Asthma Episode #3 What’s Your Control Pause & How’s Your Breathing?
Welcome back to episode three of escape from asthma entitled “What's your control pause and how is your breathing?”
Now you know your control pause, what does it mean and how can you improve on it?
As an asthma sufferer I will be surprised if your control was much higher than 20 seconds as most patients I have taught with asthma have a control pause in the teens anything from 13 to 19 seconds.
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 your medicine will not change your breathing, but will simply control the 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 asthma worse.
If your control pauses 35 to 45 seconds it is good for any asthma sufferer, but you will still benefit from improved breathing in many other ways.
It is very unlikely that your control pause was over 45 seconds as this would mean your breathing would be normal, a very rare situation for any asthmatic.
A control pause of 45 to 60 seconds is what we should all try to achieve and this will be the target for this full training course.
If you have any doubts that your asthma is not due largely to over-breathing you could try and purposefully breathed heavily for a minute or so and you will properly feel many of your symptoms coming on. You may in fact need to take medication to help reduce the symptoms after this exercise. However I would not recommend this procedure except under the supervision of your doctor or asthma nurse.
You may have been given two types of medication, Reliever medication that you can use whenever you feel tight chested or wheezy, this opens the airways but also increases your breathing rate.
If you are using the reliever medication more than twice a week you will have been given a Controller medication, this is a steroid that will reduce inflammation of the airways and calm your breathing down. You may have been told to take the controller medication on a regular basis, if so, that is what you have to do until your breathing has improved so much that you don't need any reliever medication and don't have any symptoms. At that stage you can discuss with your doctor ways of reducing your controller medication safely. At the end of this course we will also give you advice on how to do this.
So just to let you know what the rest of this course will cover I’ll give you an outline of the next episodes.
Already you have been advised to try to always breathe through your nose and not to mouth breathe. However many people find it difficult to nose breathe because it is congested or stuffy, this is in part because they haven't been using their nose in the past and as the old saying goes “If you don't use it, you lose it!” So the next episode will tell you how to unblock and clear your nose to get it back to perfect working order. Later you will be told to download a free workbook that summarizes most of the course content and you will use it to record your exercises.
You will learn how to reduce your breathing through relaxation, you will have advice on good posture for better breathing and what is the best way of avoiding over breathing when asleep.
You will learn how to check your pulse, how to reduce coughing bouts and a later episode will explain how certain foods may cause a problem for asthmatics, and you will be given a dietary screening that will help you improve your diet at the same time that will improve your breathing.
You will learn how to avoid mouth breathing when talking and how to use the control pause or reduced breathing as an alternative to your reliever medication. Towards the end you wil