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Taylor Somerville

@taylor__somerville

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- Founder of @symmetry.live ⁣
- @xptlife Master Coach
-Certified BreathScience Practioner
-@HHPFoundation Ambassador
Breath || Mindset || Stress

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Stress isn’t the enemy. And calm isn’t always the goal.

I was working with a sales team this morning and asked them what stress is. Almost every answer was negative.

But stress isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s how we respond to it, and whether we give ourselves the opportunity to recover, that determines a lot of its impact.

The same goes for breathwork. Sometimes we need to calm down. Other times we need to be more alert, focused, and ready to perform.

The real skill is learning to recognize your state and shift it based on what the moment requires.

Before your next meeting, workout, or difficult conversation, ask yourself:

Does the state I’m in match what I’m about to do?

#StressManagement #Breathwork #NervousSystemRegulation #Symmetry

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“Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger” by David Jackson @breathrunningcoach
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“Today, though, was different. I had a new technique I was testing out about the importance of breathing. Something I’d completely overlooked during my professional rugby career and never considered before taking up running. For the last four weeks I’d been learning about how the way you breathe can make a difference to the way you get oxygen into your lungs, into your blood and to your muscles. It made sense to me once I understood some of the basic physiology and, in fact, I felt a bit stupid that I’d never considered it before. But I wasn’t alone. Breathing wasn’t something anyone was trying to get better at, we were just trying to run faster.
I’d not been practising long; I wasn’t even sure if what I was doing was right, but I was keen to give it a go this morning. Although, I was a little sceptical because breathing is automatic, right? And it’s so simple, could it really make a difference?”
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The Health and Human Performance Foundation is delighted to recommend “Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger” by David Jackson @breathrunningcoach
This is a book is for everyone with interested in how your breathing can improve your overall health, wellness and athletic performance and recovery.
You don’t have to to be a runner or an athlete to learn from the wealth of the practical experience David writes from and as an @oxygenadvantage Master Instructor.
“Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger” is available through Amazon and here
https://linktr.ee/breathesmarterrunstronger
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#HHPFoundation #Breath #Breathe

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Repost from @rosnerperformance
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Can a hot tub give you what altitude does?

Ten well-trained runners sat in 40°C water up to their necks for 45 minutes, 5 days a week, for 5 weeks. Their training didn’t change at all.

VO2max went up 4.4%. Hemoglobin mass went up 3.9%. Stroke volume went up 10 mL.

What made it interesting is that heat expands your plasma volume first, and that’s the trigger for making more red blood cells. Altitude tends to shrink plasma at the start. So heat gave them more hemoglobin and a bigger stroke volume.

It’s not a replacement for altitude, and we don’t know yet how it carries over to race day. But nobody had to cut back their training to get it, and for most runners that’s the real win.

The full protocol is on slide 7. Save it for your next base block.

Jenkins et al., 2025, The Journal of Physiology
Link to study https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/JP288997
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Thank you Jonah @rosnerperformance for allowing us to repost🙏

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Obvious wisdom.

#clear #sign #death #is #disco

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This is what progress looks like.⁣
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Not eliminating stress. Not creating a perfectly calm life. Not pretending hard things aren’t hard.⁣
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This client actually went through one of the busiest and most stressful seasons of her year while we worked together. ⁣
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In her words: “While the stress has not eased, the way I show up has.”⁣
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That’s the goal!⁣
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Learning to recognize stress earlier, having tools you can actually use when it shows up, and creating enough space that stress doesn’t automatically dictate how you respond.⁣
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You’re not getting away from stress. You might as well get better at handling it.⁣
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If you’re curious about coaching, send me a DM and let’s talk.

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Four weeks of slow-paced breathing: a longitudinal, randomized, placebo-controlled study of the autonomic nervous system
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“The autonomic nervous system (ANS) relies on two essential feedback loops: respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA) and arterial baroreflex which are both regulated by a complex interplay of sympathetic and parasympathetic activations. The amplitude of RSA is modified by the respiratory frequency, i.e. an increase in respiratory frequency leads to a progressive decline in RSA as vagal effectors become less able to follow variations at higher frequencies. On the contrary, a reduction in the respiratory frequency can increase RSA.
Slow Paced Breathing (SPB) is usually associated with deep changes in thoracic volume which increases the parasympathetic tone, and which has numerous expected beneficial effects on health. However, some studies report little or no effects. The goal of this study was to test a personalized SPB training vs. placebo to help disentangle the effects of SPB from those solely linked to breathing awareness or distraction.”

“Four weeks of SPB training led to a larger increase in parasympathetic modulations to the heart in SPB than CON, indicating that such prolonged intervention has beneficial effects on health. These specific benefits were generally significant from week 4 onward.”
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Link in our bio to study and here -
https://ciss-journal.org/article/view/12026
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#hhpfoundation #breathing #pranayama #breath #breathe

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Neuroscientist Jack Feldman @jacklfeldman explains how breathing alters the brain | The Jerusalem Post
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“We tend to think of breathing as the body’s background software – a monotonous, automatic gas exchange running silently in the basement while the brain handles the “important” work of thinking, feeling, and deciding up in the penthouse.
But groundbreaking neuroscience shows that the relationship is actually a brisk, two-way street. Every single time you inhale or exhale, it isn’t just keeping you alive; it is actively rewriting your brainwaves, sharpening your memory, and dictating how you process the world around you.
Prof. Jack Feldman flew to Israel for the first time to attend and be a guest speaker at last week’s Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine’s Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada (IMRIC) Conference at the Dan Carmel Hotel.

“Breathing exercises began thousands of years ago, Feldman stated.
“The people of China and India meditated, as did residents of indigenous cultures. I originally studied physics and cosmology, but then I got interested in how the brain works. My academic adviser said the topic was too difficult. Then, as a graduate student, I took LSD about once a month. It took a while before it was banned as a psychedelic. I became interested in the perception of space and time and read about neuroscience.”
He had thought that “breathing was trivial – just simple rhythm – but it’s far from trivial.”
“We breathe for many reasons,” he said. “The heart is only a pump, but breathing does a lot of things, and it begins from the third trimester in the womb. If one has a normal lifespan, you breathe about a billion times in life. It takes many seconds to double your heart rate, but you can do this with breathing.”
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Link in our bio to article at https://linktr.ee/hhpfoundation & here
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-908194
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#HHPFoundation #Breathe #jackfeldman #prebotzingercomplex

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You already know what to do. So why don’t you do it?⁣
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I suffer from the same problem.⁣
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We know we shouldn’t send the email when we’re pissed off. We know we shouldn’t snap at our kids over something small. We know we should pause, breathe, and give ourselves a second before reacting.⁣
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But under pressure, those tools become a lot harder to access.⁣
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That’s why managing stress isn’t just about knowing more. It’s about getting better at recognizing what’s happening as it’s happening.⁣
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Because the earlier you recognize it, the more choice you have about what happens next.⁣
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Over the next few videos, I’m going to break down how we can get better at catching stress earlier and responding differently.⁣
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#StressManagement #Stress #Resilience #Leadership #Symmetry

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Beyond breathing: How regulating your nervous system helps leaders have impact, according to an expert
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“Why is voice important for leaders in building trust?
It is the most direct translation of your nervous system. Your nervous system is very close to the one we had when we were, and still are, big monkeys. It is always assessing whether you are safe, and it communicates that to others through the cues in your voice.
Take syllable duration. When syllables become shorter, that signals agitation. You have probably had the experience of entering a shop and hearing somebody say ‘hello’ in a way that makes you feel they do not want to be there. Or the opposite, when their voice makes you feel very welcome.
The voice always has two layers: the words being said and the nervous system that is speaking. If that matters when you enter a shop to purchase something, imagine how crucial it becomes when it is about leading.
When you learn to regulate yourself, which may be the most important part of leadership, and then connect to your purpose, your system moves into parasympathetic activation. Your ‘big monkey’ is calm.
When people exit fight or flight, they can express their thoughts without triggering that mode in others. Consequently, they are heard. Vocal leadership is the art of giving everyone a voice.”
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Link in our bio to article at https://linktr.ee/hhpfoundation & here https://www.weforum.org/stories/leadership/beyond-breathing-nervous-system-leaders-impact/
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#HHPFoundation #Breathe #Breath
#leadership #nervoussystem

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I’m excited to be in this year’s @tsgmemphis
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I started Symmetry because the tools I teach changed my life. And I saw how many high-performing people were doing well on paper but were stressed, exhausted, and constantly running from one thing to the next.⁣
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The goal has never been to eliminate stress. That’s not realistic. It’s to help people change their relationship with it so they can have more energy, be more present, perform better, and actually enjoy the life they’re working so hard to build.⁣
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Sometimes that means learning how to breathe differently. Sometimes it’s making small changes to your habits and routines, sleeping better, and changing your mindset. And yes, sometimes it means voluntarily sitting in really cold water.⁣
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Grateful to be included in Volume 12 of The Scout Guide Memphis and to be part of a community that continues to support local businesses and the people behind them.⁣
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Here’s to changing our relationship with stress. One breath (and occasionally one cold plunge) at a time.⁣
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#symmetry #scoutguide #memphis #healthandwellness

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It’s Wednesday! Hyrox Strength @crossfittriad
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#hyrox #hyroxtraining #hyroxworld

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What if we could stop guessing what’s driving your stress and actually see it?

That’s the idea behind Precision Stress Coaching.

See your stress as it happens. Get reminded what to do in the moment. Then we look at the patterns together.

Think of it as game film for your stress.

I’m looking for 5 people to test this new 8-week coaching experience with me.

Interested? Hit the link in my bio to set up a call.

#stressrelief #breathe #performancecoach #stress #leadership

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