Better Breathing Means Better Health

It would be good to get your feedback about this training course so that we can improve it in any way and offer you more personalized help. If you could email me your starting Control Pause  and  your most recent Control Pause you achieved after completing the course. It would also be useful to know what made you decide to take this course, perhaps you had a health problem you thought might be helped with improved breathing, or you had heard of the Buteyko Method but not been able to find a trainer near you, or you may have just decided this would be a good way of improving your health and immune system. If you have any suggestions as to how the course might be improved or developed , that would be welcomed as well.I am passionate that as many people in the world should have access to this remarkable work of Professor Konstantin Buteyko, most of us need it. Tell your friends and relatives about this powerful aid to health and you might even Twitter a comment!My email is  lingard@totalhealthmatters.co.uk or li

Better Breathing Means better Health - Episode #16  What you eat affects how you breathe and how you breathe affects what you eat.This idea comes as a surprise to many people who have never believed there was a connection between our eating and our breathing habits. However over the past forty years inn the health profession I have come to the conclusion that our health is connected to everything, and a few years ago I published a book entitled “Connection - Towards a Broader Understanding of Health in Medicine” that expands on this concept. After three years of research, gathering data from over 250 patients it seems quite clear that there is a strong relationship between our breathing and are eating habits. There are good physiological reasons why our diet impacts on our breathing and Professor Buteyko incorporated this in his training programme, but our Western diet today is very different from the diet of ordinary people in Russia back in the 1950’s. The link between our breathing and the food we choose t

**Episode # 15 General Health Questions ** Hi, this is Michael Lingard, your Buteyko Educator, welcoming you to the final episode of Better Breathing Means Better Health 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. Just to remind you of the powerful impact on your health that improved breathing will have, you can download leaflets on the subjects covered below: If you don’t have access while listening to this podcast, go to my website HERE where you will be able to download them there. Circulation & Heart Disease (Download a pdf leaflet HERE) Lowered CO2 because of hyperventilation constricts the arteries throughout the body, lowered CO2 impairs the release of oxygen from your blood and mouth breathing rather than nose breathing reduces the production of nitric oxide. The effect of the above is to put more physical stress on the heart that now needs to pump more blood around the body

**Episode # 14 Some Important Points ** Hi, this is Michael Lingard, your Buteyko Educator, welcoming you to episode 14 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. Chronic Hidden Hyperventilation 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 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, or your own Buteyko Educator for advice. You are recommended to check all the following important points now and from time to time in the future to ensure you are following best practice of the Buteyko Method. Under no circumstances should you throw away any prescr

**Episode # 13 Stopping Buteyko Exercises & Taping ** Hi, welcome to episode thirteen of Better Breathing Means Better Health. 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. So at some time in the future you will have established a new habit of breathing normally, you will have a morning control pause of over thirty-five and will often achieve control pauses of over forty. You will have achieved ideal breathing when your control pause is between forty-five and sixty seconds. How quickly you get to these levels depends on many factors: how bad your breathing was, how many exercises you have been doing each day (the m

Episode # 10 Sealing the Leaks & Talking Like The Queen ** Hi, welcome to episode ten of Better Breathing Means Better Health 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 that may include all those situations when we over-breathe: • When showering you may gasp as the water hits you • Most strong emotional states can lead to over-breathing • The act of bending to put shoes on can push out air • Getting over hot or too cold may increase breathing • Over co

Better Breathing Means Better Health Episode # 12 When You Are Ill 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 Control Pause may fall & your pulse rate 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 and how can you recover more quickly? There are many ways you can help yourself, some may be common sense but others may be new to you. Firstly don’t add more stress during these times; Don’t over-eat, avoid foods on the problem food list, eat less and even cut out a meal. Don’t over-sleep, try sleeping 1 to 11/2 hours less, since sleep is the body’s time for repair the ravages of the day, and if you have been inactive you will need less sleep. If your control pause is still low it makes sense to wake y

Episode # 11 Posture, Sleep, and Taping. Hi, this is Michael Lingard welcoming you to Better Breathing Means Better Health, episode eleven, entitled Posture, Sleep and Taping. I hope you are finding this course already helping with your general health and that the work you have put in so far beginning to pay off as you feel more in control of your health and perhaps experiencing more energy, better sleep and fewer symptoms. So how does posture affect our breathing? The raised shoulders, expanded chest and tense upper muscles are to be seen on most patients 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 discusse

Episode # 9 Anti-Hyperventilation Exercises Hi, this is Michael Lingard welcoming you to episode nine of Better Breathing Means Better Health. 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. Breathe in and out through your nose two times then pause your breath for a count of two in y

Episode # 8 Step Exercises & The Extended Pause Hi, this is episode eight of Better Breathing Means Better Health, 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. For everyone who is over-breathing habitually 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 these 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

Episode # 7. Food and Your BreathingHi, welcome to episode seven that is all about food and your breathing.Professor Buteyko included advice on diet for people learning to improve their breathing. He found that a number of common foods tended to increase the 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.My research over the past two years has led me to believe there is a strong relationship between our diet and our breathing.Chronic hidden hyperventilation is related to stress, diet and bad breat

Episode # 6 Checking Your Progress & The Mini Pause Hi, Welcome to podcast episode six of Better Breathing Means Better Health. 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 Health. 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. You may improve your control pause by just a few seconds each time you do an exercise, perhaps increasing it by 3 to 5 seconds from start to finish but usually you will find by the time you do your next exercise your control pause will have dropped a little, this is normal. Ther

Episode # 4 Nose Clearing & Your First Buteyko Exercise Hi, this is Michael Lingard bringing you the fourth episode of Better Breathing Means Better Health entitled “Nose Clearing & Your First Buteyko Exercise” Perhaps the simplest advice is to try to always breathe through the nose. Why? Because the nose functions to deliver air to the lungs in as perfect condition as possible. It makes over-breathing physically more difficult simply because of the smaller size of the nostrils compared with an our large open mouth. It filters out most of the dust and particulates found in the atmosphere. It moisturizes the air when it's dry, as in centrally heated rooms, delivering air that doesn't irritate and dry out the delicate membranes of the lungs. It conserves water and helps reduce the risk of dehydration. It contains active organisms that trap and destroy many potential infective agents in the air we breathe, protecting the lungs from infection. It is also found to be responsible for the production of up t

Episode # 3 What’s Your Control Pause & How’s Your Breathing Hi, this is Michael Lingard bringing you the third episode of Better Breathing Means Better Health entitled “What’s Your Control Pause & How’s Your Breathing” Now you know your control pause, what does it mean and how can you improve on it? If your control pause was under 10 seconds you are breathing almost 3 to 4 times more than normal and need to try to change this urgently because medicine will not change your breathing, but will simply control symptoms. If you achieved 20 to 25 seconds with your comfortable breath hold, your breathing is about 2 to 3 times more than normal. A control pause of 25 to 35 seconds still means you are over-breathing, almost twice much as you need but you will only have problems when under stress or hit by any of the triggers that make your condition worse. If your control pauses 35 to 45 seconds it is good for most people, but you will still benefit from improved breathing in many other ways. It is very unlik

Episode # 5 “Getting Started” Hi! This is Michael Lingard bringing you episode five of “Better Breathing Means Better Health” entitled “Getting Started”. Now have completed one Buteyko exercise you can begin to do more on a daily basis using the booklet “The Buteyko Guide to Better Breathing & Better Health” you should have purchased from Lulu.com by now. If you don’t have the booklet you can download a worksheet to print off copies from HERE Try to do at least one exercise in the morning and perhaps two in the evening, you can choose how long you spend doing the reduced breathing depending on how much time you can spare. If you want a short exercise that will take less than 10 minutes make the reduced breathing just three minutes long each time but if you have time you will get better results with a reduced breathing of five minutes each time giving you an exercise that will take about 15 minutes. You should find each time you do an exercise your control pause will rise from start to finish, and your pul

Episode # 2 “Why Most of Us Need Breath Training” Hi, this is Michael Lingard bringing you the second episode of Better Breathing Means Better Health entitled “Why Most of Us Need Breath Training” The fact that you are listening to this second episode tells me you know this is true and that you are wondering whether you could benefit yourself. I have been teaching the Buteyko Method of breath training for over fifteen years and have been delighted to see what a great help it has been to all those I have taught but it has also been a disappointment to me that this powerful health promoting work has not gained mainstream medical support. There may be many reasons for this lack of interest from the medical establishment and the public at large but two main ones come to my mind. As regards the medical establishment there is a bias towards disease management and treatment rather than health education and promotion, and with something so radical as this, they demand more scientific research before committing resour

Episode # 1 Your Breathing, The Most Neglected Factor in Health and DiseaseFor the people and doctors in the East this is no revelation as Eastern medicine and health care has always paid great attention to the quality of breathing. This is not a surprise when you think that we can live without food for three weeks, without water for three days but we can only survive three minutes without air. Surely just based on this fact alone, we should give more attention to our breathing?Learn more before you start on this course at just click HEREDuring this course you will learn how improved breathing will benefit many diseases including: asthma, allergies, angina, anxiety, circulatory problems, depression, gut problems, hay fever, hypertension, IBS, migraines, ME, panic attacks, skin problems and many more.The common factor in all these conditions is that the individual has developed a bad habit of breathing too much all the time, very often because of stress, some trauma, diet, or other lifestyle problems.You will