Kelsey Rivard
RRT
The Breath
Lab
Clinical breathing assessment & retraining for athletes of all levels.
You've built the fitness.
But something is still holding you back.
The missing piece isn't just your training load or your aerobic capacity. It's the system organizing all of it. Your breath. When mechanics are off, everything downstream is compromised - your core, your posture, your recovery, your ability to stay composed under pressure. Most athletes never find this. They keep training harder, hitting the same ceiling, wondering why.
I find it. I fix it.
About
I'm Kelsey - a Registered Respiratory Therapist and Certified Respiratory Educator with a decade of clinical experience and specialized training in breathing pattern assessment and retraining.
I'm also a marathon runner. I know what it feels like to train consistently, do everything right, and still feel like something is holding you back.
That experience - clinical and personal - is what The Breath Lab is built on.
A lot of what exists in the breathing space is methodology-driven. One protocol. One technique. One framework applied to everyone. The Breath Lab isn't that.
Breathing dysfunction doesn't look the same in every person. It shows up differently depending on your mechanics, your training history, your nervous system, your movement patterns, your stress load. So the assessment has to look at all of it - not just your breath, but the whole person it belongs to.
What I do is find where your specific pattern is breaking down and build a plan around that. Not a generic protocol. Not a single technique. A clinical picture of you - and a clear path forward.
What Becomes Possible
When the mechanics are right and the nervous system has updated its model, your ceiling moves. Not because your lungs got bigger. Because the system running them finally got the update it needed. Less effort at the same pace. Better recovery between hard sessions. A nervous system that can actually downregulate. Form that holds late in a race. Composure at threshold instead of survival mode. This is what's on the other side of fixing your breath.
What I Assess
My framework goes beyond the breath itself - assessing the full picture of how you breathe, move, and respond, so that nothing gets missed and nothing gets guessed.
Breathing Mechanics
Is your diaphragm actually doing its job? Your breathing pattern shapes your core stability, your posture, and your movement efficiency. Most people are compensating and have no idea.
Neural Processing
Your nervous system predicts and pre-programs your breathing response before you even start moving. Old protective patterns get locked in. Training doesn't clear them. We do.
Performance Integration
Core strength, posture, running economy, recovery, threshold tolerance. Breathing sits at the center of all of it. We fix the source, not the symptoms.