We all have gaps in our knowledge and skills. To a large degree, training in any martial art is a question of discovering what you should be practising next, and then practising it. The key is discovering the gaps and filling them, before a serious opponent discovers them for you.
These gaps can be in your breadth of knowledge (such as, you don't know how to deal with a particular attack), or your skill (you know perfectly well what you should do, but you just can't do it).
Especially for less experienced students, it can be difficult to know what questions to ask, what gaps to cover next, what skills to practice. I have a process for teaching this ability to choose the right gap to my students: it is an essential part of being truly self-directed. This process is essentially theory, and so is easily adapted to online learning. It is primarily a question of spotting gaps in the breadth of your knowledge, and spotting shallowness in the depths, and having criteria for prioritising them.
This class is a short summary of my approach, followed by a more lengthy question and answer session. I’ll run the first session on this topic on Saturday December 5th at 3pm UK time. You can register for it here:https://bookwhen.com/swordschool
The class will run for 90 minutes, and tickets are £10. Free tickets will also become available tomorrow afternoon. This class is too useful to keep behind a paywall. If you can afford to support the work please do, but if you can't, that's ok, come anyway.
I have been teaching a lot over Zoom since the Coronavirus epidemic screwed my usual teaching schedule. The primary benefit is that people and groups who couldn’t afford to fly me out to teach them can zoom me in instead. But it comes at a cost: it is astonishingly tiring to teach through a screen. I’ve been thinking about why that would be, and have come up with the following thoughts:
1. There is much less personal interaction. The sound quality and lag times mean that you can’t talk naturally with the group. Everyone takes a turn to speak, and it is really hard to generate useful discussion. My classes are usually very interactive, but teaching online is much more like giving a presentation. It’s all on me, all the time.
2. It is very hard to read the students. So much of my job is feeling the room, adjusting what I’m teaching on the fly to take the students’ affect into account. If they are flagging a bit, I’ll ginger them up or slow things down; if they are over-challenged, I’ll ease off; if they are under-challenged I’ll up the complexity. 90% of the information I get from a class isn’t verbal. It’s the sound of their feet, or their blades, or their breathing. The pattern of movement across a group. Very very often, they say they want one thing, their bodies say something else, and the body is always right. But not online- most of that information is just not available so I’m left with the unreliable verbal communications only, and what I can see on the screen, usually a partial image on a dodgy webcam.
3. 90% of swordsmanship is learned from the person you’re crossing blades with. That can’t be done over the internet, so we’re left with the 10% of material that can be taught online. This is less true when the students have a training partner in the room with them; I can usually tell the partner what to do to create the environment the student I’m working with needs. But it’s very clunky compared to being there.
4. The computer itself is built as a distraction engine. I’m conditioned to use it to check email, check social media, play videos. It takes a small but consistent mental effort to not do that. This is a form of ego-depletion, a drip drip drain of executive function, making the whole process more tiring. My students deserve and get my undivided attention, but giving them that on a computer is much harder than in real life. To get real work done I usually turn everything internet-related off. But unplugging the internet would naturally bugger the zoom call. I’m thinking of having my zoom account on a separate profile on the computer, one with nothing else in it.
But, and it’s a huge but, it is getting easier, and I am getting better at it. At the end of every zoom class I teach, I ask for feedback on what could be done better. The students are having to think harder for longer to find things to critique, which is excellent.
It is hugely satisfying for an author to see their work put to work. I received an email recently from Anthony Klon, who is using my Rapier Workbooks. He described how he's using the area for notes to make cross-referencing the steps of the Rapier Footwork form with the translation he's using.
I’ve been working through the Rapier workbooks and hit upon this idea. I was really struggling with having to flip back and forth between workbooks, scanning the TOC, then finding and reading a section and going back to Tom Leoni’s translation to see the original context. So it occurred to me to organize the footwork form like this. Every step in the form has 4 entries in this outline:
1) the action described in your text (eg, step, step, lunge, recover)
2) the terminology, if applicable (eg, the scannatura)
3) the plate in Capoferro where the technique can be found
4) the workbook volume and page number where the corresponding lesson on the technique may be found.
Now there’s far less flipping back and forth. If I get stuck or want to perfect a part, it’s easy to go straight to the plate or page for revision.
Do you want to learn precise control over the sword, for enhanced speed, power, and the ability to deceive the opponent?
In this seminar we will cover some basic handling drills, then move on to the specifics of shortening the path the sword must take. Beginners require a long movement to generate speed and power, experts accomplish the same action in a much shorter path, which of course takes less time.
These skills apply to any weapon, but we will focus on the longsword, with applications from both Fiore and Liechtenauer.
The seminar will run from 7pm to 8.30pm UK time, and there will be time for questions etc built into the schedule.
I highly recommend watching the general mechanics seminar recording first:
This seminar will take the concepts taught in the general mechanics seminar for granted, so please do watch it first.
The seminar Zoom meeting will start about 10 minutes beforehand. The class itself will start on time at 7pm, and end on time at 8.30, but I'll stay online to take questions and hang out for a while afterwards.
Please note that the time is 7pm UK, which is (for example) 5 hours ahead of EST.
You will need:
As much space to move in as you can reasonably manage.
There’s a sword meme going round the internet which features some self-important prick that can’t hold a sword properly and has the posture most commonly associated with a lifetime spent hunched over a porn site, and words along the lines of the following:
While you were out partying, I studied the blade.
While you were having pre-marital sex, I studied the blade.
While you were taking drugs, I studied the blade.
Now the enemy is at the gates, and you have the audacity to beg me for help?
This sort of fuckwittery boils my blood. It was clearly written by a fantasist who has zero knowledge of what actual swordspeople are actually like, and it is egregiously annoying because it calls my profession into disrepute. Especially the last line. What, exactly, does the original writer think a swordsman can do against threats in this modern age? And since when does mastering a particular skill entitle you to sneeringly withhold it from those who did other things? My doctor has never, not once ever, said to me “I spent years in medical school learning to heal the sick while you were fooling about with obsolete weaponry. Now you’re sick, and you have the audacity to come to me?”
And what’s with the horrible notion that training with blades requires some kind of hermity asceticism? It's unhistorical, unrealistic, and while a degree of temperance is required to train to a high level, there are entire branches of martial arts that include mind-altering practices of one form or another. And I'd bet money on the notion that a lot of people have trained to become proficient with the sword precisely to get laid.
So I’ve fixed it:
While you were out partying, I was too, because social interaction is very important. I also studied the blade.
While you were having pre-marital sex, I was too. Probably not with the incel that wrote the original version of this meme, but a good sex-life is very important for mental and physical health, and I’ve always been lucky in my choice of partners. Plus I also studied the blade.
While you were taking drugs, I was probably drinking. I also studied the blade, and sword practice is a great way to get over a hangover.
Now the enemy is at the gates, but unfortunately swordsmanship isn’t terribly useful these days. I have many friends though, so I can certainly call on soldiers, pilots, doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, plumbers, gardeners, farmers, writers, singers … please state the nature of your emergency so I can help you better? Because you’re a human being and thus entitled to whatever assistance I can reasonably offer you.
I have finally managed to articulate my health goals precisely. It’s just this: I want to play tick-tock-tick-tock-bong! with my grandchildren.
In case you don’t know the game, it’s simple: you hold the (enthusiastically willing, squealing with glee) child upside down by their ankles. Swing them a few times side to side like a pendulum, yelling ‘tick’ one way and ‘tock’ the other. Repeat a few times, then lift them straight up in the air as high as you can, and drop them straight down so their head is maybe six inches off the ground, BONG! Lift and drop BONG! Lift and drop BONG! Lower them gently to the ground, and repeat according to demand.
This requires the following things:
1) being fit enough to do it safely (for both of us): it’s a bit like a two-handed overhead press, with a kid weighing up to maybe 25kg.
2) having the sort of relationship with my kids and grand-kids, that this is natural.
I’m 46, my youngest child is 11. She might have her last child at age 40, and kids tend to get too big around age 8,that puts the window at being able to do this at 37 years from now, when I’ll be 83.
So the question to ask of any activity or intervention is this: will this make it more or less likely that I’ll be able to play tick-tock-bong at age 83? My fitness routines, diet choices, and interactions with my kids are all covered by this goal.
Let’s take diet first:
I’m running blood sugar tests; I’ve written up something about them starting with The Myth of the One True Diet. Read that if you don't know what I'm going on about.
A diabetic friend gave me a spare continuous blood glucose monitor, the Libre Freestyle, which lasted for 14 days. After my initial horror at seeing the size of the needle I was about to stick into myself (by normal standards it's tiny. By mine, it's like a 6″ nail), I found the monitor a huge improvement over the finger-prick method; not least, it automatically took readings all night, and it never forgot to run the experiment (though the 8 hour memory was not ideal; I had to remember to take a manual reading (tapping my phone to the sensor) right before sleep, and right after waking, or I’d get a gap in the data. It starts deleting the older records when the memory fills up. The sensor is small, easily installed, and I could do all my usual activities with it in place, and once I got over the needle shock, it was extremely unobtrusive. I think it ached a bit once because I’d slept with my weight on it, but that’s it. And the data is awesome. It takes a reading every 15 minutes, plus whenever you manually check.
My goals after running this experiment is to avoid unconscious blood sugar spikes, and to reduce my fasting blood sugar level a tad below the middle of the normal range. I absolutely do not intend to avoid all sugar forevermore- life is for living, and my Dad’s home-made marmalade is awesome. But being able to completely avoid sugar spikes without significant effort is very useful, and because I know what spikes it, I can avoid or embrace at will.
It’s important to establish a baseline, so I am going with fasting blood sugar at 12 hours exactly from the last calorie consumed. Simply avoiding the spikes has brought my average morning reading down from about 5.6 mmol/L to about 5.0 (which is the middle of the normal range). One reliable effect has been that exercise quickly raises my blood sugar a little (presumably as my muscles split glycogen into glucose), and no amount of exercise that I’m actually willing to do pushes my blood glucose down. This is a different body response to many people.
Another side-effect is my trousers are looser in the waist than they were. That’s no bad thing- lockdown encouraged some unhelpful habits.
I’ve also found that my previous time restricted eating protocol wasn’t doing me much good. I was doing 14:10 (last calorie in about 7pm, breakfast at about 9am). So I changed it.
At the moment, this is the protocol I’m following:
Monday to Friday: 18:6 time restricted eating (TRE). So, last calorie in about 7pm, first calorie in the next day at about 1pm. I find this works well for me; I don’t need to eat in the mornings, so skipping breakfast is no hardship. And it dropped my morning blood sugar level very quickly. I’m not terribly strict about it though: if I’m going out to do something at 12, and don’t want to be hungry for it, I’ll eat before I go (which is still a 16 hour fasting window).
At the weekends, I eat breakfast if I want to. Last Saturday I wasn’t hungry before taking my daughter to her riding lesson, so I ate when I got home at 11.30 (a bit over 16 hours since last calorie in). Sunday though, I felt like breakfast, and yes it did include marmalade on toast. And the angels sang.
I should also mention that I’ve had problems with acid reflux for the last couple of years (badly enough that the doctors shoved a camera up my nose to inspect my oesophagus). It’s been resistant to the usual interventions such as omeprazole, and over-the-counter treatments like gaviscon. One thing that I really, really, have to avoid is eating a big meal within three hours of going to bed. The consequences are truly disgusting. This puts a cap on my last-calorie-in time at 8pm at the absolute latest, 7pm better, which means when I wake up I've usually been 12 hours or more without food already. I’ve also found that this 18:10 pattern may be helping with the reflux (though I’ve no idea why).
Dinner is the main meal of the day, which we all take together (which is totally in line with the tick-tock-bong goal). We almost always cook proper food from scratch, with a decent amount of vegetables.
Thanks to reading David Sinclair’s Lifespan, I’ve also started supplementing with NMNs, and Longevinex’s resveratrol formula. If you want the details of why, I suggest reading the book. It’s very complicated, and I’m not a biologist. Suffice to say these supplements and the TRE all follow the basic rule of there being an acceptable, measurable, downside that is much lower than the probable upside.
Regarding exercise, the positive constraint of my morning training sessions has been a lifesaver (perhaps literally!). There was a time in May when I got up for my morning training and did three squats and one push-up, and thought ‘fuck it, that’ll do’. Not having seminars to stay fit for made it a serious self-discipline challenge to stay fit. I’m not a fan of using self-discipline when you can create external constraints instead. I’m a teacher first, martial artist second, swordsman third. If I wasn’t teaching swordsmanship, I’d be teaching something else. Students can bring out the best in me. So, I started the morning training sessions (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) knowing that if there was even just one student expecting me to be there to lead a session, I’d be there. It takes no mental effort, it’s a law of nature for me. It’s the same mental posture as “I have no choice”. The sessions have developed into a lovely small group of regulars (and newbies always welcome: you can join us here), such that I actively look forward to our sessions, and I am much more thorough about exercise than I ever would be on my own. We’ve even started working through my hellish ‘health qigong form’. Which means I’m practising every day to get it polished up such that I can teach it properly. Something I've been meaning to do for ages, but suddenly am finding easy. The students need it, ergo I do it. No discipline required.
You can see a sample session here:
None of this guarantees anything of course. My kids might choose not to have children, for instance. Or I could lose both my legs in a freak lightsaber accident. But luck favours the prepared. The probability is that whatever I do I’ll be alive at 83; both my grandfathers were heavy smokers who lived into their 90s. Both my parents are thankfully still alive too. The question is, at their age, will I be alive and well enough to chase toddlers over climbing frames? Fit enough for tick-tock-bong?
Framing the problem in such simple terms makes everything much, much easier. It's specific, and it includes physical strength and fitness, and mental health and connection. So that's my goal. What's yours?
The day has dawned… the newly updated Solo Training course is live, and ready. It is a huge amount of material, enough for years of training. I am offering it at half off the regular price of $600 (plus tax in Europe), for one week only. The discount is available for the one-off purchase, or you can spread the cost over ten instalments. Join us here.
As with all my courses, there is a cast-iron satisfaction guarantee- if you buy it, try it for up to 30 days, and don’t like it, then you get all your money back.
If you are currently unemployed or in difficult circumstances, email me and I will gladly send you a 90% discount code, or let you in for free. No questions asked. These are hard times for many people.
One student on the course, known as ‘The Anonymous Scandinavian’, had this to say about it:
”It has been a great pleasure for me to study as a student in the Solo Training Course. I have experience in martial arts beginning from the 1982 and I have done my share of teaching too.
To see new training methods and approaches to individual problems has been a refreshing experience! The pell-part totally blew my mind and next day I had one in my yard.
I sincerely recommend The Solo Training Course as a tool of self-improvement for both the beginners and more advanced students of Historical European Martial Arts regardless of their style or discipline.
Solo training is the secret behind all truly excellent martial artists' accomplishments. All world class sword people and martial artists spend much of their training time on solo training.
If you live miles away from the nearest fellow martial artist, don't worry, this course does not require training partners. Instead we cover everything you can reasonably do alone to improve your swordsmanship skills.
If you have regular access to a school or training partners, you can still dramatically up your game by incorporating intelligent solo training into your schedule. This course will teach you how. On this course you will learn ways of developing your mind, your body, and your technical skills, no matter what your starting point is. From absolute beginner to senior martial artist, we have you covered.
The Solo Training course includes these standalone courses:
Meditation for Martial Artists This course covers four different kinds of meditation, aimed at improving your state of mind and making you a better martial artist.
Fundamentals: Breathing This course will teach you how to breathe properly, and how to develop anaerobic and aerobic fitness without injuring yourself.
Fundamentals: Footwork This course will teach you how to move like a martial artist, whatever style you wish to practice.
Recreating Historical Swordsmanship from Historical Sources This course will teach you how to study the sources and create useful training syllabi from them. Most of such work can indeed be done alone.
Plus:
Jessica Finley (author of the book Medieval Wrestling) will teach you solo wrestling training.
Gindi Wauchope (professional historical swordsmanship teacher from Melbourne, Australia) will teach you Bolognese swordsmanship, with the sidesword, sword and buckler, and the two-handed sword.
I will teach you to train alone with
The Longsword
The Rapier
The Smallsword
The Spear
I.33 style Sword and Buckler
Sharp Swords and Cutting practice
As well as give you instruction on:
How to build a pell and a wall target
How to create handling drills for any weapon
Solo training drills for a range of weapons (with more being added over time)
Stick handling drills to improve strength and weapons control
Instruction on how to create a daily practice, and to train for longer term goals
Sometimes all this choice can be overwhelming, so there are over 30 trainalong workout routines lead by me, each about 40 minutes long, and requiring very little space or equipment. Just hit play and join in!
The breadth and depth of this course is spectacular, providing years of training material.
As with all Swordschool Online courses, you are welcome to try it for 30 days, and request a refund if it doesn’t do it for you. You are always welcome to email me with questions, and send me video clips of anything you may want help. Despite the name of this course, you are NOT ALONE. Over 900 students have taken this course so far: join them!
Chris Kerr, in Canada, says this about it:
There are a lot of reasons why we train solo: there are no martial arts groups in our area; we’re starting the martial arts group in our area but have to learn first; we’re on vacation; we’re in another country with different traditions. I’ve been all of these at various points.
This course is excellent. Guy Windsor is engaged and responsive: you aren’t just buying a series of YouTube videos here. With his years of experience and his focus on and dedication (and interaction) with his students, this is a course to take seriously – and it’s pretty much unique, so get it while you can!
You can find the course here. The discount ends on September 27th, so don’t miss it!
Please feel free to share this with anyone you think may be interested.
Do you have asthma? If so, you might find that breathing exercises can help. But don’t just take my word for it….
I have been teaching breathing exercises for as long as I have been teaching martial arts- to my mind they go hand in hand. Over the last twenty years or so many of my students have told me that the breathing exercises have helped their asthma. This was not exactly unexpected on my part, but I certainly wouldn’t go about claiming that my breathing for martial arts practice is a cure for the condition. (Before I go on: I’m not a medical doctor. If you have any concerns about your health, go see one. Don’t get your medical advice from swordsmanship practitioners on the internet.)
Last week one of my students, Ilpo Luhtala, sent me this email (edited to remove surnames and email addresses):
You may remember when I told you a story about my asthma and the breathing exercises. I used daily medication for twenty years, I had an asthma, no question about that, it was tested several times. Then I started to do regular breathing exercises, the basic one (does it have a name?) every morning and the 12 step exercise on a weekly basis. Now I have been 7 years without any medication. Asthma has gone away…And it is not about my imagination, it has been tested and confirmed by doctors.
So I have told this story to several people. One of them is Johanna, my colleague from Skanska. And the following story is from her, a message to you:
“My 15-year-old son has been doing breathing practices that Ilpo has taught on a video and has found the technique helpful. We are very thankful for hearing about this technique. My son has had asthma for ten years and has had increasing amount of daily medication. Asthma has been following him on other seasons too, but especially during spring. In previous years he hasn’t even been able to go outdoors during the pollen season because of severe breathing difficulties. He has often been in hospital and doctors especially during spring because of the same reasons and treated with more and more medication.
Last spring my son started doing breathing exercises that Ilpo taught on a video. For the first time in ten years the spring time went without any hospital visits and he was experiencing improvement with his asthma. This summer his medication was reduced for the first time in ten years. Normally his medication has only been increased every year.
My son is keeping up with the routine and we both believe that the technique has really helped him. I am just amazed how doctors don’t encourage people more to try breathing exercises which seem to help with asthma cases and also with overall well-being.
I would like to say big thank you for teaching this technique to Ilpo as I don’t think we would have heard about this from any of the doctors. Thank you!
Johanna.”
You can imagine how pleased I am to have been able to help, however indirectly. However, the plural of ‘anecdote' is not ‘data', so while I'm pretty confident that there is a causal relationship between the breathing training done by Johanna's son and Ilpo, and their asthma improving, I'm obviously biased. But, there is an increasing body of medical research to support the idea that breathing exercises can alleviate asthma: these two studies are a good starting point:
With any intervention, the key thing is to estimate the costs and risks involved. (As with the corona cures I wrote about a while ago.) There is, as I see it, zero financial cost to breathing better, and a very close to zero risk of triggering an asthma attack with gentle breathing training. The worst case scenario is you try it and it doesn't help. So keep your ventilator handy and have a go at the exercises that Ilpo started with, if you like. I'd recommend doing perhaps 5-10 minutes, once or twice a day.
If you'd like to go deeper, you can find a 30-min class on basic breathing training included in my free Human Maintenance course, which includes breathing, meditation, and joint care. https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/bodymaintenance/
It’s free because your health shouldn’t be kept behind a paywall. I hope it helps.
I read a lot. Most writers do. You may think I spend most of my time reading sword books, but it isn’t so. Probably the most important books I’ve read in the last year or so are entirely sword-free! My home is filled with books- and about half of them are in boxes in the loft- clearly we should have made one of the children sleep in the cupboard under the stairs and used one of the bedrooms as a library.
As you can see from this photo of one bookshelf in my study, I read on a wide range of topics, and I clearly have no idea how to organise a library. My current approach is to find a space on a shelf in which a new book can physically fit, and let my visual memory make finding the book possible.
Much of the non-fiction I’m reading at the moment is to do with health in one form or another. As I see it, there are three pillars to physical health: sleep, movement, and food. Movement explicitly includes breathing.
Far and away the best book on sleep I’ve ever read is Why We Sleep, byMatthew Walker. It’s a thorough description of the current scientific research on the subject, by a career scientist in the field, and includes a lot of actionable advice if you're having trouble sleeping. (Let me note here that all links are affiliate, which means I get paid a small fee if you buy the book, which costs you nothing but helps me keep the lights on. If that bothers you feel free to just search for the book by title and author.)
When it comes to food there are so many conflicting views on the subject. Some people still believe that dietary fat is bad for you! Probably the most important book I’ve read on the health implications of food is Personalized Medicine. It has lead me on a fascinating quest into the way my body reacts to certain foods. You can read more about that here. While on the subject of food, the best cookbook my wife and I have used in a very long time is Ian Haste’s The Seven Day Basket. Almost every recipe we’ve tried so far has been a family-wide hit: my younger daughter declared that the beef rendang we had the other night ought to be our Christmas dinner this year.
Regarding movement, I regard all exercises as breathing exercises, and have done for a very long time. James Nestor’s new book Breath is an utterly unmissable overview of the subject, with in-depth examinations of a huge range of breathing styles and their effects. For a more complete review, see here.
And on the subject of health, ageing is becoming a more urgent interest as I near 50. The only book I’ve found worth reading on the subject (because it dives deep into the science of what’s actually happening at the cellular level as we age) is Lifespan, by David A. Sinclair. It’s excellent. If you want to know about rapamycin, mTOR, fasting, metformin, NMN, and a badgillion other ageing related things, read this book. It might literally add decades to your life.
Alright, a couple of martial arts books for you.
Fear is the Mind Killer by Kaja Sadowski is essential reading for anyone running a club or teaching a class. It is an extraordinary resource, especially in the areas of creating the club culture you want, and in how to train for the real thing. I cannot recommend it too highly.
The Book of Martial Power by Steven J. Pearlman is also unmissable. It’s one of the very few martial arts books that goes deep into principles, and as such anyone training literally any martial art should read this book. It’s awesome.
And finally: a friend of mine is writing really fun thrillers starring an ex-porn star called Butch Bliss. I could describe the books at length, but why bother when you can get a free taste by joining his mailing list here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/pyx8j9tgfm If you like the novella he’s giving away, you’ll love the two novels in the series so far: Hidden Palms, and Snake Road. Just the thing for a long flight (back when aeroplanes were a thing) or indeed for taking your mind off the plague.
If you're enjoying reading my writing about books, then there are many more such posts on this blog! Here are all the ones I could find, there are probably more. My command of “topic” and “tag” is not what it could be.
I’ve been practising various forms of breathing exercises for about 30 years now. They are the foundation of all my training, to the point that literally every exercise of any kind is always first and foremost a breathing exercise for me. You can see that in this recording of last Friday's trainalong class: the topic is hips, but it's all breathing really:
I’ve written a short training guide on breathing (which is included in Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, and created a whole online course for it (bundled in with the Solo course). And I still learned a lot from James Nestor's Breath. Go buy it, read it, it’s one of those no-brainer must-reads. (All book links are affiliate, so I get a small commission if you buy them. It costs you nothing.)
In essence, the book covers Mr Nestor’s odyssey through the sometimes strange, sometimes wonderful, always interesting, worlds of breathing practice, starting with that age-old question- nose or mouth?
Of course you should breathe through your nose. Practically no exceptions, if the nose is available. But he has his nose plugged and does mouth-only breathing for ten days to find out what the consequences are- and they are really, profoundly, horrible. This is in the best tradition of self-experimentation. He has suffered so we don’t have to.
Unlike most books on the subject, and unlike most practitioners, Mr Nestor also looks at sinus and airway architecture and its importance for good breathing. He takes his study into dentist’s offices, the catacombs under Paris (looking at old skulls), and goes into detail about why our jaws and palates are smaller than they should be, and what to do to change that. Fun fact: though it’s often stated that you can’t add bone mass over 30, you absolutely can add bone mass in your face at pretty much any age. Nestor proves it by actually doing it, with medical scans before and after.
I won’t go into all of the breathing practices he does cover, suffice to say it’s a lot, and some I’d never heard of before. He highlights the work of people like Katharina Schroth, and Alexandra David-Néel, who have been mostly forgotten now but did amazing things with breath as recently as last century. Most interestingly for me, he goes in depth into Tummo breathing, the origin of the Wim Hof method which I practice most days.
I do have three minor caveats.
Firstly, he does the classic page-turner trick of getting half-way into a story then switching to another story, before circling back. It’s annoying to me, because I didn’t need the extra incentive to keep reading. This is a generally a well written, well researched, and utterly fascinating book about one of my core interests. It didn’t need the help. I understand why editors insist on such things but I found it intrusive.
Secondly, though he does describe a lot of anthropological studies and a lot of European, Russian, Indian, Tibetan and American breathing experts and practices, he skips right over the Chinese! Qigong gets a passing mention on page 188, but that’s it. It’s an odd lacuna. It feels to me like there’s a chapter missing.Perhaps he’s working on a follow-up volume dedicated entirely to qigong?
Thirdly, and most importantly, you need to watch out for the condition I think of as “popular science-itis”, which can be summarised as a) making unverifiable claims, b) imprecise use of language leading to misleading statements, and c) overstating the evidence.*
For examples:
a) describing a breathing technique as “a calming practice that places the heart, lungs, and circulation into a state of coherence” (p 221). What, exactly, is that supposed to mean? And how do you test it? There are similar descriptions of unverifiable effects elsewhere in the book, but to Mr Nestor’s credit he usually sticks to more verifiable/falsifiable statements.
b) “The body has switched from anaerobic to aerobic respiration”, when what I think he means is that specific muscle fibres have switched: the body as a whole (and especially the brain) would have been generally respiring aerobically the whole time.
c) Extrapolating more general conclusions than a specific study might warrant, or stating things in too-conclusive terms, such as “mouthbreathing was making me dumber”, a remark based on a single study done in rats regarding problem solving, and one in humans regarding oxygen supply to one part of the brain (p30). As a description of subjective experience it would be fine (“I felt that mouthbreathing was making me dumber”), or a more qualified statement to introduce the interesting research would also have been fine (“mouthbreathing may have been making me dumber”).
He’s generally very good about such things, and he is having to balance telling a gripping story (that’s the “popular” bit in “popular science”) with getting the science across. This is not an easy trick to pull off, and he does an excellent, if not perfect, job. As with anything health-related, take what you read with a grain of salt, and go read the original studies before betting your life on their conclusions.
But, and this is a huge but: there are so many things in the book that every human should know, and so many practices that you can simply and safely try for yourself, that you’d be a fool not to read it. Go! Even if you think you're already an expert, go. And if you know nothing about breathing, go still faster. I'm certain you won't regret it.
*and let the record state that I fall into the same three traps rather more than I should!
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