Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 264 is a stress-management check-in with breath coach and XPT master coach Taylor Somerville, recorded in the early weeks of the 2020 coronavirus quarantine. Taylor walks through the box-breathing and downregulation drills he was teaching clients over Zoom, the science behind nasal breathing and nitric oxide, the CO2 and O2 breath-hold tables borrowed from freediving, and leads a short guided breathing exercise live on the show. It is a practical, no-equipment reset for anyone dealing with stress, isolation, or a suddenly upside-down routine.
Listen now: press play in the YouTube player above, or listen on Spotify.
Taylor Somerville is the founder of Symmetry, a Memphis-based breath and stress-coaching practice, and an XPT master coach who trained directly under Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece's program. He teaches breathwork, heat and cold exposure, and mental-resilience training to individual clients and, increasingly, corporate teams. He had appeared on the podcast before this 2020 check-in and returned to talk through what he had learned since becoming a master coach.
XPT is the breath, heat, and ice training system built around Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece's pool workouts, sauna and ice-bath contrast therapy, and structured breathwork. Taylor got certified in XPT's first Level 1 group, then advanced to master coach status, which meant helping run the certification course for new instructors himself. He uses the breath and contrast-therapy tools from XPT specifically to help people regulate their nervous system under stress, not just to improve fitness.
Both are structured breath-hold protocols borrowed from freediving. On a CO2 table, the breath hold stays the same length each round while the rest period between holds gets shorter, training your tolerance to rising carbon dioxide. On an O2 table, the rest period stays the same while the breath hold itself gets longer, training your tolerance to falling oxygen. Taylor said he combines both in the same session, sometimes doing the CO2-tolerance work on an inhale hold and the O2 work on an exhale hold.
Taylor explained that breathing through the nose filters and humidifies air in a way mouth breathing does not, and it produces nitric oxide, which has antiviral and antibacterial properties. He referenced research on nitric oxide inhibiting replication of the original SARS coronavirus and said scientists were looking at similar questions for COVID-19 at the time. Nasal breathing also activates the diaphragm properly, which he said helps posture and keeps the body out of a chronically stressed state.
Taylor led Tom through one live on the episode: get into a neutral seated or lying position, drop your shoulders, and check in with where you're holding tension. Inhale through the nose for three seconds, hold for three, exhale for three, building up to a five-count inhale and eventually an eight-count exhale hissed out through the mouth. He also described the Take Five method for kids and beginners, tracing up and down each finger with one inhale and exhale per finger.
No. Taylor and Tom were both direct about this: breath-hold and hyperventilation-style techniques like the Wim Hof method are dry-land practices only. Holding your breath after this kind of breathing in water risks a shallow-water blackout, because you've blown off the carbon dioxide that normally signals you to surface. Taylor said XPT never runs its water sessions solo, and Tom described blacking out once doing Wim Hof-style breathing lying on his driveway.
Taylor's website is symmetry.live, where he posts articles on breathing and mindset, and his Instagram is @symmetry.live. At the time of this episode he was also running free and donation-based breathing classes over Zoom and Instagram Live during the quarantine, with a full weekly schedule covering stress, breathing mechanics, and longer combined sessions.
Taylor had been on the podcast before, and I first got interested in his world because of XPT and the work Laird Hamilton was doing with breath, heat, and ice. We had done a handful of episodes together a long time before this one, then lost touch for a few years. When the quarantine hit and everybody's normal support system, gyms, churches, workout groups, got taken away overnight, he was one of the first people I thought to call, because managing your own state was suddenly the whole ballgame.
Press play in the player above to hear the full conversation.
I had read The Oxygen Advantage a while before this conversation and it changed how much attention I paid to whether I was breathing through my mouth or my nose during the day. Taylor takes it further, into research on nitric oxide and a whole different book about how modern mouth-breathing has actually changed people's facial structure. It is a bigger rabbit hole than it sounds like, and Taylor lays out why in the episode.
Taylor went through XPT's very first Level 1 certification group, then years later became one of only a handful of master coaches worldwide, which meant helping run the training instead of just taking it. He walks through what changes when you go from learning the material to teaching people from every background, physical therapists, first responders, yoga teachers, how to assess someone's breathing mechanics from scratch. Worth hearing him describe it himself.
I got Taylor talking about CO2 and O2 breath-hold tables because I wanted to know if I could use them to get better at holding my breath for lobster season, and it turned into one of the more useful parts of the conversation. He walked through how he actually combines the two table styles in the same session and which one he trains on an inhale versus an exhale. Hear the full breakdown in the episode.
This is the part of the conversation I want everyone to actually listen to, not skim. Taylor and I both have stories about how quickly a breath-hold practice can go wrong near water, and he described video his own trainers use to show how a shallow-water blackout looks from the outside, which is unsettling because the person still looks like they're swimming. Hear exactly what he says about it before you try any of this near a pool or the ocean.
What stuck with me from this one is how much of managing stress right now comes down to a handful of tools you can do alone in your living room: breathe slower, breathe through your nose, and know your own baseline. None of it requires a gym or a group, which mattered a lot in the moment we recorded this.
Taylor's work is worth digging into further at symmetry.live. Press play in the player above to hear the whole conversation.
Taylor Somerville · Symmetry · XPT · Laird Hamilton · Gabby Reece · Wim Hof · Patrick McKeown · Oxygen Advantage · Belisa Vranich · Kokoro · SEALFIT · Memphis, Tennessee
Taylor Somerville is the founder of Symmetry, a breath and stress-coaching practice based in Memphis, and an XPT master coach trained under Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece's program. He teaches breathwork, heat and cold exposure, and nervous-system regulation to individual clients and corporate groups, both in person and, since 2020, over Zoom and Instagram Live. He can be found at symmetry.live and on Instagram at @symmetry.live.
Tom: What's up, everybody? We're in the middle of the coronavirus quarantine, and it's given me the chance to catch up with people I hadn't talked to in a while. One of them is Taylor Somerville, who's been doing a lot of work with XPT and has gotten more deeply rooted in it since we last talked. A lot of what he teaches can help with stress, help the immune system, and help us manage our own state so we can make better decisions right now.
Taylor: Hey Tom, good to talk. I was actually supposed to be starting a Kokoro camp with SEALFIT right about now, but they canceled it last Friday night because of how the outbreak was shutting things down in California. Damaging your immune system through an event like that and then trying to fly home and quarantine for fourteen days was one of the concerns.
Tom: Kokoro was extremely beneficial for me, one of the most influential things I've done, but it's brutal no matter how prepared you are. Fifty hours with no sleep will wreck your immune system on its own.
Taylor: I only did a twenty-four-hour event and got a fever and got sick right afterward. I've signed up for July and I'm hoping things are sorted out by then. In the meantime I tapered my own training down, we're doing distanced outdoor group workouts with gloves, and a lot more solo garage sessions.
Tom: The changes in the last two weeks feel like September 11th-level change, where the next day you're living in a completely different world. And it's happening right as the places where people normally get support, gyms, churches, group workouts, are the first things to close.
Taylor: You lose that physical touch, too, which releases oxytocin and feel-good hormones just from something like a hug. That support-system piece is a big part of why this is such a different, heavier feeling right now.
Tom: I keep coming back to the fact that it doesn't really matter whether it's an overreaction or not, it's happening, and it's the world we live in today. A lot of the anxiety comes from not knowing: how long does this last, what happens if the hospital system gets overwhelmed. Once this becomes as familiar as the flu, I think a lot of that fear goes away.
Taylor: I got certified with XPT in their first Level 1 group, over two years before this. XPT is Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece's program, breath work, heat and ice contrast therapy, and their pool workout with dumbbells and plyometric movement in the water. Last year I became one of only seven XPT master coaches in the US, plus one in Europe and one in Mexico, which meant helping run the next certification instead of just attending one.
Tom: What changes going from coach to master coach?
Taylor: As a master coach you do a deep dive into all the research yourself, present it back to the other coaches, and then help run the actual certification for new people coming through, physical therapists, first responders, yoga teachers, businesspeople, all kinds of backgrounds. Teaching people to assess someone else's breathing mechanics forces you to understand it a lot better yourself.
Taylor: A huge piece of XPT's breath work comes from Patrick McKeown's Oxygen Advantage work on nasal breathing. Most people have become mouth breathers because of posture and screen habits, and that keeps the body in a chronically stressed state, breathing into the upper chest instead of activating the diaphragm. Breathing through the nose filters and cleans the air, and it produces nitric oxide, which has antiviral and antibacterial properties. There was research on nitric oxide inhibiting replication of the original SARS coronavirus, and at the time we recorded this, scientists were looking at whether the same held for COVID-19.
Tom: I read Oxygen Advantage a while back and it made me aware of how often I was breathing out of my mouth without realizing it. There's another book too, about an orthodontist and an anthropologist looking at how modern mouth breathing has actually changed people's facial structure over time.
Taylor: Let's do one. Get into a neutral position, spine straight, shoulders down and back, and check in with where you're holding tension. Inhale slowly through the nose, breathing wide into the belly and ribs before the chest.
Taylor leads Tom through several rounds: inhale for three seconds, hold, exhale for three, building to a five-second inhale, hold, and finally an eight-second exhale hissed out through the mouth, before returning to normal nasal breathing.
Taylor: For kids or beginners, I like the Take Five method: trace up one finger on the inhale and down on the exhale, one breath per finger, five fingers, five breaths.
Tom: I want to know if I can use these tables to hold my breath longer for lobster season.
Taylor: On a CO2 table, the breath-hold length stays the same each round while the rest period gets shorter, training your tolerance to rising carbon dioxide. On an O2 table, the rest period stays the same while the hold gets longer, training tolerance to falling oxygen. I usually start people on one table for a few weeks before combining both, and personally I train the CO2 side on an exhale hold, since exhale holds get uncomfortable faster, and the O2 side on an inhale hold.
Taylor: These are dry-land techniques. Do not do Wim Hof-style breathing or breath-hold practice in the water. You blow off so much carbon dioxide that your body loses the normal urge-to-breathe signal, and a shallow-water blackout can happen without warning. The XPT water-safety lead has shown us footage of people who still look like they're swimming while they're actually blacked out. We never run water sessions solo.
Tom: I blacked out once doing Wim Hof breathing lying on my own driveway. You don't get a warning moment of losing consciousness, it's more like falling asleep, and then you wake up and time has passed.
Taylor: My website is symmetry.live, and I'm on Instagram at symmetry.live too, with links to breath sessions, articles, and my newsletter. During the quarantine I've been running free and donation-based classes on Zoom and Instagram Live most days of the week.
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