Emily: Warm welcome back to the Aligned and Unstoppable Podcast. I’m joined today by a special guest. I have Kristin Weitzel here today.

And I first found out about you, Kristin, I guess, a couple of years ago, and I remember reaching out like you’re on, we should talk. And then it was like almost a whole year later, I’m like, wait a minute, you’re awesome we should talk still. And I think that’s just how I work sometimes, you know, I can be so excited, like, yeah, this is a great connection. And I, I heard you on some else’s podcast, and I had this full body response of like, yes, yes, yes, this total resonance. And I absolutely love the work that you’re doing in the world and it has already touched me anyway, will get into that. But I would love to first have you introduce yourself to my audience and share a little bit about your origin story, how you became who you are today.

Kristin: Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much for having me, Emily. I’ve been working during that year, I was working on becoming more aligned and unstoppable, so perfect that we had some time. So I’m Kristin Weitzel. My new website is launching tomorrow. So by the time this airs, it will be up. It’s very exciting. I ran a company called wellpower.life is my new web page and I’m super stoked to share that.

I have a high focus around women’s health optimization and working with females. I also work with men and women in the breath and cold exposure space. So part of my peak expression as a coach, as a leader in this and this world and this life is really getting people to understand how the nervous system correlates to everything and really how we understand using breath and using health optimization tools to shift our stay with as baseline is using breath to be able to change our mind, change our attitude, change how we feel. And that really applies to females in so many situations, right? It’s always of course I work with many types of people, but with female specifically.

I’ve been on a soapbox a lot lately about how we look in the mirror, how we talk to ourselves, how we feel day to day, and how we can bolster all of the energetics and the way we speak to ourselves is that we can go out in the world and do amazing things. And that is all about we, none of us still, so many of us just we have this huge capacity and we don’t understand the capacity that we have to make change to do things to, you know, win our dreams. And that’s my work in the world. And that really, you know, origin story is like long and I’ve talked about it a lot on other podcasts. I don’t have as much of a you know, thankfully I’m so grateful I don’t have this was almost killed in a car accident or trauma like not available to me. Like I don’t have that per say in a physical sense.

I definitely had a lot growing up, a dancer had a lot of challenges with like food and my physique and how I could make those things work together. Definitely a lot of self-talk, negative self-talk and self-worth issues, things that came up in that way and just really discovering how I can be standing in my own best self over the years of my earlier life led me to coaching other women, and that’s really where a lot of my passion point is because we, our health is really the thing that is a baseline driver. You can ask anyone who’s not getting sleep or who has some moment in time perhaps where they can’t get themselves up and out and moving in the way that they would like. And it’s like, oh, if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. And so that that’s the bang, that’s the drum that I bang in the world.

And also, you know, how do we look at ourselves? How do we say in this moment, in this body and this skin, in this life, I am exactly perfectly where I need to be and I’m the fucking fantastic right, right here, right now. And that’s everything.

Emily: Yeah. We are taught so much to look outside of ourselves for validation and work hard and you’re never enough. And you achieve, achieve, achieve and it’s such a toxic masculine model. And you know, we’ve seen this wounded masculine show up so much and we’re seeing this change of the tides that this divine feminine is arisen. And there’s these amazing female leaders who are showing up to support the health and well-being of women everywhere. And I know you’re so strong in this biohacking feel that is really male-dominant. And it’s really beautiful to see somebody talking to women specifically and integrating cycles and really loving on our bodies. And I love that you mentioned like the words that we speak as well. That’s so important.

A lot of the work that I’ve been doing in the last year has been to educate people on just to understand how intertwined our energy field is to our physiology with just this really simplistic chart of here’s our main seven chakras look with our little rainbow chart friend that we all know and love. It’s not this little org floating outside of us, but it’s actually exactly, precisely where endocrine glands are. And it has to do with our physiology and it has to do with our immunity. And like, if we’re sick, how are we going to show up in the world and serve people?

And so part of that education, some people are just like mind blown. What do you mean? It’s exactly where it is in our physiology. So this thing that’s floating above our shoulders is also kind of in charge of everything else? Interesting. So, I really geek out about energy and you really geek out about cold and red light therapy. So I want to introduce some of these conversations to my audience I have been dabbling with cold therapies and I’ve had a lot of fun recently.

I live in New England. I live in like north of Boston, near the Maine New Hampshire border. So, it’s winter here for sure. And we have snow and ice. And I have been determined this year to get a life and go push myself and do fun things beyond what I’ve been doing and get out of the house, make some new friends. And of course, one of the people who came into my orbit was actually a friend for my son’s karate dojo, and she just happened to mention she’s going to do this polar plunge thing. And I’m like, Oh yeah, I’ve been interested in that. I read them up like a few years ago and I just basically stick my arms in the shower in the cold, and that’s kind of like my limit.

And I went into the cold bathtub at once and I was like, yeah, next time, next time I’ll get better at this. But she invited me to be in this little pod called Ice Ice Ladies. And the emoji for the group was the cold thing, but it’s now a hatchet because we use a hatchet to get through the ice that we can do a polar plunge. And so I’m 40 and I’m the youngest, actually, to know my friend is 38, so she’s the youngest, but it’s mostly like middle-aged women who are just like stripping down and getting into the water and just being like badasses. And so I want to talk about this because there’s pictures I’ve shared a couple here and there online people. There’s like two camps of like, Wow, that’s awesome. I want to be in your friendship circle. Teach me how to do that, which I know, not that I’m such a rookie. And then the other camp that’s like, Oh, hell no, I will not do that. I can’t even.

So this is your life. You live in this world every day, all the time. And I would love for you to sort of share like, how did you get into Breathwork and Cold and like, all of that world?

Kristin: Yeah, for sure. I first of all, it’s so bad as I love it. It’s like women out at the hatchet, on the ice, on the ice planes.

Emily: It’s so fun.

Kristin: Yeah, so great. And it’s, it’s like no other experience when you can do it in nature. Not everybody has access to that. You can start with cold with like a cold shower, like you mentioned. And that’s totally acceptable. I can talk about sort of why there is better benefits to like getting outside and then getting a nature and then getting in frozen water and then all the things.
Yeah, but how I started was, so I was teaching yoga. I’m a certified yoga teacher for about eight years and around the East Coast, New York City, I learned a lot about breath. I learned a decent amount about meditation or maybe what I thought meditation was from various different teachers. A lot of that breathwork in the yoga community is. You know, knees are breathing, usually locking bodies like this.

There’s a lot of different interesting styles of breathwork, all of which are amazing. A lot of them derived from, you know, cultural institutions that existed for thousands of years in other countries. And I loved all that. And I was like, fascinated by sort of how I could maybe move in space using my breath. I certainly wasn’t doing all of if I look back now is looking there in breathwork there isn’t a lot of right and wrong. There are ways you can elicit a certain state, but there is a biomechanical better way to breathe for ourselves. And because I grew up as a dancer, as I mentioned, and societally we see this with women, you know, this is like sucking in your belly. And like for me as a dancer, it’s like holding your belly in and standing up tall the entire time you’re doing moves.
Those things happen and it’s not really the best way to support your spine, the best way to support your experience of dancing, you know, and also your nervous system and space for recovery. So I had to sort of learn that over time. But I had a good baseline breath in my late teens, early twenties.

I started like taking yoga in college and then learning through that. And then I really sort of the doors blew off as I rocked up into a an XPT training class. That’s Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece run a certification for coaches. That’s super cool. That’s around breath and cold and heat and beautiful experience and opprtunity for me to go to one of those experiences. And I also got certified like right the weekend after because I was I knew immediately I was like, Oh, what’s the story with the next certification? I’m doing one this year. It’s next weekend. There’s 18 hours of homework. And I was like, I’m in. I don’t care what I’m in. And like, it’s full. And I literally Buggs like Laird and the two other like assistant leaders at this weekend to be like, I’m not going to stop bugging you and you put me in. And finally they were like, Fine, we’ll make space for it in like, fine. But I got a chance. I had a pivotal moment to do some of those things, which was really breathing and getting in pool with weights at that point, which was like giving me an understanding of breath, like, we can’t breathe underwater.

Emily: Right?

Kristin: And how do I hold my breath with weight, with stress, stress management, that there was a correlation? And then and then I met that weekend. Patrick McEwan was out guesting that weekend. And so it was like a really the poor man’s he’s amazing. He slightly introverted and he just wanted to like, sit and eat lunch. And even after he had lectured and spoke and of course I like sat next to him at lunch was like, I have 14 questions about women breathing. And, you know, I was like that girl. And, you know, love it or hate it, intense. I was curious and I learned a lot from him.

And then ever since then, I’ve been like, writing with him, talking with him, you know, having on my podcast, reading all his books and literature, just crossing over to try to stay connected to his work, which is so beautiful in the breath space. So Patrick informed a lot of that. I’ve been blessed to study with other people like Bryan Mackenzie, bit more in like the sports arena, the gear systems for performance breathing. Expertise, he has a bit of that as well.

And then working with Casper van der Meulen, who is in the Netherlands. Like a brother to me, five or six years, we have a heavy level of interaction and mentorship together and he’s just really given me a lot of guidance. He was Wim Hoff’s right-hand man for like six years and wrote a lot of the education materials, but has certainly has his own breathwork style and arena drive and all that. And he’s these are fantastic people who just came before me, who taught me their ways in many ways. And I continue to nerd out about breath in that space. I had a pretty pivotal experience with Casper, the first course that I took, sort of sight unseen. I saw him at a biohacking conference in Finland and then was like, I don’t know, he was playing hand open and breathing like 250 people in a room sitting in these like corporate chairs. And I watched the whole thing and I was taking pictures and I just knew like, this is the guy I need to study with. So that, that’s really changed my life, that the pivotal experience was really about me recognizing through breath while people were watching me breathe that I actually had some paradoxical, incorrect breathing patterns that I like have shame come up that I had feeling like everyone who’s watching me was judging me. And there was like nothing but this group of people that was fascinated to learn by watching my body and super like lovely. And it’s just a really big understanding that I’m like showing up strong with a lot of barriers and actually not delving more deeply into my own self to understand how breath can actually shift the way I feel about myself, right?

Emily: That’s incredible…

Kristin: holding nervous system energy. So it’s super incredible. Of course, the ice, the ice is a different story than breath. The ice I was doing, I don’t know, maybe you’ve been to Korean spas or Hammam or like a Turkish bathhouse or Russian or I’ve been overseas like, and my mom would always talk about. She grew up in Germany for a few years. Like I remember being the naked spa. And so I’ve always dabbled in the cold, but like since like 18 years old in college. But going to these places and being like, oh, 30 seconds. That’s the badass or That was fun. I don’t, I didn’t understand any correlation to health until about six or seven years ago when I started doing it more actively. And yeah, but people thought I was crazy or not. I knew that there was something there.

Yeah, well, I want, I want to go into ice, but I want to come back to your story, which was kind of a piece of vulnerability of following your breath and being in a room of people who were not judging you, but rather holding space for you and you processing being in your body with your breath and feeling all these things shifting and moving. You know, I think that’s something that a lot of folks don’t understand that comes with a breathwork training or an experience that you’re with people that you’re going to see sides of yourself that maybe you don’t even realize you’ve been holding back, holding off, cutting off, separate from just dismissing. And so the breath brought you back into your body to see some parts of yourself. It’s on a leg.

Yeah. This is also an example. Like, I’m a coach and I’m quite a good coach. And I’ve grown my practice in a way that I feel like I’m I’m I’ve stepped into being a phenomenal coach because of parts of me that I have, you know, this is like the fail faster thing you learn by doing and then you learn by seeing where you might have been more fragile and that you can, you know, course correct some of those things as needed.

And then you get to share with others sort of that journey in hopes that they do it. They get from A to B in a shorter amount of time. And the breath is an unbelievable piece. I mean, just to elaborate briefly on the story, it was the point of that is to say, like sometimes you need someone outside of you. This is why we hire coaches. Good coaches have coaches, good coaches have mentors. I have five mentors I work with all the time across nutrition and sports performance and breathing and ice and all that because I want to get better, right?

And ice is not the thing to have mentorship in some way because I continue to grow and evolve and evolve and it’s like, you know, traipsing through to get more knowledge and information and, you know, in an area that has a lot of research but a lot of widespread research, sure, it’s going back to the breath. It was like I was laying on the floor as an all instructors at a training. I run very serious. It’s five full days, 8 to 10 hours a day together.

Emily: Wow.

Kristin: It’s like day three. I’m one of the only Americans there. I think there’s one other American from San Diego and people from all over the world, and we’re learning from each other. And I should feel at that point, should feel wildly comfortable with those people. I was showing up an hour early before class. I was training at the gym that it was being held out and I was like, you know, all the things and Casper would say now or said to me at some point, you know, when I saw you walk in on day one, I knew at some point I would lay you down and breathe you on the floor because my I did have some paradoxical breathing and then performative breathing, meaning someone’s asking you to breathe and you want to get it right for them.

Emily: Yeah. What’s paradoxical breathing?

Kristin: Great question. I throw it, I throw around the word like it’s like everyone knows what it means. So it’s just reverse breathing pattern. And for anyone who’s listening to this right now, if you just think about like if you’re sitting in your car or you’re sitting on a couch or wherever you are in the office and you just take a moment and you like close your eyes and you inhale, let’s just use our noses. You’re in now through your nose and you breathe in. Your belly should expand. It should be like making potbellies cool again.

It should be that your belly, your lateral ribs, the back of your body is expanding like a barrel when you inhale. And then when you exhale, you’ll feel your belly fall back in towards the body. And so paradoxical breathing is when you inhale and your belly comes in and your shoulders rise. Right? And you’re really not giving yourself this opportunity to take a full breath to create diaphragmatic. Just a diaphragmatic, I must would say, like a lock, a diaphragmatic space in the breath where you are expanding and you can whole like, let’s say I’m lifting a barbell or some weights or something. You want to have intra-abdominal pressure.

And so if you’re spending your whole life up or breathing in your chest are really not ever taking a full, deep breath, which is giving the most opportunity for gas exchange rate, carbon dioxide and oxygen, oxygen getting into the body. And so just understanding that we and lots of women have this lots of yoga teachers, I see this is no slight on yoga teachers. It’s just we are also learn to hold Warrior three in. This is just like in ballet. I have this. So how do we breathe? There are noses, our mouths or whatever we’re using.

But actually, I understand that we can, like, circumferential expand the body on the inhale and then exhale, and that that aligns with the way that our muscle, the diaphragm, helps us breathe, right? We want to be like incongruence with that, not against that. And that’s why there is some biomechanical. There are a few biomechanical things that are important. So I had that right, a bit of that.

And a good breathwork teacher is going to see that walking in and I’m coaching all these other sports and I’m doing all these other things and I’m doing a bit of breath work, but nothing really heavy at that point. And I’m showing up strong every day. And Kasper sort of made me lie on the floor and put a kettlebell on my belly and like to try to breathe. And as I inhale to see if I could lift the kind of like tactile, heavy feedback that made me expand the belly. And it was actually a little hard for me, as you would imagine, with a leg.

Emily: Because we’re not using that.

Kristin: Yeah Since five years old, I was like in a ballet class where my ballet teacher would be like, okay, inhale and up, right? And everything was in and tall and all of that. And so he had the kettlebell was rising and falling, and he had me breathing there, doing different things, the kettlebell in different expansive areas and breathing into different parts of my body and, you know, with consent, like putting his hands on me and all of that happening for like 30 minutes. And I was doing the breathing.

He was asking just like listening and then doing while I was at one part of me, almost unbeknownst to me, it was just mostly worried about the fact that there’s 17 other instructors in a circle around me watching me breathe. When I was getting more and more and more and more embarrassed or shameful or like, I was like in my head, I think I was like, why does he keep having me do these things? And I must be doing it wrong this whole time, which in some ways I was right that we got to have a growth mindset.

Emily: Yeah.

Kristin: And at the end of the exercise I sat up and he was like, Hey, did you understand Abby, and see that I was just teaching directly and all the things and all I could feel was my face was red and I was about to cry and I had all these emotions and. You know, he saw that he’s like a nervous system reader. He’s like, you want to say. And he’s like. And I was like, I don’t know. I feel shame. I feel sad. And he’s like, well, can you tell me a little bit more about that? And I was like, I just feel watched and judged. And, you know, I got a little teary-eyed and was like leaking a little.
And then he smartly said, I just would love for everybody to go around really quickly and just say, like what you just saw with Kristin over the last half an hour. Like, like what? What the impact was.

And of course, every one of these people who I’ve gotten to know and you’re like really blowing doors off guys are all doing breathwork for three days together before that. Yeah, everyone in the circle is like, Oh my God, I saw your belly. It’d be stuck for so long. And then 15 minutes in it moved and then it was I learned and I. I love you and I like it can be so fluid or whatever. Like, it wasn’t meant to be a compliment session, but it was like I, my understanding was like, these people hate me or whatever. It’s my own baggage. My own…

Emily: Yeah.

Kristin: And, and as everyone went around the circle, it was like, Oh, that’s not at all what’s real. And Kas was like, Let’s just go sit for 10 minutes. 5 minutes. Like he gave everyone else partner exercises for like seven and a half minutes. He’s like, Let’s just sit next to each other over here if you want to talk about what just happened. Because I was emotional.

Emily: Integrate.

Kristin: Yeah, like integrate. How important is that thing? We always forget to integrate in the work and we sat next to each other and I watched the clock. While the partners are working at the CrossFit gym, I watched the clock count down from like 7 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever it was, and he sat next to me. He’s like, I’m here if you need to say anything, I just want to support you. I’m going to sit right next to you. Like I’m happy to have conversation. Like if you feel like you need a hug, like it’s, you know, and I sat there for six and a half minutes or so, like 30 seconds before the clock went off and was like, I’m not going to get a hug. Well, who would even ask that? I’m this I don’t need I’m fine. I’m strong. I’m like, I just kept like spinning and circling and limbic looping around this stuff as I was like sort of at the same time realizing how much pain was there and how much weird shit was coming up.

And like 30 seconds before the clock ended, I turned to him all like shy. I was like, I can use like a little hug and make things for that. And later on we laughed about it. Later on he said, I knew you walked in the door like, there’s Kristin. She shows up strong and she wants to make sure everybody knows. he says, I’m strong, right? There’s a big armor and construct that I had layered on my life that was making me a wild success in corporate America and teaching and leading. And also I wasn’t being able to be vulnerable with the world on myself or get to know myself.

Emily: Yeah

Kristin: like that isn’t… I know that’s a long story, but if that isn’t a message for people to understand that you can breathe yourself into better into feeling better, into thinking more clearly, into more confidence, into more capacity. Because my nervous system was held in such a state from all the things I was doing, that my breathing was a response to that for years and years. And as I learned to open that up and by the way, you don’t have to go through some cathartic experience. You can just be breathing and going, Wow, I’m going to bring my awareness to this. Let me be curious. Let me explore. And it will change you. It will change you so fast.

Emily: Absolutely.. I love that story. And I’m sure as a coach now, you can spot people a mile away when they walk through the door like, Oh, this is going to be very fun. We’re going to work on some stuff together. You can see when they walk in the door, is it okay? I see what I’m up I’m going to be doing today. And that’s the funny thing, is that when you’re in that state, in that constriction and this facade and who I am being in this space. You’re not even able to understand who you are. But when people are so in tune with themselves and they do this for a living, they’re used to identifying and seeing people beyond the stiff facade. They can see what’s going to happen. It’s like, okay.

Kristin: It’s like the best. One of the best lessons I’ve had in my life and it made me be a much stronger coach. It’s all a spectrum. I nobody shows up. Very few people show up completely shut off.

Emily: Right.

Kristin: It’s like a free space. So certainly I was like kind and lovely and had, like, anger and joy, just like everyone else. But this was also my protection zone. And in order to be a really good coach, I needed to have it done to me. And now I like I want to say I pride myself carefully. I ask always for permission. I say, I’m going to speak freely, may I? I want to invite you to something that I see, can I share it? But I want people to acknowledge and consent that they’re about to listen to something that they may or may not like. It could be a compliment. It could be a challenge to what they’re doing. But coming out of the cold, even coming out of breath when I run this Sherpa breath and cold instructor training. So the biggest thing I’m teaching people is I can call. I’m not going to call you out. I’m going to call it in what I see.

And we’re going to have these conversations around how your breath is driving your nervous system, driving your attitude, driving the way you are performing in this training, so that we can look at ourselves first before we go look at other people and say, here’s what I’m seeing in you. And something that comes across as ballsy, to be honest, because now that I’ve seen thousands and thousands of bodies breathe or get in cold, which is just like what someone does in stress is how they will perform and stress. You can start to say, okay, I see the different personality types, I see the different constructs, I see the different nervous system tones, which is really the physiological scientific piece of it.

And I can surmise a lot of things from people’s behaviors. And that’s like a beautiful opportunity to open the doors to people that are going, okay, this isn’t just breathwork, this is trauma release, this is change, this is mindset. This is so much of what we can do to help people in the world. It’s really not even me healing anyone, right? This is the thing I say.
I’m giving you a breathwork protocol so you can rediscover the badass amazing person you’ve always been. And then they can heal themselves. And that’s absolutely, absolutely.

Emily: And I want to kind of come back to this paradox. How do you say, paradoxical breathing?

Kristin: Yeah.

Emily: Okay. ,So if we’re stuck up here in our upper belly or not even our belly, really, Our chest, our shoulders.

Kristin: Upper lungs. Yeah.

Emily: In that area, I would, I would guess that it’s probably also leading to poor digestion. And then when we think of our energy body, our solar plexus is about where we trust ourselves, our trust, our gut instincts and what we want to will into the world.

We drop down into our sacral chakra of our creativity and our womb and our cauldron of what we want to like birth into the world.
So, if we’re cutting off the flow from those places in our root chakra, our safety and our security, I mean, family like rootedness, like if we’re cutting off the breath from those places energetically too, I think of it as like a garden hose, like there’s a kink in the garden hose and sure, there’s some little drip drippings that can get through those places, but we’re not going to have this vibrancy the way that we would if the breath is moving into those places. Is that something that you?…

Kristin: Yeah. It’s beautiful. What you just said and quite accurate. You know, when we’re breathing fully into our body, we are also moving the body in space. If you look at, like some people will post on Instagram or YouTube, you can easily go see what is happening with the organs when we’re breathing and the structure of the body. And so there’s like this massage that’s kind of happening, right? There’s a shift of the way that our biomechanical form and our ribcage is moving. There’s like a massaging of the organs. It’s the body knowing that it has that pulsation in full effect that can help you with digestion, peristalsis, all those things.

And also we’re getting a different type of, let’s just say a different level or we’re less efficient if we’re upper chest breathing quite often unless, there’s this big thing in the world right now about like nasal breathing only, you know, taking forever. And like, you kind of people are absolutists going absolutist on it. The reality is that there are contextual situations where you do want to use your mouth and upper chest breath, there are.

And putting that aside, if we are breathing down into our bellies, which most of us are not doing enough, we’re actually oxygenating the system better. You know, and then we can go into neuroscience about why I do that quite often. you can’t quite…

Emily: Yeah, nerd out. Let’s go out.

Kristin: Nerdy long poster like I love it. I’m all like, Hey, here’s my lungs. But here’s the thing we’re all taught, right? Most of us know this, or we don’t know that we know, but we know it when I say it, which is when we inhale, we inhale oxygen. And when we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. And like the carbon dioxide I exhale, the plants can use for energy, for creating more oxygen that I need to breathe in. So cool. Mother Nature. I think that’s like maybe that’s like sixth grade, right? You learned kind of a thing. And that’s about beautiful cycle.

Photosynthesis is the chapter and just this is what’s interesting, too, is like photosynthesis is a chapter. And then maybe we throw in a little bit about how the human and Mother Nature experience intertwine, which, by the way, is everything. So we learn that and that’s cool.

And the reality is like we’re actually breathing in around 21% oxygen and then a bunch of other gases mostly inert for us. And then we’re exhaling a similar amount of carbon dioxide and other gases again. And that’s cool, but we don’t learn is that in order to get oxygen from the red blood cells so we breathe in oxygen and other gases, the oxygen goes through our lungs and then gets attached to the red blood cells, the hemoglobin in our body. And then the hemoglobin is is traipsing around the body in our bloodstream, and it needs to get in our tissues.

We need to get it in the muscles when we’re moving or working out. We need to get in our brain or thinking and focusing. We need to get it into any kind of tissues. Right? And so in order to do that, we have to have certain levels of carbon dioxide. Now, that doesn’t mean if I have low levels that I’m not going to get oxygen in my system, it just means I’m going to get less than optimal. So we have this gas exchange and the vehicle with which oxygen gets into our tissues, our muscles are bringing our body is carbon dioxide.

So this is why people will be talking about if we exhale too much out of the mouth too often, if we’re in hyper stress mode, if we’re like walking through the world like, oh my God, on my own, then that becomes and what has become for a lot of people and over breathing issue. Too much breathing, too much mouth breathing. So cool. There are people in the world that don’t do that, and that’s great.

But many of us are living in stress, especially off of all the years we just came off of. Many of us are not understanding that breathing easily can support the health of the organism and also can slow the rate with which we exhale carbon dioxide. So that, the body’s levels are in an optimal, balanced enough place to give us as much oxygen as we need and our tissues.

Oxygen equals energy. Oxygen making ATP, oxygen equals feeling good, oxygen equals better sleep, weight loss, all these things because the downstream effects of being more oxygenated is that your cells function better. So it’s not woo at all.

Emily: Yeah, right.

Kristin: Hey, no one ever said to me in order to get oxygen into the tissues, you need carbon dioxide. So you could hold your breath a little to do that. You can breathe nasally to be able to take, you know, exhale less air out. And so you can have levels of carbon dioxide in your body that feel. Optimal. I feel like you’re getting more oxygen in your system. And that’s what we want, right? We want we go to oxygen bars and put that thing in our nose and like, this is good. Let’s just find ways to do that naturally, you know?

Emily: Right. Actually, well, you would say that. And I like I instantly went back. I went to a hyperbaric chamber with my husband a couple of years ago and needed oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber. It was an old, old one that was like windowless. We were basically in a submarine and it was like, okay, like everything was so strange about that experience, but that was the last time I had oxygen. I just remember, like, how good that felt in my body.

Kristin: Yeah, and H Pride is great, right? If you have access to it, it’s cool to go do some stuff in hyperbaric chamber. Just like good for the body, go to get an IV and then, like, push that into your cells faster, better. But, and, also we can’t all get to those types of places, right?

Emily: yeah, it cost a lot too to go to there, I remember that was out of pocket.

Kristin: Yeah, totally. And so it’s like, what can we do that’s free every day? That would make well, we can easily breathe a little more. We could practice breathing lighter. And by later, I don’t mean holding your breath, but breathing like less breaths per minute. So I have quite often clients working on their breath every day where they can breathe less, breathe less, and a five-minute period of time, even if they’re like, you know, we have an air hunger response. So when the carbon dioxide levels rise in the body, the body is also has a safety mechanism, right? Emily, It’s like if I’m like, hold your breath for 20 minutes, you’d probably first you’d pass out.

Emily: Right.

Kristin: Beautiful mechanism that the human body is like, well, maybe if I fall over and pass her out, she’ll open her mouth or we die. And so there’s a point of diminishing returns, however, and you’ll be super oxygenated. You won’t. you’ll be dead.

But hold your breath to a certain point, right. So that your receptors and if you practice holding your breath, sub maximally. Ah, like if you’re not holding your breath, you’re just breathing less breaths per minute. And like the carbon dioxide is going to slowly rise in the system. Right? And if it’s slowly rising, it’s probably going to hit a receptor that’s like, hey, breathe. It tells your brain, breathe, breathe, breathe.

And then you’re like, okay, I know that I have to breathe, but if I’m just like, breathing slower, the air still coming in and I’m not having too much of a panic signal, But like, we’re titrating that down so we’re more comfortable. We’re building something that the Breathwork Worlds calls carbon dioxide tolerance. So we’re getting better at having higher levels in our system so that we can breathe more efficiently. And that’s lying on the floor for 5 minutes, 3 to 5 minutes a day. You can do that.

And it’s going to make you like a more cardiovascular effect. It’s going to make you utilize oxygen better. So we’re shooting. It is not exactly the same as like running 25 miles roughly and practicing in your entire body, that kind of a thing. But really beautiful opportunity to get healthier and to understand your breath.

You know, there’s like tools, like I’m sitting here like this, I have a breath tool that’s like 35 bucks. That’s called the Breather fit. Now, those fancier versions, Eero, fits like 200 $300 device on your phone. It’s all great. It’s like, let’s be reasonable. We all only have some amount of budget to spend. And everyone, when I post this on social, people are like, are you smoking a pipe? Like THC man?

But it’s just this is like this. Obviously, this is not nasal breathing if I’m using my mouth, but it’s a muscle trainer. So second thing I can do is I can expand and get my respiratory muscles stronger like any other muscle in the body and actually have more capacity to breathe better. So like, super nerdy, right? And also and people don’t have to even go out and buy any tools. You can just practice on your own.

You know, this is quite often what I’m doing with putting breath work in the world or doing audio recordings for my clients is just saying, Hey, this is how we can do this easily and effectively, you know, and just, you know, someone who’s like, Where the hell do I start? You said all the science, Kristin.  Like you can just set, I say to two weeks time, just pick a song you love, not alarm. That’s annoying. Micro stressor, Pick a little song you love. It’s in your phone and be like, I’m going to set an alarm once a day, same time every day. And that song is going to come on like whatever it is, it’s like trance music from Germany. I don’t know.

Emily: Sure.

Kristin: Broadway show, tune, whatever you want. And when that goes off, that’s your little signal to do like 15 seconds of awareness breathwork just saying to yourself, Oh, that just went off.
How am I breathing in my nose or my mouth? That’s like a three-second thought checking in with that, and then also asking yourself the back of question is like, what’s going on right now in my life and my body? Meaning am I yelling?, am I arguin?, am I calm?, am I resting?, am I having sex?, whatever, and then saying, is this correlated what I’m breathing out of how am I breathing feels in my body to what I’m doing or how I’m feeling.

And like if you do that for two weeks, you just naturally start to gain some awareness not only about yourself. Honestly, if the alarm goes off in a room, you’re like, You know, you’re a creeping people. How’s Johnny breathing over there at his desk? I sit in his desk while holding his breath bright red.

You know, And so however it is, it’s. It’s still continuing to bring awareness, right? Bring awareness. Yeah. When you look around at your kids, you’re like, Oh, look at this. Quite often if you look at a little baby, there’s like big fat tummy sticking out there, breathing all barrel belly style, and they’re just fine. They’re like, Oh, we have great biomechanical.

Emily: Totally if we just go back to that place. In every place in our life and our well-being, we would just be fine. Well, this is actually a funny segway about the song.
Last week I was kind of, you know, rolling over in the middle of the night. And I heard sometimes, like, my spirit team gives me little phrases or songs. In this case, it was the song Bulletproof by Le Roux, which is like a blast from the past. And I’m like, falling back asleep. And I like to do some deeper breathing to get myself into a nice getting back-to-sleep energy. I woke up and I couldn’t think of the song the next day.

The same thing in the middle of the night it came to me again and I was like, I’m just going to Google what was that bulletproof thing?
And it came right up, and I ended up doing a cold shower. And I mean, it’s very, very cold here. We had a cold streak. It was 15 degrees below zero over the weekend. So our cold water was very cold.

Kristin: All the way up from you to Toronto is a huge cold snap.

Emily: Yeah, and it was great. So I got that shower water real cold, and I had it playing that song, playing on my bluetooth speaker.
And I was just like, in all of my, like, naked Glory, they need to this song like pelted with cold water and just like, yeah. But that was like it was helping like pumping prime my system to just totally love that cold to.

But the first time I went in with those ice ice ladies, I got out and I started to do some, like deep breathing. And I was doing this like, I was just like, instinctually. And I got my breath moving so fiercely. When I got in the water, I did not feel the water. My fingers were actually, like, tingling with energy. Like my whole body was, like, surging.
Like, they’re like, let’s run out. And I was like, my back was them. I was like, is everybody getting now? No, no. Okay, we’re all getting out now. I was on like another, another level.
And even back in my car, I was like, my hands are like, what is going on? So I would imagine I probably took a little bit too much oxygen in at that point. But can you explain sort of what the hell just happened when I did that?

Kristin: I mean, so there are beautiful things that go on in that in the plunge world and the shower piece is great.
I also will say to people, if you want, you can start anywhere you want as long as it’s, it needs to be said, I’m not a medical doctor and you need to make sure if you have some health contraindications, like a heart condition or super high blood pressure, any kind of if you’re on any kind of medication, it’s just good to check with your doctor to say, hey, what’s extreme temperature are going to do to me?

Although I have also seen people who are like taking their own, you know, autonomous choice to get in the cold anyway, but and have wonderful things happen. But make sure you know what you’re doing. You’re being reasonable and you know where your heat source is if you’re in nature. So you’re not like, I walked a mile to this cold lake and I dug a hole and then I had no warm clothes and I had no shoes. So walk back, you know, like, let’s be smart people.
But also what you’re talking about is like, there’s really beautiful physiological things that are happening in the body. And the first thing is when you’re getting in the cold weather, it’s like a lake or a plunge or whatever it is and even in the shower, your body will do some shunting of the blood, meaning it recognizes probably less in the shower, more in cold water immersion, your body will shunt blood to the core.

And that is a protective mechanism and that’s to keep your organs warm. That’s to say, hey, all of our important major organs are in the trunk of the body and our brain. And so we’re going to shunt all the blood there. And we don’t really need the arms and legs as much, right? There’s no organs in there. It’s the body doesn’t want them. It’s just trying to save your life as the heart pumping and keeping from getting hypothermia.

And the other thing is, if you get in up to your neck and this is like an important point, if people are wanting to start with an ice plunge, which if you are generally healthy, you can start with cold water immersion or an ice plunge or lake plunge or frozen water plunge, whatever, just fine. But it actually will help you to get up to your neck. And that’s just a nice we have this built in thing from being mammals mammalian dive reflex that is up to your neck or cheeks of your face even getting into the water. Well, we’ll actually have this contra indicated this like contraindication to what’s happening. So you’re having a sympathetic nervous system response. Your body is going to vaso constrict because of the cold and then you’re getting your neck in or even getting your cheeks in can come. It will slow the heart rate again, a protective mechanism.

Your body thinks you’re a mammal, you’re breathing, you’re now in cold water. I need to protect you so you don’t even beyond, you know, autonomously without my control, my heart rate is going to slow. I’m going to calm. Sometimes we get a little loopy in the mind, and that’s to be able to quell any panic.
If you were, like in a dire situation. Right. It wants to give you the tools, whether you like it or not, to survive, survive longer. So because of that, if you get your neck into the water, it actually makes it easier.

You know, I’m like my entire feed feels like I’m the last person on the planet to go in an ice plunge because the algorithm of like Instagram is just serving me cold and breath all day long. That’s my world. I know that that’s not the truth for everyone else. But quite often I see people that are like having a really challenging time in cold, which is can be for everybody.

But like they’re only up to their sports bras, they’re only up to their waist or they’re like halfway in, or they’re just not all the way in. And I encourage people and they never want to listen, but I encourage them. And when they do go up to their neck, you see this thing, you see what I call the turnover happen.

And my friend Lisa, who runs Unbounded, which is outdoor plunging and primal therapies in Canada, calls it the bliss point. That’s the point where what you’re talking about that your fingers are tingling. That’s a lot because your blood is shunting to the core of your body and you will get some tingling in your fingers and there’s less blood oxygenation that you’re used to there. You are slowing your heart rate, right, by getting up to your neck and your body is starting to settle in because it’s like, well, it doesn’t seem like we’re getting out here. Any time I do a big thing with my clients and my coaching classes and my workshops where I have people down, regulate their breath and do calmer breathing styles in the beginning of their ice punch career, anyway.

Emily: yeah

Kristin: ..and that is because we are getting in the ice bath to learn how to manage stress. So if we breathe because our breath is the remote controls of the nervous system. So if we breathe in a way that’s actually like we’re calm. Your nervous system is like, Hmm, I like feeling more freaking out. This is cold. Like, our breath isn’t freaking out. It’s like I don’t have to be freaked out. Like, maybe we’re okay.

You have this beautiful cascade happening, so you have, like, adrenaline coming in the body. You have just like, your heart rate slowing. All of these things are happening to help keep you alive. And there’s a mental capacity. This is the energetic piece to it where you are realizing, I put myself in this ice tub. I’m in it for a minute. I didn’t think I could do it. I was just freaked out. I’m now calm. I’m now able to kind of surrender.

And your understanding of your capacity just in that microcosm of, let’s say, 3 minutes all in like, damn, okay, I’m doing this hard thing and it’s in me and I’m in it at the same time your body is having a positive response to show you out and says, let’s do things together. I like that is life-changing.

That is a microcosm of I get I say, I got to do this work around cold where I see people like everything they ever were in their lives and ever will be in like 3 minutes. Because you can’t be anywhere else but in the now, when you’re in the cold and how you manage stress on the ice is how you manage stress in life. And you see there are 11-year-old selves and their discovery is and you see and it’s all that may sound woo and I actually don’t even care anymore because it’s like it’s not. You just get to see people at their truest place and it doesn’t mean people that freak out is always going to freak out, or people that are easy are going to be easy. If you watch really closely, you can see how people navigate stress and that’s everything.

Emily: Yeah

Kristin: So it’s so beautiful. And then also what you experience when you get in your car and you sing in your dance or I’ve got like Hollywood executive producers of the biggest films in ice tubs, and they’re like, come out and they’re like singing Broadway. They’re stoic before they go in there, froze in the ice, no problem, because they know how to handle stress, right?

Emily: Sure.

Kristin: So get out and they have a parasympathetic rebound. So you have this other cascade of chemicals and oxytocin. If you were with other people and they’re like singing The Lion King on my rooftop in L.A. or something, it’s like what’s happening? And it’s beautiful because we get to see people’s essence, right? Essence without obstructs. And that is so cool.
And when you’re alone in your car afterwards, you’re feeling high levels of elation because of both the brain chemistry, of the neurochemical response of it. But also you’re like, I did the damn thing and you’re celebrating. And this is why I tell people all the time there’s a lot of scientific benefits. But the biggest one is like, it’s going to boost your mood and your capacity like you’ve never seen before.

Emily: Yeah, that by itself. Just that everything you just said and I think that’s why it can feel like it calls you back again, not in a medically addictive way, but just it just calls you back for that boost of energy the way that, you know, you go, I think I want a cup of coffee. It’s going to make me feel a certain way. You want a cold experience because seeing your body, feeling your body the way it feels going into it.

And, you know, we’re talking about we’re debating, is it is it harder to do a cold plunge at home in a tub or out in nature? And my friend was like, I could never do it in a tub. If I had it, I wouldn’t even use it because it’s too hard. If it’s outside, I’m just like outside and I can’t get out of that.

So but if it was, I just like wouldn’t choose to go into it. And I said, I totally see that because when I open the shower too, I can feel the cold air coming at me. And when I did it at home, my husband’s like, let’s take the freezer and take the ice tray and just dump all of the ice into the tub. And you’re like literally seen ice going into a cold tub. You can tell it’s going to be really freaking cold.

So like, you have to get over that mental herd of like everything in you is like, No, I’m not going to do it. But so what you’re saying about calming your breath before I feel like that, that’s it. Just having a slow, calm breath. It’s like you get in and you physically feel the cold, but your breath is so much more important than how cold, how the cold feels.

Kristin: I don’t know if there’s this, if this is real, this one thing is a real quote, but I will just say it because I think it’s beautiful that someone attributed or told me a story about Wim. Of course, I studied with Casper a lot and I’ve seen and done and read a lot of women’s work and online, but I’ve never physically studied with him in person. And in the midst of that, like the conversation he was having with someone, I was told that he was, you know, someone’s asking him the question like, this is incredible.

You’re like climbing mountains and flip flops and, you know, it’s cold and sitting in cold water and diving under ice holes from holds a hole, which is even like crazy because your brain goes ice cream headache and loopy really quickly.

So, you know, you have to do all this again, like don’t try this at home if you don’t know what you’re doing. And so I’m saying, how do you you know, how do you manage it? How do you do all this stuff? How are you Have you gotten so good at this? And he said, I just let it be cold. You know, and it’s just like there’s a life lesson in that. It’s not just about cold water. It’s like if the hand that we’re dealt in the moment is not necessarily the one we’re choosing, like hopefully it is, but if it’s not, we’re going to put ourselves in the cold and we know that it’s deliberate or intentional cold exposure. We know what we’re getting into. How do we just let it be what it is, experience it for what it is?

You know, I want to say to anyone listening, if they’re trying and I stop at home or lake plunge with friends or anything, you know, cold water experience really, really like connect community if you can, because that makes it more fun even if you’re all like, but 90 seconds, like you kind of need that first 90 seconds for your body to have that turnover, that bliss point so that you can feel the physical surrender happen where you’re actually like, Oh, I’m okay, I could do.

Many people will go from like 30 seconds, Oh my God, get me the F, out of here to like by the 92nd point, sometimes as soon as like 45 to 60 seconds, they’re like, Oh, I feel like I could do this for like 5 minutes. Let’s go longer. Like, it’s a prodigal shift.

Emily: Okay. Can I talk about that there? Because in my brain, I’m like, I could do this for a longer, but, like, should I be doing this for longer than 2 to 3 minutes? Like, what is the stopping point? Where is there dangerous for me or not? Been getting those benefits any further?

Kristin: Yeah. Killer question. I think the best answer, like any good answer, is it depends. Minimum effective dose for me is going to be different for you depending on where you live on the planet, depending on how much you cold plunge, you’re going to titrate and learn how to manage more of that cold exposure or less.

For women especially and for everyone, you know, the static load, the stress bucket we carry around every day is different. And so I’ve been in colds. I mean, countless, countless, thousands of times. If not, I mean, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands of times. I’ve been in cold and watch so many people go through cold. And even the other day it was my partner’s birthday.
It’s been two nights in a row, 4 hours sleep, mostly because I was traveling on flights, landing, had a really weird try to have this like brunch in a new place in the morning. Not good food. Didn’t feel well. It’s his birthday. He wanted to train at the gym. I’m like, let’s go to the gym. I don’t think I can push weight. I have a bellyache, but there’s a sauna there. There’s an outdoor pool. I’m in Austin. We just came off a little bit of a cold snap. The pool is probably 50. Now in my mind, I’m like, Yo, I coach this, you know? Here we go, right? This is ego. Yeah, like this. I’m fine after a pool no problem. I’m the sauna 190. I’m going to sit in there with a bunch of sweaty dudes for a while. It’s all fine. I know what’s best for my body. That I won’t go directly from sauna to cold. It’s too fast, too Furious. You want your body to do the work so your cellular health boost.

So I’m like, you need a cool-down period. After the sauna I took, I watched it six and a half or so minutes before I got into the pool, and then I was o’clock outside by the pool and I’m like, I’m going to do about the same amount of time as my break in a cold water. And today, because it’s 51 and not sub 40, which is where I normally plunge, I’m going to do breaststroke and nasal breathing only. So I’m training some cardio capacity. I’m feeling what that feels like in my body. I now remember, I’m on minimal sleep. I don’t feel great and I feel like a bit sick to my stomach. And so I go and I do this whole thing and I’m like in a new gym. And inside the gender happens to be a lot of like chlorine and stuff. When I, when I get out of the pool, I feel actually like my belly’s cleared out. I feel great for about a minute. And then after a minute I, like, realize, oh, I’m starting to see like a little stars. Like I’m starting to have probably the quick shift from vasoconstriction to vasodilation has happened and my body’s just not feeling great and my stress load was already high.

And for whatever reason, right, I decided I’m not going to go to the gym, but I’m into this cardio-shifting thing. And so I sat down in a chair and like after another 2 minutes, I just finally was like, I need to pull the record. I took two towels. I had to go upstairs. I found my partner. I just said, Babe, something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is like. And the moment of me speaking those words aloud to him saying, Hey, something’s wrong. I’m seeing stars. I feel like I’m going to pass out. It’s from the cold and the heat. There’s like, I have a moment where I recognize in myself like, Oh, I’m having shame that I have to say this because this is what I’m coaching.

But the reality is my body, any given day and women’s bodies, any given day during the time of the month, because we have different propensity for stress and anxiety and managing those things, like when we’re ovulating, we’re like, I can do anything. So typically women could go a little longer during that ovulating period because they’re like more stress resilient and a lot of things are positive with our hormonal cycle in our reproductive years to help that.

But that’s the point of me telling the story is to say to you, like even to me, I like will take it to heart. I’ve sat in 32-degree water for like almost 12 minutes and felt fine, like cold when I get out. And that’s normal. But been like, Yeah badass. No problem. I’m Instagramming it, no problem. And then also and then I’m like 51-degree water. But like, why did I layer in nasal breathing, feeling sick, poor sleep to have an anesthetic load, you know.

Emily: Yes.

Kristin: And normally we were sitting or standing in the water and swimming too heavily. And of course, shit goes sideways, right. And the reason that happened to me is because it’s a universal lesson that I get to share both right now and with people I’m coaching.

So the answer to your question is, is why it’s important. Is there plenty of times you can be totally fine. I would say start with 2 minutes, try to be under 40 degrees. If you can’t do that, get close and don’t sit on the Joe Rogan experiment – love him. Maybe you saw a few years back, he did one minute in a cold bath and then got out. And then you know what happened? All his dude friends, all of the Jocko Willings and probably, you know, Goggins called him and said, Buddy, you’re big, tough UFC, you’re my guy, you know, And you guys got the cold the minute you saw you’re not good, do it more. And then like he skips a day and a date later he goes on Instagram live and he does a cold plunge for almost it’s like 21 minutes.

Emily: Oh, Jesus.

Kristin: Now there’s a point where I feel like he has some responsibility to not scare people away and all the things, but we want to titrate minimum effective dose. What’s the smallest amount of cold that you can get a shiver for a little bit after you get out? And then feel okay, great. If it was easy, great. Then you can take the time up or the temperature down. But when you go from that short to that long, it’s point of diminishing returns.

And I always say I like I love Joe. If he called me tomorrow and said, let’s have a contest, who can stay in longer? Like I’d be all for it. Not the best thing, but I’d be like, you know, it would be fun.
But the reality is like, we don’t have to, like, go hard. And this is a big lesson for the females that are following and listening to you and your audience. So many women in it, is that we are equally as sensitive as we are powerful.

And if we’re just trying to do this like go hard male energy male clock thing, and this is not men against women. This is just as the dawn of time we’ve been organized a bit more in the business world on the hormonal call. So but if we’re trying to do the go-hard thing to keep up with the Joneses, of all the men that came before us, all the time, then we are ignoring this beautiful superpower.

We have intuition and sensitivity because soft is not weak, right? But being sensitive and being in our softer side, our divine feminine, our goddess energy, whatever you want to call it, it is powerful, probably some would argue more powerful than being in like go hard mode, right? Which is to burn out.

Emily: Absolutely.

Kristin: You don’t have to go hard in the ice. We can go for 2 minutes. We can play in that temperature. We can see how it feels.
I just say give try to give yourself 90 seconds because there is a moment of physiological shift that if you get out after 30 seconds, you may not get and you want to have that shift. So you can go, Oh, I can see, here’s where I can surrender, here’s where I can let go, here’s where I can be in stress and be comfortable in the uncomfortable. And that’s like that’s the queen of goals, you know, It’s a really feel.

Emily: I absolutely love that. Thank you for sharing the story and for sharing your personal story and experience, too. I know, you know, as leaders, we sometimes can get into our own egos of being like we all have to be flawless, perfect knowing, all knowing beings. But then we get to look glass. That’s when we get the spirit dope slap. We’re like, Oh, really? That’s cute. That’s really cute of you. And then we have to take those of our own medicine. And so thank you for sharing that story.

And you know, I would love to share some links with my listeners in the podcast show notes on how they can get involved with your work. Learn more about you, of course, follow you on Instagram, your group program, and perhaps your Breath and Cold Instructor Training. I’m so interested. I’m so fascinated and I’m like, Ooh, that sounds yummy. Breathwork.

Kristin: Get your ice ice ladies together and let’s find a place, you know. All I have to do is find a host location that sort of either just has an open most people like to do on the weekend, but it’s like we put, we put in.

Sometimes I bring a Rubbermaid tub or a trough. Sometimes they have something on site one. Once in a wonderful time, we get to do outdoor and nature plunging and then we we spend a weekend together and it’s like it is definitely some hours. But I guarantee and promise you, I give you everything that I’ve spent years and years gathering for data and benefits and insights. I give you a tons of resource and then everyone who walks in the door can become or already, you know, level up the way that they teach a safe, fun and effective breath work and cold exposure class or workshop or any of it. It would be so fun. I have not done anything in New England yet. I used to live in Bedford, New Hampshire, so there’s people there. Yeah, it’d be so fun to do in that area if we just got a little host facility together, whether it be a gym. A yoga studio or space we can work in. So fun.

Emily: I have yoga studios and I have my backyard. I have a small hobby farm in my backyard with chickens, ducks and goats. And so the goats would get a kick out of us doing it next to me.

Kristin: Like what’s happening? There’s goat yoga. We can have goat breathwork.

Emily: Sure

Kristin: So, I’m always, always into that. And I have a website called Sherpa Breath and Cold, and wellpower.life. The good news is you can get to it and click out to it too. But Sherpa Breath and Cold is an instructor training in a workshop series. I work with performance athletes and I work with anyone, everyone, householders and I do this instructor training that kicked off just over a year ago. I have 62 instructors worldwide right now, which is really exciting and continuing to grow that program. And it is an intensive weekend that people can like lean in or many people will call me and say, Hey, can I host something? And then we get a group together, about ten people and me, we just have at it.

And then for the women, I will say, follow me @warriorwomanmode. It’s super fun. It’s just like fun, you know, social media can be fun too, I swear. I try to give as much free education as possible there. And I know that we get lost in social.

So I have a podcast as well that’s called Willpower, just like willpower.life. And it is, you know, I have wild, exciting guests in the health space and experts who have far greater knowledge than I do sharing. Not just tips and tricks, but like tactical, practical applications of ways to become healthier for all of us who are living like a day-to-day real life, you know, budget and wanting to grow our awareness around these modalities and cut through some of the bullshit, quite frankly. I mean, you get out in the world as well as a coach, which is marketing, as marketing, and there’s real life.

Emily: Yeah, Yeah. We like the real ones. We like the real ones around here. Well, Kristin, it’s been such a joy. I’m so grateful for your time and your energy and all this wisdom that you’ve shared with the listeners. I hope to connect with you again in the future.

And everybody listening, please, You know, follow Kristin, get in touch with her, join her programs, do all the things that you feel called to do. She is a wonderful person and I hope you enjoyed this podcast. As always, you can leave us a review, share all the love that you can, tag me and Kristin on Instagram. You know, we’re real people and we love when real people like you listen and have enjoyed something from something that we’ve shared. So please take a screenshot, tag us on Instagram, let us know what really was in our heart for you. So anyway, we’ll see you guys next time.

Thank you so much. Kristin, it’s been a pleasure.

Kristin: Can’t wait to plunge with you, sister. Amazing. Have a beautiful day.

Emily: You too.

Kristin: Bye.