Buteyko Breathing - Not Just For Asthma

[AAorris]

trux, thank you for those links! I did a search before starting the thread, but I did not find most of those threads!

I hope, then, that this can be a dedicated thread for discussing the Buteyko method and its relevance to apnea. I think normalbreathing.com is an important web site to consider when discussing it, written by Artour Rakhimov, someone who worked with Buteyko himself I believe. He describes functions we're already familiar with, such as the Bohr effect(Bohr Effect and Cell Oxygenation: Healthy vs. Sick People), vasoconstriction, and others. It may help understand why high level apneists will breath normal, or less than normal before a hold: that it's not just for higher CO2, but that the higher CO2 will help oxidize tissues and muscles and increase time before hypoxia-induced blackout.

Seeing auras aside, does this seem at all true to anyone?

 

[Mullins]

Of course the Bohr effect is true - most of us have experimented with its effects extensively. The effects of hyperventilation are also pretty well known. Tachycardia, cerebral vasoconstriction etc.

What normalbreathing.com adds to the discussion is the assertion that many diseases are caused by chronic hyperventilation, and cured by deliberate hypoventilation. Worth checking out in medical literature if you have the time, though I strongly suspect it may be a load of rubbish.

Given the Bohr effect etc are truisms, the only relevance to freediving is the idea that mild long-term hypoventilaton might give you better CO2 tolerance. Not sure how you're going to achieve this since breathing rate switches back to being regulated by the brain-stem whenever you stop thinking about it, and I don't think it will help your freediving either (CO2 tolerance doesn't seem to change much, and the changes you do get in freediving come from more intense, specific and transient training stimuli). But try it, and let us know how you get on.