Breathwork Training for Performance

Build your tolerance to air hunger and CO₂ to enhance your performance, health and stress mastery. A 90-minute immersive experience.

How you meet air hunger is how you meet pressure.

Air hunger is the uncomfortable pressure or urge to breathe. It builds as carbon dioxide rises.

You feel it at the top of a hill, deep in a hard set, in the last minutes of a game.

How you respond to that signal shapes how you handle effort, fatigue and pressure.

This is directly trainable when we use breathing as a performance skill. In this 90 minute immersive workshop you will learn exactly how.

Here’s something most people don’t know:
Your breathing rate influences how hard effort feels, more closely than heart rate or lactate.

Lose control of your breath and the intensity feels harder than it is.

Feeling gassed is often your brain slowing you down, well before you run out of energy. It limits your access to the capacity you actually have.

This carries into the rest of your life.
When stress builds and you feel overwhelmed, your breathing is one of the first things to change. Air hunger training teaches you to stay composed, calm and regulated in those moments of pressure.

90 minutes. Immersive. On the gym floor.
You’ll gain the insight, a process and the skills to train your breathing patterns for performance, and feel each one in your own body.

What you’ll walk away with

• Why you get breathless, and what carbon dioxide does in your body
• Your CO₂ tolerance baseline, measured on the day. How to maximise the function of your airways.
• How to use breath hold training to calm you, boost your energy and train your performance capacity
• The Five Breathing Gears. A system to train breath control through every intensity, in training and performance. Match your breathing to the effort, from easy work to full output. Find your nasal breathing limit and lift it, and learn how and when to use mouth breathing optimally.
• A clear breathwork practice and training system to integrate into your life and progress week by week.

Who this is for

You’ll get value from this if you:

• Want to learn how breathwork training improves performance
• Are seeking the extra edge of mental and physical ability
• Get gassed faster than you’d like and want to know why
• Feel there’s more in the tank you can’t access
• Feel stress and overwhelm and want a practical way to regulate
• Want to stay calm and composed when pressure hits, in training and in life
• Train hard and want to recover faster between efforts
• Want to train breathwork as a system and integrate it into your life, rather than a one-off experience

What the training builds

• Breathing patterns and breath control. You breathe around 20,000 times a day, and every one of those reps is either enhancing your performance or pulling you down. Breath control is the ability to influence those patterns, and through them how you feel and perform.
• Stronger breathing muscles. Your diaphragm and the muscles around your ribs respond to training like any other muscle. When they tire, your body pulls blood flow away from your legs to keep them working. Trained breathing muscles keep more of it where you need it.
• Better oxygen delivery. Carbon dioxide is more than just a waste gas. It helps your blood release oxygen into your muscles and brain. Raise your tolerance to it and you breathe less and keep oxygen moving where the work is.
• Stress mastery and tolerance to pressure. The brain circuits that sense carbon dioxide overlap with those that drive your stress response. Low CO₂ tolerance and poor breathing patterns keep your body closer to anxiety and stress. Each rep of staying calm as the urge to breathe builds teaches your nervous system the signal is manageable, and that carries straight into the moments pressure rises, in sport, at work and at home.

About Ben Hamlett

Ben Hamlett is a leading Health & Performance Coach and founder of HOLOS Performance. He trains people to perform under pressure and find presence through breath, body and mind. His work spans elite sport, defence and corporate leadership, along with people who are curious to feel better, perform at their best and enjoy a great quality of life.

A Hobart local he had a career as an elite athlete and spent nearly two decades competing across three continents and using breath training to find his edge in performance after discovering the power of breath at 11, when a moment in sport dropped him into flow and a rhythmic breathing pattern came with it.

Breath and presence training is also how he overcame crippling brain injuries, depression and anxiety, and found a new depth in his experience of life. He has delivered breathing and performance work since 2015.

He holds a Bachelor of Psychological Science, Adv Accreditations in Strength and Conditioning accreditation, is an Oxygen Advantage Master Instructor and an Australian Sports Commission Mentor.