Martin McPhilimey - School of Breath Science

Social media rewards attention.

That’s great for exposure.

But exposure isn’t enough.

Attention gets people to look at you.

But what if they are looking at you because they like how you perform?

A bit like watching a Netflix documentary full of cheap, exciting ideas, but lacking any real depth. You leave feeling like you’ve learned something, but when you reflect on it, there’s not much there.

There are many people with large numbers who have no idea how to convert that attention into a business.

They have worked with every business coach under the sun, tried all the tricks, and still got nowhere.

That’s because trust is the reason people buy from you.

Unless you’re only selling tricks.

But if you’re a coach or an educator, you have to build trust and likeability.

You do that through authenticity.

And often, that requires a hell of a lot of vulnerability.

The joy of my 1:1 mentorships is that you are not just getting an educator.

You are getting someone who has walked the walk and can talk the talk.

And I am there to mentor you, not just educate you.

Lydia told me a few weeks ago that she could never see herself getting behind the camera.

I told her the truth:

People don’t buy from businesses.

They buy from people.

She is now posting regular reels, and I could not be more proud.

If this is the type of support you want alongside your professional training, drop me a DM today.

“But it’s just breathing.”

As a breath practitioner, you’ve probably heard that before.

Yet an interesting finding from the research is that how breathing is practised appears to matter.

Whether someone is being guided, counting their breaths, following a specific pace, or simply observing their natural breathing pattern can influence which brain networks are engaged and how the experience is processed.

This raises an interesting question:

If someone struggles with attention, might a guided practice be more useful initially because it provides an external anchor for focus?

Over time, however, that same person may need to learn how to count or pace themselves so regulation is not dependent on someone else’s voice.

Likewise, someone experiencing anxiety or panic may find it difficult to let go of conscious control. For them, simple breath awareness and learning to observe the breath without changing it might be a more appropriate starting point.

The nuance matters.

Breathing is automatic, but that doesn’t mean it is unimportant.

In fact, the very fact that it operates mostly outside conscious awareness may be one reason why it is so often taken for granted.

And perhaps why the work of breath practitioners is sometimes taken for granted too.

The breath may be automatic.

How we relate to it is not.

A recent study concluded that different breathing approaches can engage attention, emotional regulation, and self-referential processing in different ways.

What are your thoughts?

Have you noticed that different breathing instructions create very different experiences for your clients?

Ng, H. Y. H., Hsu, A. L., Wu, C. W., Huang, C. M., Chao, Y. P., Jung, T. P., & Chuang, C. H. (2026). Frontal Electroencephalography Asymmetry and Desynchronized Functional Connectivity Associated with Long-Term and Short-Term Breathing Training. Mindfulness, 1-16.

schoolofbreathsciencE

Breathwork is not as simple as choosing a technique and expecting a guaranteed outcome.

A breathing practice is not powerful because someone on the internet says it “activates the vagus nerve,” “releases trauma,” “improves CO₂ tolerance,” or “calms the nervous system.”

Those claims often confuse mechanisms with outcomes.

A mechanism might make something biologically plausible, but it does not tell you how that technique will land in a real person with a real history, real stress, real sleep patterns, real health concerns, and a real nervous system already adapting to its environment.

This is where a lot of breathwork education falls short.

It teaches techniques before it teaches assessment.

It teaches claims before it teaches clinical reasoning.

It teaches “do this for that” before it teaches practitioners how to understand the person in front of them.

The same breathing technique can help regulate one person and dysregulate another.

That is why context matters.

The goal is not to memorise more techniques.

The goal is to understand when, why, and for whom a technique may be useful—and when it may not be.

Don’t be fooled by the person with the biggest following telling you what the “best” technique is.

Simple content from the peak of Mount Bu****it often goes viral.

Depth, nuance, assessment, and personalisation rarely do.

If you work with people, put the person before the breath.

Too many breath coaches are focused on techniques.

The best practitioners are focused on understanding the human being in front of them.

Hyperventilation syndrome may be more complex than simply “breathing too much.”

This paper compared 12 people with confirmed idiopathic hyperventilation syndrome to 12 matched healthy controls and found a more nuanced pattern of ventilatory control.

People with HVS showed:
* higher resting ventilation
* more variable breathing
* more breathlessness at rest
* similar central CO₂ sensitivity
* lower plant gain
* greater peripheral chemoreceptor influence

In other words, the physiology may not be best explained by a simple “low CO₂” story.

Instead, this study points toward a broader picture involving breathing instability, altered CO₂ buffering, and stronger peripheral influences on resting ventilatory control.

Important context: this was a small case-control study, so the findings are best viewed as mechanistic and hypothesis-generating rather than the final word.

Pauwen, N. Y., Bruyneel, M., Herpeux, A., Sergysels, R., Ninane, V., & Faoro, V. (2026). Peripheral chemoreceptors, plant gain, and CO₂ stores as drivers of resting ventilatory control in idiopathic hyperventilation: A prospective case-control study. Journal of Applied Physiology, 140(1), 262–278.

From working 1:1 in clinics…

To leaving it all behind to live in a little shack in Indonesia with a woman I’d only been dating a few months…

To travelling the world and building a six-figure business…

To returning to Australia with the odds stacked against us…

To creating a certification…

And now…

The School of Breath Science community is reaching across 52 countries and territories 🌍

Our strongest communities are in Australia, the UK, and the US, with growing numbers across Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, Austria, India, Singapore, Sweden, Denmark, and France.

But what I find especially exciting is seeing this work reach places I never expected:

Japan, Brazil, Costa Rica, Israel, Iceland, Mexico, Slovenia, Ukraine, Argentina, Bosnia, Brunei, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malta, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the UAE, Guernsey, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Only five years ago I was in a clinic seeing one patient at a time.

Now this work is reaching practitioners, coaches, therapists, health professionals, and communities all over the world.

That is something I’m deeply grateful for.

The impact is no longer just the person in front of me.

It is the people those practitioners go on to support.

Their clients.
Their students.
Their families.
Their communities.

And perhaps most meaningful of all, this work is reaching people across borders, cultures, and lived experiences often separated by politics, conflict, or history.

For me, the School of Breath Science is not about taking sides.

It is about supporting humans.

It is a space where people are welcomed with open arms, and where the nervous system, breath, stress, sleep, recovery, and resilience are shared human experiences.

I’m grateful to every student, practitioner, client, mentor, and friend who has supported this journey.

What started as a vision to raise the standard of breathwork education is now spreading across cultures, professions, and continents.

This is more than a course.

It is becoming a global community committed to raising the standard together.

School of Breath Science — A Global Community.

Five things BJJ has taught me about life and regulation.

1. Regulation is context specific.
When I first started BJJ, I thought I’d have an advantage because of everything I know about stress, breathing, and nervous system.

But like any fresh white belt, even though I knew the gym wasn’t a real fight, my ego still wanted to win every round.

I relied on strength, stuck to what I knew, and avoided positions where I felt exposed.

Over time I realised training isn’t about being better than the person in front of you. It’s about creating the conditions to learn.

That is regulation in context: not just staying calm, but adapting to the purpose of the environment.

2. The need to perform can become dysregulating.
Over the last few months this has landed.

I feel more creative, more consistent, and I’m picking up fewer injuries.

It’s crossed over into life too.

My HRV has increased around 30% over the last two months, and I don’t think that’s from one recovery hack.

I think it’s because not every session, work block, or class has to be 100%.

Sometimes the most regulating thing you can do is stop turning life into a test of your worth.

3. The body becomes more intelligent through practice.
I’ve always had big legs and years under a squat bar, but mobility became an issue.

As I develop my leg game in BJJ, my movement is changing in everyday life.

Getting off the sofa, standing from the ground, getting out of bed — I use my feet, hips, hooks, and leverage differently.

BJJ teaches you the body is not just something you train. It is something you learn through.

4. Play is a serious form of learning.
As adults, we lose the instinct to play.

BJJ returns you to curiosity.

One tiny change in hand position, hip angle, shoulder pressure, or leg placement can change whether something works or fails.

Play is not childish. It is how the nervous system explores possibility without perfection.

5. Pressure reveals your patterns.
BJJ shows what happens under pressure.

Do you tense? Rush? Hold your breath? Force?

Or can you pause, breathe, feel, frame, and make a better decision?

Regulation is revealed when there is pressure, uncertainty, discomfort, and consequence.

The breath is central to the mind body connection and that is central to sports performance.

But much of modern breath coaching has emerged from clinical literature, where the goal is often to identify and correct dysfunctional breathing patterns.

The issue is that clinical dysfunction and sports performance are not the same context.

Even when papers show a high presence of upper-chest or thoracic-dominant breathing patterns in athletes, the interpretation often gets reduced to mechanics.

But breathing mechanics do not only influence oxygen transfer or ventilatory efficiency.

They also interact with arousal, attention, interoception, emotion, behaviour, and performance state.

This is an important consideration because an athlete’s breathing pattern may become linked to prior experiences of success.

If an athlete has repeatedly won, survived pressure, or found another gear while breathing in a certain way, that breathing pattern may become associated with readiness, aggression, confidence, timing, and ex*****on.

In that context, immediately correcting the pattern may not just change mechanics.

It may alter the athlete’s access to a learned performance state.

This does not mean chest breathing is always good.

It does not mean mechanics are irrelevant.

It means performance breathing should not be reduced to one ideal pattern.

A breathing pattern should be judged by the function it is serving, the context it appears in, and whether it supports or limits the person’s desired outcome.

This is why I often argue that most performance breathing work should be developed outside of competition itself.

In competition, the athlete’s primary job is not to think about breathing.

It is to execute, adapt, and win.

This is a theoretically supported argument grounded in respiratory interoception, predictive processing, associative learning, and sport psychophysiology.

The specific claim that an athlete's breathing pattern may become linked to a learned performance state is best framed as a plausible applied hypothesis, not a directly proven finding much like many other areas in breathing performance. We simply don't have concrete evidence.