mike

“powerful story showcasing shiitake’s healing properties involves a young teenage celebrity I know who was quietly suffering from a particularly pervasive and tenacious case of acne. Though he was using aggressive treatments, his skin was increasingly becoming a source of stress on his professional life as a public figure. The young man started taking 1,500 milligrams of shiitake extract, stopped taking his prescription, and in about a month his skin had cleared considerably, improving until the acne was completely gone.”
― Tero Isokauppila, Healing Mushrooms: A Practical and Culinary Guide to Using Mushrooms for Whole Body Health

“Around this time, a few thousand miles west, in the industrial factory town of Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a gangly, five-foot-eight-inch runner named Emil Zátopek was experimenting with his own breath-restriction techniques. Zátopek never wanted to become a runner. When the management at the shoe factory where he was working elected him for a local race, he tried to refuse. Zátopek told them he was unfit, that he had no interest, that he’d never run in a competition. But he competed anyway and came in second out of 100 contestants. Zátopek saw a brighter future for himself in running, and began to take the sport more seriously. Four years later he broke the Czech national records for the 2,000, 3,000, and 5,000 meters. Zátopek developed his own training methods to give himself an edge. He’d run as fast as he could holding his breath, take a few huffs and puffs and then do it all again. It was an extreme version of Buteyko’s methods, but Zátopek didn’t call it Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing. Nobody did. It would become known as hypoventilation training. Hypo, which comes from the Greek for “under” (as in hypodermic needle), is the opposite of hyper, meaning “over.” The concept of hypoventilation training was to breathe less. Over the years, Zátopek’s approach was widely derided and mocked, but he ignored the critics. At the 1952 Olympics, he won gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. On the heels of his success, he decided to compete in the marathon, an event he had neither trained for nor run in his life. He won gold. Zátopek would claim 18 world records, four Olympic golds and a silver over his career. He would later be named the “Greatest Runner of All Time” by Runner’s World magazine. “He does everything wrong but win,” said Larry Snyder, a track coach at Ohio State at the time. —”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“BEFORE STOPWATCHES, cinder tracks, and perfect records, man ran for the purest of reasons: to survive. The saying goes that “every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or an antelope—when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” There are few instincts more natural than the body in full motion as it races across a field or through the trees. From the beginning, we were all made to run. In days past, when “survival of the fittest” meant exactly this, the only measure of the race was whether the hunted reached safety before being overtaken. Seconds and tenths of seconds had no meaning.”
― Neal Bascomb, The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It

“Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art