Longer & Better Life Through Better Breathing
Christian Tullberg Poulsen
CHRISTIAN TULLBERG POULSEN (DNK)
CEO & Founder @ Airofit
In order to discover your superpower, I believe it is often very important to meet some resistance and actually get over it. Your best friend is your breathing; if you can get control over yourself, you are much better off and ready to act.
Summary
- Breathing techniques help manage stress and foster the persistence required to overcome significant life and professional challenges. - The diaphragm acts as the engine for the lungs and can be strengthened through resistance training to improve overall health and physical control. - Training the respiratory system for five to ten minutes a day can decrease "lung age" by up to 20 years and significantly increase total lung capacity. - Studies demonstrate that consistent breathing exercises can increase diaphragm thickness by 30% and abdominal muscle thickness by 25% in just six weeks. - Targeted respiratory training can improve physical performance by 7%, providing a legal and effective way to unlock greater athletic potential.
Article
Longer And Better Life Through Better Breathing
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, Christian Tullberg Poulsen Framed Breath As Both Survival Tool And Performance Engine
In a presentation that moved easily between startup collapse, personal resolve and the biology of the human diaphragm, Christian Tullberg Poulsen stood before the audience at Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam and made a strikingly simple argument: better breathing could unlock more of life.
Poulsen’s talk, *Longer & Better Life Through Better Breathing*, was delivered on Saturday, 15 October 2022, in Amsterdam, where the annual gathering drew biohackers, founders, athletes and health obsessives into a shared conversation about optimisation. But while much of the summit’s language orbited devices, data and enhancement, Poulsen brought the room back to something older, humbler and more intimate: the breath itself.
He did not present it as mystical salvation. He presented it as infrastructure.
“Focused breathing might not solve your problems,” he said, “but it makes you ready to act so you can do the important things in your life.”
A Search For The Mind’s Hidden Strength
Poulsen opened with a proposition that was part provocation, part encouragement. Everyone, he told the room, possessed a “mental superpower”, whether they had identified it yet or not.
“I have a clear vision that you have a mental superpower,” he said. “Maybe you are not aware of what it is yet, but I am sure you all have it.”
To make the point visceral, he led attendees through a brief exercise: exhale fully, hold that empty state, walk through the discomfort, then slowly return to controlled nasal breathing. It was a simple drill, but it exposed something essential. Resistance, he suggested, was often the place where hidden character came into view.
For Poulsen, that character was persistence.
“I discovered my mental superpower when I realized that I am persistent,” he said. “Sometimes being persistent is enough to get you through the toughest parts of your journey.”
From Classical Singing To Breath Technology
The biography behind the pitch mattered. Poulsen described himself not only as CEO and founder of Airofit, but as a trained classical singer. His route into respiratory training did not begin in elite sport or Silicon Valley, but in performance, craft and the mechanics of voice.
He recalled encountering a rudimentary breathing device from a Danish medtech company, a low-tech system built around tubes and green fluid. Crude though it looked, he saw a possibility in it for singers. Trials involving 30 of Denmark’s best singers at the University of Copenhagen proved highly successful, he said, and what began as a niche intervention for vocal performance gradually widened into something larger.
The real turning point came years later, when his eldest son, a junior swimmer, trained with the breathing method and then returned from the Nordic Championships with seven gold medals.
That result sharpened Poulsen’s conviction that respiratory training had been underestimated, not only as therapy but as performance enhancement. It also pushed him towards building a more accessible platform: an intelligent device paired with smartphone coaching, replacing fiddly manual tools with guided, measurable training.
The Brutal Middle Of The Startup Myth
If the success story sounded polished, Poulsen was careful to shatter its sheen. He described the familiar public narrative of entrepreneurship as a clean upward curve, then replaced it with the uglier truth: delays, defective products, drained capital and the threat of losing everything.
A Danish factory hired to build the electronics repeatedly postponed delivery. When the devices finally arrived, he said, 70% were faulty. The business was left stranded before launch. The board moved against him. He was fired, he told the audience, and his ownership was nearly stripped away.
It was here that the presentation acquired its emotional force. Breath, in Poulsen’s telling, was not only a pathway to sharper abs or stronger lungs. It was the tool he reached for when the floor gave way.
He guided the audience through a second exercise, gentler this time: inhaling while imagining positive energy entering the body, exhaling while releasing worry and fear. The problems remained, he said, but the body became ready.
That distinction sat at the heart of his argument. Breathing was not magic. It was preparation.
The Diaphragm As The Engine
From there, Poulsen moved into physiology. The central actor of the talk was the diaphragm, which he described in plain, memorable language.
“The diaphragm is the engine that drives your lungs,” he said. “Training this engine allows you to be in better control of yourself and have more joy and fun in your life.”
That framing gave the presentation its practical backbone. Breathing, he argued, should be treated like any other trainable system in the body. The respiratory muscles, once assumed by some researchers to be beyond meaningful training because they worked continuously, were now demonstrably responsive to targeted resistance.
Poulsen cited more than 1,000 international studies supporting the impact of respiratory muscle training across different populations, from elite athletes to people living with COPD, asthma and long Covid. But he insisted the benefits were not reserved for the sick or the exceptional. Ordinary people, he said, could use breath training to gain greater control, resilience and quality of life.
A Bold Claim About Lung Age
The talk’s most attention-grabbing claim concerned “lung age”, a concept Poulsen used to illustrate the decline in respiratory capacity that typically follows early adulthood. Lung function, he said, generally peaks between the ages of 18 and 30 before gradually dropping year by year.
Yet he argued that consistent respiratory training could meaningfully reverse that trajectory.
“By training for just five to ten minutes a day, you can decrease your lung age by twenty years and truly unlock your full potential,” he said.
It was the kind of claim designed to electrify a room like Biohacker Summit. But Poulsen anchored it in routine rather than spectacle: four to six weeks of daily training, often done at home, with measurable gains in capacity and strength.
The appeal was obvious. Here was a biohack that required no clinic, no infusion, no punishing protocol. Sit on the couch, train the breath, change the numbers.
Data, Muscle, And A Legal Edge In Performance
Poulsen pointed to research from Manchester Metropolitan University, where ultrasound was used to observe changes in respiratory musculature after training. According to the results he cited, six weeks of practice could increase diaphragm thickness by 30% and abdominal muscle thickness by 25%.
Those figures gave his presentation the hard-edged, data-driven quality the summit audience would have expected. So did the performance claim that followed: a 7% improvement in exercise output during all-out cycling tests among students.
For effect, Poulsen compared that figure to blood doping, which he said typically delivered gains in the 5% to 8% range.
The comparison was deliberately provocative, and it landed because it spoke to the enduring fantasy at the centre of performance culture: meaningful advantage without moral compromise. Breath training, in this formulation, became a legal and health-promoting route to a competitive edge.
Breath As A Democratic Biohack
What made Poulsen’s presentation resonate was not merely the statistics, but the way he linked them to a wider moral vision. Better breathing was presented as unusually democratic. It was relevant to singers and swimmers, founders and patients, exhausted professionals and everyday people trying to steady themselves against pressure.
The habits he described were simple enough to feel almost anti-climactic in a culture addicted to complexity: practice brief respiratory muscle training daily, use breath holds and controlled walking to build tolerance to discomfort, visualise calm under stress, measure inspiratory and expiratory strength, return to persistence when panic narrows the field of action.
Behind all this sat an old truth in a modern idiom. Control the breath, and you may not control the world, but you stand a better chance of meeting it.
A Performance About More Than Performance
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, Christian Tullberg Poulsen offered a presentation about longevity and optimisation. But underneath the metrics, it was also a meditation on what people do when systems fail, when pressure mounts, when identity thins under stress.
Breathing, in his hands, became both metric and metaphor. A trainable muscle system, yes. A source of athletic gain, certainly. But also a discipline of staying present long enough to continue.
For a summit often animated by the pursuit of the next frontier, Poulsen’s message had an almost radical modesty. The future, he suggested, might begin with something we do every minute, and barely notice.
And perhaps that was the most compelling claim of all: that the doorway to fuller physical and mental potential had never been hidden. It had been there, inside the lungs, waiting to be used well.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam