Holding Your Breath Might Be the Ultimate Cardio Shortcut

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:34Darin Olien:Before we get into today's episode, I want to acknowledge the company helping to support this conversation, Alchemist. You know, most of us spend so much energy thinking about what we put into our bodies. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe outside. But here's something that doesn't get nearly enough attention. The air inside your home. Here's a fact that floored me. Conventional paints, which are petrochemical-based, are off-gassing, endocrine-disrupting chemicals for not just days, for years after they've been applied. This means the walls of your bedroom, your kids' rooms, your kitchen, they could literally be releasing toxic chemicals into the air you're breathing every single day.

1:23Darin Olien:That's why I want to talk about Alchemist. Alchemist is the world's first wellness paint. Their paints are mineral-based, VOC-free, and completely free of PFOS, those damn forever chemicals that have no business being anywhere in our environment, especially in our home. And because the formula is rooted in natural minerals, it's inherently anti-mold, anti-fungal, so there's no synthetic additives needed to perform, nature has already done the work. On top of all of that, alchemist paint is class A fire resistant, which I love here in Southern California, because guess what? Rocks, i.e. minerals, don't burn.

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2:55Darin Olien:We put so much thought into the products that touch our bodies or go into our bodies, it just makes sense to extend the same standard to the surfaces that literally surround us. If you're repainting a room, or now inspired to do so, building something new, or just ready to make a healthier swap, check out Alchemist. Go to A-L-K-E-M-I-S dot com. Use the code Darren10. D-A-R-I-N 10. Right now, your heart rate dropped. Blood is being pulled out of your arms and legs, rushing towards your heart and your brain. Your spleen from that little breath hold, yes, your spleen just squeezed itself like a fist and dumped a reservoir, like a reservoir tank of oxygenated red blood cells into your bloodstream.

3:54You didn't do anything. You just stopped breathing and only for a second. And your brain already started running this incredible program that's older than language, older than fire, a program we share with seals, whales, and yes, of course, dolphins. Scientists call it the mammalian dive response. And it turns out when you train it deliberately, safely, it doesn't just help you survive a moment underwater, it appears to build a more resilient cardiovascular system. This is the hidden treasure I want to talk to you about. Simple, powerful, very powerful, and easy to do. This is not a parlor trick.

4:41It's not how long can you hold your breath and flex at a pool party. It's a legitimate science-documented lever for your cardiovascular adaptation and better performance. One that's been hiding in plain sight inside elite free diving physiology labs for the last 20 plus years. I'm Darren O 'Lean, and this is Super Life. Most of what I bring you on the show, of course, is fatal conveniences, what to stay away from in our modern world. This one is a mirror image. It's a hidden capacity that you absolutely have. You have. And you can change it by doing it today. Something built into your physiology.

5:28Freely available. Zero cost. And almost nobody, I mean nobody, is really training this on purpose. And when I want to be straight with you up front, because this show is science forward, this is not a hype. This is evidence, real evidence, but it's not uniform. Some of it comes from beautifully controlled physiology labs and studied elite divers. But I'm going to leave you with some powerful things at the end that you can absolutely do to improve your cardiovascular strength and performance. And you can do this right away. So let's get a little nerdy. So the mechanism, because it explains everything else.

6:16When you hold your breath, especially, there's also this other aspect, and you realize just holding your breath is fine, but it can get amped up and you can double up on some things. When you put your face in cool water, but even without it, you trigger what the researchers call the mammalian dive reflux. It's a bundle of three main things happening at once. Your heart rate drops, which is great, sometimes even 10 % just from the reflex alone. Your blood vessels in your arms and legs constrict, shunting blood towards your core. And then your spleen, which acts as a biological reservoir for your red blood cells, contracts, and it releases its stored supply into general circulation.

7:10If I were to tell you that this was a supplement, you would pay and sprint towards what this actually does. Researcher Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integral biology at UC Berkeley, quote, The spleen holds oxygenated red blood cells, so presumably an enlarged spleen injects more blood cells into circulation and makes more oxygen available for basic body functions during prolonged dives. That's from Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integral biology at UC Berkeley, who studies this thing. And on the reflex itself, he said something I freaking love because it validates something people already feel.

8:01Quote, we all know. Before we continue the pod, I want to share something.

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9:40Darin Olien:Go to manavitality.com. That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. That if you dive down into cold water, you feel refreshed. But it's not just in your brain, it's in your body. In addition to contraction of the spleen, you have a brachycardia, a lowering of the heart rate, and the blood is shunted into the central vital organs and away from the skin. A sea nomad population in Southeast Asia who free dive for a living. Their spleens are roughly 50 larger than their non-free diving neighbors.

10:36And it's genetic. It's actually passed down, selected for, and because it works for that population over time. Melissa Lardo, who ran the field research, found that these people, underwater working time is only rivaled by sea otters. Let that sink in. humans trained and adapted, operating the same performance category as a marine mammal. Here's the part that matters for you and me, who are not genetically gifted yet as the sea nomads. This reflex isn't fixed. It's trainable. Researcher Erika Shugte, one of the leading researchers of breath hold physiology at Mid-Sweden University, has published two decades of work showing that trained breath-hold divers can significantly amplify the magnitude of these responses compared to untrained people, meaning practice makes measurable differences in this mechanism.

11:44And this was one of the findings that made me want to talk about this and do this episode. In 2021, researchers used cardiac MRI to scan elite breath hold divers during maximal apnea while their blood oxygen saturation dropped as low as 50 to a level that would be a medical emergency in almost all of us. What they found was remarkable. No myocardial perfusion deficit, no drop in oxygen delivery to the heart tissue. In fact, blood flow to the heart increased and there was no marker of cardiovascular injury or strain. And here's the twist. No one expected blood lactate and the byproduct of anaerobic stress actually dropped by 20 % by the end of the longest holds.

12:45The heart appeared to shift towards burning fat and lactate as fuel. The same metabolic shift, the same metabolic trick that lets diving seals stay submerged for 20 minutes without damage. The researchers called this cardiac hypoxic resistance and noted that elite divers also developed thicker, stronger heart walls over years of training, roughly 31 % thicker in some measurements. This is a structural adaptation, not a trick, literally a trained heart. Now, the important caveat, because I promise you a full picture, a 2021 review in the European Journal of Applied Physiology looked across the whole body of chronic breath holding and training research and said, Essentially, the short-term adaptations are real and well-documented, but the long-term health picture over years in regular people, not just elite competitors, is still being established.

13:55There are open questions and the research still is and needs to be continued. But there seems to be powerful young science that is proving this incredible deep adaptation response that we have. Here's where I want to be really precise because this is where a lot of wellness context gets sloppy. In 2025, a systematic review and meta-analysis in the frontiers of medicine pooled data on hypoxic training and cardiometabolic health in older adults. When hypoxic exposure was used by itself, just the breath hold, there was no significant improvement in blood pressure or fitness for the general older adult population.

14:45But when the hypoxic stress was combined, and this is where it's going to get really interesting and something that I can tell you that you can actually do at the end when you combine this with resistance exercise. And that is, I'll tell you what resistance, it's not just picking up a weight. When you combine the hypoxic with some training, the numbers changed. meaningful drops in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and real gains in cardiorespiratory fitness, especially in people who already had metabolic conditions like diabetes. Think about that. You can do this right now, and it can improve your cardiovascular health.

15:30The takeaway isn't breath-holding alone is a miracle. It's that hypoxic stress appears to amplify this adaptation you're already getting from the movement. It's a multiplier, not a replacement. So it gets really efficient to give you great gains. So here's a honest synthesis of this information. Breath holding trains a real, measurable cardiovascular reflex and appears to build genuine hypoxic resilience in the heart with practice. Its clearest, most defensible benefit for regular people like you and me shows up when you stack it with movement. Not as a substitute for it, but it sits alongside of it, not above it.

16:21Okay, everyone, I'm going to pause the episode right there. We've completely broken down the science behind the malmalion dive response, how it builds genuine hypoxic resilience in the heart, and how stacking it with movement creates a massive multiplier effective for your cardiovascular fitness. But knowing the science is only half the battle. Now, we have to put it into practice. In the second half of this episode, which will be available on Patreon, I'm breaking down the five exact step-by-step protocols you can use to safely train this incredible reflex today, including apnea walking, CO2 tolerance rounds, and how to safely stack these with cold exposure.

17:14To get these five protocols and unlock the rest of this powerful conversation, head over to patreon.com forward slash Darren Olean. That's patreon.com forward slash Darren Olean. D-A-R-I-N-O-L-I-E-N. Click the link in the show notes and I'll see you over there right now to get all five of these actionable steps you can take today. Let's go build your super life.