Breathe & Feel Better With Breath Training
Simo Kekäläinen
On a mission to make us healthier one breath at a time. Simo Kekäläinen is a lean co-creation specialist, multilingual commercialization and startup expert, who now works as the CMO of a Finnish health tech company WellO2 which aims to make us all breathe better and thus, feel better. He’s an aspiring voice actor and a TEDx speaker whose dream is to one day voice a Disney character.
Simo Kekäläinen invites attendees to a breathing revolution, emphasizing that
From this moment on, let's make every breath count on our way to breathing better and ultimately feeling better.
Summary
- Breathing exercises should be a daily habit like brushing teeth, as breathing is a vital function that can be consciously controlled and trained to improve overall health and well-being. - Effective breath training involves the entire respiratory system, including sinuses and mucous membranes, requiring both muscle activation and recovery through moisturizing. - The Nordic Breathing Method combines adjustable resistance with warm steam to simultaneously strengthen breathing muscles and recover by cleansing and moisturizing the airways. - Daily access to breathing data, such as VO2 max and spirometry, enables athletes and health enthusiasts to optimize performance, manage stress, and detect early signs of health issues. - Using a smart mouthpiece to track breathing metrics provides the data and motivation needed to understand how environmental changes and training habits affect respiratory health.
Article
Breathe, Measure, Repeat
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, Simo Kekäläinen Cast Breath As The Missing Daily Ritual Of Modern Health
Breathing, Simo Kekäläinen argued, had long been treated as a background function of life: automatic, essential, and strangely ignored. Speaking at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki on Friday 3 June 2022, the WellO2 chief marketing officer made the case that respiratory training deserved a place beside brushing teeth, going to the gym, and tracking sleep.
“I want to invite you all to join a breathing revolution today,” Kekäläinen told the audience, framing his talk, *Breathe & Feel Better With Breath Training: The Nordic Breathing Method & Data Tracking*, as both a health pitch and a cultural intervention.
It was a simple proposition with ambitious implications. We breathe thousands of times a day, he noted, yet rarely train the system that makes every other act of living possible. Unlike the heartbeat, breathing occupies a rare territory in human biology: an automatic function that can still be consciously controlled. “We cannot make our heart stop beating at will, but we can control our breathing,” he said. “This is what makes breathing so cool; we can fully control, train, and maintain it at will.”
A Forgotten System Hiding In Plain Sight
Kekäläinen’s central critique was that modern people had misunderstood breathing by reducing it to lungs and diaphragm alone. Real respiratory care, he said, had to include the entire pathway: sinuses, mucous membranes, throat muscles, chest, abdomen, and the delicate tissues that make sustained breathing possible.
That wider view shifted the discussion from performance to maintenance. Strength alone was not enough. A breathing system could be exercised, but it also had to be protected, recovered, and moisturized.
“The health benefits that we get from correct breathing techniques are vast; it really affects almost every part of our well-being,” he said.
In that framing, respiration became less a fitness niche than a whole-body practice, touching cardiovascular performance, stress management, recovery, and resilience against environmental irritants.
The Nordic Breathing Method
At the heart of the presentation was the method promoted by WellO2, the Finnish health technology company where Kekäläinen served as CMO. Called the Nordic Breathing Method, it combined resistance-based breathing exercise with warm steam inhalation, a pairing designed to strengthen respiratory muscles while also helping the airways recover.
The approach, he said, drew from two familiar Nordic images: clean air and sauna heat. In practice, the technology used adjustable resistance and positive expiratory pressure to activate breathing muscles, then paired that effort with warm steam intended to cleanse and moisturize the respiratory tract.
“Breathing training has to be coupled with recovery, and warm steam is a perfect way to provide that recovery for your lungs and sinuses,” Kekäläinen said.
The promise was both therapeutic and performance-driven. He said the method had been used by athletes as well as people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, with sessions lasting just five minutes twice a day. The implication was striking: that meaningful respiratory care might be folded into ordinary routine, not as a dramatic intervention but as a habit.
Why Daily Practice Had Not Yet Taken Hold
Kekäläinen suggested two reasons breath training remained neglected. The first was conceptual: most people did not fully understand what breathing involved. The second was behavioural: without data, there was little motivation to build a daily practice.
“Like brushing your teeth or going to the gym every day, we should make breathing exercises a part of our daily routine,” he said.
That comparison was deliberate. Toothbrushing had become unremarkable precisely because it was ritualised. Breath training, by contrast, still belonged to the margins of health culture, admired in theory but rarely sustained in practice.
His talk tried to close that gap by turning respiration into something measurable.
The Rise Of Respiratory Data
Here the presentation moved from physiology to the language of devices, metrics, and feedback loops. If people could track heart rate variability, sleep, and pulse with ease, Kekäläinen asked, why should breathing remain visible only in clinics and hospitals?
He introduced a smart mouthpiece designed to gather daily breathing data, including spirometry and VO2 max, and to offer users a more continuous picture of respiratory health and performance. For elite athletes, this could mean finer performance optimisation. For health-conscious consumers, it might reveal how stress, environment, or other biohacks altered breathing patterns. For ordinary users, it could become an early warning system.
The most provocative claim was that breathing data might someday do more than capture fitness. Kekäläinen suggested that subtle changes in lung function could help surface early signs of broader illness, even before more obvious symptoms appeared.
In that sense, breath became more than a wellness trend. It became a signal.
A Sales Pitch, But Also A Diagnosis Of Modern Life
There was, undeniably, a commercial thread running through the talk. Kekäläinen was presenting a branded method and a product ecosystem, and he closed with an invitation for attendees to visit the company’s stand. Yet the broader force of the talk came from something more resonant than marketing: the idea that modern health culture had become saturated with data while leaving one of the most fundamental human functions underexamined.
His “breathing revolution” was less about novelty than rediscovery. To breathe better, in his telling, was not to add one more optimisation trick to an already crowded routine. It was to return attention to a system that had always shaped how people slept, trained, recovered, and felt.
Every Breath Counted
By the end of his session at Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki, Kekäläinen had offered the audience a distinctly contemporary vision of breath: ancient in function, modern in instrumentation, and ripe for reinvention through habit.
The power of the message lay in its paradox. Breathing was the most ordinary thing we did, and perhaps that was why it had been so easy to overlook. Kekäläinen’s argument was that this ordinariness was exactly what made it worth reclaiming.
“From this moment on, let’s make every breath count on our way to breathing better and ultimately feeling better,” he said.
In Helsinki, that line landed as both invitation and warning. The future of health, Kekäläinen suggested, might not begin with a new miracle cure, but with the oldest rhythm in the body, finally taken seriously.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Helsinki