Never underestimate the power of a proper breathing technique. I’ve just been reading an article on college students who were found to be suffering from (EIA) exercise induced asthma but never had a history of asthma. Out of the 107 students that were tested 42 (39%) tested positive for EIA.
How can this be?
Does exercising increase the chance of you having an exercise induced asthma attack or does it increase the chance even if you’ve never had asthma before?
And if this is the case wouldn’t it be better for all asthma sufferers to avoid exercise like the plague and just become couch potatoes because it’s safer for there health?
It would make sense, right?
The reason I felt I had to write this article was that in its findings the article never considered how the students were breathing as they exercised and could this be the cause of the EIA’s.
Because we all breathe every day of our lives we assume that we know how to breathe properly but as I’ve said before in some of my other articles the population generally has got lazy with their breathing technique.
We try to take shortcuts here and there to avoid effort and our bodies adapt and after a time we think what we’re doing is the norm.
If we take exercise as an example, how do you breathe as you train?
Do you breathe in gasps and gulps with a mouth that’s wide open or do you have control over yourself and continue to breathe through your nose?
Because this could be the trick to avoiding exercise induced asthma!
Yes, such a simple thing as nose breathing!
We were all given a nose for a reason and that was to breathe through and nothing else.
Your mouth is to talk and put food in and nothing else.
By not breathing through the nose you lose out on all important functions that it gives us like
1. Filtering the air that goes into your body: As you know the air that we breathe everyday contain more things than just air, it contains dust particles and pollution. Your nose is covered on the inside with small hairs and has a lining or mucus to catch all of this before it enters the airways and your lungs. (That’s why we sneeze to get rid of these particles.)
2. Regulating the intake of air: There is also a reason why the opening of your nose is a lot smaller than the opening of your mouth and that is to regulate the quantity of air coming in. Your body and lungs can only process so much oxygen and by breathing through the nose you give it as much as it needs.
3. Control the levels of CO2: Believe it or not but carbon dioxide plays an important part in a healthy body. We all assume that because we breathe in out that it’s a waste product and we don’t use it but the level of co2 is very important. A high level of carbon dioxide causes the muscles and airways to relax and so eases the flow of air and blood in the body.
By mouth breathing you allow too much carbon dioxide to escape through your mouth and your body reacts by closing down you airways to hold onto as much as it can. Which can then lead to you suffering from exercise induced asthma.
While this may seem a simple thing to do by just reverting over to nose breathing when you exercise rather than mouth breathing you may find it difficult to do but keep with it, it does pay off.
But be aware that you’re performance will probably drop for a couple of weeks until your body adapts to this way of breathing before your running times start to come down again.
Remember keep you mouth shut! (and I mean that in the nicest way possible.)
