JANET WINTER

ME/CFS/fibromyalgia asthma hayfever anxiety snoring sleep apnoea

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Is yoga breathing damaging your health?

April 22, 2017 by info@breathingremedies.co.uk Leave a Comment

Dr Mercola on yoga breathing “In fact, the whole field of breathing and breath-work has enormous potential for improvement, as most prevailing ideas about breathing promoted in yoga, Pilates, and meditative methods tend to focus on taking big, deep breaths — which is actually the opposite of what you should do”

Robin Rothenberg is a very experienced yoga therapist (mainly Iyengar and Viniyoga) and teacher trainer  who has taken part in research studies and written a book on yoga for low back pain. Recently, after a period of worsening health, she took a fresh look at yoga breathing, learning about Buteyko to improve her own health, and discovered for herself that Buteyko was far more closely aligned with the original yoga teaching (yoga sutras and hatha yoga pradipika) than modern pranyama teachings. Please watch the 35 minute video here, it is well worth it. I have summarised some of the key points below.

  • Robin recalled that many years previously she had had a student in her yoga class with such severe asthma that she needed to keep her inhaler next to her on the yoga mat. Yoga helped but she was still on the maximal dose of several medications for asthma. When 68 years old, the student’s doctor recommended she take a Buteyko breathing course, which proved to be transformational. She recovered from asthma, no longer needed medication, and trekked round Nepal when aged 70 after decades of disabling asthma. This remarkable transformation was noted by Robin. The student still came to yoga lessons, but did her own (Buteyko) breathing exercises instead of yoga ones in class. Robin noted this with interest, and also liked that the science backing up the Buteyko method, which made perfect sense (see links below, how hyperventilation harms). Robin still assumed that Buteyko breathing may have helped her student but would be of no relevance to herself (“I do pranyama”).
  • Then years later, Robin gets a severe chest infection which will not clear up. She is becoming progressively more disabled and her chronic cough –which would always get worse with a lot of speaking, eg teaching courses, gets so bad she is losing sleep. She is exhausted. Coughing in class over students. Nothing is helping out of her yoga toolbox, she can’t even lie down flat. Eventually to her horror, she is diagnosed with asthma and prescribed a reliever inhaler, with the threat of steroid medication if it is not brought under control.
  • Robin remembers her student with asthma and her “cure” with the Buteyko breathing. She decides to investigate it further and studies the ancient yoga texts (e.g. yoga sutras and hatha yoga pradipika) and notes how retention of breath was emphasised, very different from the large, noisy, big breathing she and many colleagues teach. Robin learns Buteyko from the student, Pippa who has trained as a Buteyko educator (a colleague of mine who now edits the Buteyko Breathing Educator Association newsletter) and after the very first session, she sleeps well and her husband has to check that she is alive as she is uncharacteristically quiet! She goes on to recover quickly from her breathing problems, and also the chronic cough she had had for years. She can now run up hills that she had struggled to walk up for 25 years, all while nasal breathing. She said it was transformative in every aspect of her life: she has constant high energy; greater mental clarity; great digestion; no breathlessness at all.
  • Robin points out that the important points about breathing had somehow been lost as pranyama was handed down through the generations. She would nasal breathe in class, but not bother for the rest of the times, whereas 24.7 is important in Buteyko. Robin then trained as a Buteyko educator with Patrick McKeown and is now spreading the word among her yoga colleagues, as the science and physiology makes sense, whereas she had accepted the pranyama practices without any real explanations. She now teaches clients and practitioners and feels that it is important to get to yoga teachers as what many are teaching with big noisy breathing can be bad for health.
  • In brief many (not all) yoga teachers may not be teaching breathing correctly.
YOGA breathing

 

BUTEYKO breathing

 

Nasal if possible in class Nasal (24/7), exercises to clear blocked nose
Diaphragmatic  (if mentioned at all, or “what is natural for you”) Diaphragmatic
Full deep breaths Small, quiet breaths
Get rid of toxic CO2 (not all yoga teachers, eg Dru yoga – science is understood) Retain CO2 as usually too much is lost, CO2 not just a waste gas, need a balance
Oxygen transfer will be decreased Oxygen transfer will be increased

Patrick McKeown says “you should not be able to hear breathing in a yoga class”

Useful links:

Here is an hour long interview where another experienced yoga instuctor (Lucas Rockwood of Yogabody) asks Patrick more about Buteyko and yoga breathing.

Why you need to rethink this popular stress management technique

Tess Graham, a respected breathing expert in Australia trains yoga, pilates, sports e.t.c. teachers

Artour Rakhimov has books and more information on yoga breathing (slower and less).

  • How hyperventilation harms: part 1 hyperventilation can narrow the airways.
  • How hyperventilation harms: part 2 hyperventilation can narrow the blood vessels and reduce blood and oxygen supply.
  • How hyperventilation harms: part 3 hyperventilation can unbalance the blood gases and reduce transfer of oxygen from the blood to the organs and tissues that need it.

If you would like to have a comprehensive breathing assessment, call me on 01663 743055.

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Filed Under: hyperventilation, Nose breathing is important, oxygenation Tagged With: carbon dioxide, diaphragm, hyperventilation, nose, yoga breathing

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About me/ contact

You can sign up to Breathing Remedies newsletter here. Information on posture and breathing and how they affect health.

Or phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter)

 

Hello, I am Janet,  a  Breathing educator, (Buteyko Breathing Method) and I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing. Both myself and my teenage son have recovered from ME/CFS, and I want to help more people with these devastating illnesses.

You can contact me here (please leave phone number, landline preferably: 

What I do

Louise Bibby - CFS Coach, Blogger, Author

Louise Bibby – CFS Coach, Blogger, Author

Here is a very brief (3.5 mins) audio introduction to the Buteyko method and DEEP BREATHING; part of an hour-long interview with CFS coach Louise Bibby in Australia – the full interview will be available on her “Get up and go Guru”
site
soon.

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

I trained to be a Breathing Educator with Jennifer Stark and Savio D’Souza. Jennifer has been teaching Buteyko for almost 20 years and conducted several of the successful asthma clinical trials of the Buteyko method in the West. (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) trained by Nicole Lourens of the Egoscue University. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

egoscue023You can find a great summary of Egoscue here.

My background

I had been 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. I have also worked as a medical writer, so have a firm grounding in evidence-based medicine. 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. 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.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”), breathing education worked, it was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered.

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. 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. 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.
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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  • Mouth breathing in children can be harmful. This can help you assess it. https://t.co/GTFekOuzkD https://t.co/GTFekOuzkD Yesterday at 08:36
  • Ecstatic to see this breathing article in the Guardian. Mary Birch is a very experienced Buteyko breathing educator… https://t.co/scqHG0yax3 February 19, 2019 20:36
  • Ok it’s funny, but it is also a good demonstration of breathing dysfunction known as “paradoxical breathing” where… https://t.co/gmG7iDPKAk February 17, 2019 17:07
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Asthma allergies sinusitis

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Anxiety stress panic

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Snoring sleep apnoea insomnia

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Sports performance

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