I want to talk to you about intermittent hypoxic training as a tool for post concussion rehabilitation. If you are new to our company, we are brain-based education company. We teach doctors, therapists, and coaches from all over the world and we show them how to integrate neuroscience with biomechanics and other movement stuff that they are probably are already really good at, but they want to blend cutting edge neuro into that.
That’s what we do. And as a result, We spend a lot of time talking about traumatic brain injury, concussions, and the rehabilitation of those, particular syndromes. Now, why we’re talking about it right now is in the United States, March is Traumatic Brain Injury Awareness Month. We have a extensive Post Concussion Rehabilitation Syndrome product, but I want to share with you some kind of cutting edge things that are coming out.
And I want to show you one simple approach that is incredibly powerful in this video today, and it’s about, it’s called intermittent hypoxic training. So the foundation of this is very simple. When someone has a blow to the head, they have a concussion, one of the preeminent issues that arises is a decrease in cerebral blood flow.
A lot of times it was believed years ago that, hey, yeah, we know that the blood flow is going to diminish as a protective response, but it should come back to normal really quick. Actually, in most cases now, current research shows that it doesn’t. We can see reduced cerebral blood flow for two, three, four, eight years, or even longer in some individuals.
In order for the brain to heal from an injury, it needs blood flow, right? That’s how we’re going to get oxygen. That’s how we’re going to get nutrients to the neurons that need to heal. So we need some approaches that are accessible, cheap, and easy, and incredibly effective that we can give our clients to increase cerebral blood flow very quickly. And one of the fastest ways to do that is through using breathing.
Whenever we look at breathing, we’re dealing with oxygen and carbon dioxide. What we know is that if I hyperventilate or I have a poor breathing pattern, so I’m always breathing too fast for my current level of activity, I am going to have too much oxygen on board.
Brains don’t like that. And we know that because we can watch in intestine imaging when we hyperventilate usually within 30 seconds to a minute we can see, um, the vessels in the brain beginning to constrict. And in fact, there are some studies that show that we can reduce cerebral oxygen levels so brain oxygen levels by up to 40 percent within with 30 seconds of hyperventilation.
So if your clients are hyperventilating, number one, you’ve got to fix that. You’ve got to assess them for hyperventilation. You’ve got to start showing them how to solve that. But the mechanism of excess of oxygen causing constriction is countered by increasing CO2 levels. Whenever we increase CO2 levels in the body, guess what happens to the vessels in the brain?
They dilate, which allows additional blood flow to move through areas maybe that have been previously injured. So one of the approaches that is showing really, really profound effects in rehabilitation is the use of what’s called intermittent hypoxic training. There are a lot of ways to do this. There’s the high tech expensive versions where we’re going to give you different mask to put on.
We’re going to use different bottles of oxygen and CO2 mixtures. There’s a lot of different ways you can do that, but that’s expensive. It’s time consuming and most people can’t do it at home. You have the very invasive way of increasing CO2 levels. which is like move to Denver, move to the top of a mountain.
That’s what a lot of our endurance athletes used to do. It’s called live high. Those are very useful, but they’re quite impractical. And in many cases, they’re not what people with concussion or traumatic brain injury really need. We need the ability to acutely increase blood flow to the brain so that we can then do exercises that are more supportive of the rehab with that increased blood flow.
So the practical way to achieve a hypoxic state in the comfort of your own home or in the gym is to use a variety of breathing exercises. Now there are tons of different ways to do this. I’m going to show you one. I’ve used this for years with clients. It’s easy. It’s really effective.
In our programs, we typically call this an air hunger drill because I want our clients to understand it. Intermittent hypoxia makes no sense to anybody, but air hunger does make sense. So the basic way that we’re going to have people do this is if they are really symptomatic, we’re going to start off very gently.
We’re going to have them breathe just normal kind of diaphragmatic breathing. Maybe I put my hands on their abdomen. I have them do, you know, chest and abdomen palpation themselves. We have them do two or three minutes of diaphragmatic breathing. We’re going to increase the depth of breathing. Now, as we do that, if we’re not having them do a long exhale, we’re going to start increasing oxygen levels, right?
And oxygen is not what we want for intermittent hypoxia, but we’re kind of setting the stage for what’s going to come next. Now, after we have gotten them into a kind of focused state, two to three minutes of diaphragmatic breathing, We’re now going to go into our hypoxic training. Super simple. What we’re going to have them do is they’re going to breathe in through the nose.
They’re going to breathe out through the nose or the mouth. You can do either one and they’re going to go to their first comfortable exhale. So breathe in, exhale, and now stop where you think you would normally stop your exhale. At that point, we’re going to add in a second. Light exhalation. We’re trying to get down to what’s kind of called a residual volume.
So we’re gonna breathe in Exhale come to your first natural stopping point Freeze and then a little bit more. At that point you hold your breath. You want them to hold their breath for about 10 seconds in the beginning 5 to 10 seconds And then they’re going to breathe normally for 30 seconds You’re gonna have them do that 6 to 8 times if you want to be very scientific about this you can get a pulse oximeter that will check their oxygen saturation and you put that on their finger and as they are accumulating more and more time in that breath hold state, we should start to see their oxygen levels drop.
That’s going to indicate that we have more CO2 and hopefully that’s going to start expanding some of those arteries and arterioles in the brain and allow more blood flow into the areas that we want to affect when we then begin doing our other rehabilitation like visual and vestibular and movement drills. Super again, simple idea.
We do six to eight rounds of a 10 second breath hold. After that second exhalation, as they improve, we will start working that up to maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds. At that point, we can then begin adding movement to it. So we would go breathe in, breathe out, hit your second exhale, hold that. Now, as you’re doing the breath hold, you’re also doing body weight squats or pushups or whatever it is.
And again, trying to hit those time marks of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 seconds. This is a fantastically easy way, in terms of number, amount of equipment, cost, expense. None of that doesn’t cost you anything other than some, some focus, some knowledge and time. It is incredibly effective. I have seen probably better changes in the end result of a lot of rehabilitation strategies for hundreds of concussion clients by adding in this one particular drill. It is that important to us. That’s why we wanted to share it with you this month. You can read a lot about this. If you have questions, you go on Google type in intermittent hypoxia. You will see all kinds of data that’s now coming out, in neuroscience journals and about how to use acute, IH for, rehabilitation. And we’re seeing this not only in, in concussion, but also stroke rehabilitation, et cetera. So super valuable tool. If you’re a movement professional, you got to know about it and you need to be able to teach it. All right, have a great week.
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