BreathHoldWork – Erwan Le Corre, a massive let down.

I listened to the above podcast earlier this year. I am familiar with Erwan Le Corre from an interesting interview with him in the second WeMove publication. The founder of MovNat he’s built a large business around teaching his movement practices. The above podcast with Rangan Chaterjee was Erwan sharing his ideas & new breathwork course he was teaching. He was discussing how he has developed strategies that allowed him to hold his breath for up to 8 mins, in a far more gentle fashion that involved none of the more agressive hyperventilation techniques that have been populised by Wim Hof. All of this piqued my curiosity, something for me to try myself and also teach if it was applicable. With this in mind I was happy to use the discount code to sign up (offering 20% off the $495 price, so a good discount for a fairly expensive course).

The details of when to learn were 2 hours, twice a week throughout September. I was a little concerned about the length of time being on a Zoom call, but felt what I knew of Erwan made it worthwhile so put the time in my calender and waited for the course to start.

The first (and for me last) session happened last Tuesday – and it was poorly taught, veering at times into an almost cult like delivery from Erwan. Some stand out moments that ramped up my discomfort with the experience:

• Throughout the 2 hours we did 4 to 5 exercises, for a couple of minutes each. The rest of the session was being talked at by Erwan, complete passive learning, which isn’t only highly ineffective from a learning point of view, but becomes very boring.
• When the 2 hours where up, Erwan announced he was going to carry on for another 30 mins to an hour, assuming that this was OK and his audience would welcome access to his ongoing monologue and being talked at.
• Some of his statements that he made were unhelpful or opinion that he presented as fact – his assertion that fast breathing isn’t driven by CO2 intolerance, but is habitual, misses the nuance and importance of both. It’s not either or and he presented it as such.
• “I don’t do any daily breathwork – Are you surprised?” a direct quote, which is incredibly arrogant and disrespectful to an audience who he then is asking & expecting to carry out daily breathwork practices.
• Criticising general breathwork classes for delivering breathwork protocols to an audience, when the audience didn’t understand the impact they would have on their cellular respiration. Followed by doing exactly the same thing. At no point did he check for understanding, so just assumed people knew what he was talking about and I doubt the majority on the course did.
• Rehashed Patrick McKweon / Butekyo method of reduced breathing with absolutely no reference to them, which is pretty disingenuous as he makes a big thing about how he can hold his breath for a long time without using Wim Hof, when in fact he is leveraging this through existing breathing techniques that he then doesn’t acknowledge.

I came away deeply underwhelmed ,disappointed and decided to sleep on what to do. The next day I thought that to carry on the course, for another 8 hours was a poor use of my time and it really wasn’t something that I could learn anything valuable from. So I decided to email Erwan’s assitant to ask for the money back for the remaining lessons. As part of the response was this line:

Throughout the program, Erwan offers many exercises, techniques, and insights specific to his BreathHoldWork method, which may differ from others in the breath-work space.

Which just isn’t true with regards exercises & techniques – he doesn’t. What he does is talk at his audience, offering breathing practices that are already in existance across many other courses (and the arrogance to believe that you are inventing new techniques is astounding)

All in all something for people to stay well away from.