Kelsey Rivard
RRT

Even before I became a respiratory therapist, breath fascinated me. Not just as a mechanical process - but as the thing that connects everything. How you breathe shapes how you move, how you recover, how you respond to stress, how you perform under pressure.

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I didn't just learn that in a classroom. I lived it.
 

I spent over 20 years struggling with an eating disorder. It affected everything - my physical health, my performance as an endurance athlete, my relationship with my own body. Recovery wasn't linear and it wasn't simple. But the real turning point came when I stopped trying to escape the body I was in and started actually listening to it.

 

What I found when I did that was my breath.

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I realized my breathing patterns were influencing everything - how I moved, how I responded to stress, how well I performed and recovered. When I started restoring them, things shifted. My nervous system settled. My posture changed. My performance improved. Not because I found a new protocol or a better technique - but because I fixed the foundation.

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That experience is why The Breath Lab exists. And it's why I don't work from a single methodology or a fixed protocol. Breathing dysfunction doesn't look the same in every person. It has to be assessed - the whole person, not just the breath.

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I became a Registered Respiratory Therapist to understand the science behind what I'd experienced. A decade of clinical work, specialized training in breathing pattern assessment, and years of running have built the picture. But the reason I do this work started long before any of that.

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I know what it feels like to be disconnected from your own body. And I know what it feels like to come back to it.

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That's what this work is about.