High Performance Breathing Technology - The Oxygen Advantage - Fighting Irish Olympic Runners

"Training Secret for The Next Generation"

Guest Blogger Chris Giesting - Olympic 400 Meter 

Living at near sea level in Granger, Indiana, it’s almost impossible to get the kind of high altitude training if we were in Colorado or New Mexico...until now.

For the last month the three of us have been working with a team from High Performance Breathing Technologies that has been helping us to develop our own high altitude training regimen right here in Granger, Indiana USA. And to think they said Indiana was all corn fields.

Patrick McKeown, the author of The Oxygen Advantage, is an expert at utilizing the breath to improve one’s health. He has been working directly with us since August in order to coach us and teach us the techniques necessary to benefit from this program.

At the elite level in track and field, the difference in winning and losing comes down to a hundredth of a second. We can’t tell you have many times we’ve lost by a hundredth or a tenth. Who even keeps count of the one, two or twelve times it’s happened. We aren’t bitter at all. They are just lucky we had the sun in our eyes, and the wind facing the...anyway, like we were saying, track and field is determined by these small fractions of seconds. So much so that even the slightest of edge can make the difference. With the High Performance Breathing Technologies practice, we believe we can take up to a mind-boggling half a second off of our times.

That’s like the time it takes a college kid to get dressed before an 8 am class!

In our sport, it really does make the difference in being a champion and watching from the bleachers.

So just to give you a sense of what type of exercises we are doing, here is one of our favorites:

First things first, you must have your mouth closed for the entirety of these exercises. It’s paramount you perform nasal breathing only. Science. So we start off walking at a moderate pace breathing through the nose. Then we’ll pinch our noses shut and walk 15 steps, and then go back to nasal breathing after the 15 steps to catch our breath. Then rinse, wash and repeat. After two times, we’ll move up to 20 steps for a couple times, and then 25, 30, 35 and so on and so forth until we reach 80 steps while holding our breath.

One thing to note here is that you’ll catch a lot of odd looks when you’re walking around holding your nose. We believe that when you hold your nose in front of people, it releases a strange light that attracts newcomers. The jury is still out on that one though!

What Patrick and his team have been able to accomplish with their research and practice is astounding. They have introduced certain types of exercises similar to the above that call for you to hold your breath while walking, jogging and sometimes running. Like running wasn’t hard enough already.

Essentially, they’ve figured out a way to improve your ability to improve oxygen carrying capacity and deliver more oxygen to your organs and muscles. Another goal is to train the body to reduce lactic acid build up, thereby delay the onset of fatigue.  Lactic acid is the cause of your gluteus maximus to lock up at the end of the race. Are you not entertained?!

Now, with their help, we are able to “live” at high altitude without actually living at high altitude. “live high, train low”. That’s what Patrick emphasizes and we’ve already seen benefits within a month of incorporating these exercises.

We’ve seen an increase in our ability to hold our breath, which is a good indication of your VO₂ max level, and we’ve experienced an ability to complete workouts easier than before. On a smaller level, we’ve reduced our nasal airway congestion and been able to sleep throughout the night without having to get up to pee. Trust us, when you hydrate like we do, you typically have the nighttime bladder capacity of an 80 year-old man. BUT NOT ANYMORE!

No other athletes are using this program...yet, so we have the ultimate advantage, or the oxygen advantage, if you will. But once they realize the difference it makes, this will revolutionize the way we think about training.

It’s certainly been an enlightening experience getting to work with the High Performance Breathing Technologies team and we’d like to thank all of them for choosing to work with us while we train for the Olympics. This could be the difference it takes to set us apart.

If you don’t believe us, check it out yourself at www.oxygenadvantage.com.

Don’t forget to check out our donation page link! All donations help us fund our training and racing efforts for the year.

Go Irish!

Chris Giesting - Jade Barber - Patrick Feeney

#oxygenadvantage #highperformancebreathingtechnology #chrisgiesting #jadebarber #patrickfeeney

#2016summerolympics #riodejaneiro #brazil #usatrackandfield #notredame #patrickmckeown #markiez #markandrewzwartynski #markandrewz #doctormartindenbar #davidcraig #ioc #usoc

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Dancin' Shoes - Markie Z Band Live Featuring Carl Storie

Guest Blogger - Robert Reich - Big Tech Today

Berkeley, Calif. — CONSERVATIVES and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.” Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America.

In reality, they aren’t two separate things. There can’t be a market without government. Legislators, agency heads and judges decide the rules of the game. And, over time, they change the rules. The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game.

Two centuries ago slaves were among the nation’s most valuable assets, and after the Civil War, perhaps land was. Then factories, machines, railroads and oil transformed America. By the 1920s most working Americans were employees, and the most contested property issue was their freedom to organize into unions.

Now information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property. Most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Such “intellectual property” is the key building block of the new economy. Without government decisions over what it is, and who can own it and on what terms, the new economy could not exist.

But as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies that must eventually be broken up.

The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network. Google runs two-thirds of all searches in the United States. Amazon sells more than 40 percent of new books. Facebook has nearly 1.5 billion active monthly users worldwide. This is where the money is.

Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent. Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic. Meanwhile, Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything. Talk about power.

Whenever markets become concentrated, consumers end up paying more than they otherwise would, and innovations are squelched. Sure, big platforms let creators showcase and introduce new apps, songs, books, videos and other content. But almost all of the profits go to the platforms’ owners, who have all of the bargaining power.

Contrary to the conventional view of an American economy bubbling with innovative small companies, the reality is quite different. The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants.

The patent system is crucial to innovation. The law gives 20 years of patent protection to inventions that are “new and useful,” as decided by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the winners are big enough to game the system. They make small improvements warranting new patents, effectively making their intellectual property semi permanent. They also lay claim to whole terrains of potential innovation including ideas barely on drawing boards and flood the system with so many applications that lone inventors have to wait years. The White House intellectual property adviser Colleen V. Chien noted in 2012 that Google and Apple were spending more money acquiring patents (not to mention litigating them) than on doing research and development.

Antitrust laws used to fight this sort of market power. In the 1990s, the federal government accused Microsoft of illegally bundling its popular Windows operating system with its Internet Explorer browser to create an industry standard that stifled competition. Microsoft settled the case by agreeing to share its programming interfaces with other companies. But since then Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.

In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition submitted to the commissioners a 160-page analysis of Google’s dominance in the search and related advertising markets, and recommended suing Google for conduct that “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation.” But the commissioners chose not to pursue a case. Investigators also found evidence that Google was pushing its products ahead of competitors’ on search results; though no legal action was recommended on this point.

It’s unusual for commissioners not to accept staff recommendations, and they didn’t give a full explanation. The F.T.C. noted a competing internal report that recommended against legal action, but another plausible reason has to do with Google’s political clout. Google is now among the largest corporate lobbyists in the United States. Around the time of the investigation the company poured money into influencing both the commissioners and the commission’s congressional overseers.

GOOGLE is heading into a major fight with antitrust officials in the European Union for some of the same reasons the F.T.C. staff went after it. Not incidentally, Europe is also investigating Amazon for allegedly stifling competition in e-books, and Apple for doing the same in music. While many on this side of the Atlantic believe Europe is taking on these tech giants because they’re American, another possible explanation is that Google, Amazon and Apple lack as much political clout in Europe as they have here.

Economic and political power can’t be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are maintained and enforced, which enlarges their economic power further. One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent this.

“The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, in 1873. Antitrust law was viewed as a means of breaking this link. “If we will not endure a king as a political power,” Senator John Sherman of Ohio thundered, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale” of what the nation produced.

Sherman’s Antitrust Act easily passed Congress and was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison on July 2, 1890. Twelve years later, President Teddy Roosevelt used it against the Northern Securities Company, which dominated rail transportation in the Northwest. In 1911, President William Howard Taft broke up the Standard Oil empire.

The underlying issue has little to do with whether one prefers the “free market” or government. The real question is how government organizes the market, and who has the most influence over its decisions. We are now in a new gilded age similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. As then, those with great power and resources are making the “free market” function on their behalf. Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture and financial giants — dominates both our economy and our politics.

Yet as long as we remain obsessed by the debate over the relative merits of the “free market” and “government,” we have little hope of seeing what’s occurring and taking the action that’s needed to make our economy work for the many, not the few.

Robert B. Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the forthcoming book “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” from which this essay is adapted.

#robertreich #markandrewgroup #markandrewz #markiez #economy #technology 

Guest Blog - Dr. Martin Denbar "For Everyone Concerned About Improving Their Lives"

Finally, high altitude training using simulated techniques while at sea level without the need for expensive equipment is now being coupled with proper breathing techniques.  This allows for year round optimized conditioning that will improve endurance, stamina, mental acuity and performance.  No longer does an athlete have to be at altitude just before an event to maximize their training before competition.  This program provides for the complete athletic program that is drug free, comprehensively addresses an enhanced airway management program for the athlete or individual and provides for generalized improved health and wellness of the participant.  

            Trained doctors look for abnormal breathing and swallowing patterns that can negatively impact performance and the ability to maximize one’s training efforts.  This program is performed drug free with possible lifelong structural and functional improvements for the junior to senior athlete or private individual.

            All protocols, therapies and techniques are back by published research.  The difference is that for the first time these protocols, therapies and techniques have been structured into a comprehensive program that provides for enhanced results.

Dr. Martin Denbar - Guest Blogger 

Mark Andrew Zwartynski (Markie Z Blog)

214-552-0652

www.oxygenadvantage.com

www.highperformancebreathingtechnology.com

The Mental Game

Markie Z (Mark Andrew Zwartynski)

Take a deep breath.  Wait.  Breathe through your nose, hold until you feel the beginning of your body wanting to release.  Exhale through your mouth.

"It is how you breathe during your daily life that determines how you breathe during physical exercise. If our breathing is off during rest, it would be unreasonable for it to automatically correct itself during physical exercise.  The seemingly innocuous tendencies of breathing through the mouth during the day, having noticeable breathing from the upper chest or holding the breath during sleep not only dictates your breathlessness during training but often limits your capacity to go faster and further."  Patrick McKeown - Buteyko Clinic Dublin, Ireland.

"Nose breathing imposes approximately 50 percent more resistance to the air stream in normal individuals than does mouth breathing, resulting in 10-20 percent more O2 uptake. (Cottle, 1972: Rohrer, 1915) 

Faster and father.  This means you are feeling good, rested and the shape you are in at the moment. Wait a minute, you say.  Weren't we discussing the mental game?  You bet we were!  You get 80% better oxygen needs into your lungs than by breathing through your mouth.  When breathing correctly one supplies the fuel for the brain and the opportunity to be mentally sharper, think quicker, be resilient to immediate and long term strategic planning.

Check out www.oxygenadvantage.com by Patrick McKeown.

Take a deep breath.  How many times have you heard someone say that phrase?  Magic Nutrition and MagicMind - www.magicnutrition.com - are produced to improve one's lifestyle.  Placing your body and mind into shape will help you overcome the daily obstacles in life and improve your overall "Lifestyle." 

The Human Performance Resource Center published 10 great tips for mental game peak performance:

http://hprc-online.org/total-force-fitness/performance-boosters/performance-boosters-ten-rules-of-engagement-roe-1

Markie Z (Mark Andrew Zwartynski)

Many Pro Songwriters Are Starving - How and Why - by Brent Baxter Guest Blogger on Markie Z Blog

ro Songwriters Are Starving- And That’s Good News For You!

Posted by manvsrow in Biz

Brent Baxter is a hit songwriter with cuts by Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, Lady Antebellum, Joe Nichols, Gord Bamford, Ruthie Collins, Ray Stevens, and more. He’s written a top 5 hit in the US and a #1 in Canada… so far.

I have good news and bad news.

Bad news: These days, it’s so hard to make a living writing songs that a lot of great, talented professional songwriters need to look for additional income outside of just publishing deals and royalties. Yeah. That’s the bad.

Here’s the good. A lot of those pro songwriters are turning to teaching and coaching as a way to make ends meet, so there has never been a better time for you to learn the art and craft of songwriting!

Yeah, that’s pretty messed up when you think about it, I guess. But it is what it is.

You probably can’t do much to affect the state of the music industry, but you CAN take advantage of the situation by seizing as many learning opportunities as you can.

Whether it’s through folks like me who are writing ebooks and doing the occasional workshop or coaching session, or the fine folks at NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association International) or GSC (Global Songwriters Connection) who hold workshops and give you the chance to connect with publishers, there are plenty of options.

There is really no excuse for you NOT to be learning a ton about the music business.

Even if you can’t afford to join a songwriting association or pay for coaching right now, there are still free blogs (like Man vs. Row) and YouTube videos that are free- and full of great information and inspiration.

Beware of sharks.

Out of desperation or greed, some “coaches” may lie to you. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If he or she says you’ll have a good chance at a big cut if you pay a few hundred dollars for a cowrite… run. After all, if this pro can get cuts that easily, why are they writing with anyone who’ll pay them?

However, if a pro offers up a paid cowrite as a chance to “learn by doing” while you work on a song together and the pro teaches as you write… well, that’s a lot more realistic and could be a worthwhile investment.

The royalty scraps we’re being thrown is leading to a heaping buffet of learning opportunities. So pile up your plate, pig out, and come back for more!

When it comes to learning, gluttony is a virtue.

Speaking of learning, I’ve written an workbook about how to write market-smart songs (songs that have a competitive advantage in the commercial market).  If you want to discover more about how to write market-smart songs, check out my ebook, “Cut/able: Lessons In Market Smart Songwriting.”  Click on the image below or click here to write market-smart songs.

God Bless,
Brent

tThe most popular rock album of all time. Recorded on 4-Track. Cheers to John, Paul, George and Ringo, Geoff Emerick, his assistant Richard, all the musicians and George Martin! #markandrewz #markiezband #music #recording The making of sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band