The oxygen advantage
"Learn how you can: increase your exercise intensity while expending less effort and breathing less heavily; achieve your perfect weight by suppressing your appetite naturally; improve your energy levels and mental focus; have far greater control of your asthma for the rest of your life; achieve a personal best athletic performance."--Dust jacket.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
15mentions
14people
2019–2025years
67% recommend27% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've read that book and also Patrick McKeown's 'Oxygen Advantage', which also talks about CO2 tolerance and the benefits of Buteyko.
https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Advantage-Scientifically-Breat...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m8jIhQyiDY
Good stuff honestly, helped me a lot
- Two books helped convince me this effect was "real" enough to try it: The Oxygen Advantage and Breathe.
A ~year later, anecdotal evidence: it works.
- Feedback:
- This is great to link to breathing
- After reading multiple breathing books (Breath by James Nester, Outlive by Peter Attia, Oxygen Advantage, etc.), there's a lot of evidence to breath slower. Specifically, 5.5 seconds in, and 5.5 seconds out, make the dot match or be closer to matching that rate could actually cause a lot of physical benefit by people matching with it
- Alternative if you don't want that, make it a control setting so someone (like myself) can do it.
- If you want to learn more about breathing I recommend checking out the book The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick Mckeown. It's got a bunch of different breathing exercises and ways to measure progress. It basically reteaches you how to breath too, which is fascinating on its own. Worth checking out for sure.
https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Advantage-Scientifically-Breat...
- Oxygen Advantage is a great book. I'd recommend James Nestor's - 'Breath' [0] as a first read, however. I feel like the book has more real world application and I picked up a number of things outside of what I learned studying Hof breathwork. I also studied, prior to both books, with Wim Hof in Poland in 2017 on one of his week long expeditions. The in person experience of group breath work is something to experience if you've never. It's so much different than working on it solo - especially if you're new to any of these methods.
Breath work and cold exposure have been a large part of my life after reading 'What Doesn't Kill Us' by Scott Carney [1]. That was the book that drove me want to experience it first hand.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48890486-breath [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30039048-what-doesn-t-ki...
- I was curious too. Taken from [0], not my knowledge or opinions. (I'm new to all of this.)
- James Nestor - Breath:
"I love this book and it‘s more a kind of overview about different breathing systems and techniques. He writes about Wim Hof and also about Oxygen Advantage. It‘s a good starting point into the topic of breathing. Highly recommended."
"Breathe is like a pop sci intro to breathing. It covers a lot and not very deeply, but it is engaging, makes a good case, and have a few actionable things that have a larger payoff (mouth tape)."
- Patrick McKeown - Oxygen Advantage:
"The base of this book is the Buteyko method and Patrick follows a very scientific approach. He can explain all hows and whys without beeing to complicated. Also highly recommended. You will find breath holds and reduced breathing in different techniques. Focus is on sports and conditioning. Highly recommended."
"O2 Advantage goes a lot deeper and helps you systematically evaluate and improve your co2 tolerance and thereby improve your body's ability to use oxygen. If I only could recommend one of these three, it would be this one with Breathe as a close second (simply because it is so accessible). It gives clear guidelines, tests, and actionable steps to improve your breathing. It is a very useful book."
- Wim Hof - The Wim Hof Method:
"It’s basically about breathing, cold exposure and the mind. The breathing work is about overbreathing (hyperventilation) followed by a breathhold. There are times that I love it, but science is mostly against it. I guess nobody knows why this works. Pavel is against breath holds after hyperventilation by the way (SECOND WIND). But there are lots of people having success using the WHM. I can also recommend the newest book."
"Wim Hof. It mainly focuses on a intense breathing technique and cold exposure. I know a lot of people that swear by them. I've never had any benefits from them that I could tell. After talking to some people that were really into this, they pointed out that I'm way more stressed all the time than they are. Adding more stress when you are already at max doesn't exactly help and probably hurts (more info here). This is my least favorite of the three as it has a very narrow benefit and that benefit isn't applicable to a lot of people. since it is basically a book on how to increase stress levels through breathing and cold."
[0] https://www.strongfirst.com/community/threads/james-nestor%E...
