You've been breathing wrong your whole life. PJ Nestler showed us how to fix it.
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You've been breathing wrong your whole life. PJ Nestler showed us how to fix it.
XPT's head of performance led the FOC community through a live breath work session — and left us with a toolkit we'll actually use. Here's what stuck.
From our FOC semimonthly community call · Featuring PJ Nestler, Head of Performance at XPT & FitLab
If you joined the call expecting a calm, meditative experience, you got something better: a complete rearrangement of your blood chemistry, a two-and-a-half minute breath hold you probably didn't think you were capable of, and a framework for breathing that actually makes sense.
PJ Nestler has coached everyone from 72-year-old beginners to elite UFC fighters and special forces operators. He's been doing breath work seminars with Eric for years — on Instagram Live, at XPT expeditions in Kauai, and now, live with us. The man knows how to meet people where they are. And that, it turns out, is also the entire philosophy behind how he teaches breathing.
First, ditch the dogma
PJ opened with something that reframed the whole conversation. Most breath work is taught like a religion — you're either a Wim Hof person, a yoga person, a box breathing person. Pick your camp.
His term for it at XPT is performance breathing — a system built around understanding what state your body is in and what outcome you're trying to create. The breath is the lever. You just have to know which direction to pull it and when.
That framing alone is worth the hour. Once you stop thinking about breathing as a fixed thing you either do right or wrong, and start thinking about it as a dial you can adjust, everything else he taught clicked into place.
What we actually did on the call
PJ took us through what he calls exploration breathing — not a single protocol with a single goal, but a guided tour across the full spectrum. Slow awareness work, rib mechanics, CO2 buildup, power breathing, long breath holds, and finally a down-regulation finish. By the end, a significant chunk of the group had held their breath for two and a half minutes on an exhale. Most of us would have guessed we could do maybe half that.
Here's the science behind what happened: when we breathed very slowly, CO2 built up in the blood and triggered that desperate urge to breathe — the air hunger feeling. That wasn't a sign you were running out of oxygen. It was your body reacting to rising carbon dioxide. When we shifted to fast, powerful breathing, we scrubbed that CO2 out — which is what caused the tingliness, lightheadedness, and mild euphoria some people felt. Then we manipulated the blood chemistry enough to make those long holds possible. The body is more adaptable than most of us realize.
The protocols — save these
PJ walked us through a handful of techniques that are immediately usable. Here are the ones worth keeping in your back pocket:
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Down-regulation Combat 3160 Before bed Post-workout Ice bath Inhale through the nose for 3 counts, brief pause, exhale through the teeth (hissing) for 6 counts. The 1:2 ratio activates 8 of the 11 parasympathetic triggers in the body. Scale up to 4-in / 8-out as it becomes easier. |
Cortisol spike recovery The downshift Anger Panic High stress Don't try to go calm immediately — meet your nervous system where it's at. Take a few intense, fast breaths (like you just sprinted), dial it down one notch, then ease into 3160. Jumping straight to slow breathing from a level-10 state is like being told to "just calm down." |
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Pre-competition Respiratory warm-up Race day Hyrox Big events Slow nasal breaths with lateral rib expansion — 360-degree inflation, not chest rising. Restores full lung volume (you can lose 10–30% from postural restriction alone) and primes the diaphragm. Then adjust intensity based on whether you need to ramp up or calm nerves. |
Nasal breathing training The ceiling lift Zone 2 runs Endurance Pick one workout a week and make nasal breathing the only priority — not the pace, not the distance. Run right at the edge where you'd break nasal breathing, and hold there. Everything else becomes secondary. The ceiling slowly lifts over time. |
The moment that hit different
Dylan asked PJ what to do when your cortisol spikes hard — an emergency, a fight, a panic moment — and you need to bring it down fast. PJ's answer reframed something a lot of us probably get wrong.
The instinct most of us have is to try slow breathing immediately when we're activated. But physiologically, that's the wrong sequence. The downshift protocol — breathe intensely first, then step it down in stages — is what PJ uses with fighters backstage before a bout and with people panicking in the ice bath. Same principle, wildly different contexts.
What we took away
- —Breathing isn't one thing. It's a spectrum of tools matched to states and outcomes — stop treating it as a single practice.
- —The air hunger feeling during slow breathing isn't oxygen depletion. It's CO2 rising. Knowing that makes it much easier to sit with.
- —You can hold your breath a lot longer than you think — when you understand how to manipulate the chemistry first.
- —Combat 3160 is the one protocol PJ keeps coming back to. Simple ratio, outsized return. Worth drilling until it's automatic.
- —For nasal breathing in training, make it the priority or don't bother — you can't have two things be the priority at once.
- —Pre-competition breath work should start with a respiratory warm-up, same as you'd warm up your muscles. Most people skip this entirely.
PJ also flagged that XPT's app has guided breath sessions sorted by goal and duration — so if you can't remember the protocols, you can just tell it what you want ("downregulate, five minutes") and let it guide you. Given that most of us will forget half of this by tomorrow, that's a genuinely useful on-ramp.
Their expedition series is worth knowing about too. Rim to rim is already sold out, but they've got a Mount Temple climb in July and an ultra marathon through the Tetons in September. If you run with this crew, you already know that's your kind of suffering.
This recap is from our FOC semimonthly community call. PJ Nestler is Head of Performance at XPT and FitLab. You can find the XPT app and upcoming expeditions at xptlife.com.