bolt score
This past weekend I found myself flipping through an old book of mine, The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown. I was first recommended this book in 2018, after attending a seminar in Virginia Beach about all things breathing.
A main theme of the book is that you don’t need to breathe due to lack of oxygen, but rather, due to the build up of carbon dioxide. Doing breath holds, breath work and the like will result in better performance because your body can handle the stress of accumulated CO2 better, will improve the oxygen-carrying capacity of your blood, and improve the strength of your respiratory muscles.
From page 111:
“When the breath is held following an exhalation, the intake of oxygen is halted while carbon dioxide accumulates in the blood. During this pause, oxygen cannot enter the lungs, and carbon dioxide cannot leave the blood stream.”
I was always skeptical of the chapters claiming that improving your CO2 tolerance could improve your performance at high altitude. There’s potential for me to have a high altitude excursion soon though, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to add in daily breath work to hedge against getting worked by the altitude.
I stated yesterday with a BOLT test, Blood Oxygen Level Test. The BOLT test measures your sensitivity to carbon dioxide. If you’ve been around the gym for a while and been a reader of the blog, you may know this as the CO2 Tolerance test, which was a slight variation of the BOLT test I learned from some other coaches.
Here’s how to do it:
Take a few normal breaths through your nose, and let it all out and start your timer.
Time the number of seconds it takes until you feel the urge or desire to breathe - this is not a measurement of how long you can hold! Rather how long until your body reacts to the lack of air.
Stop the timer when you feel the urge to breathe. That’s it!
*If you need to take a big breath at the end, you held it too long.
Lower BOLT score = less tolerance to CO2.
Mine was 24 seconds, which was lower than I expected, but then again, I haven’t been doing breath work like I was when I originally read this book and last tested my BOLT score. You can check out what your score means here on McKeown’s website.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain