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Records of three better breathing success stories

November 8, 2015 by info@breathingremedies.co.uk 3 Comments

One of the hardest things about breathing education and retraining is MOTIVATION, putting in enough effort (breathing exercises and lifestyle changes) early on to make a real change your breathing pattern. A colleague calls it “time, dedication and discipline” (TD&D). Sufficient effort at the beginning means clients soon see a decrease in symptoms, (after the first day or two often getting a good night’s sleep or no longer needing asthma reliever inhalers) which motivates them to carry on, and they will soon (usually after 1-3 months) be able to taper down the amount of breathing exercises; it is not usually a big time commitment long term.
For most people we check and record their breath holding time or control pause (CP), a stress free breath hold after a normal outbreath. This is also now sometimes called BOLT (body oxygen level test –see Patrick McKeown’s new book the Oxygen Advantage), and it gets longer as you make progress. The main driver of progress is putting in time doing relaxed/reduced breathing (RB). (I won’t go into these measures and exercises in detail here, as it is the logging and monitoring I want to describe).
But it is also not good to be too competitive, some people try too hard and strain to push up the BOLT or CP, and it must be a stress free breath hold. One way to check clients are not trying too hard is to check what is happening to the pulse which should stay the same or drop; if the pulse increases, that suggests the breath hold was not a stress free one. So pulse is also checked and recorded.
For me, the best way of ensuring the client stays on track is to use the breathing log, developed by Buteyko colleagues Hadas and Amit Golan of Breathe on. (This is free to use and I recommend you sign up for it even if you are learning from books or other self-help methods). So rather than looking at clients’ records on sheets of paper during a session with them, I now check on line how their morning CP or BOLT is progressing and how much of their breathing exercises they are doing, and if each exercise is effective. For most people it is very motivating to see their data and progress plotted up on a graph this way. It also means that I can monitor my clients and see quickly if they need further coaching, or need to make adjustments. Symptoms and triggers, and time exercising, hours of sleep, pulse after each exercise and other parameters can all be logged, but the 2 measures in the examples below are the ones I quickly check on regularly; RB reduced/relaxed breathing and CP control pause /BOLT or breath holding time.

Three logs from Butyeko breathing training

The three clients below now monitor their breathing each day and maintain it with just 10 mins of breathing exercises. (Click on the image of the 6 graphs for a clearer inmage in a new window).

oct breathing logs

1) This client with ME/CFS got good symptom relief and was able to drop down her relaxed/reduced breathing  and maintain her CP at over 45 sec in less than 4 months which is excellent. You can see 2 holidays (the second spans July 1st) where exercises were skipped, and the CP slid down a little!.
“My symptom “score” started at  76 and has reduced to 20 over a four month period. The most dramatic outcome has been that I now sleep well nearly every night which has made a huge difference to me. This started  two nights into the course….The other improvements have been slower to appear but have included a marked reduction in anxiety levels, in lethargy during the day, chronic exhaustion and headaches”.
2) This client with disordered breathing was able to start reducing her exercises after about 2 months.

“Before I started the course I had days I couldn’t leave the house as I had lack of energy and sometimes fell over.  Pretty restrictive generally.  It was tiredness and so much more; my body didn’t want to move and was in a lot of pain…..I can now start back to work gradually anyway and begin to live my life”.

3) This client with anxiety, rapidly increased her CP in about a month, then reduced. The lower values in March coincided with a very stressful time, showing the link.

“I feel calmer, more energised and I am sleeping better, without snoring. The Buteyko method has given me a daily support mechanism and an emergency medical kit when times get hard”.

Give it a go and see if it helps you to improve your breathing.

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Filed Under: Nose breathing is important

Comments

  1. Carmen Spence says

    March 1, 2017 at 01:28

    I have Emphysema, and I have tried to do the exercises myself, I have been in this misery for 4 years now, as I become breathless all the time, even to get dressed is a hardship.

    I am now trying to do the exercises I am reading in Patrick mcKeowns Oxygen Advantage Book, but I am a woman of 73 years, who does not want to be an athlete, all I want is a simple routing, that I can follow.
    Can you please email me one, also I am tapeing my mouth each night and trying to keep my mouth closed most times.

    Kind Regards,

    Carmen Spence
    Queensland
    Australia.

    Reply
    • info@breathingremedies.co.uk says

      March 1, 2017 at 21:40

      Hi Carmen,
      I am sorry to hear that you have COPD, and that is great news that you are taking steps to maintain nasal breathing. It should help a lot. I agree the oxygen advantage book might be more than you need. Patrick has a gentler one with a CD https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anxiety-Free-Featuring-Breathing-Mindfulness-ebook/dp/B00AEB99AC

      I do assessments and courses on skype etc. Some people do manage the self help, others need live help from an experienced practitioner, as breathing retraining is easy at first glance, but people react differently to it.
      Best wishes,
      Janet

      Reply
      • Carmen Spence says

        March 2, 2017 at 05:22

        Thankyou Janet for your reply,

        I have already spent over $1000.00 dollars on a Buteyko Practitioner Janet, but it didnt work for some reason. Maybe I didnt keep up the exercises long enough.

        I have also paid $200.00 on getting a gmail course sent to me, but it is very slow, so i am trying to do everything I have learnt, but I really just want someone to give me a simple schedule, that I can remember to do myself.

        Reply

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About me, Buteyko breathing educator

Janet Winter breathing and posture educator (Buteyko and Egoscue)

Dr Janet Winter (PhD)

Hello, I am Janet,  a  Breathing educator (Buteyko), and Posture specialist (Egoscue).

I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing.

Listen to a client’s (Suzy Glaskie, functional medicine health coach at Peppermint Wellness) 15 minute podcast on how Buteyko helped her.

I teach natural health control with no drugs, gadgets or manipulation. You can sign up to my newsletter here.

Phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter) or contact me here.

What I do

Breathing education gently retrains a disordered breathing pattern and helps people naturally recover from breathing-related health problems.

The Buteyko Method relieves asthma symptoms, and has been listed in the UK Asthma Guideline since 2008.
I am a member of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association and am fully insured.

I am also a qualified postural alignment specialist (PAS) Egoscue method. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

My background

I was involved in healthcare/biomedical research for 30 years although previously in a very different role: before training as a Breathing educator, I spent 20 years in drug discovery looking for new painkillers for a major pharmaceutical company based in a London Institute.
I worked as a neuroscientist and cell biologist, directing a team of bench scientists. (So I am not a medical doctor but I have a PhD in Neuroscience) I authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles and reviews on my research.  My professional profile can be seen here on LINKEDIN.

Why I became a breathing educator

If you are reading this because you have CFS/ME, I know what you are going through. I know what it is like to hold onto a job by my fingernails, worried about how we would feed the family if I lost my job, come home and eat and sleep and spend my weekend recovering.

I had no social life. I was lucky to quickly get to a consultant who diagnosed me with candidiasis, and anti-fungals and a yeast and sugar-free diet helped a lot, but not enough.

I felt I had been “written off” and had nothing to offer. I was a mum, partner and employee with massively reduced physical and mental output compared with previously.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”).

How I got sick

I suspected my symptoms were “stress related” but they did not ease when I left my stressful job and moved out of London to the countryside.

Looking back on my history I can clearly see my own physical and emotional stresses accumulating, from a very traumatic bereavement, on-going work and family stresses, then a really bad summer respiratory infection and cough that was not shifted by two different antibiotics (but they probably contributed to unbalancing my gut flora, hence the fungal overgrowth/candidiasis).

A cough seems to be one of the best ways to mess up your breathing pattern, and many of my clients tell me “I was fine until I had that cough/chest infection, and I never really got my health back!!”

The breathing centre in the brain gets to think that big volume breathing is normal and unless you know about it, it is sometimes hard to recover. Luckily you CAN retrain your breathing by doing a series of gentle exercises and making some life style changes, and you CAN have hope of better health.

My recovery

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. It was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered. One definition of stress is “anything that makes you breathe more”. And I know now that breathing too much can actually deplete the body of oxygen. And stress can be emotional or physical.

So that is why I do what I do and why I am passionate about it; I found a way to improve my chronic fatigue by better breathing and I trained as a breathing educator so I could help others with this devastating disease. There is so little help out there for them (you?).

Then chronic backache made good breathing impossible, and I discovered postural alignment therapy (Egoscue) to help with that. And I am still amazed at the progress I am making -it’s wonderful to have decreased pain and increased function when I had accepted decline at my age was inevitable. It’s not!


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