FULL POWER

Full Power builds the flexible robust foundation you need to move beautifully and powerfully through life.  It leverages your innate human wiring to put you in the driver’s seat.

It is for everyone who breaths and has a nervous system and wants to feel and perform optimally.  From elite athletes and hard-driving executives, to long Covid sufferers and overwhelmed parents, Full Power gives you reliable science-backed lifetime tools that are already built into you that will become your go-tos when the chips are down, and when you want to fully feel and experience life.

This scientifically grounded 7-week program is based on functional breathing, heart rate variability (HRV) training, biofeedback, mindset, community, and knowledge of key physical and psychological mechanisms involved with breath. It is scalable to and will improve all levels of physical activity.

The program cultivates self-awareness and a positive mindset, and provides a foundation of behaviors and habits that can empower and transform, and enhance your enjoyment and engagement in life.

Whether you are an elite athlete looking to squeeze that extra 4%-10% improvement, or a long-haul Covid sufferer restoring basic breathing and heart rate and nervous system function, or anything in between, this program will move the needle for you.  


Benefits 

Optimized breathing for effort, rest, and daily life

Embodied emotional and physical resilience 

Improved performance, sleep, and focus

Increased awareness and control of your internal state

Lifelong habits and feedback for growth

A thriving community for supports and optimization

Alignment to nature, elements, and your innate programming

The Team

 I have been partnering with my favorite complementary practitioners, for greater depth and range of exploration, to enrich your understanding and tools for showing up fully in life. They will be providing sessions and workshops across the 7 weeks of the program. Exact participation TBA.

They are:

I am also blessed with three excellent assistants, highly experienced guides who will be there every step of the way to reflect and provide wisdom:

  • Karla Weeks, veteran of the program and assistant for four of my courses in 2021; she has a deep understanding of how to guide you

  • Christopher Villanella, fellow Oxygen Advantage Instructor and Wim Hof Method Instructor, veteran of my program, wise research-driven practitioner of brain-body-spirit integration

  • Katherine Touhey, Yogi, NCAA D1 swimmer, mom of 3 boys under 10, rising Enneagram coach

Your Commitment If you’re already working out, expect an additional 30 minutes a day. Including some seated and some moving breathing exercises, and HRV biofeedback. As well as sleeping with mouth tape on. Or at least aiming to achieve that. Daily in-app communication with your buddy group.  And eight one-hour Monday 7:00 pm Zoom group meetings. 

The Breathing  Most athletes train everything except their breathing, leaving 4-10% performance on the table.  Breathing is the remote control of your nervous system.  And your nervous system determines your experience of life. Learn to control your breathing, and you learn to control your performance.  The breathing component of Full Power is based on Oxygen Advantage https://oxygenadvantage.com/, designed to improve functional and performance breathing. Over the course of the program, we establish your personal breathing baselines, learn about the biomechanics, biochemistry, and psychology around breathing performance and improvement, build and execute a program to normalize and optimize your breathing, track progress and adjust as needed.

Exercises include reduced breathing, meditation, nasal-only workouts, mouth taping at night, cadence breathing (like box breathing), light and strong breath holds, breath separation, hypoxic hypercapnic training, and use of Buteyko Belt and SportsMask. To improve CO2 tolerance, O2 exchange, calm breathing patterns, and train you to relax into difficult situations. Each person’s program will be customized (and continuously recalibrated) to meet you where you are. 

Communication  Daily text check-ins from me.  You will also be paired with another athlete (or athletes) in the program, and a different one each week; we will talk about the value of peer support and accountability. It is powerful. You will miss a lot if you do not communicate. In fact, lack of communication is one thing that keeps people sub-optimal. And finding your voice opens the world to you.  

Why is HRV a big deal? Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a key indicator of the resilience of your nervous system. It tells you how ready you are to engage, or whether you need to recover.

A healthy heart and nervous system respond nimbly to your needs; your heart rate varies constantly and dynamically.  An exhausted heart and nervous system become a metronome: very little variability.  So we take a hard look at HRV.

HRV directly correlates to blood pressure, breath rate, and heart rate. Which correlate to state of mind, and sense of calm and peace. In this program, HRV measurement and biofeedback will be used to supplement and optimize breathing and performance targets. The goal is for you to achieve greater awareness, relaxation, and overall feeling of wellness and strength, as well as greater faith in your own body as a machine to propel you through the experiences you want in life.

Using the Lief device, will track HRV as well as learn to modulate it. To bring yourself back into a resilient state more quickly. Ultimately, so that you no longer need the device for feedback; you learn to feel your body’s states and can change them at will. Which is true freedom.


Why Biofeedback?  Because biofeedback is one of the most powerful technologies humans and nature have ever invented.  It allows you to directly improve yourself, through your own signals, to yourself. You learn to recognize your own internal state, something many of us simply have become deaf to, or never learned to feel. 

Learning About Lief Full Power uses the Lief device for HRV monitoring and biofeedback.  You’ll be wearing it for a few hours a day.  It is a clinical grade EKG patch that sits on your left chest wall and directly reads your heart signals. It calibrates to your body’s specific HRV and uses haptic feedback to cue breathing changes when your HRV moves below a configurable level. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. And like driving without headlights at night, most of us aren’t aware of our state. HRV biofeedback will begin to move you into state awareness.

I will be offering 30-min zooms on HRV and the Lief device prior to program launch. I highly recommend you attend. My goal is that you have the Lief device working and ready and you are familiar with how it functions before we launch on March 7. 

I have also produced some amateur but useful videos of me demonstrating the nuts and bolts of wearing and charging the device, so that you understand what you are saying yes to. Linked below. 

Meetings

HRV and Lief Orientation meetings offered prior to Launch

Monday Group Meetings: 7:00 pm EST Mondays on Zoom. Kickoff is 90m-2hrs; all others 1hr.

Optional Practice Sessions offered throughout the program to reinforce exercises and learning.

Reference To get started, here are introductory materials and a few extras for exploration:

You The practices are simple but powerful. You will get out of them what you put into them. The most important things you bring to this work are a can-do attitude, consistency, and open honest communication. Everything else will take care of itself. 

Payment Donation-based. No one will be turned down due to finances. My out-of-pocket per-person costs are $230. Suggested donation $2000. Yes, really. You will have an opportunity to adjust up or down at the end, too, as you are called.

Intake and Disclaimers This is a widely applicable program; I titrate it to your level of overall health. Nonetheless, if you have specific health concerns, contact me directly to discuss. Always undertake any breathing or exercise program in consultation with your health care provider.

 

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