Escape From Asthma Michael Lingard

This is a series of fifteen five to ten minute episodes that will give you all you need to know about the Buteyko Method of Breath Training to improve the management of your asthma.
This course of training is free and you will learn how, by simply improving your breathing and a few other lifestyle changes, you will be able to manage on far less medication, have better control of your asthma and have improved energy and sleep.

As an asthmatic, you may have never considered yourself as suffering from over-breathing, especially as you have often found yourself short of breath and needing to breathe more. This is the paradox that many people don't understand; that an asthmatic seems to suffer from shortness of breath and needs to breathe more but the cause of their asthma is the fact they are breathing too much.

Asthma Episode #3 What’s Your Control Pause & How’s Your Breathing?
Welcome back to episode three of escape from asthma entitled “What's your control pause and how is your breathing?”
Now you know your control pause, what does it mean and how can you improve on it?
As an asthma sufferer I will be surprised if your control was much higher than 20 seconds as most patients I have taught with asthma have a control pause in the teens anything from 13 to 19 seconds.
If your control pause was under 10 seconds you are breathing almost 3 to 4 times more than normal and need to try to change this urgently because your medicine will not change your breathing, but will simply control the symptoms. If you achieved 20 to 25 seconds with your comfortable breath hold your breathing is about 2 to 3 times more than normal. A control pause of 25 to 35 seconds still means you are over-breathing, almost twice much as you need but you will only have problems when under stress or hit by any of the triggers that make your asthma worse.
If your control pauses 35 to 45 seconds it is good for any asthma sufferer, but you will still benefit from improved breathing in many other ways.
It is very unlikely that your control pause was over 45 seconds as this would mean your breathing would be normal, a very rare situation for any asthmatic.
A control pause of 45 to 60 seconds is what we should all try to achieve and this will be the target for this full training course.

Nose breathing, an aid to better asthma control.
Perhaps the simplest advice is to try to always breathe through the nose. Why?
Because the nose functions to deliver air to the lungs in as perfect condition as possible. It makes over-breathing physically more difficult simply because of the smaller size of the nostrils compared with an open mouth, it filters out most of the dust and particulates found in the atmosphere, it moisturizes the air when it's dry, as in centrally heated rooms, delivering air that doesn't irritate and dry out the delicate membranes of the lungs, it conserves water and helps reduce the risk of dehydration, it contains active organisms that trap and destroy many potential infective agents in the air we breathe, protecting the lungs from infection, it is also found to be responsible for the production of up to 50% of nitric oxide in our body when we breathe normally through our nose. Nitric oxide has many vital functions in the body that are still being discovered, we know nitric oxide can dilate blood vessels and improve circulation hence its use for treatment in angina.

Hi! This is Michael Lingard bringing you episode five of “Escape from Asthma” entitled Getting Started. Now have completed one Buteyko exercise you can begin to do more on a daily basis using the worksheet you have downloaded and printed off, or the booklet The Buteyko Guide to Better Breathing & Better Asthma Management you may have purchased from Lulu.com.

Hi, Welcome to podcast episode six of Escape from Asthma. We shall be checking your progress and introducing the Mini Pause.
By now you will have probably done a few Buteyko Exercises and recorded them on a worksheet or in the Buteyko Guide to Better Breathing & Better Asthma Management. In the last lesson I suggested you plot the average of each start Control Pause and end Control Pause.
You will find your control pause will vary from day to day and also during the day depending on many things, so don’t be surprised if some days your exercises are not as good as you expected, what we are looking for is a slow steady improvement . This will always come if you persevere.