Optimal Breathing for Performance and Health
By Jac Vidgen
Heavy breathing is overbreathing!
“OK, everyone, take a deep breath and work that body,” yells the bright-eyed, enthusiastic fitness instructor. Everyone in the class tries to comply, but poor Mary in the back row just can’t manage to take another deep breath. It’s as though the capacity to take any more air into those tired old lungs is just not there. What Mary doesn’t realize is that’s she’s already breathing way too deeply. In fact, she is chronically hyperventilating, not just in her fitness class but all the time.
The common view is that the more or deeper we breathe, the more oxygen our body gets, and it stuns the intellect to find this is not the case at all. Getting oxygen from the lungs into the blood and from the blood into cells are two separate functions, dependent upon different factors. It is possible to have optimally oxygenated blood, yet suffer oxygen deficiency, in heart disease, for example. The same situation applies to working out: think of the middle-aged executive on the treadmill, mouth open and gasping for air.
More than 50 years ago, Russian respiratory specialist Dr. Konstantin Buteyko made a startling observation: Terminally ill people ventilate far above recommended norms as they approach death. Their breathing deepens significantly but they clearly don’t absorb oxygen efficiently. The propaganda around the value of deep breathing has proliferated with no physiological basis. Yet forcefully deepening the breath is among the most common instructions, even from certain (misled) yoga teachers.
Overbreathing reduces uptake of oxygen in the body because it disturbs the critical balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. CO2 is a vital component of every living organism. For humans, it is the chief regulator of the respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, hormonal, digestive and immune systems, as well as the organism’s pH balance. CO2 is often referred to as a waste gas, yet without stable concentrations of it, the human body is thrown into chaos. The major role of CO2 is to liberate oxygen from the blood for delivery to cells and tissue. Overbreathing dilutes the body’s reserves of CO2, and so, paradoxically, breathing too much reduces oxygenation.
Dr. Buteyko developed a method to improve a person’s breathing pattern and consequently dramatically reverse a range of health problems and enhance fitness by retraining the respiratory center, resulting in better CO2 levels. Oxygenation, circulation and all metabolic processes can be optimized through normalizing the breathing.
When we exercise, CO2 is elevated – which is why if we miss our regular workouts, energy levels drop. Chemically speaking, “gym junkies” are actually addicted to CO2. If they habitually overbreathe, their reserve of CO2 falls, and the only way to get it back is through repeated physical exertion.
For years, many Russian athletes have known about breath control and how it improves stamina, muscle tone, recovery and performance. Athletes who practice Buteyko’s method also notice that muscle ache due to lactic acid buildup reverses. It seems that the increase in carbonic acid (a form of CO2) from reduced breathing replaces the need for lactic acid compensation.
“The New York Times” recently published an article extolling the virtues of Buteyko’s method in the treatment of asthma, and mostly the method has been promoted for people with chronic illness. Yet those athletes who use the method advocate it for improving performance as well as for addressing breathing-related health problems such as sleep and anxiety disorders, allergies, excess mucous and fatigue.
One basic rule is keeping the mouth closed during all exercise. At first this is challenging, and performance may even be reduced temporarily, but after practice and adjustment, results soon demonstrate its value. More importantly one can be assured of protecting and enhancing long-term health.
As the sage Lao Tzu so wisely said some 3,000 years ago, “the perfect man breathes as if he’s not breathing.”
Buteyko’s method is taught regularly in Hong Kong by veteran Australian practitioner Jac Vidgen. Jac has been based in Asia for 10 years, also teaching the method in Thailand, Philippines, Bali and online. For more information, please visit http://www.buteykoasia.com call 9378 5185 or email jacvid@gmail.com.
