of the byproducts carbon dioxide the other byproducts water okay so we can train ourselves to have a higher threshold of carbon dioxide in the body and that allows us to better utilize the oxygen in our body and we can train ourselves to have a higher threshold of carbon dioxide in the body and we can train ourselves to have a higher threshold of carbon okay so to better explain this uh almost everybody humans 98 or 90 98 or 99 percent of our blood is saturated with oxygen so that red the red blood cell that's transporting through our body the bus it's filled with oxygen okay and it's circulating around however the only way the bus lets the oxygen off is by if there's enough enough carbon dioxide to replace it okay so we've got a lot of we've got this bus driving around with a bunch of oxygen and if we have a large um if we have a large amount of carbon dioxide in our body already from exercising and the carbon dioxide switch places with the oxygen and we um get fresh oxygen into our muscles and ourselves otherwise just carrying a lot of dead oxygen basically it's not dead oxygen it's just not letting it go okay it's just staying it's staying on the bus okay there's no bus stops yeah um
and so when it comes to uh performance if we can allow our body to build up more carbon dioxide within it then when we take fresh oxygen in that oxygen will switch places really fast with the carbon dioxide and go into our muscles and ourselves okay so another way to look at it if it's your it's the start of the season you're going on your first mountain bike ride you're going on your first run and you're out there and you're like you're
breathing really hard it's probably in and out through your mouth and you're doing that because you're trying to blow off carbon dioxide that's being produced in the body through the mouth because you're not trained properly you don't you haven't built up that tolerance to withstand carbon dioxide however then you do a couple trainings and then eventually you find yourself running or biking for 10 20 30 miles and you're barely breathing that's because you've built up the tolerance to withstand the carbon dioxide in your body and when you breathe in fresh oxygen you are able to
switch the so the oxygen gets off the bus and the carbon dioxide gets on and then you're able to feed your muscles and cells more effectively with the fresh oxygen coming in
so if you're going throughout your day and just breathing shallow breaths in and out through your mouth you're pretty much blowing off all your carbon dioxide so you have tons of oxygen circulating through your body but it's not being utilized it's just going around on the bus and never getting off so there's a lot of ways to do that so i'm going to show you how to do that there's a really good book called breathe by james nester that talks about this and there's also also the oxygen advantage by patrick mckuin when you're going through your day to day you should be breathing slowly in and out through your nose the nose is meant to breathe the mouth is meant for talking and eating okay and there's a couple important things that the nose does when you inhale through the nose it actually humidifies the air so if you're living out west or you live in a dry climate it humidifies the air it also
conditions the air so if it's really cold air warm enough it's really hot air will cool it down so when it comes into our lungs it's had a better temperature and then we have a nitric oxide that resides in our nasal cavity and when we breathe in through our nose we get nitric oxide into our blood system it actually dilates our blood vessels and it helps move oxygen more effectively throughout our body and it also filters pollution or you know pollutants in the air so there's huge reasons to breathe in and out through your nose and the nose is meant for breathing and the mouth's meant for eating and talking this
is a really big deal with kids and that often if you know if kids have adenoid problems or tongue ties or and it's becoming more and more prevalent as i understand it across the board you can't get it to now it's a whole other discussion but you know whether that's pesticides or bad food or whatever but uh you know if you're a mouth breather especially as a kid you don't develop a jawline you don't develop a good immune system there's there's a big cascading of bad if you don't if you breathe through your mouth especially at night you really want to
snoring
yeah and then some people say hey my nose is always clogged i can't breathe through my nose like it's just clogged that's a byproduct of breathing through your mouth right so you may have heard i'm a little popular as taping your mouth so if you tape your mouth and we're talking about like a little piece of medical tape right in the you know small piece of medical tape right in the center of your lips yeah we're not you know taking duct tape yeah right want to come even though maybe if maybe if you're out listening and your your partner snores you maybe want to do that to them you know i'm going to shut you up um but no uh closing the mouth and breathing in and out through the nose will actually if you do it and force yourself to do it it will clear your nasal cavity so if you feel like your nose is always blocked and you kind of force yourself to breathe in and out through your nose it will start to clear
um and we can also taper melanias shut at night because for those of you that wake up in the morning with a dry mouth you're breathing in and out through your mouth all night okay and so we sleep for eight hours a night so if we can practice breathing in and out through our nose at night you know subconsciously with our mouth being taped shut then that trans that goes into your day-to-day life so it's like we can train all night to do that right and the crazy thing is we take like 60,000 breaths a day so even these things we're talking about with breath work and changing your breathing patterns breathing in and out through the nose it might seem like so minute and such a nuanced thing to somebody oh how is what do you mean i need to learn how to breathe properly it's like this
is something you do 60,000 times a day the smallest change can affect your life in such a positive way right so it's like what other things you do 60,000 times a day you know maybe you take 10,000 steps not 60,000 right you know so what
are let's give people a couple of action so you're on launch and you're low motivation you're you're not you're not feeling it you'd rather just be down in bed and wake up right whatever uh you're you're not stoked what what can you do yeah
so if we look at this you're unmotivated you're lower you're probably having more firing of your parasympathetic nervous system you're not unmotivated but you know you're going on a big flight or you've got a race or you know do something like that and in that sense even though we just talked about breathing in and out through the nose we can use mouth breathing in short stints of training in order to elect a different change in our nervous system so for that situation and i can take you through a couple rounds here is we're going to do and i want to preface this that breath work and breathing techniques can be super powerful and they're meant to be very powerful and they're meant to be done lying down or if you have a comfortable seated position never while driving um this this exercise never while paragliding i have another one that is is fine to do while you're flying but not this one and never around the water in the water driving your car on the chairlift they can be very profound okay so let's just do these in a comfortable environment but let's take this for example you're up on launch you're feeling tired and lethargic all right step away off launch let's go go in the trees find a find a spot sit down lie down close your eyes and you can go ahead and do this gavin and you can do one round you can do two rounds you can three rounds whichever so in order to help stimulate our sympathetic nervous system and get more energy we're going to breathe at a faster pace in and out through the mouth okay and this is a quick this is only going to take a couple minutes and we're going to do about 15 to 20 deep breaths in and out through the mouth okay
the last one we'll take a couple of minutes and we're going to do about 15 to 20 deep breaths in we're going to hold at the top of the breath and while you're holding at the top of the breath you can start to engage the muscles of your pelvis your lower back your abdominals and start to imagine that energy you created while doing the breathing is going out the crown of your head okay esoteric as it sounds it's just a good visualization so go if you if you want to try this at home again lying down or seated not driving doing this please go go ahead and close your eyes take a nice deep breath fully in open
up your mouth and let it go we just take a couple breaths here to settle in fully in let
it go last
one fully in let
it go
now we're going to do 15 deep breaths in and out through the mouth a quicker pace moving quite a bit of air and as we're doing this imagine you're building energy within your body okay so here we go inhale let it go inhale let it go inhale let it go inhale let it go inhale let it go Inhale.
Let it go. Inhale.
Let it go. Inhale.
Let it go. Five more. Inhale. Let it go. Inhale.
Let it go. Inhale.
Let it go. Two more. Here we go. Inhale. Let it go. Last one. Full breath in. Hold at the top of the breath. Sip in a little bit more air. Hold here. Now start to engage the muscles of your pelvic, your lower back, your abdominals, your middle back, your chest, your upper back.
Imagine that energy coming up to the crown of your head. We're
going to hold for five, four, three, two. Let it go.
I feel so good.
I feel so good.
That was just one round. Maybe that took a couple minutes. You can do another round. I feel so good.
We're really just trying to change our state. If we're in one state and we want to go to a different state, it's a tool to just shift how we feel.
Get high on your own supply. Totally, man.
I feel so good. Hopefully, you all did that with us at home. That feels amazing. Okay. So now, you're in the sky. It's Lee. It's rough. You're not digging it. But you know this is a good day. You want to keep flying. You just need to reset in the air. You're leaning forward. We all do this. We're tense. We're too hard on the bees. We're janking things around. We're too handsy. There's just too much energy. There's too much energy. There's
too much energy.
There's too much
energy. There's too
much noise in the system. What can we do then?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think this is a super powerful thing that we can utilize in coming back to focusing on our breathing. Because when we're flying in turbulent conditions, flying in Lee, we take a big collapse. At the end of the day, we're the pilot in command. We need to right the ship. We need to change and shift our state to more calm and clarity.
For the most part, the conditions that we're in, depending on your skill level,
we can manage it if we write our mental aspect of it. Whether you're a competition pilot, whether you're newer, at some extent, you got to be flying in the right conditions. But sometimes shit happens and we get in the Lee and we get a big collapse and we're like, oh my God, I want to go land. Maybe if you're flying in the middle of the desert and it's the middle of the day, you don't want to go land. We need to write the ship. We need to write the ship as quickly as possible. And so we can do a different breathing technique that utilizes nasal breathing with some mouth breathing that will help calm our nervous system down. So the one we just did energized us, made me feel a little woozy, a little high. This is to calm down our nervous system. So
what we're doing and what I like to call this is called pyramid breathing. So imagine a pyramid of trying. Imagine you're on a big FAI triangle.
Use triangles. Everybody likes triangles.
So what we're going to do, and we're not going to close our eyes because we're flying paragliders, you know, we're still in the mix, but for this example, you can close your eyes if you're not flying,
but we're going to inhale through our nose for five seconds, inhale two, three, four, and then we're going to exhale through our mouth. With pursed lips. So like pretend you're blowing out of a straw, okay. For five seconds. And then we're going to hold our breath for five seconds, very short breath. Okay. And what this does is it helps you focus on your breathing and takes your mind off, you know, the fear or the stress or whatever. And it's, it can be very powerful. Okay. So we'll run through this with you, Gavin. Yeah. Um, if you're listening at home again, if you're not flying a paraglider, you can go ahead and close your eyes. And if you're listening to this while flying a paraglider, you need to seek help.
Actually, that's really rad if you are in school. Yeah, if you're doing that,
get on ya.
Um, so go ahead and close your eyes.
Again, we're going to breathe in through our nose, and then we're going to breathe out through our mouth with pursed lips, like we're blowing out of a straw. Then we're going to hold, okay. Five seconds on each. So go ahead and inhale two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Inhale to the nose, two, three, four. Exhale to the mouth with pursed lips, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. four inhale through the nose two three four exhale with first lips flowing out of a straw three four hold two three four one more time inhale two three four exhale two three four hold two two nice
full breath in through the nose let that go ah
it's so nice so what is the what's the physiology there what are we doing that's so so much different yeah
so um if we breathe in and out through our mouth it's very stimulating it's very more sympathetic it's really easy to way to think about it i'm gonna breathe in and out through my mouth and probably have this more like sympathetic nervous system response when we breathe in and out through our nose it's more it's more calm and it um and the blowing out of the mouth with the straw has to do it actually activates our it's called the vagus nerve it's our 10th cranial nerve we have 12 12 cranial nerves nerves i'm sure that's right i studied gross anatomy a long time ago um our 10th cranial nerve is called our vagus nerve and that nerve innervates and it actually passes through our heart um kidneys all these different organs within our body so if we can stimulate that vagus nerve which is our 10th cranial nerve then it innervates to all these different parts of our body and
that's how that's how we're able to get a parasympathetic response and calm down same thing happens when you go into cold water and you bring that water up over your shoulders is it stimulates that 10th cranial nerve of the vagus nerve and then it helps us relax so when i take people into cold plunges you know some people they don't want to go under their shoulders i'm like trust me it's gonna be better if you're on the shoulders or if you dip your head first it's going to be better if you're on the shoulders or if you dip your head first it's going to be better if you're on the shoulders or if you dip your head first it's going to be better it can be it helps calm you down actually so by doing that breath work and blowing out like you're blowing out of a straw that's that's that's stimulating that so it it's not just a mental thing it's like physiologically calming your system down and that's why it works and you can you can feel that or if you tried this with us and so imagine you're out you're out flying you do two rounds of that in the pyramid breathing in through the nose through the mouth hold
you do two rounds of that in the pyramid breathing in through the mouth hold physiologically you're calming down
and you're
taking your mind off the stress or that collapse or whatever because at the end of the day you're up in the sky you still got to deal with this and what happens is when we have accidents is something happen to collapse then you're nervous then you're scared and it's like and it feels like the conditions just got 10 times as strong and then the wind got stronger and it didn't that's what happened you're having this mental and it didn't that's what happened you're you're having this mental exercise in your brain and you're and you're having this mental exercise in your brain and you're you're scared and that's fine yeah we all get scared but scared and fear is part of the sport but if we can train ourselves to manage our fear in real time then we will reduce the amount of incidences and totally accidents like extremely fast yeah and if we build this awareness
of ourselves and build this train ourselves to know okay i feel fear coming as opposed to fear of ourselves and build this train ourselves to know okay i feel fear coming as opposed to fear um um
sayMgOanteenseff 1950 fur victory way out but at that moment you got to be like you know take a breath take a second if you have a second which we usually do yeah these things don't fly that fast yeah and look around and it will open up your vision and so if you train yourself i'm feeling fear come in i have a tool to mitigate that as opposed to fears here i have no fucking idea what's going on anymore that's going to save you from you know packing in or something worse happening yeah and i think that's what you know as you experience to talk about experience you gain that and you gain that experience to manage your fear and manage the risk but for new pilots out there it's like we can change our physiology and experience this relief from anxiety in a very stressful environment i mean we're pilots we yeah it's gonna happen it's gonna happen cold
how does cold fit into all of this yeah
so when we relate back to the wim hof method there's three pillars there's breath work there's cold and there's mindset okay so we we touched a little on the breath work that wasn't wim hof method breath work but that's other breath work that we can practice in this setting in relation to paragliding pilots that i think are most effective
going into the cold water okay the cold water is an ability and a chance for you to voluntarily go into a stressful situation okay so
if you want to get stronger muscles you go to the gym and lift weights makes sense if you want to be more resilient you put yourself in stressful environments voluntarily just like you go to the gym voluntarily and you train that mental muscle because guess what if you go out and you're paragliding and some shit hits the fan and you haven't trained your mind to deal with shit hitting the fan in a safe environment then bad shit can happen okay so the ice bath it could be different you can go sauna whatever like that but it's not the same thing you can go to the gym and you have to whatever but the going into cold water it's funny you'll be in the supermarket you'll see these magazines say like be present live in the moment meditate mindfulness and you're like for some people they're like yeah i just close my eyes and i sit there and then it's like i keep thinking about thoughts and this and this is like this doesn't work you
know mine but
i challenge you to go find a cold plunge or freezing body of water go get in there and think about your taxes or your problems with your girlfriend or the problems with your kids like impossible it doesn't happen you're you are you are a hundred percent in the present moment because you are it's like you kind of go into the survival mode okay and i would and if we can train ourselves to go into this survival mode of extreme uncomfortableness and be able to recognize how our body responds to that then when we are paragliding and we go into this mode of like extreme discomfort falling you out of the sky wind rotor collapses then now instead of that being a new situation now we're like oh i was in that ice bath i was stressed out but i was able to regulate oh i'm in the sky i'm stressed out why can't i regulate here and
i and i think you can't i think you can and not not every situation but i you know most of the accidents if you go back and look at them it's usually pilot error yeah yeah i mean it's not gear yeah yeah i mean gear is great and but it's mostly pilot error yeah and it comes with experience but it also comes with the mental capacity to deal with what is in front of you and so likewise if you just go jump into cold water there's a huge physiological response huge it's huge if you take a big whack and you come down you have a huge physiological response those aren't different our body doesn't know if we're like you know we're having a response because we jump in ice water voluntarily or we have a response because we've started falling out of the sky but
we we can train ourselves because there's similar responses so we can train ourself using the cold to deal with that when we're up we're out flying and so it just allows you to be more calm and cool and collected when shit hits the fan so again just think about you go to the gym to lift weights to train your muscles and be stronger we go into the cold water to train our minds to be more resilient under extreme stress right
i mean and is this recreating in a sense who we once were as a as a people as a humanity as a society you know we have we are we've gotten pretty good at surrounding ourselves with not having to deal with uh there's plenty of stress but we're not having to deal with fight or flight we're not running from the tigers anymore you know we we we create more and more and more stuff to make life easier and so we've lost that you know campfire we've lost the we've we've lost the there's not many things that are going to eat us or kill us or uh there's many things that are going to kill us slowly yeah not fast anymore and so we we're not uh you know these
of things jumping in the cold water is very to me primal makes you feel alive
oh yeah makes you feel alive and and quickly and yeah no it's a it's a great point when we look at our modern society um you know if it's if it's too hot in our house we turn the ac on if it's too cold we turn the heat on yes we didn't used to be able to do that and now we're we're living in this sense of comfort in this very small you know 67 to 70 degrees nice warm
showers yeah showers for my wife yeah exactly
but i think our modern society has correlated being healthy with being comfortable right and i would i would say abundant comfort is killing us yeah okay it's like abundant comfort more food more relaxation more this it's it's it's not what our species was developed on our species with on scarcity exactly yeah hunter gatherer caveman um and so while you know not many of us would probably desire to go back and live in caves with our only heating source of fire and you know pounding on our chest and doing that somehow we have to mix in with this with modern society and modern society is saying here's a comfort here's a comfort here's a convenience here's convenience have this convenience have it and you'll be happy in here and then we're like oh
yeah distract distract yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
yeah we got all this comfort and convenience but i feel empty yeah and i don't feel like full but i have my car and my paragliders and this and i got everything i feel empty well you feel empty because you're too fucking comfortable you know and like i love comfortable things i love it but we have to mix with discomfort right we have to voluntarily go into uncomfortable things we have to go you know like you might have that epic the like you might have that epic the fun that's like you know hiking for 30 miles and you got blisters and you're beat up and you're exhausted and you're hungry and blah blah blah and it's like those
are the best memories yes the next day is awesome that's
that's what i did that's what we do you know and it's like you know i'm probably your best vacation wasn't that memory of sitting on the beach sipping a mark you know a margarita it was probably like when you went on a fishing trip and then the storm hit and this happened and blah blah and i was like oh my god i'm so tired i'm so tired i'm so tired i'm so tired i was just trying to survive yeah and that's like what it comes down to and like when you jump in the cold water you're really just you're just trying to survive yeah and then you survive the experience you're like holy shit like whoa i i feel alive yes this is it it's not all the stuff it's here it's in within me simple yeah didn't
need anything to do it exactly you don't even need a pair of shorts that my my gym recently installed a cold plunge and i was surprised how the brutalness backs off pretty quick you know the first few times it's just oh god i hope i can make it 30 seconds and then really quickly you're going three four minutes and it's still pretty brutal but it's i mean really quickly yeah at the end of the week you're you're you're you're going for a sustained amount of time and the getting out feels this it just feels blissful both ways the 30 seconds and
then you're like oh my god i'm so tired i'm so tired i'm
the three minutes it's just you just you feel like you've accomplished something which is weird you're sitting in the cold water but you've come out feeling really invigorated stoked happy and yeah i survived i made it yeah it's quite an easy way to you know just go in cold water i
mean it's the fastest and
it's scary you know to go do it yeah
oh this is gonna be brutal i mean i've been doing this it's a hack that's what i like yeah i mean i've been doing this for eight years and every time before i go in the cold water or take a cold shower i like have i have this mental talk with myself it's like yeah okay and it's like never really gets that much easier but you get more used to the ability to do it and that is building your mental resilience so that when you have something else happening your boss is yelling at you why if the kids you got all this stuff instead of like oh i don't want to deal with this you're like okay let's just deal with it let's let's go like because you build this mental fortitude to in order to do that so while you say you know very quickly the it gets better it's a little easier it's because you're building that you're exercising that mental fortitude muscle and that's that's why your perception of it is is easier so it's it's super powerful and it only takes a couple minutes it's like all these things like the breath work you can go into deeper sessions but you got five minutes two minutes one minute i don't care how much time you know just focusing on your breath because when you start to build that ability to recognize subtle changes and differences and like have a moment with just yourself then
you get this like new autonomy like well i'm more in control of my life than i thought like i can i can do hard things i can go in that cold shower or i can go in that cold water or i'm more aware of what's the subtle changes that are happening in my body because i did one or two minutes of breath work and just kind of focused on myself and then it's like oh when i do that then i show up as a better person and then all of a sudden you know my wife's not as agitated with me my kids seem happier around me my flying's improving wow life just feels like a little bit nicer but we often think the answer is outside of us and it's hippy dippy it sounds it's like we're we're right here like we have our own medicine cap we
need to deal with a lot of the things but it starts with us you know it starts with that like self-reflection and the ability to do things you don't necessarily want to do for very short spurts of time because there's always stuff we don't want to do and we can keep putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and then at some point it just drags on us it's like it's like flying on full bar and like pulling some brake it's like so inefficient and you're pulling and then it collapses you know you pull too hard on those two liners yeah you get a collapse now you're spiraling down you're like oh i gotta fix this and you just lost more altitude and i like the analogy too if you're dealing with hard stuff that you don't want to deal with it's like or
you're have a negative attitude towards something then fly to the fly out of it you know like when we're paragliding we're going on big cross country flights we're racing what what do you do when you get in the sink leave sink to where to lift okay so your day-to-day life use this as an example when you're feeling crappy or if you're feeling negative for this push on some bar and get out of that sink this this downward trend to the lift you know like utilize your same principles in paragliding in your day-to-day life and whether that is you know there's something going on with your kids or you're doing something to your wife okay to leave that sink go jump in a cold plunge go do a little bit breath work find the lift quick change quick change yeah don't dwell on it just quick change go yeah
you know you
dwell on it you just start going down right so
yeah great stuff jeremy thanks for sharing all this knowledge and your passion for this with uh with me our community in this community i really appreciate it it's very powerful and uh that made me feel nice
thank you so much for having me glad to be able to do this again and um yeah we're excited for another another couple more days of racing if
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