What's your BOLT score?

Theme: Breathing, Performance

Word count: 988

Picture this.

You’re rolling on the mats.

Somehow, your partner has taken superior position.

You are pinned on your back.

It’s sweaty.

The room is boiling.

You can barely breathe.

It’s horrible.

You know you could escape but,

you just seem out of breath.

No matter what you do, your lungs can’t feel up with air, and you’re gasping for oxygen in every opportunity.

Now why would I paint this scenario?

Because I want to introduce you to yet another breathing-related concept.

The BOLT score.

And the higher your BOLT score is.

The lower the chances of this happening.

In addition to that, there is a positive correlation

between the BOLT score and your overall health.

So what exactly is it?

The BOLT score (Body Oxygen Level Test) is a subjective measure of breathlessness.

It gives feedback on functional breathing and exercise tolerance.

and it’s influenced by:

Chemosensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO)Constriction in the airways or lungs (narrow airways impact breath-hold time)

How uncomfortable the diaphragm feels during the breath hold

Anxiety and other psycho-emotional influences like fear of suffocation

This ties in with the over-breathing post from last week.

The lower your BOLT score, the more unecessary breaths you take,

leading to all the bad stuff we talked about here.

So how do you measure it:

To get an accurate measurement, it’s best to rest for ten minutes before measuring your BOLT score.

Read these instructions carefully first.

And have a timer on hand.

It’s best to take the test first thing in the morning, but if you’re ready to try now, go ahead.

Take a normal breath in through your nose and allow a normal breath out through your nose.

Hold your nose with your fingers to prevent air from entering your lungs.

Start your timer.

Time the number of seconds until you feel the first definite desire to breathe, or the first stresses of your body urging you to breathe.

These sensations may include the need to swallow or a constriction of the airways.

You may also feel the first involuntary contractions of your breathing muscles in your abdomen or throat, as your body gives the message to resume breathing.

The BOLT is not a measurement of how long you can hold your breath but simply the time it takes for your body to react to a lack of air.

Release your nose, stop the timer, and breathe in through your nose. Your inhalation at the end of the breath hold should be calm.

If you feel that you gasped for air, you held it too long.

Rest a few minutes until you can return to a calm, normal breath and try again.

You might be surprised that even if you consider yourself very fit,

or look the part, your BOLT score could be relatively low.

Scientists have discovered that breath hold time can be used to measure sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2).

When you hold your breath, you prevent oxygen from entering your lungs and excess carbon dioxide from being expelled into the atmosphere.

As your breath hold continues, carbon dioxide accumulates in your lungs and blood, causing slight decreases in oxygen levels.

CO2 is the primary stimulus for breathing in.

As CO2 levels increase in your lungs and blood, your brain prompts your breathing muscles to begin breathing.

This means that your comfortable breath hold duration is influenced by how much carbon dioxide you can tolerate – known as your “ventilatory response” to carbon dioxide.

If you have a strong ventilatory response to carbon dioxide, you will reach your threshold sooner, and your breath-hold time will be shorter.

On the other hand, if you have a higher tolerance and reduced ventilatory response to carbon dioxide, your breath-hold time will be longer.

A low BOLT score indicates that your breathing receptors are especially sensitive to carbon dioxide.

Your breathing volume will be larger as your lungs work to remove carbon dioxide,

creating a vicious cycle in which you habitually breathe more air than your body needs, yet you feel constantly breathless.

The good news is that you can use breathing exercises to normalize your tolerance to carbon dioxide.

When your tolerance to CO2 is normal, your BOLT score will be higher, and you will be able to maintain calm breathing during rest and lighter breathing during physical activity.

So let’s have a look at what is the distribution of BOLT scores.

What’s a low score?

Any BOLT below 10s is very low: At this stage, any form of conscious breathing will help improve it, and whoever scores below 10 seconds desperately needs that.

10-20s: Is the most common, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

20-30s: Now we’re getting closer to athlete territory.

The goal is 40s and above, and we’ll learn how to get there with the breathing exercises we’ll cover next week.

You might still be wondering why you’d want to do that.

I get you.

Maybe I haven’t painted a compelling picture yet.

Let’s say you want to drop stubborn belly fat; improving your BOLT score will help.

Perform better for longer in any sport?

You got it.

Long-term health and longevity?

Sure thing.

Improving your sensitivity to CO2 will not only help you hold your breath for far longer than anyone you know,

which is a very cool feat in itself, if you ask me…

But it will also make your hardware more robust and efficient on a cellular level.

And there’s another bit that I love about it.

It grounds you.

Through coming in contact with the uncomfortable sensations that the training produces on a regular basis,

you develop an aura of coolness.

When people are reactive and all over the place, you hold your ground,

cause you’re doing the work and meeting yourself at depth daily.

Enough for today,

Talk next week about the solution.

Yours in truth, always,

Aris