Escape From Asthma

Hi, this is Michael Lingard, your Buteyko Educator, welcoming you to the final episode of Escape from Asthma and offering you my congratulations on completing this course. You now have the understanding and tools to continue improving your breathing and health in the future.

Asthma is a serious condition and as such safety is paramount with the management of this condition. This final episode will highlight areas that you should take particular care over and remember that this course is a general presentation and each individual asthma sufferer is unique. No responsibility can be taken for any adverse reactions to the training or your failure to follow the safety recommendations given; always, if in doubt, consult your doctor, asthma nurse or your own Buteyko Educator for advice.

Hi, welcome to the penultimate episode of Escape from Asthma. I hope by now you are really making progress and feeling the benefits of better breathing. One of the great attractions of the Buteyko Method breath training is that people don’t need to carry on doing exercises indefinitely but once their carbon dioxide receptors have been re-set and they are achieving good control pauses of 35 to 45 seconds all the time, then they can begin to reduce their exercises and eventually stop them altogether.

Hi, welcome to episode thirteen of Escape from Asthma that is about reducing your asthma medication safely. Since we know every medication carries some adverse side effects that vary from minor to potentially very serious, so it makes sense to try to manage with as little medication as possible while maintaining good control of your asthma.

With the best will in the world and despite your greatest care, it is still possible that you might fall ill at some stage, with a bad dose of a cold, some random infection or just be run down.

When you are ill you are more liable to over-breathe and your CP may fall & your

pulse may rise. All infections are stressors, whether flu, a common cold or viral

infection. So how can you combat the adverse effect on your breathing with the increased risk of your asthma symptoms returning and how can you recover quickly?

There are many ways you can help yourself, some may be common sense but others may be new to you.

So how does posture affect our breathing? The raised shoulders, expanded chest and tense upper muscles are to be seen on most asthmatic patients and others who normally over-breathe.

With habitual heavy breathing these ancillary respiratory muscles need to be used repeatedly and they become chronically tense with over-use.

We should breathe primarily with just our diaphragm, the large dome shaped muscle under our lower ribs, and we should not normally use the upper chest for normal activity breathing.

During Buteyko training the effects of different postures on our breathing, when awake and asleep are discussed, based on Professor Buteyko’s research. He found that sleeping on our left side reduced breathing at night the most, sleeping on the right side or stomach was almost as good for our breathing, but sleeping on the back invariably increased the breathing rate.

Hi , welcome to episode 10 of Escape from Asthma entitled Sealing the leaks and Talking Like The Queen.

As you will now know, our breathing is controlled automatically by the level of carbon dioxide in our body. It is a good image to hold in ones mind that our lungs are not just the means to get oxygen for our body but act as reservoirs or tanks of carbon dioxide that need to be kept at just the right level.

Maintaining this image of the lungs as reservoirs or tanks of Carbon Dioxide that help maintain the normal 6% CO2 in our body, we can think of activities that may lead to “leaks” from the tanks. There are many possible reasons for these leaks, they may include all those situations when we over-breathe.

Hi, this is Michael Lingard welcoming you to episode nine of Escape from Asthma. With the best will in the world every now and again you may find your breathing is getting out of control. This may happen at times of severe stress, when ill or after some trauma. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a simple exercise that you could rely on to bring your breathing back to normal? This is the job of the three anti-hyperventilation exercises I shall tell you about now.

The first one is particularly useful as you can do this anywhere, at home, at work or even in company and people will not realize you are doing it.

The concept behind this exercise is that when we start to over-breathe or hyperventilate , the gap between breathing out and breathing our next breath in gets very small or sometimes nil, so this exercise teaches you how to reintroduce this essential gap.

Hi, this is episode eight of Escape from Asthma entitled Step Exercises and The Extended Pause.

As part of your breath retraining wouldn't it be good if you could speed up your breath training while out for a walk or while walking to work each day? Well this is exactly what the step exercise allows you to do. Remember what we are trying to achieve is a change in your breathing through a re-setting of your carbon dioxide receptors in your body that control your rate of breathing. Every asthmatic is over-breathing and their receptors are trying to maintain a lower level of carbon dioxide than is normal and healthy. The Buteyko exercises you have been doing have been gradually accustoming the receptors to accept a higher level of carbon dioxide through relaxation and perhaps reduced breathing with the accompanying slight “air hunger”.

If we could apply more pressure on your receptors to get used to a higher level of carbon dioxide, that would speed up your recovery of normal breathing and reduce all your asthma symptoms. Step exercises do just that.

Professor Buteyko included advice on diet for people learning to improve their breathing. He found that a number of common foods tended to increase patient’s

breathing rate; they included dairy food such as cottage cheese, yogurt, ice cream and milk; stimulants such as strong tea, coke, coffee, alcohol and cocoa; other foods such as chocolate, honey, raspberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, nuts and beef, chicken or fish stock. However, when this research was conducted in Russia, the diet of most people was much simpler than today’s Western diet. In the West today our consumption of meat, dairy and processed foods is far greater and the link between our food and our breathing has become much more important.

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.