A $40 mouthpiece is improving squats in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That's the essence of what Renegade Strength and Performance is reporting — athletes using the Airwave mouthpiece are holding more tension through their back and shoulders, bracing better, and moving more weight. Elizabeth noticed she was carrying chronic strain in her jaw during heavy lifts. Zach found his upper back position improved. The mechanism they're pointing to: nasal breathing, enforced by the mouthpiece, leads to better intra-abdominal pressure and less energy leak during the lift.
It's a simple claim. And it's more grounded than it might sound.
The relationship between jaw tension and full-body tension has been studied in athletic contexts for decades. Occlusal splints — essentially what performance mouthpieces are — have shown measurable effects on force production in some populations. The mechanism isn't fully understood, but the hypothesis is that jaw position affects the trigeminal nerve system, which in turn influences muscle activation patterns throughout the body. When your jaw is clenched incorrectly, you're leaking tension. When it's supported, that energy can go elsewhere.
The nasal breathing angle is equally interesting. Nasal breathing generates significantly more nitric oxide than mouth breathing, which improves oxygen uptake efficiency. For a powerlifter holding a brace through a maximal squat, that efficiency matters at the margins. Our knowledge base has a useful counter-signal here — the cold water immersion and muscle hypertrophy research consistently shows that marginal interventions have smaller effects than people hope. But they're not zero effects.
There is a meaningful difference between "this helps" and "we have rigorous controlled trials proving this." The Airwave research appears to be largely observational and testimonial at this stage. Zach's enthusiasm is genuine. But the same community adoption dynamic that drives all wellness tools is at work here — coaches use it, athletes see coaches using it, athletes adopt it. That's not evidence of efficacy. It's evidence of trust.
Which doesn't mean it doesn't work. It means the personal evidence in this video should be held as a signal worth investigating, not a conclusion worth generalizing.
If you're already training consistently and your breathing mechanics under load feel like a limiting factor — if you notice your jaw clenching, your bracing collapsing, your upper back losing position at heavy percentages — a $40 mouthpiece is a reasonable experiment. Test it for six weeks on your primary compound movements. Notice what changes. That's it. The cost-to-signal ratio is favorable.
What I find genuinely compelling here is how this connects to contrast therapy. Every cold plunge protocol we've ever documented — Wim Hof's method, the Finnish sauna tradition, James Nestor's breathwork frameworks — begins with breath discipline. The moment cold water hits your skin, your sympathetic nervous system fires. Your instinct is to gasp, to hyperventilate, to lose the breath. Athletes who train nasal breathing as a practice under load are training the same system they'll need in a plunge. The controlled exhale that gets you through a heavy deadlift is biologically related to the controlled exhale that gets you through the first ten seconds of cold immersion. Renegade's athletes may be building a skill in the gym that transfers directly into recovery protocols they haven't tried yet.
Breath is the thread that runs through all of it. That's not woo-woo. That's physiology.