Dr. Artour Rakhimov: It’s also that we breathe right now so that to get more oxygen flow in my mind, inside my brain, inside my heart muscles, so that they can function better. But didn’t people more -- because I can do a bit exercise maybe for ten minutes, half an hour, one hour because they may remain part of day, how full day breath? How full day breath during sleep and stress when I am reading the book, when I am writing, working on computer doing some other activities, what will be the optimum breathing patterns for better oxygenation of brain, heart, kidneys, liver, other organs of the human body?
Of course, to find the answer, we need tests. Which tests will be considered? Take the measure of oxygen content in tissue, in blood, inside glands, take a measure of frequency of breathing. We can measure how heavy is our breathing. But all these tests, we need special equipment. But there is one very simple test, which is very sensitive to oxygen levels in the human body inside the tissues exactly what we need. Since my talking and brief on these tests, I am going to explain in full of these tests right now.
We can look at what Dr. Buteyko told about these tests. Oxygen content in the organism can be found using a simple method: after exhalation, observe, how long the person can pause their breath without stress. Dr. Buteyko, Public lecture in the Moscow State University on 9 December 1969. Dr. Buteyko was absolutely right.
Moreover there is a lot of western research that is our breathing holding is indeed very sensitive to oxygen level inside our tissues. And for this reason, I also do these tests with students and find new collections of talks like these because my following collection, my talk, my presentation is based on these tests. These tests are called breath-holding time tests. How do we do the tests? When we do the tests, we can imagine our breathing pattern before the tests is like, we take inhale, and then the exhale, inhale, exhale. It is how we breathe all the time even without thinking.
After one of the exhales, we pins the nose, mouth of course is closed then we hold our breath. But we hold our breath only to feel the desire to breath. It may be ten, 15, 20 seconds depends on the person and oxygen level and when you get the very strong desire, it will be maybe swelling movement or pushes in the diaphragm, then you need to release the nose. If you doing exactly at this movement of time, your breathing pattern will be unchanged. So after the tests, your breathing will be the same as before the test. So it’s easy, comfortable, stress free test.
What the doctors usually do so called maximum time test, breath-holding time test and many people get stressed. In fact, if people are suffering from for example, high blood pressure, panic attacks, migraine headaches, they can get of diseases if we overdo the tests. So for them, particularly important to stopping time. As soon as you feel discomfort, feel stressed, which would be growing in time after this moment, breath-holding time, then we need to immediately release the nose. So this is we call breath-holding time. I write here, breath-holding time.
I did this test thousands of times with many, many people. One day I found, people often do the following mistake. You breathe normally before the test, then they hold their breath, and at this moment of time, they feel real stressed but they but they always do the test may be by two, three, five seconds, a little but stress is already increasing. When they or we do the test, by a little bit, the breathing pattern after the test gets disturbed. We take big inhale -- about stress. This is not correct way of doing the test.
Now this test again very important for this lecture, for understanding discoveries made by Russian spaceship doctor, Dr. Buteyko. Let us do this test together. So how we do the test? When I say three, two, one, you just relax and when I say start, you pin the nose, mouth is closed and we are going to count how much is oxygen in your body, how much is index of oxygenation and breath-holding time. So we can start this test in three seconds, two, one, exhale and start. You can relax, hold your breath, five seconds, ten, 15, 20, it’s enough, you may finish already, 25, 30. Some people have even more than 30, it’s good if you have more than 30 because most people might release it in 20 seconds only.
What must be the normal breath-holding time? Let me quote a sentence from physiology text book. If a person breath-holds after a normal exhalation, it takes about 40 seconds before breathing commences. Essence of exercise physiology 2000. This is a remainder that the test should be done excellently so that we know oxygen level. It’s why the test when we are trying to push ourselves, to stress ourselves, we want to find the oxygen level. What we also know that it’s possible to change breathing pattern so that people get better breath-holding time.
Well, anything apart, I wrote a book, Normal Breathing: the Key to Vital Health. It’s about when you take a breathing test and develop ways to breathe, how breathing relates to diseases, what about different breathing patterns. So in this book, I kept a table and you can look this table online, it’s on my website normalbreathing.com. You can go on big book, chapter 1, whole book is online and you get this big table from western studies telling us that breath-holding in sick people is might be low, if unit of --
Then a few more things. People with asthma, heart disease, COPD, disease, other congestions, they have breath-holding time which is quite short. If people are healthy, breath-holding time should be above 40 seconds but very few people have these days a lot of oxygen in their body.
What Dr. Buteyko did? He developed a method helped in -- one of his pupils wrote a PhD thesis about these tests and he proved that this test in fact is much more informative, sensitive to the health of people. In sick people, who do the short breath-holding time can be as low as 5, 7 seconds, whereas in healthy people, it’s up to 25, 30, and 35. And in about 100 years ago, this table shows there are statistics done about 100 years ago on breath-holding time because it doesn’t seem, breath-holding time was up to 46, 49, 47, and 45. Just imagine that -- and we can imagine that something happened with our breathing during 100 years and we’re going to discuss this question next.
But right now, the question which we need to ask ourselves will be, how breath-holding time is index of oxygenation, it relates to the breathing pattern, how should they breathe at rest so that my oxygen content in the brain, heart, in muscle, other organs is high. Maybe I should have fast breathing, shallow breathing, deep breathing, may be I should sigh, or their some duration of breath-holds in between. So what will be the best breathing pattern at rest in order to provide optimum oxygenation? This is the subject of the next part of my book.
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