Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome friends to Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I am Matt Bennett here for a solo episode today on Resonance Frequency Breathing. So I really want to dive into the science and practicality of this term. It's something that I find more and more gets thrown around a lot, not always with accurate understanding and science behind it. It's a really fun sounding fancy scientific term that I really see. Whether I'm looking at peer reviewed journal articles or just kind of blogs on the web doesn't always get used in the correct way. So I want to take some time today to explore what is Resonance frequency breathing, where do I see it misused and some fun ways we can play around with it? However, before we jump into that, I want to give my other side of me the AI Map, a chance to present the research on resonance frequency breathing. So if you're not familiar with the podcast, I have this aimat version of me which pronounces names and fancy terms a lot better than I do. So I'm just going to let I'm going to turn it over to AI Mat to get a good reading of what the science and the practice of RES's frequency is and then I'll be back shortly to to explore this with you further.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Resonance frequency breathing is the simple idea that your body has a breathing pace where everything clicks into rhythm. Your breath, your heart and the reflexes that stabilize blood pressure. For most adults, that pace is around five to six breaths per minute, roughly a five second inhale and a five second exhale.
@ this rhythm, your heart rate rises as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out, creating smooth, high amplitude waves in your heart's timing. That's the sweet spot where heart rate variability. The beat to beat flexibility that reflects your nervous system's balance tends to peak.
Think of it like pushing a swing. When you push at precisely the right moment, the arc grows effortlessly. Your breath provides the push. The baroreflex, the body's pressure regulating reflex, supplies the timing. Inhaling nudges heart rate upward while blood pressure dips slightly. A moment later, the baroreflex responds and as you exhale the system swings back the other way.
Breathe at the resonant tempo and those swings become larger, smoother and more efficient. The vagus nerve, your built in brake pedal, engages rhythmically, tilting the autonomic nervous system toward calm, clarity and control.
You don't need equipment to start. Sit comfortably with a tall, relaxed spine or lie down if you're winding down for the day. Let the breath come from the diaphragm so the belly rises on the inhale and falls on the exhale, while the chest and shoulders stay quiet. Settle into a steady pattern close to 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out. Keep the breath gentle. The goal is smoothness, not big gulps of air. 10 minutes a day is an effective starting point, and you can expand to 15 or 20 minutes as it becomes familiar.
If you feel lightheaded at any time, you're probably breathing too deeply. Reduce the depth, but keep the rhythm.
What should you expect?
Most people notice an immediate settling of stress, a clear sense that the system is shifting down a gear during practice. Heart rate variability takes on a sinusoidal shape, big regular waves rising with the inhale and falling with the exhale. Over a few weeks of consistent sessions, many see improvements in resting HRV outside of practice and and sometimes a small drop in resting heart rate, a sign of stronger vagal tone. The baroreflex becomes more responsive, which supports steadier blood pressure. The mind follows the body focus sharpens, mood steadies, and it becomes easier to regulate emotions.
A brief session before bed can quiet the nervous system and pave the way for better sleep.
A brief session before a meeting or workout can smooth performance jitters and steady attention.
Everyone has a personal resonance, and while six breaths per minute is a useful average, your best pace may be a little faster or slower, often somewhere between four and a half and seven breaths per minute. If you use an HRV app or device, test a few paces for a couple of minutes each 6.5, 6.0, 5.5, 5.0 and watch for the biggest, smoothest heart rate wave or the clearest peak around 0.1 Hz. And if you're going by feel, start with 5 in and 5 out. If that feels strange, shorten the inhale slightly and lengthen the exhale. 4 seconds in, 6 out. If it feels dull or sleepy, try 6 in. And 4 out. The right pace feels effortless and quietly powerful, like a rhythm you could ride for a long time. Perfection isn't required. Being within half a breath of your exact resonance delivers most of the benefit.
If you track HRV you'll recognize a few signatures. The live heart rate trace during resonance work looks like a clean sine wave. On a frequency view, you'll see power cluster near 0.1Hz.
Apps that report coherence or resonance typically climb into higher zones within a couple of minutes. When you're on pace over time, the carryover shows up in morning readiness metrics and in how quickly you settle after stress. A few practical tips make the habit stick. Pair your session with anchors you already do every day after waking, during a lunch break or before bed, so the practice piggybacks on an existing routine. If scheduling a full session is tough, scatter short sets across the day. 2 or 35 minute mini sessions can be surprisingly effective. Favor nasal inhales to naturally slow and humidify the airflow. When the mind races, give it a simple job. Count the inhale and exhale or follow a pacer so attention has a track to run on under pressure. Even 60 to 90 seconds of resonance breathing can reset your state. A gentle four week progression works well. In week one, do 5 to 10 minutes daily at roughly 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out. In week two, bring it to 10 to 12 minutes and adjust the ratio slightly. If a longer exhale feels better. In week three, extend to 12 to 15 minutes and if you like, add a brief pre sleep session. In week four, hold 15 to 20 minutes most days and recheck your pace. Small tweaks can keep you in the sweet spot as your body adapts resonance frequency breathing should feel calm and sustainable. If you experience dizziness, anxiety or air hunger, pause, return to normal breathing and resume later with smaller, quieter breaths. If you have a significant cardiovascular or respiratory condition, it's sensible to consult a clinician before starting a new breathing routine. The take home is simple one rhythm, a few minutes most days and measurable change. Settle into a smooth diaphragmatic pace near five to six breaths per minute. Let the heart ride the breath in large, coherent waves. Over time you'll feel the shift towards steadier nerves, clearer focus, better sleep and a more resilient baseline benefits that show up in your data and more importantly in your day.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Thank you AI Matt for that detailed description. I told you, AI Matt reads a lot better than I do. So anyway, I want to talk about what I'm seeing around this term now that we've got if you're not familiar with it, hopefully gives you a good overview about what resonance frequency breathing is.
One is that there's this idea of six breaths per minute, five inhale, five Exhale. And I do see that used quite a bit to talk about optimizing the oscillations between the heart, the breath and the bare reflux or our blood pressure nervous system. Now just on its face, we're really synchronizing three huge systems in our body, which is what I love about this science. Right. We're getting that great synchronization. We, we also know that it has impacts on brain functioning as well. You know, all this is really powerful stuff. However, a lot of people walk away from, you know, seeing resonance frequency breathing. I read a couple, you know, magazine articles just today. I even see this in peer reviewed journal articles as well, is they walk away with resonance frequency breathing is six breaths per minute. And that's I think I would say halfway right, because that may be your resonance frequency breathing. So if I was going to, you just throw an average person in front of me and say matt, I'm not going to show you this person, but what do you think? Person A's resonance frequency breathing is six breaths per minute. That's a slam dunk, research based answer. However, if you put somebody in front of me that's six, three or taller, I'd say it's probably lower than six breaths per minute. We may be going five breaths per minute. You show me somebody who's you know, six, 11, maybe four breaths per minute because we know height can impact that as well, but we don't know. Just because you're tall like I am, you don't know is it 5, is it 4.5, is it 6? Without taking a resonance frequency assessment, same thing we're seeing. I know I mentioned on this show before with a lot of our trained biofeedback practitioners, so people who are trained on HRV biofeedback with in office equipment that often runs, you know, in the tens of thousands of dollars, they're with special operators, professional athletes getting resonance frequency breathing rates as low as 3.5 breaths per minute. We've actually added this to the app itself, not based on necessarily peer reviewed research, but what we're seeing out over and over again in the field itself. So we try to combine those two together and you know, if you are six breaths per minute, going down to 3.5 breaths in the assessment isn't going to do any damage to you yet. We may be missing something with those people who are taller, bigger body mass. We seem to be seeing in the field with this as well. So here is where resonance frequency breathing. I almost think we're talking about two different things.
You know, one is six breaths per minute. And if you were to ask me again, guess what the average person's Resonance frequency is? 6 breaths per minute would be my guess. Slam dunk, no argument. However, mine is 4.5 breaths per minute. I know a lot of people four breaths per minute, five breaths per minute, some seven breaths per minute. So we each have, and this is where it gets tricky. If you say resonance frequency is just a five second inhale, five second exhale.
Yeah, that may be correct for the best guess we have, but it's not correct for probably the majority of people is we're looking at an individual rate. So if you've never taken one of these. Resonance frequency assessments are fairly straightforward. As you breathe it, we go from 7 breaths per minute down to 3.5 breaths per minute. And we're looking for what breathing rate improve, increases and peaks out your low frequency hrv. And if you want a masterclass on low frequency, please go back to Ina's episode a couple weeks back on low frequency hrv. It'll be easy to find in your feed and well, well, well worth the listen.
So she really ran a masterclass on that. So we're seeing what in a little lay person's term is what breathing rate increases your HRV the most. And low frequency we know we're getting the bare reflex, we're getting breath heart synchro of those three, synchronization of those three systems. Another thing that I find again in the field is you know, research would say for the most part, I think there's a question mark here that we're seeing in the field. Does your residence frequency stay consistent throughout the lifespan? Well, if the only thing that impacts HRV is your height, it would make a lot of sense that you know, height being a variable that doesn't change a lot in your life and that it would remain the same. But if you think of what we're seeing in the field is fitness and body mass, maybe lowering resonance frequency, breathing maybe again it's field, it's not peer reviewed research.
You know, if you are a professional athlete then you stop being a professional athlete and your body mass changes, muscle fat ratio, whatever it might be.
We may want to retake your resus frequency assessment. The other thing is paced breathing is a skill set and a lot of people, I now encourage people, if you're not doing a whole lot of paced breathing before you get on optimal, we really encourage you to practice it before you take your resonance frequency breathing assessment. But hey, you know, take it five, six Seven weeks later and just see if you're practicing this every day, you know, now you've got a skill set, you feel more comfortable with pace breathing really check to see if it's changed. Most people, what I hear back is it might have changed a 0.5 of a breath. So 5 might have gone to 4.5 or 5.5. We don't see usually rapid swings in this. Because my follow up question is, okay, you know, did you take one of these after a workout? Did you pause it in the middle and do something? You know, I start to want to ensure that we get quality readings here. But you know, we, we may see some small adjustments. So redoing your residence frequency every few months I think is actually a really good thing. Now if you keep getting the same number for three months in a row and you don't have any, you know, you weren't then diagnosed with a chronic disease or started doing bodybuilding or something like that, you can have pretty good confidence.
However, I also want to encourage you to play around with something else. And something that I've been doing recently is during my breath work, especially in the evening where I'm sitting down so it's more relaxed. Work is I've been lowering my resonance frequency breathing, you can also go up as well.
But I've been playing around as a 4.5 person.
I've started being going to 3.5 for my resonance frequency breathing to see what would happen. Just out of curiosity, okay, what would this. And I also recently adjusted my breathing rate due to an article that we featured a couple weeks back now on this Week in HRV where they found that twice the exhale as the inhale promotes better low frequency hrv. Now, just one study. I always like to say small study, small effect. There's been contradictory research in other studies as well, but I thought it was a pretty well done study. So I was like, okay, I'm going to set my settings on this. So if you think about just this change, right, if you go to five in, five out, because that's what you read in some magazine article about resonance frequency breathing, we start to shift that pretty dramatically with that two to one breathing. So you know, we're starting, you know, six to seven breaths, three breaths with the inhale, 7ish breaths, a little under for exhale. If you're doing that 2 to 1 breakup. So that extended exhale. I'm a big fan of the extended exhale, basically due to the work of Dr. Ina Hazan, balancing that carbon dioxide oxygen balance to maximize thanks to carbon dioxide ironically oxygen intake into the cell. So even if you pretty confident with your resonance frequency breathing rate, I encourage you on one of your practice, maybe go down 0.5 breaths per minute, maybe go up 0.5 breaths per minute because there is a level of comfort and playing around. Also in the inhale exhale is to fine tune this to how do you spend the most time and again if you're using the optimal app, what we call optimal zone, in other words, how do you spend the most time during your practice? In low frequency we use optimal zone is 80% of the time in the last 60 seconds you were low frequency dominant. It gives you a really nice scale to really determine are you getting the maximum impact of your practice. So again we're throwing around and I see it more and more which I consider a positive, the term resonance frequency is being thrown around a lot more. Good thing overall there's been some more of this in consciousness now and in popular magazines and other things, not just research.
However, oftentimes and I would say the majority of times when I see resonance frequency breathing, I don't see the author saying you should take an assessment to figure out your resonance frequency breathing.
This is a 5 second inhale, 5 second exhale, which technically might be good general advice, but boy are we missing quite a bit of impact if we don't do the assessment itself. So one, if you're an HRV nerd like I am, take that assessment. You can get a 30 day free trial to optimal HRV app. We'd love for you to continue on with that membership, but you can go in there, get some take a resonance frequency breathing assessment, work on that practice paced breathing. If you're gonna ditch the app after 30 days, take one more before you do, hopefully stick with us, but practice it one more time. Get that now you've got your residence frequency breathing rate and you can maximize any breath work practice either on the app or just counting your breaths or however you're doing it with that moving forward. So again I'm glad it's getting out there into conscious the consciousness of fitness influencers.
Even again, peer reviewed journal research articles the term is out there, but maximizing the impact of the science is being missed in a lot of these articles, a lot of these blog posts that I see. So just wanted to throw out something I'm seeing there and thought it would be worth an episode to throw that out. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can find show notes.
I'll put some research in here in the show notes as well on resonance frequency breathing. And we'll see you next week.
