Steve Maxwell has spent decades as a wrestler, jiu-jitsu black belt and strength coach, and late in that career he became obsessed with something everyone does without thinking: breathing. In this clip from his 2016 London Real interview, Brian Rose asks him why breath matters so much, and Maxwell explains where his interest began and how he assesses people’s breathing.
It’s a practical introduction to breathwork from someone who learned it on the mat.
▶ Watch the full episode: Steve Maxwell – Breathe
A room that shifted
Brian sets the scene. Maxwell was about to teach a full-day breathwork seminar in London. Brian had recently led around 100 London Real Academy members through a breathing exercise, and says something powerful happened in the room that he doesn’t get when breathing alone. What is it about the breath?
Learning from the Gracies
Maxwell says he became seriously interested later in life, despite a background in physical education and wrestling. The turning point was training with the Gracie family, the founders of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Rickson Gracie, whom he calls perhaps the greatest expression of the art, was also a breath master.
He noticed the Gracie brothers breathing in a particular way as they trained, and that they never got out of breath, even when they wrestled a whole room of people at seminars. They weren’t teaching it then. Today, he says, Rickson sometimes spends one or two hours on breathing at seminars before any technique. His breathing even features in a scene in The Incredible Hulk, where he teaches Bruce Banner to stay calm.
Chest breathers
Maxwell’s core point is about modern life. In sedentary, industrialised countries, he says, most people no longer breathe with the diaphragm. Many inhale through the mouth and breathe into the upper chest, which he associates with a stress response. Breathing low into the lungs, in his view, keeps people calmer, even in an emergency or in combat.
One idea, many traditions
He then traces similar breathing methods across cultures: Russian Systema, which its teachers link to monks defending Christian Russia; Shaolin monks; yogic pranayama; qigong and tai chi; and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He studied with Systema teachers in Toronto and Moscow, learned 13 breathing techniques from an Ayurvedic physician in New Mexico, and came across the work of Konstantin Buteyko, the Russian doctor known for breathing methods. Out of all of it, he built his own approach.
The breath-hold test
How does he start with students? First, he observes how they breathe: through the nose or mouth, into the chest or belly. Then he uses a simple test, the “control pause”, also called the BOLT score. After a normal exhale, you time how long you can comfortably hold your breath before you really want to breathe. It isn’t a contest: you should be able to return to normal breathing straight afterwards. Maxwell says the result says a lot about a person’s breathing efficiency and their tolerance of carbon dioxide.
He ends with a point that sums up his view: people argue endlessly about diets, but rarely talk about the one nutrient we all need most, oxygen.
What to take from it
You don’t need a full-day seminar to start. Notice whether you breathe through your nose, and whether your breath goes into your chest or your belly. Maxwell’s argument is that small changes to something you do 20,000 times a day can add up.
This clip is for information only and is not medical advice. Never practise breath-holding in or near water or while driving.
Who is Steve Maxwell?
Steve Maxwell is an American strength and conditioning coach and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt who trained with the Gracie family and opened one of the first jiu-jitsu academies on the US East Coast. He was named one of America’s top trainers by Men’s Journal, and travels the world teaching mobility, strength and breathwork.
In the full 2016 episode, he talks with Brian Rose about breathing, training and staying strong as you age. You can also watch his earlier interview: Steve Maxwell – Ageless.
See everything Steve Maxwell has done with London Real on his guest page: Steve Maxwell on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Steve Maxwell – How Breathing Properly Can Change Your Life
0:00 Brian Rose: On Sunday you’re giving a seminar here in London. You travel the world teaching people all the knowledge you’ve accumulated: wrestling, jiu-jitsu. You were hanging out with the Gracies before the UFC started; we’ll talk more about that later. But on Sunday you’re giving a seminar on breathwork, from 9am until 5pm. Breathwork only. And I want to know more about it. You mentioned it last time, and it went in one ear and out the other, or maybe you sowed a seed in me.
0:33 Brian Rose: Since then I’ve picked up a few other pieces. We had Wim Hof, the Iceman, in here, and I saw him do some breathwork. And funnily enough, we had a focus group on Friday: 100 of our London Real Academy members came, and I led them in a 25-breath exercise, twice. And collectively, in the room, something powerful happened, Steve. I don’t know what it was. When I do the breathing on my own it’s good, but when I did it in a room with these people, something shifted. So what is it about the breath? When did you realise it was important, and what can you tell us?
1:11 Steve Maxwell: It was actually later in life that I really got serious about it. I was always aware of breathing as a physical education major, and then as a wrestler. Everyone has experienced that horrible feeling of being winded, which can provoke a panic response. The first time I became acutely aware of breathing was training with the Gracies. Master Rickson Gracie was a real breath master, as well as being probably the greatest expression of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, possibly jiu-jitsu ever. Some might argue Kimura, or Maeda, who taught the Gracies, would be right up there, but Rickson certainly stands out as one of the greatest.
1:56 Steve Maxwell: All his brothers were privy to a lot of the same information, and I would hear them breathing in this particular style when they were training and wrestling, but they weren’t teaching it at the time. All I know is they weren’t out of breath. I would watch Rickson and Royce and Royler literally wrestle an entire room full of people during seminars and not be out of breath, and I thought, how can they do that? What are they doing? They weren’t teaching it then. Now Rickson actually does an hour and a half to two hours of just breathwork in some of his seminars.
2:37 Brian Rose: He’s famous in the movie Choke for that breathing sequence, collapsing his stomach.
2:46 Steve Maxwell: That’s an epic piece. I’m really into superheroes, and there’s a really cool scene where he’s teaching Dr Banner, the Incredible Hulk, breathing to calm down. Edward Norton was in that one. He’s hiding out from the world in the Amazon, and he meets this spiritual martial arts guru who teaches him how to breathe. And that was Rickson playing himself in the movie.
3:23 Steve Maxwell: But the point is this: with chair sitting and the sedentary lifestyle of America and most industrialised countries, you’d have to include Japan, the UK, Germany and so forth, people are no longer breathing diaphragmatically. A lot of people inhale through the mouth, breathing into the upper chest, where the panic receptors are, and they’re not bringing the breath down into the lower lobes of the lungs, where the calming receptors are. That keeps you calm even in an emergency. It’s a great advantage to learn to breathe into the lower lobes all the time, even during athletic training, especially in combat.
4:08 Steve Maxwell: The Russians have a martial art called Systema that’s all based on the breath. They claim it goes back to ancient Christian monks defending Christendom against invaders, the Tatars, the Mongols, because Russia was constantly invaded. These monks developed their own martial art, similar to Shaolin. And the Shaolin monks use the same type of breathing. The yogis use it in pranayama. You’ll find it in qigong, tai chi, kung fu, Russian Systema and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Where they learned it, I don’t know. Great minds think alike: people came to similar conclusions all over the world.
5:16 Steve Maxwell: So I started looking into breathing a lot. I studied with the Systema guys in Toronto with Vladimir Vasiliev, later with Mikhail Ryabko in Moscow, and took a lot of workshops. I went down to Krasnodar, where there was another type of system. I studied yoga pranayama. There’s an Ayurvedic physician in New Mexico, Dr Vasant Lad, and at a workshop he taught me 13 different ways of breathing for different health aspects. And because of my connection with the Russian Systema guys, I ran into Buteyko, a Russian physician who treated his patients with specific breathing. I put all these things together into my own version.
6:34 Brian Rose: But eight hours of breathing? Don’t the students want [unclear]?
6:38 Steve Maxwell: First we test them. We find out what kind of breather you are: clavicular, intercostal or diaphragmatic. There’s a little test: you just ask people to breathe and observe their structure. Are they inhaling through the nose or the mouth? Then there’s a test called the control pause, or the BOLT test, body oxygen level test. How long can you comfortably hold your breath on the exhale? Not until you bleed from the eyes; it’s not competitive. On the exhale, you just time how long it is until you feel like you really want to breathe, and then you should be able to resume normal breathing. If you can’t, you pushed it too hard.
7:29 Steve Maxwell: That tells you a lot about a person’s general health and their CO2 tolerance, and how well their tissues are being oxygenated. It’s a very simple test people can do. Once you have that information, you can start to prescribe breathing exercises to improve their BOLT score. If they have a very short time between breaths, it means their breathing is very inefficient and they’re not getting proper oxygen.
8:04 Steve Maxwell: We could argue all day about diets: high carb, low carb, paleo, vegan. It almost turns into fistfights. But I think we’d all agree we need calories, proteins and fats; some would argue you don’t need carbs. We’d definitely agree you need water. But the one nutrient people are not talking about is oxygen.
