What's a good BOLT score?
On Gyroscope’s coaching bands, 20 to 30 seconds is moderate, 30 to 40 is good and over 40 is excellent. Under 10 is very low. The bands are a coaching guide, not clinical cutoffs, and in 49 elite speedskaters the score had nothing to do with how fit they were.
BOLT gets passed around as a measure of how well you breathe, sometimes even how fit you are, with charts that turn a breath hold into a grade. It’s simpler than that. It times how long you can comfortably pause after a normal breath out, and that’s a mix of how your body answers rising carbon dioxide, how calm you are, and how you did the test.
What we’d do
Take it once a month, the same way each time, seated and rested, and stop at the first clear urge to breathe. Watch your own trend rather than chasing a band. Never take it, or any breath hold, in water.
The bands
| Comfortable hold | Band |
|---|---|
| Under 10 seconds | Very low |
| 10 to 20 seconds | Low |
| 20 to 30 seconds | Moderate |
| 30 to 40 seconds | Good |
| Over 40 seconds | Excellent |
These are Gyroscope’s practical bands, matching the coaching method the app uses. They haven’t been validated as clinical cutoffs, and they shouldn’t be used to guess at a lung or mental health condition. Try it on the breath hold test and retest once a month, the same way each time.
How to take it
- Sit upright somewhere quiet and safe. Breathe normally through your nose for a minute, with no deep breaths.
- Take one normal breath in and one normal breath out through your nose.
- Start the timer as the breath out ends. Pinch your nose if it helps.
- Stop at the first clear urge to breathe or swallow. Don’t push through.
- Breathe normally again through your nose, and note the seconds.
The breath hold test times it and puts your seconds on the bands. A deep breath first, a forceful breath out, or waiting past the first urge turns it into a different test, so keep it gentle and the same each time.
Does it mean you’re fit?
In a 2024 study, 49 elite and development speedskaters in Poland, average age about 19, took the BOLT test along with a 30 second sprint test and a lab exercise test. Their BOLT scores didn’t line up with any of the fitness results. The correlations ran from -0.17 to 0.01, which is essentially nothing. The authors concluded their findings “did not demonstrate a significant relationship between BOLT scores and exercise performance”.
A comfortable breath hold is like how long you can stand in a line before you get restless. It changes with practice and with your mood, and it says very little about how far you could walk.
Why it bounces around
A 2006 review of breath holding describes hold time as easy to measure and highly variable. The point where you have to breathe isn’t set by blood gases, lung volume or the oxygen sensors in your neck alone, and your brain keeps running its breathing rhythm through the whole hold. Coffee, a stressful hour, a poor night or a recent workout can all shorten it.
The test was made popular by Patrick McKeown and his Oxygen Advantage method. More on why a long hold isn’t a fitness score is in a long breath hold means you’re fit.
The hold comes from the Buteyko method, and freedivers train it with CO2 tables, which are never for water.
3 sources
- Gyroscope, BOLT score benchmarkgyrosco.pe
- Kowalski T et al., Body Oxygen Level Test (BOLT) is not associated with exercise performance in highly-trained individuals, Frontiers in Physiology, 2024pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Parkes MJ, Breath-holding and its breakpoint, Experimental Physiology, 2006pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
