Dr. Artour Rakhimov: First let us consider how should we breathe when we are healthy so that we have good breath-holding time. What is the breathing pattern according to medical and physiological text books? So let us put as a diagram, the amount of air in our lungs, we will get the following pattern. We take inhale, it takes about two seconds for inhale. We take about half of liter of air, very small amount. Then we relax with exhale. The exhalation is longer, about three, four seconds. Here have a period of normal breathing, so called automatic pause when we do nothing, we just relax. Then we take another inhale and we exhale and the relaxation, the cycles repeat itself. Inhale, exhalation, this is our breathing at rest, for example during sleep when we are not involved in any activity.
If we try to measure how many liters of air we breathe, it’s only about 4, 6 liters for one minute, it’s a very small amount as we can imagine. Breath-holding time is 40, 60 seconds. Breathing is easy and relaxed. The breathing ingredient will be probably about 10, 12 liters per minute. If you have very healthy friends you can observe his breathing, it’s invisible and inaudible so that if you try to see, if you try to listen then you can not. Might be there are very, very small movements in the belly part observable.
This is what Lao Tze, Chinese Philosopher told about breathing of healthy people. The perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing, Lao Tze, Chinese Philosopher. What about breathing of sick people? This table is from my book, Normal Breathing: the Key to Vital Health. It has a result of western statistics about breathing of sick people, how heavy it is, minute ventilation, how many liters per minute they need. So we can see here the – for example patients with chronic heart failure, heart diseases, they breathe about 10, 15, 20 liters per minute. Another statistic, average minute ventilation, 16 liters per minute. Another one; 14, diabetes; 10-20, asthma; 15, 14, 12. There are many other conditions when breathing is about 2, 3, 4 times heavier.
So if we try to put this pattern here on this diagram, how will it look like? Sick people take inhale, which is bigger and deeper, then they exhale quite quickly, then they take another inhale and the exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. So what we can see? There are two big differences. First of all, their breathing is bigger, they take more air, up to one liter for one breath. What they’ll do next? They forcefully exhale the air out, they don’t have a period of relaxation, they don’t have automatic pause. Now if we try to write the rate, it will be about 15 liters per minute. Breath-holding time index of oxygenation, for example patients with mild heart disease or mild asthma, it’s about 15 seconds.
Now we can also think about breathing of severely sick people, people who are in critical care, in emergency, those who have for example heart attacks, asthma attacks, what about their breathing? Their breathing pattern is even heavier. They breathe even faster and even deeper. Sick people breathe about may be 15, 20 liters per minute. Severely sick people can breath even heavy, and it can be more than 25 liters per minute, while the breath-holding time is only 5 seconds. If you have friends with various health issues, you can see that their breathing is heavy.
Healthy people as I mentioned have very light easy breathing pattern, it’s invisible and inaudible. Sick people what we can often see that the chest is moving. If the chest is moving, breath-holding time would be less than 26. Sometimes, we see that people, they have such a breathing pattern so that their shoulders start moving, then breath-holding time will be probably less than ten seconds. And very rarely, we can see a person whose head is moving and breath-holding time will be five seconds or less. These people are really in a very bad health state.
Now we can move and think about breathing of people who are very healthy. Let’s think about Hatha yoga masters. Hatha yoga is one of the schools and the main parameter of these masters or Hatha yoga masters was to have very high breath-holding time. Hatha means master of breath. Breath-holding time of Hatha yoga master is supposed to be 3, 5 or more minutes. So what about their breathing? If I try to put a diagram here, it will be the following. They take small inhale, and they have long relaxed exhale, then we take their next inhale, it is again long relaxed exhale. They breathe only about 2 liters per minute but breath-holding time is 3 minutes. So it looks unusual. How it is possible that those people who breathe very little have a lot of oxygen in their body? Those people who breathe very heavy have only 5 seconds of oxygen? We are going to investigate this paradox later.
Now let us think about some other patterns which are not normal. Here is some regular patterns, periodic one. How then if people cough, sneeze, yawn, sigh, and those other things those make breathing irregular, sometimes we are laughing. When people have self talk, when they talk with themselves in a type of anxiety, their breathing pattern can be also very irregular. But as soon as breathing in quite heavy in terms of minute ventilation, how many liters per minute they breathe, their breath-holding time is going to be short.
Do people know that their breathing is heavy? In fact if a person breathes about 15 liters per minute, he would not or she would not tell that her or his breathing in heavy, why? Because air is weightless and our breathing muscles chest and diaphragm, they are very strong. With maximum exercise, we can breathe up to 150 liters per minute, hence sick people breathe only about 10% of the maximum capacity. That means it’s quite easy, just 10% of maximum capacity, so normally they will not notice. People usually tell that their breathing is heavy when it’s 25 liters per minute or even more. But in health, we should breathe only about 3%, 4% of our maximum capacity. In fact as you can see here, Hatha yoga people breathe almost nothing, just 1%, slightly more than 1% of maximum capacity, which is possible during physical exercise.
We can also think about efficiency of our breathing. How efficient we are in terms of extracting oxygen? Do we take all oxygen in? In fact healthy people with medical physiological norms are able to extract only about quarter of oxygen, three quarter exhaled back. Sick people, they use only about 10% of oxygen, 90% is exhaled back. So we can also think that heavy breathing is very inefficient in the clinical terms. But there is another even more important factor why sick people with heavy breathing have low oxygenation? In order to find this factor, we have to consider physiology of oxygen transfer.
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