Dr. Andy Galpin

So the opposite direction, right?

We're too basic.

And so it slows the heart rate down.

So every time you take a breath in, your heart rate jumps up a little bit.

Every time you take a breath out,

It goes down a little bit.

So if I'm altering my respiratory rate, I'm then altering my heart rate.

And this is why things like HRV are so intrinsically tied to things like respiratory rate.

I can't let us move off this point without saying one final thing.

I know we want to get to our three I's here in one second.

But a lot of people are aware, and in the coaching world, people use HRV very often, and there's a lot of data to support this.

There's a lot of critical information we can get for assessing, say, exercise volume, fatigue, readiness, and things like that.

Tons of value there.

But I don't think enough people are paying attention to respiratory rate.

This is really highlighted in a paper that just came out in the last few months, and so I'd like to bring this to your attention.

What they did is looked at college-age students, and they simply measured their respiratory rate.

And one of the things that they found that's interesting is for every breath,

Per minute that increase.

So if a respiratory rate went from 15 breaths per minute to 16 breaths per minute, they increase their likelihood of experiencing stress by 1.25 X. And what I found particularly interesting about this is they found that irrespective.

Of changes in things like HRV, total hours of sleep, sleep efficiency, sleep onset, and various other things that are typically the metrics used to measure overall stress and autonomic nervous system functionality and things like that.