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 their 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. Could this be the cause of the EIA?

Because we all breathe every day of our lives we assume we know how to breathe properly, but as I've said before in some of my other articles, the population has generally gotten lazy with their breathing techniques. We try to take shortcuts here and there to avoid effort, our bodies adapt and after a time we think what we're doing is the norm.

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 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. The mouth is to talk with and put food in. By not breathing through the nose you lose out on all the important functions that it gives us like:

Filtering The Air That Goes Into The Body

The air that breathed in everyday contains more than just air, it contains dust particles and pollution. The nose is covered on the inside with small hairs and has a lining of mucus to catch all of this before it enters the airways and lungs. (That's why we sneeze to get rid of these particles.)

Regulating Air Intake

There is also a reason why the opening of the nose is a lot smaller than the opening of the mouth, and that is to regulate the quantity of air coming in. The body and lungs can only process so much oxygen. Breathing through the nose gives the body as much oxygen as it needs.

Controling Carbon Dioxide Levels

Believe it or not, carbon dioxide plays an important part for a healthy body. We all assume that breathing out is a waste product and that isn't used, but carbon dioxide levels are very important. A high level of carbon dioxide causes muscles and airways to relax and so eases the flow of air and blood in the body. Mouth breathing allows too much carbon dioxide to escape through the mouth and the body reacts by closing down airways to hold onto as much of it as it can, which can then lead to EIA.

While reverting to nose breathing when you exercise rather than mouth breathing may seem like a simple thing to do, you may find it difficult. Keeping with it will pay off. But be aware that performance will probably drop for a couple of weeks until the body adapts to this way of breathing. Remember, keep your mouth shut! (I mean that in the nicest way possible.) 

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