Are You Breathing Too Much?

Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko, a Ukrainian, attended the first Moscow Institute of Medicine, the most prestigious medical school in the Soviet Union, graduating in 1952. During his residency he noticed that patients in the worst health all seemed to breath far too much. The more they breathed the worse off they were, especially those with Hypertension, (high blood pressure). Buteyko himself suffered from severe high blood pressure, along with debilitating headaches and stomach and heart pain.

In his book called “Breath” James Nestor says, “As the story goes one night in October, Buteyko was standing alone in a hospital room. He turned his focus to his reflection on the glass— a gaunt and haggard face drawing heavy breaths through his open mouth. This was the same respiratory rate he had seen in terminally ill patients. Buteyko wasn’t exercising yet he was breathing as if he had just finished a workout.

He tried an experiment. He started to breathe less, to relax his chest and stomach and sip air through his nose. A few minutes later the throbbing pain in his head, stomach and heart disappeared. Buteyko returned to heavy breathing and within 5 minutes the pain had returned. What if over-breathing was not the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause of it”

Bueyko went on to pioneer cures for asthma patients with his breathing techniques. For a long time he was ridiculed but in the end he was recognised as someone who had found a new way to health.

Your lungs act like a giant pair of bellows, drawing air in and letting it out to extract oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. However oxygen can only be transferred to your muscles and organs if those organs and muscles have carbon dioxide in the first place. To make sure this happens you need to move/exercise at some point during each and every day. Your body is an engine which is in constant motion even when you sleep. It appears that with this engine your body needs to speed up at some point in any 24 hour cycle so as to create energy, which your cells do and the by-product of this is carbon dioxide, which gets exchanged for oxygen when you breathe.

This leads to a healthy, vibrant body that is extroverted and coping well with life.