Performance Breathwork
$499
6 weekly sessions in person or online, following a structured progression through the core areas of performance breathwork.
What is it?
Most endurance athletes train their legs, their cardiovascular system, and their lactate threshold. Almost none of them train their breathing.
That's a significant gap — because how you breathe during exercise directly determines how efficiently your body uses the oxygen it takes in. Two athletes with identical VO2max scores can perform very differently based on breathing mechanics alone. The one who has trained their respiratory system will delay the onset of breathlessness, sustain higher intensities for longer, and recover faster between efforts.
Performance breathwork at Tristar is led by Tony Beaumont, a competitive long-course triathlete and INSCYD-certified practitioner who applies Patrick McKeown’s Oxygen Advantage framework to respiratory training grounded in exercise physiology.
What we address
Nasal breathing at intensity Most athletes default to mouth breathing as soon as exercise gets hard. This bypasses the nitric oxide production in the sinuses that helps dilate airways and blood vessels, reduces the humidification and filtering of incoming air, and drives breathing rate rather than efficiency. Training nasal breathing at progressively higher intensities is one of the most impactful changes an endurance athlete can make — and it's trainable.
CO2 tolerance and the Bohr Effect The Bohr Effect describes how oxygen is released from haemoglobin to working muscles — and CO2 is the trigger. Low CO2 tolerance means your body releases oxygen less efficiently, even when VO2max is high. Improving CO2 tolerance through structured breathwork directly improves oxygen delivery to muscles without any additional aerobic training load.
Breathing economy Just as running economy describes how efficiently you use oxygen at a given pace, breathing economy describes how much of your respiratory muscle energy is spent on the act of breathing itself. Inefficient breathing patterns waste energy. Performance breathwork trains a more economical breathing pattern that reduces the oxygen cost of ventilation.
Breathlessness management The sensation of breathlessness during exercise is driven as much by CO2 accumulation as by oxygen depletion. Athletes with high CO2 tolerance experience breathlessness later and manage it better when it arrives. This is trainable — systematically.
Recovery between efforts How quickly you return to nasal breathing after a hard effort is a measurable indicator of recovery quality. Performance breathwork includes specific protocols for accelerating post-effort recovery — useful for interval training, racing, and back-to-back training days.
Format
6 weekly 60 min sessions with Tony, in person or online, following a structured progression through the core areas of performance breathwork. Each session builds on the previous one and is integrated with your training week rather than added on top of it. Includes weekly home protocols and a follow-up BOLT assessment at programme completion.
The 6-week programme covers:
Baseline assessment and nasal breathing foundations — BOLT score, breathing mechanics, introducing nasal breathing at low intensity
CO2 tolerance development — structured breath-hold training, tolerance progressions
Nasal breathing at threshold — integrating nasal breathing into tempo and threshold efforts
Breathing economy and pattern refinement — reducing breathing rate, improving tidal volume efficiency
Race-specific protocols — breathlessness management, pre-race activation, between-effort recovery
Integration and home programme — consolidating the full practice, final BOLT assessment, long-term maintenance protocol
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Endurance athletes who want to improve performance without adding more training load
Athletes who get breathless earlier than their fitness level can explain
Those who have tried nasal breathing during training but found it too hard to sustain
Coaches looking for an evidence-based respiratory training tool for their athletes' programmes
Anyone who has completed a Tristar VO₂ max or Full Metabolic Profile test and wants to work on respiratory efficiency as part of their development
Performance breathwork pairs naturally with INSCYD coaching — your metabolic profile tells us what your physiology looks like, and breathwork training gives us a direct tool for improving how efficiently it operates.
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All individual sessions and the 6-week programme are available in person at Tristar Performance in Rangiora, or online via video call. Performance breathwork translates well to an online format — the practice itself requires no specialist equipment, only a quiet space and, ideally, a heart rate monitor for some sessions.
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Your first session begins with a conversation about what's brought you here and what you're hoping to change. We will then take you through a simple functional breathing assessment, including the BOLT score — a validated measure of CO2 tolerance and breathing efficiency that takes less than two minutes and gives an immediate, objective picture of where you're starting from.
From there, the session moves into practice — guided, supported, and paced to where you are. You won't be pushed into anything uncomfortable. You'll leave with a clear understanding of your breathing patterns, why they matter, and a simple home protocol to start working with straight away.
All prices NZD inclusive of GST.