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.
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, she was like a different person. She started doing the laundry. Yeah. Yeah. 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
Breathwork, cold plunging, the Wim Hof Method has been super powerful in my progression as a pilot, and um, I just, 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 help you 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 breathwork is, so we are a big electrical system. We send impulses from the air, we send impulses 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, 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, and that 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
wherever you'd like like to be. So with the breathwork, 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 or 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 breath and you're not feeling nervous and you're collapse 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, is 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 in to the state I'd like to like to go to." Um, what
I liked about it, I mean, in the work 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
it and
it's just
Really quite cool, 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 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 in a cold plunge and doing this breathwork 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 this like tribal movement, this horse stance and hoon 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, and this is why my claps, oh, and this, and I was like, "Oh, this line," and it's—and it's really cool, you know? Like, that's what we like, too, but at some level, you know, there's ability to go deeper with people and talk about things that Maybe aren't paragliding 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, uh, 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, or feel uncomfortable 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 way to do it; 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 depressed, 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, yeah, 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 breathwork, 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 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 that, 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 some thing, 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, 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, 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 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 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 is the bus stop, which is our muscle in our cell, and the oxygen is the bus stop 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 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 because
We're, 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 gotta pee, so
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. Okay, so in order to do that, we need to have a higher threshold of carbon dioxide. Okay, so to better explain this, uh, almost everybody, humans, 98 or 90, 98 or 99 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 with oxygen, it. Okay, so we've got this bus driving around with a bunch of oxygen, and if we have a large, 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 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 really good book called Breathe by James Nestor that talks about this, and there's also also The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown. 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 at 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, which we can't get into 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
be able to breathe through your mouth, and you want to be able to breathe through your mouth. 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 become 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? You want to, 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, 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, it will start to clear. Um, and we can also tape our mouths 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, a 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 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 sixty thousand times a day? You know, maybe you take ten thousand steps, not sixty thousand, 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. You didn't 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. Maybe you're not motivated, but you know you're going on a big flight, or you've got a race, or you 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 done lying down, or if you have a comfortable seated position, never while driving.
This exercise, never while paragliding. I have another one that 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. 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 in the trees, 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 do 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
is 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. That's 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 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, so
So that was just one round, maybe that took a couple minutes. Yeah, oh man, you can do another round. So good. So we're really just trying to change our state, like if we're in state and we want to go to a different state, and it's a—it's a tool to just shift how we feel.
Yeah, on your own supply, totally, yeah.
It feels so good. Hopefully y'all did that with us at home. That feels amazing. Okay, so now, uh, you're, you're in the sky. It's lee, it's rough. You're not digging it. Um, but you know, it's, this is a good day. You want to keep flying. You just need to reset in the air. You're, you're, you're leaning forward. We all do this, and, and we're tense. We're too hard on the bees. We're janking things around. We're too, we're too handsy. There's just too much energy. There's too much, there, 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, we can utilize in coming back to focusing on our breathing, because when we're, you know, flying in turbulent conditions, flying in lee, we take a big collapse. You know, at the end of the day, we're the pilot in command, like we need to right the ship, okay? We need to change and shift our state to more calm and clarity, okay? And 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, okay? Whether you're a competition pilot, whether you're newer, I mean, 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, you know? So we need to write the ship, and 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, okay?
So, um, what we're doing—and what I like to call this is called pyramid breathing, okay? So, imagine a pyramid, a triangle. Imagine you're on a big FAI triangle.
These triangles, everybody likes triangles.
So what, what we're going to do? And we're not going to close our eyes because we're flying paragliders, you know, which is a good thing, but we're not going to close our eyes because we're still in the mix. But for this example, you, you can't 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's going to make us feel like we're breathing through our nose. That helps you focus on your breathing and takes your mind off, you know, the fear or the stress or whatever 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 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 yeah
So go ahead and close your eyes again. We're gonna breathe in through our nose, and then we're gonna breathe out through our mouth with pursed lips, like we're blowing out of a straw. Then we're gonna hold. Okay, five seconds on each. So go ahead and inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Inhale to the nose, two, three, four. Exhale to the mouse with pursed lips, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Inhale to the nose, two, three, four.
Exhale with pursed lips, blowing out of a straw, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. One more time. Inhale, two Three, four, exhale. Two, three, four, hold. Two, nice.
Full breath in through the nose, let that go.
Ah, 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 write it. 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 calming, 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 there's 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 the shoulders. I'm like, "Trust me, it's going to be better if you go on the shoulders, or if you dip your head first." It's—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 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, yes. And so imagine you're out—you're out flying—and you do two rounds of that in the pyramid, breathing in through the nose, 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 have got to deal with this. Yeah, and what happens is when we have accidents, is something happened to collapse, then you're nervous, then you're scared, and it's like, then it feels like the condition's just got 10 times as strong, and then the wind got stronger, and it didn't. That's what happened. You're, 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 ourself 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 take over. Yeah, so the difference is if you feel the fear coming and you recognize that, then you can go, oh, I feel this is fear, I have this tool to mitigate the fear. As opposed to this, fear came over me. Now my vision's narrowing. Now, all of a sudden, I'm out of control. Now, all of a sudden, I'm trying to come in and land, and like, that tree looks like the only... when there's literally a field over there, there's a field over there. You can go back down when there's a field, and so your vision narrows and you're like, "I have no 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, and I'm feeling fear come in, I have a tool to mitigate that. As opposed to, "Fear's here, I have no fucking idea what's going on anymore," that's going to save you from, you know, packing it 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 breathwork, there's cold, and there's mindset. Okay? So, we we touched a little on the breathwork—that wasn't Wim Hof Method breathwork, but that's other breathwork 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. Make 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 stimulus—you can go sauna, 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, this doesn't work. You
know mind 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 100 in the present moment because you were. It's like you kind of go into the survival mode, okay? And I would, and if we can train ourselves to to go into this survival mode of extreme uncomfortableness and be able to recognize how our body responds to that. When we are paragliding and we go into this mode of like extreme discomfort, falling 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't not not every situation, but I, you know, most of the accidents, if you go back and look at them, it's usually pilot air. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's not gear. Yeah, yeah, I mean, gear is great, and but it's mostly pilot air, 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
Whack, and you come down, you have a huge physiological response. The responses 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.
Again, just think about: you go to the gym to lift weights, to train your muscles to 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 a 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.
So we we're not, uh, you know, these kinds 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 of comfort, in this very small, you know, 67 to 70 degrees, you're like, this is prima, 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 was, you know, felt to be challenged on scarcity. Exactly. 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, 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 type two 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, 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 then this happened and blah blah and 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 and 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 parachute, you don't even need a parachute, you don't even need our 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 sustained amount of time, and you're going for a long time, and you're going for a long time, and you're getting out feels this, it just feels blissful both ways. The 30 seconds, 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 in your life, the your boss is 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 breathwork, 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 breathwork 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 are our own pharmacy 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 brakes; it's like so inefficient and you're pulling, and then all, 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, 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 your wife, okay?
To leave that sink, go jump in a cold plunge, go do a little bit of 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 and 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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