Martin McPhilimey - School of Breath Science

Martin McPhilimey - School of Breath Science šŸ§  Helping coaches build clinical-grade breath, sleep & nervous system skills.

Iā€™m Martin McPhilimey, a respiratory and sleep scientist, educator, coach, and founder of the School of Breath Science. My work sits at the intersection of breathing science, sleep, nervous system regulation, stress resilience, and human performance. With over 15 years of experience across respiratory and sleep science, clinical practice, education, and applied coaching, I help individuals and professionals better understand how the body works ā€” and how to use that understanding to improve health, wellbeing, and performance. Through my consulting and educational work, I support people in building stress resilience, improving sleep, regulating the nervous system, and developing practical tools to feel calmer, clearer, and more capable in everyday life. Through the School of Breath Science, I train coaches, breathwork facilitators, health professionals, and practitioners to apply breathwork and breath training safely, intelligently, and effectively using evidence-informed frameworks. My mission is to raise the standard of breathwork education by bringing together science, practical coaching, and a deep respect for the human experience. Whether you are here to improve your own health, deepen your understanding of breath and the nervous system, or become a more confident practitioner, you are very welcome here.

17/09/2026

To be an entrepreneur, you have to be resilient.

Your environment is going to change constantly, and you have to learn how to adapt.

You might have a vision of where you want to go, but the path there is rarely straight. Itā€™s more like sailing down a river that keeps meandering. You can steer, you can make decisions, but you donā€™t control every bend.

Things will work for a while, then they wonā€™t.

Revenue isnā€™t as predictable as getting paid a salary every month. Opportunities appear, disappear and change. Some months feel easy, others make you question everything.

You have to become comfortable with the unknown and still be able to show up consistently, make good decisions and keep moving forward.

And you have to do all of that while managing your health, your stress and your recovery, because burning yourself into the ground isnā€™t resilience.

Being able to adapt, recover and keep moving when the environment keeps changing?

That, my friend, is what we call resilience.

I talk about this, failure, prediction error and developing mastery in Episode 2 of Beyond Breath.

Comment PODCAST and Iā€™ll send the episode straight to your DMs.

17/09/2026

Bohr effect / COā‚‚

The Bohr effect is a real physiological phenomenon.

As COā‚‚ and hydrogen ions rise and pH falls, haemoglobin releases oxygen more easily into metabolically active tissue.

But the problem is what often gets added on top of that.

People assume that more COā‚‚ means more oxygen is therefore being used.

That chain has not been demonstrated.

In runners adapted to nasal breathing, Dallam et al. found higher end-tidal COā‚‚, but VOā‚‚max was not higher.

It was numerically around 7% lower.

And in the more recent BreathWISE study, COā‚‚ rose during exclusive nasal breathing while peak VOā‚‚ and workload fell.

So yes, the Bohr effect supports oxygen unloading.

But oxygen unloading, oxygen delivery and oxygen consumption are not the same thing.

At sea level during exercise, there is currently no convincing evidence that deliberately raising COā‚‚ creates a meaningful performance advantage by amplifying the Bohr effect.

I unpack the studies and the physiology in the full essay.

Comment ESSAY and Iā€™ll send the article straight to your DMs.

The Bohr effect is real.As COā‚‚ and Hāŗ increase and pH falls, haemoglobin holds onto oxygen less tightly, helping oxygen ...
15/09/2026

The Bohr effect is real.

As COā‚‚ and Hāŗ increase and pH falls, haemoglobin holds onto oxygen less tightly, helping oxygen unload into metabolically active tissue.

But that does not mean:

more COā‚‚ = more oxygen consumed = better performance.

The nasal-breathing data make this interesting.

In the BreathWISE study, exclusive nasal breathing increased PETCOā‚‚ while peak VOā‚‚ and workload fell.

And in Dallam et al., runners adapted to nasal breathing had higher PETCOā‚‚ and substantially lower ventilation, yet VOā‚‚max was not higher.

Numerically, it was around 7% lower, with a moderate effect size.

At submaximal exercise, however, VOā‚‚ was lower at the same running speed, which may point towards improved exercise economy.

That is a very different claim from saying more COā‚‚ creates more oxygen use through the Bohr effect.

I go through the studies, the statistics and the physiology in the full essay.

Comment ESSAY and Iā€™ll send the article straight to your DMs.

13/09/2026

A low BOLT score does not automatically mean you have low COā‚‚.

That is one of the most common ideas in functional breathing, but the test itself is more complicated than that.

The BOLT score and Control Pause are taken after a natural exhalation and stopped at the first clear urge to breathe or involuntary respiratory movement.

COā‚‚ contributes to that urge.

But the first urge to breathe is not determined by COā‚‚ sensitivity alone.

The result is also shaped by lung volume, metabolic rate, starting Oā‚‚ and COā‚‚, chemosensitivity, attention, expectation, prior experience and how your brain interprets the respiratory signal.

And when this relationship has actually been tested, breath-hold time has not predicted resting end-tidal COā‚‚ in the way the model proposes.

So a 15-second BOLT score does not prove that your COā‚‚ is low or that you are chronically overbreathing.

I break down the evidence in the full essay.

Comment ESSAY and Iā€™ll send the article straight to your DMs.

11/09/2026

Failure does not automatically make you stronger

One of the clichĆ©s I donā€™t really agree with anymore is:

ā€œFailure makes you stronger.ā€

It can.

But failure can also make you bitter, defensive, avoidant, or convince you that you are simply not capable.

The useful part of failure is the gap between what you expected to happen and what actually happened.

You expected one outcome.

Reality gave you another.

The question then becomes whether you are willing to investigate that gap and update your approach, or whether you use the result to reinforce an existing story about yourself.

I explore this in Episode 2 of Beyond Breath, through a clinical assessment I failed, Jiu-Jitsu and building a business.

Comment PODCAST and Iā€™ll send the episode straight to your DMs.

This isnā€™t another course to add to your collection.Iā€™m opening a small number of places for professionals who want to c...
11/09/2026

This isnā€™t another course to add to your collection.

Iā€™m opening a small number of places for professionals who want to complete the Breath Science Practitioner Certification privately, 1:1 with me.

Youā€™ll still work through the certification process and develop the knowledge and competencies required of a Breath Science Practitioner.

The difference is the level of access.

Rather than simply moving through the material, we work together around you, your clients and where you want to go professionally.

That might mean bringing me complex cases, challenging your clinical or coaching reasoning, refining assessments and interventions, reviewing presentations or programmes, developing your teaching, or working through bigger professional and business decisions.

Thatā€™s already how I work with many of the people I mentor. They donā€™t need more information for the sake of information. They need someone who can challenge their thinking, spot gaps and help them make better decisions.

This is not designed for someone at the beginning of their journey.

Itā€™s for established coaches, practitioners and health professionals who already take their work seriously, already implement, and want to see how good they can become.

Iā€™m only taking on a small number of people this way.

If it sounds like you, DM me MENTORSHIP and tell me:

What are you trying to become exceptional at?

Weā€™ll then have an alignment call to see whether working together makes sense.

Iā€™ve been reflecting on what it means to lose.In a recent Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition, I changed my perspective on w...
10/09/2026

Iā€™ve been reflecting on what it means to lose.

In a recent Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition, I changed my perspective on what losing actually meant. That shift changed my outlook, and it changed how I approached the competition itself, with less fear around the outcome.

I then brought the question into the School of Breath Science community:

What do you view as losing?

And how can you start to see loss as a pathway towards success?

In this episode of Beyond Breath, we dive into that idea. I also reflect on some of the biggest losses and failures in my career, and how many of them ultimately contributed to later success.

Comment PODCAST below and Iā€™ll send you the episode.

One of the most common ideas in functional breathing is that a low BOLT score or Control Pause means you are sensitive t...
08/09/2026

One of the most common ideas in functional breathing is that a low BOLT score or Control Pause means you are sensitive to CO2, have low CO2 and are overbreathing.

The problem is that this chain contains several assumptions.

BOLT and Control Pause are not blood gas measurements.

They are perceptual thresholds taken after a normal exhalation, where CO2 contributes to respiratory drive, but the point at which you first feel the urge to breathe is influenced by far more than CO2 sensitivity alone.

Starting lung volume matters.

Metabolic rate matters.

Oā‚‚ and COā‚‚ matter.

Chemosensitivity matters.

But so do attention, expectation, previous experience, interoception and anxiety.

And when researchers actually compared Buteyko-style breath holds with resting end tidal CO2 the relationship predicted by the model was not there.

So a low score may still tell us something useful.

But it does not, by itself, prove low CO2, chronic overbreathing or poor ā€œCO2 toleranceā€.

I go much deeper into the evidence in the full essay.

Comment ESSAY and Iā€™ll send the article straight to your DMs.

The connections between breath, sleep, and consciousness continue to amaze me.The breath plays a role in the scaffolding...
07/09/2026

The connections between breath, sleep, and consciousness continue to amaze me.

The breath plays a role in the scaffolding of sleep.

Fascinating research by:

SƔnchez Corzo et al., Progress in Neurobiology 2026; Liang et al., Journal of Applied Physiology 2026.

What are your thoughts below?

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