The CapnoTrainer Go, a portable device that measures carbon dioxide expenditure, is bringing high-quality breathing science to the masses

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While many think of breathing as a reflexive behavior, identifying and modifying breathing habits can improve health and performance.

Dr. Peter Litchfield, the CEO of Better Physiology, has dedicated his career to understanding the science of breathing. Dr. Litchfield earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Portland in 1972 and is now the President of the Professional School of Behavioral Health Sciences. 

Dr. Litchfield created the CapnoTrainer Go, a device that measures carbon dioxide expenditure to help users understand their breathing patterns. While measuring and understanding breathing on a deep level has long been left to elite performers, Better Physiology has created a more accessible, portable tool for consumers to gain insight into their breathing habits.

Users attach breathing tubes to the device and their noses to measure carbon dioxide. The Go Personal, which is marketed to individuals, displays raw PCo2, end-tidal PCO2, breaths per minute, various HRV signals, and history graphs, among others. Features include threshold setting, diary keeping (including audio notes), and breathing challenge testing. The Go Personal ranges in price from $2,500 to $2,900 depending on configuration.

“Good breathing optimizes acid-base physiology through precise management of carbon dioxide, from breath to breath,” Dr. Litchfield told Athletech News. “Misunderstood by most people, carbon dioxide is a physiologically precious molecule, essential to life. We generate it during metabolism, we excrete some of it, and we keep some of it for regulating basic physiology, from moment to moment.”

CapnoTrainer Go (credit: Better Physiology)

Reflex-controlled breathing habits aren’t always ideal for health and performance, Dr. Litchfield points out.

“The CapnoTrainer Go helps one learn to align breathing mechanics with respiratory chemistry wherein users learn to optimize respiration for improving health and performance,” he said.

The Importance of Proper Breathing

When it comes to fitness, Dr. Litchfield cited “over-breathing” as one of the most common dysfunctional habits. Over-breathing is losing too much carbon dioxide by breathing too deeply or rapidly.

“Losing carbon dioxide means reduced blood flow to the brain, up to 50% within a very short time,” Dr. Litchfield noted. “This translates into brain hypoxia and hypoglycemia and their immediate associated symptoms, like an inability to focus, emotional discharge, performance anxiety, disorientation, memory deficit, distraction, hand-eye coordination deficit, compromised sensory acuity (e.g., vision), poor judgment, and an inability to rehearse.”

“These symptoms and deficits are rarely understood to be consequences of breathing habits triggered during performing a sport or a physical activity,” he added. “The CapnoTrainer Go addresses these issues head-on, with precision and clarity.” 

Why All Breathwork Isn’t Created Equal

While understanding breathing habits through a technological tool might be largely unprecedented in the wellness world, breathwork has been rapidly gaining popularity.

Sage Rader is well-known for creating bespoke breath programs for A-list celebrities, professional race car drivers and CEOs. He created NeuroAcrobatics, a new system of breath and brain training designed to create shifts in the brain.

Rader partnered with Dr. Litchfield after teaching his NeuroAcrobatics course at the Professional School of Behavioral Health Sciences. 

Rader saw value in the CapnoTrainer Go’s technology.

“I have found no more effective tool to convey the core premise at the center of my NeuroAcrobatics breath/brain/body system: that what you think about while you breathe is the most important thing,” Rader told ATN. “‘The same breath with a different thought is a different breath,’ is how we say it.”

credit: Better Physiology

One of the downsides of the term “breathwork,” according to Rader, is that it is a loaded term that can mean anything from hot and cold contrast to more “spiritual” breath schools. 

“The tricky part is when people forget that everyone’s psychology is unique and begin to prescribe breathwork without any real knowledge of respiration and the difference between breathing and respiration, or factoring in the unique meaning each of us assigns to life events and how that plays out in breathing behavior,” Rader added. “This makes it quite difficult with any real integrity to qualify or quantify ‘unique’ benefits of all breathwork on all people everywhere, and is also the main reason I am working with Dr. Litchfield to simplify a significant path to better breathing behavior.” 

Change How We Talk About Breathing

Rader calls on the fitness and wellness community to bring more understanding to the different facets of the term “breathwork.” 

“We need, as a culture of ‘fitness and wellness,’ to begin to operationalize the definition of ‘breathwork’ and to appropriately define the lanes more clearly,” Rader said. “Then we can actually measure and replicate the benefits of better breathing behavior based on unique psychophysiology in an effective real-world application.”

“World-class art is always well informed by bleeding-edge science and CapnoTrainer Go is the fastest route from hard science to the art of application in the real world,” Rader added.

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