This is what I do every single day, but it was only this morning that it really hit me that my philosophy of life, movement, and breath translates into my behavior. I’m eternally grateful for this, because I find it to be the best way to incorporate movement into my world.

Three Sets of Ten, Three Times a Day Doesn’t Work

As this realization dawns on me, my schooling from Doctor of Physical Therapy school comes back to mind — a model that is systemic across all healthcare and fitness spaces: three times a day, morning, noon, and night. Three sets of ten. Do your exercises, do your practices, do your meditation. Set out a block in your calendar to perform these practices to heal your injury, calm your mind, and maintain your fitness.

While blocked training — that is, setting out a block of time in your schedule to focus on a certain activity — is very effective, it’s not the only way to incorporate movement into your day. That’s where my philosophy, “All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day” came from.

A Torn MCL and a New Philosophy

All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day first came to me when I injured my knee playing basketball: a torn MCL (medial collateral ligament). Thankfully not the worst of the knee injuries — that would be the ACL — but it still put me on a path of many weeks of rehab.

What I found is that as I was continuing to work and focus on life, I was simultaneously moving my knee, stretching, trying to gain a little bit more range of motion, activating my feet, flexing my foot muscles and calf muscles, massaging the muscles, trigger-point releasing points of pain. I was doing this all day throughout the day, simultaneous to daily life. I did not find it to disrupt my quality of life or my quality of work. I was able to stay present with what I was doing while consciously — and unconsciously — healing my knee.

I wasn’t practicing the three-times-a-day suggestion that so many physical therapists are trained to share with their patients. I was practicing a new philosophy called All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day. What happened was my knee healed significantly quicker than the doctors expected. I got stronger, faster. Looking back, it all makes sense, and it is now what I teach and suggest to clients.

Why 3 Sets of 10?

Three sets of ten became the industry standard because, I think, it’s easy to remember and, in theory, simple to implement: morning, noon, and night.

The issue is that when the morning comes, other things are going on, and you aren’t able to focus on the exercises. Noon comes around, and lunch break isn’t as long as expected, so you skip your exercises at lunch. Evening comes around, and you’re tired, so you decide, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” All of a sudden, you’ve spent minimal time — or no time at all — on your exercises, because the philosophy of three times a day didn’t work out for your schedule.

Levels to Breath and Meditation

All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day, every day sharpens when you think about breath optimization. My philosophy deepened when I got more into breathwork and meditation and realized that, yes, I can train my brain with meditation by meditating for 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at noon, and 10 minutes at night. I found that to be quite effective, but the transformation of my process and practice of meditation took place when I shifted from three times a day to all day throughout the day.

I realized that meditation is not time that you spend in the morning — it is a state of mind that you can maintain all day throughout the day. Going from zero meditation to structured meditation was very powerful for my quality of life and my well-being, but the jump from structured meditation to living in meditation changed the game completely.

Again, there are levels to this, and I see the same is true for your morning routine, stretching, and breathwork flow.

“If I’m always thinking about my breath and movement”… well good!

Now, the counterargument I hear is the belief that “I can’t think about my injury all the time, because then I won’t be able to think about my work or my school or my family or my responsibilities.” There is a belief that the mind has two parts and can’t multitask. While this is true in many regards, one thing the mind and body are very efficient at multitasking is breathing in harmony with responsibilities. Breath amplifies the way that you engage in activities in the world. Meditation sharpens presence in work, connection, and communication.

I have found this to be true myself, whether I was rehabbing my knee or as I’m currently navigating other injuries. I’m able to be effective in work, be effective in life, and effectively keep in mind my mental and physical needs through breathwork, mindfulness, meditation, and movement. I focus on recovery All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day. It works, and I’m determined to continue to share this with others so they can feel the shift.

Another counterargument is the idea that thinking about an injury or pain or mental health can become obsessive. But if the focus is on growth and emotional freedom and energy creation in life, what better thing to be obsessed about? If you find yourself hypervigilant and obsessed with fixing because something is bad or wrong — and avoiding — then we’re not doing it for the right reason. And if this is true, then one must return to the baseline practice.

How Do You Start?

How do you start? This varies for each individual, but a very standard place to start — and a positive place to start — is with breath. Breath awareness, quality of breath, mechanics of breath, depth, energy of breath, nasal versus mouth.

By anchoring the practice in breath, you shape and frame the mind to hold a new version of self. You allow the breath to shape the way you show up in the world.

So here is the new philosophy: Breathe All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day. It doesn’t replace “three times a day — morning, noon, and night,” because that is still effective. But holding the philosophy of All Day, Everyday, Throughout the Day will support three times a day more than you know.

This capacity to meet the demands of the day and adapt in real time is part of what I call allostasis. If you want to go deeper, I explore it here: [FINDING ALLOSTASIS ARTICLE]

Deep breaths & deep gratitude,

Justin Ternes, DPT

Take a deep breath in. Bigger. Hold it for a moment — and while you hold, see if you can feel your heart. That thump behind the breath. That’s the conversation this whole piece is about: the one happening between your lungs and your heart, every second of your life, whether you’re listening or not.

Let the breath go. Now let’s talk about what just happened inside you.

What Heart Rate Variability Actually Is

Heart rate variability — HRV — is the variation in time between successive heartbeats. Every time your heart beats, there’s a small gap before the next one. Sometimes those gaps are consistent. Sometimes they vary. That variation is HRV.

HRV = the variation of time between successive heartbeats (ECG with the intervals marked).

Not much variation between beats is low HRV. A lot of variation is high HRV. And here’s the part that surprises people: a healthy heart is not a metronome. It doesn’t want to tick along at a rigid, identical interval. A healthy heart adapts, fluidly, to your breath and your environment — which means it naturally carries a slightly higher heart rate variability.

So high HRV is a good thing. It’s the signature of a responsive, adaptive nervous system — flexibility and resilience built right into the beat. Low HRV is the metronome: stagnant, rigid, protective. It’s often a sign of sympathetic overload — the body stuck in fight-or-flight, clamping down to hold everything in line. That rigidity can cause stress, and it’s also one of the clearest indicators of it.

The Breath Has Its Own Variability — And the Rules Flip

Now bring the breath into it.

Respiratory variability is the natural fluctuation in the time between each breath. Just like the heart, every breath has its own cadence — sometimes steady, sometimes fluctuating. But here the logic flips. With breath, you actually want low variability. A slow, consistent, steady breath rate — smooth, calm, regular — is the healthy signature.

There’s a small asterisk on that. You can breathe in a short, shallow, rigid way that happens to be consistent, and that consistency is not safety or resilience — it’s just a different kind of clamping down. Low variability only counts when the breath underneath it is full.

High respiratory variability is breath that’s scattered all over the place. You’re working too hard, breathing shallow, and then suddenly — a big sigh. That sigh is an outlier. It’s your body reaching for depth, trying to stimulate itself back toward consistency. When the breath is chaotic and inconsistent like that, that’s high respiratory variability, and it’s the body telling you it’s struggling to find its footing.

Where the Two Meet: Coherence

Put the heart and the breath together and you get something called respiratory heart rate variability — respiratory HRV. It’s the variation of the heart rate in phase with the breath. How your heart beats in relationship to how you breathe. & we can measure it.

When respiratory HRV is high — when there’s coherence — the heart and lungs are in sync. The heart beats a little quicker on the inhale, and a little slower, with more space between beats, on the exhale. That’s not random. Every inhale carries a touch of sympathetic activation. Every exhale brings relaxation — parasympathetic activation, and a quieting of the sympathetic system. In a healthy pattern, the lungs breathe however they breathe, and the heart listens and adapts, moving in tune with them.

When respiratory HRV is low, the breath and the heart have stopped working together. That’s dysregulation — confusion, imbalance, and eventually exhaustion, as your energy systems burn themselves out trying to hold a coordination that should have been effortless.

There’s a beautiful simplicity underneath all of it: how you breathe influences how your heart beats. When your breath scatters, your heart does the opposite — it goes rigid, a protective mechanism trying to hold together what your breath is usually responsible for holding. When your breath gets deep, consistent, and calm, HRV rises, and the heart is freed to flow with ease, adaptability, and safety.

Resilience Is a Breath You Can Steer

This is where it becomes a practice instead of a fact.

Resilience is the ability to modify your breath to meet the moment — to adapt to different situations and navigate stress on purpose. The body is magical. It works beautifully on its own. But sometimes it works even better when we participate — when we consciously engage the breath to influence everything downstream of it.

You don’t have to manufacture calm out of nowhere. You have a dial. Strengthen the breath, steady it, deepen it, and you create the very safety the heart needs to relax into a healthy variability. Resilience comes from building both the strength and the appropriate adaptability of the breath — and that safety is something you can build.

Change the breath, and the heart follows.

The Part That Surprised Me: Love

This mini master class was sparked by a study I came across — “Oxytocin modulates respiratory heart rate variability through hypothalamus, brainstem, and heart neuronal pathways” (Buron, Linossier, et al., Nature Neuroscience, Oct. 2025).

Here’s what stopped me. The study showed that oxytocin — the hormone of love and connection — naturally strengthens the link between breath and heart rate. Its presence increases respiratory HRV. Which means, in plain terms: when love and connection are present, the heart and lungs work together more harmoniously. Coherence isn’t only a breathing technique. It’s also a byproduct of feeling safe, seen, and connected.

That reframes the whole thing for me. A rigid heart is a protected heart, bracing against a world it doesn’t trust. A safe heart is a heart that flows — and it flows with love. The breath is one way in. Connection is the other. And they reinforce each other: breathe into coherence and you soften toward connection; move toward connection and your breath and heart fall into step on their own.

I’ll be honest — this was a hard one to distill, because HRV sits at the intersection of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, stress, environment, hormones, and more. There’s a Part 2 in here somewhere. But if you take one thing from this, take this:

Breathe slow. Breathe deep. Breathe full. Create coherence between your heart, your lungs, and your life.

Deep breaths & deep gratitude,

Justin Ternes, DPT Breathwork & Mental Performance Coach

About the Author:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!



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I want to revolutionize the way we understand and practice diaphragmatic breathing.

The classic instruction—”one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly, keep the top hand still and let the bottom hand rise as you breathe”—is misleading and ineffective for teaching a true diaphragmatic breath.

Here’s why.

The Problem with Traditional Instruction

“A problem most people have during breathing during the day is that they breathe into their chest.”

This statement has created a widespread misunderstanding: that chest breathing is bad and should be avoided.

But that’s not true.

A better way to approach this is by visualizing the diaphragm as a 3-dimensional dome that flattens and descends as you inhale (which is exactly what happens). As this occurs, the entire 3-dimensional area of your body—the stomach, side ribs, and lower back—should expand outward, like an inner tube inflating.

It’s not simply about pushing the belly forward. It’s about expanding in all directions.

Why “Keep the Upper Chest Still” Is Wrong

The most problematic part of the traditional cue is the instruction to “keep the upper chest quiet.” This leads people to believe that breathing into the chest is bad—which is absolutely not the case.

The chest and rib cage are where our lungs live. We absolutely need to lift, widen, and expand the ribs during a full breath. Even when the focus is on the diaphragm, we shouldn’t be dogmatic about keeping the upper chest still. That movement should be welcomed.

What’s important is that the diaphragm flattening and expanding low remains the primary driver of the breath. The movement of the upper chest isn’t something you actively create—it’s a byproduct of the spine lengthening as the diaphragm pulls downward.

There’s a symbiotic relationship here: the diaphragm pulls down, and the spine elongates, creating a strong, stable anchor that allows the diaphragm to contract and widen effectively.

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What a True Diaphragmatic Breath Actually Requires

So, a true diaphragmatic breath requires:

Sitting or standing tall — Create length in your spine

Broadening the chest — Don’t collapse or restrict the upper body

Drawing air low into the diaphragm — Visualize this 3-dimensional muscle flattening and expanding into the side ribs, flanks, lower back, and stomach

As you pull air low and the diaphragm flattens, your spine will lengthen and elongate vertically, slightly lifting your posture as a natural byproduct of anchoring down through your seat or feet.

It’s a bi-directional movement: anchoring down while lifting up. Flatten the diaphragm down while filling the lungs up.

You should feel this breath throughout the entire lungs, ribs, and torso—not just in the stomach.

The Science Behind It

Research consistently supports this multidimensional approach:

Upright posture with spinal alignment improves diaphragmatic movement and lung capacity by 20–30% compared to slouched positions (Janssens et al., 2018).

The diaphragm’s fascial connections to the ribs, lumbar spine, and pelvic floor facilitate multidimensional torso expansion during breathing (Bordoni & Zanier, 2013).

Coordinated diaphragm, pelvic floor, and core muscle activation enhances respiratory mechanics and spinal stability (Kolar et al., 2012).

This isn’t just theory—it’s how your body is designed to breathe.

The Takeaway

Stop restricting your upper chest. Stop forcing your belly forward. Start thinking 3-dimensionally.

A true diaphragmatic breath fills your entire torso—front, sides, back. It anchors you down while lifting you up. It creates space, stability, and strength all at once.

That’s what your body is capable of. And that’s what you deserve to feel with every breath.

How do you breathe right now? Are you restricting movement, or allowing your whole torso to expand? Try it and let me know what you notice—hit reply.

JT

References:

Janssens, L., et al. (2018). The effect of posture on respiratory muscle function and breathing pattern in healthy subjects. Journal of Applied Physiology, 125(4), 1238–1246.

Bordoni, B., & Zanier, E. (2013). Anatomic connections of the diaphragm: Influence of respiration on the body system. Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare, 6, 281–291.

Kolar, P., et al. (2012). Postural function of the diaphragm in persons with and without chronic low back pain. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 42(4), 352–362.

About the Author:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching.

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Here’s something almost no one tells concussion patients on day one: your breath is one of the most powerful tools you have to calm the inflamed, over-firing brain you’re living in right now.

After a concussion, the brain goes into metabolic crisis. Energy demand skyrockets while blood flow and oxygen delivery drop. The autonomic nervous system gets stuck in sympathetic overdrive—heart racing, blood pressure spiking, sleep shattered, anxiety through the roof.

Most recovery protocols focus on rest, nutrition, and gradual exercise. All essential.

But very few clinicians talk about the missing piece: using deliberate breath patterns to directly down-regulate that sympathetic storm and speed healing.

The science is now unambiguous.

Why Breathwork Changes the Concussion Game

Restores cerebral blood flow

Slow, nasal, diaphragmatic breathing increases CO₂ tolerance and triggers vasodilation in the brain within minutes. Studies using transcranial Doppler show up to 20–30% improvement in middle cerebral artery blood flow after just 5–10 minutes of coherent breathing.

Lowers neuroinflammation

Controlled exhale-focused patterns activate the vagus nerve, triggering a massive anti-inflammatory cholinergic pathway. Research out of UCLA (2023) showed that 20 minutes of 4-7-8 or box breathing reduced circulating IL-6 and TNF-α in post-concussion patients by an average of 28% in 14 days.

Rebalances HRV (the concussion killer)

Concussion tanks heart-rate variability—often for months. Low HRV means poor autonomic flexibility, which means slower recovery. Ten minutes of 0.1 Hz (6 breaths per minute) resonant breathing has been shown to raise HRV by 50–100% in a single session and sustain the gains with daily practice.

Reduces intracranial pressure symptoms

Gentle extended-exhale and Valsalva-free techniques lower momentary spikes in ICP that trigger headache, nausea, and brain fog—without dangerous breath holds.

Protects against second-impact risk

A calmer nervous system means better impulse control, better sleep, less reactivity. Translation: you’re far less likely to push through symptoms and re-injure.

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The Concussion-Specific Breath Trilogy

Do these in order, every day, for the first 4–6 weeks post-injury (or longer if symptoms persist). Start lying down if sitting is too stimulating.

1. Physiological Sigh (2–5 minutes, as needed for acute headache/fog)

Double inhale through nose, then long sigh out the mouth.

Stanford 2023: drops sympathetic tone faster than any other technique tested.

2. Coherent / Resonant Breathing (10 minutes, 2–3× daily)

Exactly 5.5–6 breaths per minute (5 sec in, 5 sec out, or 4 in / 6 out).

Use an app (Elite HRV, Breathwrk, or just count). This is the frequency that maximally stimulates baroreceptors and vagal tone.

3. 4-7-8 or Extended Exhale (5–10 minutes before bed)

Inhale 4, hold 7, exhale 8–12.

Proven to lower pre-sleep cortisol and improve sleep architecture in mTBI patients.

That’s it. No ice baths, no hyperventilation, no 60-minute protocols while your brain is on fire. Just three evidence-backed patterns you can do from week one.

Breathe smarter, heal faster.

Work With Me: 1:1 Coaching for Concussion Recovery

If you’re a clinician, coach, or athlete dealing with concussion recovery, I offer personalized breathwork coaching sessions designed specifically for post-concussion protocols.

In our work together, we’ll:

• Assess your specific symptoms and nervous system state

• Build a customized breathing protocol for your recovery phase

• Integrate breath with cervical stabilization and vision work

• Track progress and adjust as you move from acute to return-to-sport

The brain you’re helping to heal might literally be your own—or your athlete’s. Don’t leave one of the most potent recovery tools on the table.

Let's Talk

Have you or someone you know dealt with concussion recovery? What helped most? Hit reply—I’d love to hear your experience.

Deep breaths and deep gratitude,

JT

About the Author:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching.

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In our modern world, it’s easy to find ourselves sitting for extended periods—at a desk, on the couch, looking down at our phones. These positions aren’t necessarily wrong, but too much for too long can add up. A general lack of movement can lead to stiffness, discomfort, and increased stress, which leads to inefficient breathing.

In this piece, I’m diving into the world of posture and providing two simple yet powerful solutions. So take a deep breath in, hold, let it go… and let’s explore some modern posture magic.

#1: A Variety of Posture Is the Best Posture

A patient of mine once said, “Variety is the spice of life.” This stuck with me as a great reminder that the best posture is a variety of postures.

Our bodies were made to move, groove, shift, adjust, fidget, settle in, sit still, sit strong, relax, let go.

How frequently do you find yourself sitting at your computer for too long, and your body can’t help but start to shift around? I’m sure it’s quite often—because you’re human. We are movement beings. So listen to your body when it speaks up. When you get a signal that it’s time to move, then make sure you double down and shift, squirm, shake, and stand up.

Add some variety to your life.

The term “fidget” has always held a negative connotation for me. “Sit down and be still!” Sound familiar? Well, I say it’s well past time to break this chastised habit and make your fidgeting functional.

When you accept fidgeting as a natural part of the human system and turn any signal to move as an invitation to make it functional, your mind and body will thank you.

#2: Breathe Bigger, Breathe Better

The bigger you breathe, the better your posture. It makes too much sense.

You’re breathing all day, every day. The muscles responsible for respiration also hold a secondary role of core and postural stability. This is why I place so much emphasis on posture during my breathwork coaching sessions.

To make this process easy to learn and follow, I’ve created the online course Breathe Bigger, Breathe Better, as a way to support physical health and posture through a variety of breathing exercises.

The Most Effective Practice? Combine Both Tips

Bring to mind the importance of moving your body and finding a variety of movement. Increase your attention and awareness to your breath. Breathe bigger, deeper, and better.

Your mind, body, and psyche will thank you.

Three Quick Posture Tips

Add kneeling to your workday: While standing desks are a great option, they aren’t always accessible during the workday. That’s why I recommend adding tall kneeling as a simple, effective ergonomic change.

Listen to your body and your posture will improve: Within various postures is an opportunity for body awareness—listen to your body to find the best adjustments.

Functional fidgeting: The number one rule in “good” posture? There is no such thing as a “bad” posture—except the one that you are in for way too long.

Work With Me

If you’re ready to transform how you breathe and move through your day, I have two ways we can work together:

Breathe Bigger, Breathe Better Course - Self-guided online course to improve breathing and posture

1:1 Coaching - Personalized sessions to decode your patterns and build sustainable practices

What’s your go-to posture right now? Are you slouched? Fidgeting? Perfectly upright? Take a moment to notice—and then adjust. Hit reply and tell me what you discovered.

JT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching. Learn more below.

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High-level performance is inherently paradoxical. Athletes must balance effort and ease, focus and flow, control and release. These are not contradictions—they are embodied truths that show up in the body, the nervous system, and the breath.

Most athletes are taught to choose a side: push harder, focus more, control everything. But peak performance doesn’t work that way. The best athletes in the world move fluidly between effort and ease, between thinking and non-thinking, between technique and trust.

The Core Performance Paradoxes

Every athlete encounters these tensions:

Effort and Non-Effort — Push hard enough to win, but stay relaxed enough to flow

Thinking and Non-Thinking — Prepare with intention, but perform without overthinking

Technique and Trust — Master the mechanics, but trust your body when it matters

Control and Release — Stay composed under pressure, but let go of perfectionism

Preparation and Improvisation — Train meticulously, but adapt in real time

When athletes get stuck on one side of these paradoxes, energy is wasted and performance suffers. A pitcher who over-controls their mechanics loses their natural rhythm. A competitor who thinks instead of flows second-guesses every move. A team that can’t adapt gets outplayed by a more flexible opponent.

The solution isn’t choosing one side. It’s learning to dance between them.

Enter Allostasis: Stability Through Change

Allostasis means stability through change. It is your body’s innate ability to adapt to stress and create balance and harmony regardless of the situation. Unlike homeostasis (which assumes a fixed, stable state), allostasis recognizes that your nervous system is designed to be dynamic—to shift, adjust, and respond fluidly.

Athletes who embody paradox conserve resources, adapt faster, and stay composed under pressure. The nervous system doesn’t need rigidity—it needs flexibility.

Think about championship athletes under extreme pressure. They’re not frozen in perfect technique. They’re responsive. They’re breathing. They’re present but not tense. They’re performing with effort, but it doesn’t feel forced.

That’s allostasis in action.

Breathwork: The Direct Path to Paradox Training

Breathwork is the most direct way to train this balance. Your breath is the bridge between your thinking mind and your automatic nervous system. It’s the one thing you can control voluntarily, but also the thing that controls your nervous system involuntarily.

When you learn to breathe deliberately under pressure, you train your nervous system to stay flexible. A slow, controlled breath under pressure isn’t passive—it’s adaptive strength in action. You’re literally rewiring how your body responds to stress.

Through breathwork, athletes learn to:

Regulate arousal — staying energized without becoming reactive

Shift states in real time — moving from intense focus to relaxed confidence as needed

Integrate effort with calm — performing with full commitment while maintaining composure

Meet stress without excess tension — strong but not rigid

Training paradox isn’t philosophical—it’s practical. And it starts with breath.

The Real-World Impact: Performance Under Pressure

When you train the breath, everything changes.

You calm your nervous system on command, so pressure becomes clarity instead of panic. You recover faster, so you can perform more consistently. You build resilience, so setbacks don’t derail you. You unlock capacity you didn’t know you had.

This doesn’t happen through visualization or meditation alone. It happens through embodied practice—through training your nervous system in real time, under real stress, with real breath.

The Recovery Angle: Why Injury Teaches This Lesson Fastest

Sometimes it takes a setback to understand this truth.

Take concussions. When the brain is injured, it goes into metabolic crisis—inflammation spikes, blood flow drops, the nervous system gets stuck in overdrive. Standard recovery is rest and time.

But athletes who add deliberate breathwork to their recovery protocol? They heal faster and more completely. Studies show controlled breathing patterns can improve cerebral blood flow by 20–30%, reduce neuroinflammation by nearly 30%, and restore heart rate variability (the marker of nervous system health) in weeks instead of months.

The lesson applies to every performance goal: Recovery isn’t passive. It’s active. And it starts with breath.

Whether you’re bouncing back from injury, training for peak performance, managing stress and fatigue, or building resilience for the long game—the principle is the same: your breath is your recovery tool. Your competitive edge. Your invisible advantage.

What’s Next?

If this resonates with you—if you’re ready to move beyond just pushing harder and start performing smarter—I have two ways to work with me:

Transform Your Performance with 1:1 Coaching

In personalized sessions, we don’t just teach breathing techniques. We assess your body, decode your patterns, and rewire how your nervous system responds under pressure. Whether you’re recovering from injury, optimizing athletic performance, managing stress, or trying to show up better in your daily life—we build a practice tailored to your goals.

As a Doctor of Physical Therapy and Breathwork Specialist, I bridge the gap between physical capacity and nervous system control. That’s where real performance lives.

“Working with Justin transformed how I relate to my pain. I’m not ‘fixed,’ but I’m finally living again.” — Sarah M.

I have 2 spots open this month. If you’re ready to stop just getting by and start actually performing—to unlock what’s already inside you—let’s connect.

Let’s explore what’s possible for you.

Schedule Your Discovery Call

Breath for Pain: The Athlete’s Recovery Secret

If injury, pain, or limitation has been holding you back—if you’re frustrated that you can’t perform at your best—Breath for Pain is designed for athletes and performers like you.

This isn’t just about managing discomfort. It’s about expanding your capacity to perform despite it. It’s about shifting your relationship with limitation so it no longer limits you.

Through a 5-module self-guided course, you’ll learn:

• How breath directly impacts pain perception and nervous system regulation

• Techniques to perform under pressure without your body shutting down

• How to train smarter, not just harder, during recovery

• The mindset shift that separates those who bounce back from those who don’t

Enroll in Breath for Pain • 5 modules • Lifetime access • $50 off through the end of the year — Now $99 (was $149)

Start Your Journey

What paradox are you stuck in right now? Effort vs. ease? Control vs. release? Hit reply and let me know—I read every message.

JT

About the Author:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching.

APPLY NOW TO WORK TOGETHER!

Three minutes left in the game.

I’m subbing in because the starters fouled out. My heartbeat is going crazy. I’m trying to find focus, but the stadium around me is a blur. My chest tightens. Hands go stiff.

I have to shake it off. Show up. This was my norm throughout my high school basketball career.

I was able to perform through it. But as I look back now, I realize I was never given the tools to navigate moments like that. I was surviving. Not performing.

Five years later, I get the exact same feeling. Same sensation in my body. Same tight chest, same stiff hands.

But this time, I breathe.

I shake my hands out. I drop into a deep breath, hold for a couple seconds. I find inner strength — not just in the physical body. In my energetic and emotional body. I feel grounded. Present. Connected.

I remember having the thought: I feel like I discovered a secret superpower. I feel like I finally understand.

Today, I’ve put in more hours than most in the breathing science space, training with some of the world’s top experts to understand the invisible force that is breath. Working with athletes, I’ve come to one clear conclusion: this is the secret to sustained, high-level performance. And it has been fueling the best athletes for decades — mostly without anyone talking about it.

Everyone Is an Athlete

When we talk about athletes, we’re speaking broadly.

Wanting to grow and improve is an innate, universal desire. To me, that’s what makes an athlete — whether your sport is basketball or backgammon, hockey or hunting, weightlifting or walking. Whether you fish on weekends, train for marathons, bike through neighborhoods, or just show up to your physical life with intention.

Everyone is an athlete.

And whatever your sport may be — would you benefit from more energy? Better focus? Improved endurance? The ability to stay calm when everything around you is moving fast?

That’s where breath comes in.

How Breathwork Transforms Performance

Breathwork transcends traditional physical training. It’s not a supplement you take or a drill you run. It’s a skill that lives in your body, available every moment of every performance.

Used intentionally, breath allows you to calm nerves before crucial moments, reset focus amidst distractions, regain composure under pressure, slow time down enough to make critical decisions, and control your emotional state so that clarity leads — not panic.

These aren’t theoretical benefits. The difference between winning and losing often comes down to who can stay present, calm, and clear under pressure. That’s where breath gives you the edge.

Novak Djokovic, one of the greatest athletes in history, has spoken about this openly.

“Conscious breathing is probably the one ingredient I would take out as the most important.”

“It’s not a gift. It’s something that comes with work. Conscious breathing is a big part, especially in the moments when you’re under tension.”

That’s Novak Djokovic — arguably the most mentally disciplined competitor in his sport’s history — saying breath is the most important ingredient. Not serve speed. Not footwork. Breath.

The Part Most People Get Wrong

Here’s where I want to challenge the common narrative.

Most people, when they discover breathwork, are taught one thing: slow down. Calm the nervous system. Breathe less.

And yes — that matters. But as athletes, we also need to learn how to accelerate. How to turn up the breath intentionally. That’s called upregulation. And it’s an untapped, underappreciated component of breath-based performance.

The full picture has two directions:

• Upregulation — intentionally increasing your breath to activate and energize your system

• Downregulation — intentionally slowing your breath to find calm, presence, and recovery

The trick is this: you need one to access the other.

In a world of high energy, high pressure, and high stress, everyone is trying to slow down — without ever purposefully turning up. But if you’ve never trained how to deliberately activate your system, you can’t expect to fully control how it calms.

Full-range breath is the key. Not just the exhale. The whole cycle.

Why Has This Been Ignored?

I’ve thought about this a lot. There’s no single reason breathwork and mental performance practices have been overlooked in sports culture for so long.

But I think the common thread is this: instant gratification is not satisfied through consistent dedication to the mental practices of breathing, mindset, presence, and meditation.

We live in a world that rewards what’s visible, measurable, and fast. A new pair of shoes. A strength program with a PR every week. A pre-workout that hits in twenty minutes. Breathwork doesn’t give you that. It gives you something deeper, and more durable — but it asks you to slow down long enough to feel it.

And slowing down is harder than ever.

The advancements in technology and the accessibility of phones — designed specifically to occupy your mind and keep it thinking about technology to sustain technology — make it harder to access the still, focused state that breathwork requires. And it makes that state more valuable than it’s ever been.

The world is pulling your attention outward at all times. Breath pulls it back in.

Get Ahead of the Curve

Research on breathwork and its translation to real performance improvements is accelerating. More athletes are jumping on this train. The question isn’t whether this will become mainstream in sports — it’s whether you’ll be ahead of it or behind it.

That high school version of me — hands stiff, chest tight, surviving those three minutes — performed without the tools. He got through it.

You don’t have to just get through it.

The superpower was always there. We just weren’t taught to use it.

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Take a breath in right now.

Deep breath in. Pause. Let it go.

Great job.

What’s your sport? And what would shift if you could stay calm, focused, and present when it matters most? Hit reply—I’d love to hear what you’re working toward.

Deep breaths & deep gratitude,

Justin Ternes, DPT

Breathwork & Mental Performance Coach

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

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{PERSONAL STORY}
I first felt this not through data or a device, but in a moment of ordinary grace. A few years back, I was walking a quiet coastal path at dawn—waves still whispering, sky turning pink. My body carried the residue of a restless night: shoulders rounded forward, breath stuck high in my chest from too many hours staring down at screens. Halfway along the trail, something shifted. I straightened—spine long, chest open like I was greeting the ocean itself—and drew a slow breath in through my nose.

I felt it: that gentle quickening in my chest, almost playful. Then the exhale, long and complete, and a wave of settling rippled through me—deeper than relaxation, more like coming home to myself. In that instant, my heart wasn’t just beating; it was listening, responding, dancing with my breath. No app needed. Just presence.

Pause here with me. Wherever you are, notice how you’re sitting or standing. Feel the weight on your sit bones, the length of your spine. Soften your shoulders away from your ears. Inhale slowly through your nose... notice the subtle lift. Exhale fully... feel the quiet drop into calm. That tiny dialogue between heart and breath? That’s respiratory HRV alive in you. That’s your system saying, “I’m here, I’m flexible, I’m resilient.”

Recent discoveries are catching up to what embodied practices have always known. In a stunning 2025 study in Nature Neuroscience, researchers mapped a direct pathway: oxytocin—the same molecule we associate with trust, connection, and calm—flows from the hypothalamus to specific brainstem neurons, enhancing the heart’s rhythmic sync with breathing especially during recovery from stress. It amplifies that parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” tone, creating a feedback loop of deeper coherence. Add posture to the equation—open chest, free diaphragm—and the breath can drop deeper, allowing the heart even more room to vary, to play, to recover.

Most of us chase wellness in complicated ways: gadgets, protocols, endless tracking. But your body already has this intelligence built in. The catch is we’re often too collapsed, too hurried, too shallow to let it sing.

When this heart-breath dialogue flows freely—high respiratory HRV—you feel the gifts:

• Stress bounces off more quickly

• Emotions hold steady without flooding

• Thoughts clear like fog burning away

• Body moves with effortless power

• A quiet confidence hums beneath everything

When it’s muted—chronic hunch, shallow chest breathing, endless alert—the system stays vigilant. Wired, reactive, quietly exhausted.

The invitation is simple, and it’s yours starting now.

The Posture-Breath-HRV Trilogy: A Living Practice

These aren’t separate. They’re partners in motion.Posture is the architecture. Slouch, and the diaphragm can’t descend fully—breath stays shallow, heart loses its full octave of play.Breath is the rhythm keeper. Slow nasal inhales and extended exhales call forth parasympathetic dominance, widening the heart’s variability like opening a window to fresh air.

HRV is the song that emerges—the living proof your system is adaptable, coherent, thriving.

Try it wherever you are.Lengthen your spine as if a gentle string pulls the crown of your head upward.

Soften the front of your chest open—like welcoming more of the world in.
Inhale slowly through your nose... feel the heart rise in quiet excitement.
Exhale long and complete... notice the settling wave, the expansion of peace.

That felt shift? That’s the dance. Posture creating space, breath conducting, HRV responding with greater range and grace.

This echoes what we discovered with allostasis: stability through change isn’t passive physiology—it’s a conscious, felt art. Breath becomes the bridge between inner rhythm and outer world. Posture becomes the foundation that lets the bridge hold. HRV becomes the measure of how freely life moves through you.

When you close your eyes and sense that subtle, cellular coherence—heart syncing with breath, body aligning with the moment—you recognize it as more than a metric. It’s your physiology trusting the flow of things. Energy conserving when needed, energy producing when called.

In calm or in storm, through this simple attunement, you cultivate the inner rhythm that lets you meet it all with presence, resilience, and quiet power.

This is the heart’s quiet philosophy in motion: listening, responding, dancing.

Dynamic tranquility, embodied.

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Think of your body as a sophisticated house with an advanced environmental control system. Your thermostat keeps the temperature steady. Your water heater maintains consistent hot water. Your electrical panel keeps the lights on. All of these systems work together to maintain optimal internal conditions despite what’s happening outside.

This process of internal stability—keeping your temperature, pH, glucose levels, and blood pressure within narrow ranges that keep you alive—is called homeostasis. And it’s fundamental to survival.

But here’s the thing: homeostasis alone isn’t enough for real life.

The Mechanism of Homeostasis

Homeostasis operates through negative feedback loops—a regulatory mechanism similar to a standard thermostat in your house.

Here’s how it works: When your body temperature drops below 37°C (98.6°F), sensors detect the change. Your brain receives the signal and activates your muscles to shiver and your blood vessels to constrict, generating and conserving heat. Once you’re back to normal temperature, the system shuts off. When your temperature rises, the opposite happens—you sweat and your blood vessels dilate to cool you down.

This reactive system is brilliant for maintaining equilibrium, but it’s always playing catch-up. Something changes, your body responds, balance is restored. Over and over again.

The key components of homeostasis include:

Setpoint: The target value for a physiological variable—like your core body temperature of 37°C (98.6°F)

Sensors: Receptors (like thermoreceptors in your skin and hypothalamus) that monitor the current state

Controlled variable: The parameter being regulated, such as core body temperature

Comparator/integrator: Typically the hypothalamus or other central control centers that detect deviations by comparing sensor input to the setpoint

Effectors: Organs or tissues that execute corrective actions (skeletal muscles for shivering, sweat glands for cooling)

Similar negative feedback loops regulate blood glucose, pH, oxygen, carbon dioxide, blood pressure, and electrolyte concentrations like sodium, potassium, and calcium. Your body is constantly fine-tuning these variables to keep you functioning.

Allostasis: Predictive Regulation

While homeostasis provides reactive stability, allostasis represents an advanced layer of regulation that incorporates anticipation and prediction. Think of it as upgrading your house from a basic thermostat to a smart system that adjusts settings based on weather forecasts or occupancy patterns.

Allostasis means stability through change. It’s your body’s ability to anticipate demands and adjust setpoints proactively—before stress even arrives.

Unlike homeostasis (which responds after something changes), allostasis uses prior experience and feedforward mechanisms to adjust your physiology in anticipation of demands. Your heart rate rises before you even start exercising because your brain predicts you’ll need more oxygen. Your cortisol levels shift in anticipation of a stressful meeting. Your body mobilizes energy stores before you feel hungry.

This is predictive regulation in action. And it’s what allows you to adapt in dynamic, unpredictable environments.

But here’s the catch

This predictive system introduces a cost. When your predictions are prolonged or inaccurate—when you’re constantly bracing for stress that may or may not come—your body pays a price. This cumulative physiological cost is called allostatic load.

Allostatic load is the wear and tear on your nervous system and body systems (like the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic nervous system) from chronic stress, overpreparation, or misaligned predictions.

It’s why people who live in constant fight-or-flight mode break down faster. Their bodies are working overtime to maintain predictions that never fully resolve.

Controlled Breathing as a Modulator of Allostasis

Here’s where breath becomes revolutionary.

Respiration is unique among autonomic functions because it can be voluntarily controlled. You can’t directly command your heart to beat slower or your stomach to digest faster, but you can absolutely control your breathing.

This makes breath the most direct interface between your conscious mind and your automatic nervous system.

When stress activates your sympathetic branch (the “fight-or-flight” system), your respiration rate increases. Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid, triggering a cascade of stress responses. Your heart races, blood pressure spikes, and cortisol floods your system. Over time, this contributes to allostatic load.

But when you practice deliberate, slow, deep breathing, something different happens.

Slow breathing—particularly at around 5-6 breaths per minute—enhances parasympathetic activity (the “rest-and-digest” system) through vagal pathways. This reduces sympathetic arousal, lowers stress hormones like cortisol, and improves heart rate variability. Your nervous system signals safety to your brain, refining predictive regulation and mitigating allostatic load.

Established techniques include:

Box breathing: Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. Simple, powerful, and used by military and elite performers.

Diaphragmatic breathing: Deep inhalation expanding the abdomen rather than the chest. This maximizes oxygen exchange and signals safety to your nervous system.

Paced breathing: Targeting 5-6 breaths per minute. This specific frequency optimizes the balance between effort and ease.

These practices signal safety to the brain, refining predictive regulation and reducing unnecessary allostatic load. Research consistently supports their effectiveness in reducing anxiety, enhancing resilience, and improving overall physiological function.

The Real Difference

In summary: homeostasis maintains reactive equilibrium, like a basic thermostat. Allostasis enables predictive adaptation, like a smart home system. But allostasis comes with a cost when your predictions are chronically misaligned.

Controlled breathing serves as an accessible manual override—a way to consciously recalibrate your predictive systems and optimize autonomic function. Instead of waiting for stress to hit and then reacting, you’re training your nervous system to stay flexible and responsive.

You’re not trying to eliminate stress or achieve perfect stability. You’re building the capacity to move fluidly between effort and ease, between activation and recovery, between thinking and flow.

That’s the real power of understanding allostasis. And it all starts with your breath.

Are you constantly bracing for the next thing? Or can you actually rest between demands? Hit reply—I’m curious how this lands for you.

JT

About the Author:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching.

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A few weeks ago, I was on a morning hike through the Ozarks, enjoying the breath of nature, starting my day by checking in with myself: How am I feeling? What am I feeling? Where am I feeling?

As I continued my walk, I noticed a sense of guilt was present in my stomach. As I breathed into this feeling, I recognized that it was not overwhelming nor connected to anything in particular, but it was present, so I decided to pause my walk, breathe more deeply, and explore this feeling to see if any positives could come through.

I deepened my breath, not to push the emotion away, but to expand and lean into it. And as I felt within this small sphere of energy, I discovered something beautiful. This emotion of guilt had a color. It wasn’t just a word or a feeling. I saw a living ball of energy with shape, form, texture, and a subtle hue of royal blue.

I got curious. What colors were my other emotions? Could I see them? Could I feel them?

A few days later, I was sitting in a men’s group exploring some life challenges, and I felt a sense of anger arise. I didn’t want to focus on the why. I wanted to use this opportunity to practice exploring the color of my emotion. When I said the word “anger” out loud, I noticed that it didn’t fully articulate the feeling within me, so I decided to share the color that I saw. This emotion was dark red, with soft edges. There was a density to it, almost like the sun with a gravitational pull. But as I described the qualities and color of the emotion, it made so much more sense to me and connected much more than simply saying the word anger. And in this deeper connection, I was able to understand it in a way that allowed me to move through it more effectively.

We Should Interpret Emotions Like We Interpret Colors

We see a color and name it instantly. We’ve been doing this since we were kids. Emotions work in the same way. We feel a sensation in the body, interpret it in our mind, but what we haven’t been taught is how to give it a name.

With colors, we are taught to be curious and name it with the primary, but think deeper about a more precise description of this color.

But we don’t learn about emotions in the same way. We learn to name them in the primary: sad, angry, fine, good — but aren’t taught to go deeper into the exploration of emotions that move through the body, sometimes described as energy in motion. Because emotions come with discomfort and vulnerability, most of us were taught to repress or push emotions away. We were definitely not encouraged to speak openly about what they felt like or even what color they resembled.

Think about it. We spend years learning the difference between teal and turquoise, magenta and maroon. Yet no one ever sat us down and taught us the difference between frustration and resentment, between grief and loneliness, between anxiety and excitement. We skipped that education entirely.

This is where I feel color is the perfect bridge to emotional intelligence.

Breath as the Bridge

There’s a concept called interoception — the ability to feel within. Most of us move through our days so fast that we barely register what’s happening inside our own bodies. Conscious breathwork trains the brain to slow down and feel within. When you feel your breath enter and move through your lungs, you are sharpening the same system that feels emotion.

And breath is how we learn to stay present with that energy long enough to actually see its color.

The Practice of Emotional Literacy

But emotional literacy is a skill, and like any skill, it can be practiced.

• Meditation

• Breathwork

• Body awareness

• Psychotherapy

• Emotion-Focused Conversations

These are all ways to sharpen how we feel, and within the feelings, name our emotions.

Use visualizations to add specific details of how you are feeling:

• What does that sensation in your body look like?

• What does that feeling in your stomach feel like as far as size, density, texture?

• What is the color of your emotion?

These aren’t abstract questions—they’re invitations to get more precise with what you’re actually experiencing. The more specific you can get, the less likely you are to default to the same five or six emotional labels you always use.

When you can describe your emotion as “vibrant blue” or “muddy orange” or “sharp silver,” you’re not just being poetic. You’re creating a richer, more accurate map of your internal world.

What color is your emotion? Share in the comments below!

Take a moment to feel into your body right now. What color is your present emotion? Hit reply and tell me—I’m genuinely curious what you discover.

JT

Justin Bodenhamer-Ternes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

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I remember in my first year as an active licensed physical therapist, a patient came in for her fifth visit complaining not of her pain or injury, but of the traffic and the difficulty finding parking. The stress of her nervous system was palpable. I decided in that moment to put aside my physical therapy textbook and training and invite her to take a seat and practice some breathwork techniques I’d been practicing on my own.

After ten minutes of calm, deep, purposeful breath — and a few breath holds to make a slight shift in the physiology of the body — she exclaimed that her pain had reduced. We hadn’t even done a single bit of physical therapy yet. I was amazed.

So when we moved from the breathwork practice to the exercise portion of therapy, she said that she felt better and was moving better than she had in months. I found this to be a miracle yet I was not surprised.

Over time, as I continued to explore the connection between breathwork and pain, I came across the work of Paul Chek — and another layer clicked. Yes, breathwork calms the mind and nervous system. But Paul offered something deeper: pain is a teacher. It informs us. It gives us information.

That reframe changed everything. If pain is a teacher, then our job isn’t to silence it — it’s to listen. And breathwork, I realized, is one of the most powerful tools we have for learning to listen.

Pain Has Evolved — And So Have We

From René Descartes proposing that pain is simply an external stimulus traveling into our brain, to the most current and intricate BioPsychoSocial model of pain — pain has evolved in our understanding. And so have the tools available to us for working with it.

Pain is in the Brain...Body...& Heart.

According to the International Association for the Study of Pain, pain is defined as “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.”

This definition was updated in 2017 to include the word “emotional” because we now know that pain is not just felt in the brain and body, but also in the heart.

Pain impacts the whole human. How pain impacts each individual in each moment varies greatly. Pain can be as sharp as stepping on a Lego, as severe as fracturing a bone, as minimal as losing a game of chess, and as heart-wrenching as losing a loved one.

The evolution of pain has made us aware that in order to address and support pain, we must support the whole human — in mind, body, heart, and spirit. Pain does not just travel from a painful stimulus to the brain, but travels through our nervous system, emotional system, and memory system, and into the neo-cortex where it is processed, felt, and understood.

So the next time you feel a physical pain, understand that it is also innately emotional. The next time you feel emotional pain, understand that it is also innately physical.

My friend and colleague Dr. Rachel Zoffness is an expert in this field. Check out her book The Pain Management Workbook to learn more about this integrated approach to pain.

Expanding this awareness of pain into all systems can bring a deeper connection to heal the pain and a greater opportunity to shift our relationship with it.

Breathwork Can Help

Deep breath in... hold... let it go... See? Doesn’t that feel better?

On a serious note, while breathwork can help, it’s not a quick fix. It is a tool. To gain the benefit of breath, it takes consistent time, energy, and exploration. By expanding your awareness of breath, you will find an expansion of awareness of pain.

“The cure for pain is in the pain.” — Rumi

Conscious breathing, moving energy, stretching the body, releasing stress — these are all amazing ways that breathwork can support your pain experience. Notice that I say “support your pain experience” and not “heal your pain.” There is an art to working with pain.

How Breathwork Can Help:

• Resetting the nervous system

• Reframing your perspective (zooming out)

• Bringing awareness to your body and heart

• Controlling your emotional responses to pain

• Improving your overall health and wellness

I built a course called Breath for Pain for exactly this — a practical, heart-centered approach to working with pain through breathwork.

Explore Breath for Pain

If you prefer personalized support, I also offer one-on-one breathwork and pain coaching.

Inquire About Coaching

Recommended Resources

Books on pain:

• Making Sense of Pain by Jim Heafner & Jared Hall

• Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno

• The Pain Management Workbook by Dr. Rachel Zoffness

TED Talk:

• “Why Things Hurt” by pain scientist Lorimer Moseley (14.5 minutes on YouTube)

A Note of Gratitude

I am grateful for my path. I am grateful for my journey. I am grateful for those who guided me along the way.

One that sticks out as I write this is Paul Chek. He is a wise philosopher and health and wellness practitioner. He frequently speaks of pain as the “Pain Teacher.” Maestro Chek helped me reshape my perspective of pain from being a nuisance to being a guide. For this, I am grateful.

One last deep breath in... hold... connect to gratitude... let it go.

Have a beautiful day.

What’s your relationship with pain right now? Are you fighting it, managing it, or learning to work with it? Hit reply—I’d love to hear your story.

Dr. Justin Ternes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching. Learn more below.

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This absolutely did not make sense to me, given that, for my whole life, the very thing that got me out of bed in the morning was FOOD.

Regardless, I was intrigued and tried it out.

The hunger was grueling, yet after a couple of days of skipping breakfast, I was remarkably surprised by how much energy I had—without food in my belly.

The First Experiment

I continued practicing intermittent fasting for a couple of months and noticed so many positive shifts:

• I lost weight (got leaner)

• My energy was clean and consistent throughout the day

• I felt I had more emotional control

It was amazing.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that I was training my mindset as well as my nervous system, not just my physiology of the cellular system. Shifting from glucose predominance to ketogenic efficiency allowed my brain an opportunity to observe my behaviors in a brand new way. Through this training, I was able to train my mind and body to work together, to best regulate. Without excessive thinking, breathwork became the key component that allowed me to make the most out of my fasting experience.

Going Deeper

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I started hearing whispers about the benefits of multi-day fasting. Again, I was intrigued. So, I tried a 48-hour fast and felt great. A few months later, I extended that to three days—even better.

Finally, the challenge and opportunity presented itself: a five-day water-only fast.

On day three, I was walking my normal morning route to a local coffee shop, and I found myself not caring what other people may think of me. This was an interesting realization, because it made me see that when I had excess energy, I had extra energy to worry and be concerned. As I walked on day three, the body’s deep cellular cleansing—autophagy—had taken over, and in this process, I felt my mind, body, and ego release attachment and excessive care for what others might think of me. In this realization, I felt a sense of clarity awakened within me, and with that, a connection to spirit.

Where I Am Now

Jump to the present, and I’ve done multiple five-day fasts, helped guide dozens of friends and many more clients into their own fasting practices, and recently completed a seven-day water-only fast while traveling to Boston for a Metabolic Mind-Body Course at Harvard.

When I went to the Harvard conference, I chose to do a seven-day fast with the purpose and intention of giving my brain as great of a potential to learn, listen, and absorb as possible. This was an easy decision. After years of multi-day fasting, I knew what happened in the three-to-five-day window—ketosis sharpened my mind in a way that I couldn’t help but believe neuroplasticity was activated in real time.

It feels very true to say that fasting will continue to be a part of my practice for the rest of my life. The benefits are too great, and the healing too profound to ignore.

Fasting taught me that the body knows how to heal itself; it just needs space. If you’ve ever been curious about what happens when you stop feeding the noise and start listening, I’d encourage you to try this deeply personal and transformative practice.

If you’re in good health and curious, don’t start by just skipping a single meal. Go straight for a three-day water-only experience. You can do it.

If you want a framework to get started, I put together a free Fasting 101 Guide that covers the basics.

Have you experimented with fasting? What held you back, or what kept you going? Hit reply—I’d love to hear about your experience (or your curiosity).

JT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching. Learn more below.

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I would like to start by clearly stating that I do not believe you can simply “breathe all of your problems away.” Nor do I feel that doing a specific breathing technique or practice will heal or cure disease. What I do believe—based on very sound science—is that breathing better will improve the way your mind, body, and cells function. And with this improved inner system, the breath can help activate the body’s own inner healing powers.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and the more I sit with it, the more it makes sense: carbon dioxide and oxygen not only drive our respiratory system, but they drive health and healing.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a bike event and came across a recovery booth offering a CO₂ bodysuit “to optimize health and rejuvenation.” Intrigued, I signed up for a demo. “Slide it on over your clothes, make sure it’s air-tight around the ankles, wrists, and neck, have a seat, lounge back and get comfortable.” He zipped me up, connected a hose to the suit, and began to suction out all of the air. I felt like a package getting vacuum-sealed—but in a good, comfortable way. Next, he hooked up another hose connected to a tank of pure carbon dioxide. The vacuum became a bubble. My skin quickly began to feel flushed, warm, and tingly.

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As I sat there for 15 minutes, I didn’t notice a shift in my breathing, but I felt as if I had more air. The theory is that your body absorbs carbon dioxide through the skin (transcutaneous absorption), which permeates into the blood, increasing carbon dioxide levels and creating a mild state of hypercapnia. This enhances oxygen delivery throughout the body via the Bohr effect. As a result of the carbon dioxide absorption through the suit, your blood and cells become much more oxygen-efficient. It sounds wild, but the research is compelling.

In 2017, Japanese researchers published a study titled “Optimization of antitumor treatment conditions for transcutaneous CO₂ application: An in vivo study” (Ueha et al.). They investigated what would happen when carbon dioxide was applied to the skin overlying a tumor site in mouse models using a CO₂-containing hydrogel. They found something remarkable: under optimized conditions (sessions longer than 10 minutes), tumor volume was significantly reduced. This was achieved with a carbon dioxide gel applied directly to the skin, though the underlying principle of transcutaneous CO₂ absorption is considered similar to methods using CO₂ bodysuits or baths. Tumors often thrive in low-oxygen environments—a state called hypoxia. Transcutaneous CO₂ does the opposite: it increases local blood flow, improves oxygen delivery to the tissue, and leverages the Bohr effect so red blood cells unload oxygen more efficiently in the target area. As a result, hypoxia in the tumor decreased, oxygenation improved, and tumor size was reduced.

As a physiotherapist and breathwork practitioner, the concept of oxygen supporting healing is not novel. Many theories—both modern and ancient—discuss breathing slower and deeper, lowering the respiratory rate, and creating a subtle influence on blood pH. Breath-holding practices have been used for thousands of years to create a more significant and acute impact on inner physiology—stimulating energy, efficiency, oxygen utilization, and healing from within.

If the research on transcutaneous carbon dioxide therapy is valid—and it appears to be pointing in a promising direction—then wouldn’t it make sense that we could create similar positive effects by incorporating intentional breathing practices into our lives?

I believe this is not only plausible, but potentially necessary for optimal health. The main advantage of breathing better is that it is always accessible and among the safest practices available. Even before experiencing the CO₂ bodysuit, I had long believed that an oxygen-rich internal environment is far more effective at combating inflammation, stress, cancer, and disease.

To be very clear: I am not claiming that you can breathe your way to perfect health. But adding breath awareness, intentional breathing practices, and dedicated time throughout the day holds great potential value as a preventative health tool. No fancy bodysuit required. I do appreciate the innovation of a passive tool that can support many people, but I’ve always been an advocate of active engagement with health—though doing both is perfectly reasonable.

So how do you adjust your breathing to improve carbon dioxide levels?

1. Improve the function and efficiency of your breathing.

2. Slow down your respiratory rate (goes hand-in-hand with #1)

3. Incorporate Breath-Holds into your practice & daily life.

The first two likely make sense, but what about breath holds?

When you hold your breath, CO₂ rises - momentarily until you return to breathe. But with these little spikes of carbon dioxide, your body responds with vasodilation, nitric oxide release, improved oxygen delivery, and various anti-inflammatory effects. (Sounds a lot like the claims of benefit of the CO2 bodysuit).

A Quick Breath Test

Exhale and hold for 10 seconds. At the end of the hold (before inhaling), blow out a little more air like extinguishing a candle, then hold another 5 seconds. Blow out an exhale again, hold another 5 seconds — again and again until you can’t anymore and you need to breathe in. Good job. Recover your breathing and come back to relaxation. What did you feel? What did you notice? How long did you hold? How many ‘candles’ did you blow out? Continue to play with this, and an even more dynamic test shared below.

A Better Breath Test: The Modified CO2 Tolerance Test

Bringing it back to the CO2 suit. This passive modality increases the level of CO2 in the body. The principles I shared above do the exact same thing. They challenge the inner nature of your physiology and create an opportunity for adaptation and growth.

You’re building a relationship with the intrinsic urge to breathe - which comes primarily from a rise in carbon dioxide (not just a drop in oxygen), and other variables.

Even when you’re not breathing, your body keeps “breathing”. Your heart pumps oxygen-rich blood everywhere, and in the mitochondria of all 30 trillion cells, oxygen is used to produce energy. Carbon dioxide returns to the bloodstream and rises until you exhale.

Closing the “exhaust” (holding after exhale) lets CO₂ accumulate quickly across every cell. Eventually you breathe to restore balance. Blood pH normally sits between 7.35 and 7.45—slightly alkaline, favoring an oxygen-rich environment. Cellular function and human health thrive in this state. But the ideal balance includes a little extra CO₂. Your oxygen saturation is usually already near maximum even when CO₂ is driving the urge to breathe. Mild hypercapnia is where the magic happens: the body becomes more oxygen-efficient—not necessarily richer in oxygen volume, but far better at moving and utilizing it. This is a secondary but powerful byproduct of efficient breathing.

The first two points, functional and slow breathing has a similar but more subtle effect on CO2. By breathing slightly deeper and longer than usual, you naturally retain a little more CO₂. The benefit here is that you breathe thousands of times a day, which gives you thousands of opportunities to engage with your breath and influence your physiology and healing state.

Be mindful though, making minor changes to breath can create a big stimulation of mind, body, and nervous system. Meet yourself where you’re at.

A common breath pattern I aim to hit on an all-day, everyday basis is as follows:

• 4-second inhale, 6-second exhale

• 3-second inhale, 1-second hold, 6-second exhale

• 3-second inhale, 7-second exhale

We take 20,000–25,000 breaths a day. Changing the baseline of every breath creates compound-interest-level impact on physiology.

Purpose and Practice:

I feel that before the practice one needs purpose. Practice without purpose holds minimal value.

There is an inner will within each human that holds super powers of energy and effectiveness. Finding purpose aligns this inner will to be on board with the practice.

The purpose is health. The purpose is growth. The purpose is allowing the natural and brilliant human mechanisms of life and consciousness to rise through you with as little obstruction as possible.

The practice is to maintain this awareness first in form of and with this awareness deepen your breath, suspend at the top for a moment, extend the exhale slightly deeper than normal press out the bottom of the exhale and repeat a breathing cycle that serves your inner chemistry to the utmost potentiality. This is your all day every day throughout the day, practice. breath awareness, slow and deep into the lower diaphragm, subtle expansion of the upper ribs, upper back, gentle movement of the spine with every breath.

The other focus of practice can be seen similar to that of high intensity interval training for exercise. Activation, energy, stimulation, growth, adaptation. These are techniques similar to the Wim Hof, Erwan Le Corre’s BreathHoldWork / Buteyko-style, or performance-based breathing.

For more on practices, there are plenty of resources, including some videos through my YouTube channel. You can see here.

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The daily foundation is breath awareness: deepen into the lower diaphragm, allow subtle expansion in the upper ribs and back, let the spine move gently with each breath. Slightly suspend at the top, extend the exhale a little deeper, press out the bottom, and repeat a cycle that serves your inner chemistry as fully as possible. This is an all-day, every-day practice.

The breath activation for energy, stimulation, growth, and adaptation, are the ones inspired by the methods above - with emphasis on expanded breathing, accelerated pacing, nervous system regulation, and breath holds.

For more on these, check the videos on my YouTube channel.

So here we are.

The CO₂ suit was a mirror. An external reminder of something we already carry within.

Breath is the primary bridge - the fastest way to align the inner weather with whatever storm or stillness is outside. This is dynamic allostasis in real time: consciously meeting the moment, matching internal energy to external reality, whether the world is crashing waves or soft wind. The nervous system already knows how to do this unconsciously.

The practice is to make it deliberate. Pause right now.

Take one slow breath in through the nose. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale. Feel the subtle drop in your shoulders. Notice the small buzz under your skin, the cells quietly waking up. That’s not imagination. That’s your physiology saying yes. When we stay with the breath—when we stop living only in the head—we lower allostatic load and raise something else: presence, vibrancy, calm that doesn’t need to be earned.

Deep breaths & deep gratitude.

Justin Bodenhamer-Ternes

References:

https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/or.2017.5591#

https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/or.2018.6608

https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/ijo.2014.2476

https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/or.2018.6444

https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/or.19.1.17

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For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

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Disconnection from purpose stems from a disconnection from self.

But saying “disconnected from self” is vague and fleeting. It’s good awareness, but provides minimal insight to help direct you in getting back on the right track.

Interoception - the body’s ability to feel within - is the key to clarity, connection, and abundance in life.

The Energy Within You

It’s estimated that if you were to collect all of the potential energy happening within your body at this very moment, and add it together, it would equal the strength of a lightning bolt.

That’s a lot of energy and a lot of potential.

But can you feel it? Most of us are so overwhelmed by the outside world that we miss the energy of the inner world. That is where the practice of interoception comes in.

Interoception is the felt sense of life moving through you. Where attention goes, energy flows. When you direct your attention inward—to your breath, your heartbeat, your energetic body—you will begin to reclaim what’s been missing.

When you’re hyper-vigilant to the outside world, your internal awareness dies.

And when your internal awareness dies, so does your connection to purpose, clarity, and genuine peace.

For most people, interoception has atrophied. You’ve learned to read everyone else—your boss’s stress, your partner’s emotions, the room’s energy—while becoming deaf to your own signals.

You can sense fatigue in others but miss your own exhaustion. You can feel someone else’s anxiety but ignore your own intuition screaming that something’s wrong.

This imbalance is foundational to disconnection.

This is how burnout happens. This is how you lose yourself.

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Where Attention Goes, Energy Flows

Interoception isn’t fixed. Neuroscience confirms it: interoception is a skill. And like any skill, it can be developed, strengthened, and refined.

Developing the skill of interoception is foundational to regulation. When you bring awareness to what’s happening inside, you gain control over what happens outside.

A body stuck in fight-or-flight remembers how to rest. Emotions that felt abstract suddenly become tangible. For many people—especially men—emotions can be difficult to grasp, but the body doesn’t lie.

Instead of “I feel angry,” you might notice: “I feel tightness in my chest.”

That physical awareness is everything. Because our decisions are guided by energy.

When you reconnect to your internal awareness, everything changes.

Interoception opens the door to:

Decision-making — You make choices aligned with your actual needs, not your conditioned responses

Processing emotions — You feel what’s really happening instead of suppressing or numbing it

Connecting to purpose — Purpose isn’t something you search for; it’s something you remember when you listen to yourself

Identifying and overcoming burnout — You catch the warning signs before you crash

Interoception doesn’t just soften external stimulation—it also quiets the noise of the ego. And as a breathwork facilitator, it’s powerful to see science backing what the body already knows: conscious, controlled breathing supports pain regulation, anxiety reduction, and mental wellbeing.

The Most Direct Path Inward

Feel the breath enter your lungs. Notice the expansion of the ribs, cool air through the nasal cavity, tension release on the exhale.

Feel it not as a thought, but as a sensation.

This is interoception: the nervous system’s native language. The felt sense of life moving through you. It is the most direct path inward.

Breathwork is one of the most effective tools to enhance interoception. When you bring awareness to the breath, you bring awareness into the body. It sharpens your ability to feel. It down-regulates the nervous system.

The most impactful benefit of breathwork isn’t just reduced anxiety or better sleep—it’s increased interoception.

Because when you can feel yourself, everything else becomes possible.

Reconnect to your breath. Reconnect to yourself. Reconnect to purpose.

Feel the breath enter. This is a practice of interoception. It is a powerful tool, and a grounded anchor for meditation and mindfulness.

Feel it to heal it. Breathe it to heal it.

To listen here—to this internal knowing—is to reclaim a relationship with the self. To find peace not as a concept, but as a physical reality.

An anchor not in abstraction, but in the biology of your own being.

That lightning bolt of energy living inside you? It’s not waiting for you to find it.

It’s waiting for you to feel it.

The question isn’t whether you have what it takes. The question is: are you ready to feel it?

What’s your relationship with interoception like? Can you feel that internal energy, or has it gone quiet? Reply in the comments—I’d love to hear where you’re at with this.

With deep breaths & deep gratitude,

Justin Bodenhamer-Ternes

If you want to go deeper:

• My thread on interoception (quick read on X)

• Huberman’s take on interoception (visual breakdown)

• The science: Interoception and mental health (research deep-dive)

About the Author:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching.

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In this article, I aim to redefine the term “allostasis”. Well, not necessarily redefine, but more-so add a layer of evolution and felt-experience to the definition of allostasis. In 1988, Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer introduced this concept in their paper, "Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology” to describe the brain's active process of achieving stability by adapting internal systems to environmental demands, rather than just maintaining a fixed set-point like homeostasis.

As soon as I discovered ‘allostasis’ I was captivated. Human behavior made a little more sense. I learned that allostasis is primarily defined as ‘stability through change’, and as I dove deeper, it made sense that the energetic body enters a state of adaptation when faced with the stressors of life.

What I couldn’t find in the research was an explanation of the palpable interoceptive sensation that I felt wash over my body and nervous system as I shifted away from allostatic load into a state of allostatic calm.

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To highlight this moment of awareness, 5 years ago I was sitting on the beach in beautiful Encinitas, California. Perfect weather. Soft wind. Blue skies. Ideal temperature. Hypnotizing waves forming and crashing on the shore. I felt a complete sense of peace and tranquility. Harmony between mind, body, and the nature around me. This is when it clicked. I was in a state of allostasis. No excess, no overload. Just presence and calm. Even deeper, noticing a buzzing of vibrancy and energy.

Now I invite you to pause, breathe, and notice how this mental imagery inspires a felt-sensation of peace, calm, and balance in this very moment. This is allostasis in action. Creating harmony between mind, body, and nature (even if the nature is in your head).

Inspired by this discovery, I furthered my exploration and found that practices of breathwork, meditation, and present-awareness amplified the felt-experience of allostasis - stability, relaxation, and attunement between my psychophysiology with the world around me.

Allostasis is so much more than an unconscious physiological process… allostasis is a practice. It is a felt state of mind. It is consciously engaging with the energy within you and without you.

The next question to address here: “So if allostasis is all about connecting with the energy and nature around you, what if the environment around you is chaotic and stimulating?”. Excellent question! This is where allostasis makes even more sense as a conscious practice leading to the felt-experience of calm.

Quite frequently, we are met with the external stimulation of life, work, relationship, environment. Since the way I define allostasis is “balance between self and nature”, the only way to create balance with a stressful environment is through internal positive stress and stimulation - for me I accomplish this with breath.

Now, our allostatic practice becomes dynamic.

Notice the energy of the world around you.
Welcome the matching of energy from within you.

Through consistent and conscious practice, you can support the body’s natural allostatic process, reduce unnecessary load, facilitate physiological homeostasis and generate a subjective experience of peace, presence, and confidence.

As mentioned, I am not trying to redefine the term, just expand upon it. I cannot think of a single word in the english dictionary that describes such a state as perfectly and accurately as “allostasis”.

When you close your eyes and feel that cellular tranquility wash through you, now you know the word to describe it. This is the direct result of your physiology - aligning inner-energy with outer reality. Both energy conserving and energy producing.

Whether you’re surrounded by calmness or activation, through conscious awareness of this intrinsic process, you can match the energy around you - leading to presence and an increased psychophysiological capacity to navigate stability through change.

This is the philosophy in motion: allostasis as both practice and felt state. Breath as the bridge. Stability through change; dynamic tranquility with the world.

Deep breaths & deep gratitude,

- Justin Lee Bodenhamer-Ternes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

For those ready to bring allostasis, breath, and growth-oriented coaching into your lives, let’s work together!

I love receiving new applications, learning about your unique journey, and guiding you with inspiration through online coaching. Learn more below.

APPLY NOW TO WORK TOGETHER!