Being confronted with asthma in my close surroundings, I decided to have a closer look at it with regards to yoga.

Does yoga help when you suffer from asthma ?

After reading up about it on the net and of course drawing on my own knowledge about yoga I’ve come to the conclusion that yoga can definitely alleviate symptoms and sometimes prevent them. With a regular yoga practice and breathing exercises, after some time, it might be possible to diminish your intake of medication and who knows down the line stop taking them altogether. Always in accordance with your general practitioner of course.

To explain how yoga helps when you suffer from asthma, we first have to take a closer look at what asthma is exactly.

Asthma is a disease that causes the airways of the lungs to tighten.

An asthma attack is when your lungs aren’t getting enough air to breathe. Your might be having an asthma attack when you have:

* Trouble breathing
* Wheezing
* Coughing
* Chest pain
* Chest tightness

The reason or thing that causes your asthma attack is called a trigger. These triggers can be different for everybody.

Triggers can be everywhere. Different triggers can be mold, dust mites, cats and dogs, secondhand smoke.

Other asthma triggers may be air pollution (such as ozone, small particles, and pollen), allergies to foods, respiratory infections and also exercise can trigger off an asthma attack.

Stress and, or strong emotions can trigger an attack or episode.

From what I understand you can safely say that when you suffer from asthma you breathe too much too quick, you draw too much oxygen into the body, more than you need, and as a result of that you breathe out too much carbon dioxide. most likely than your carbon dioxide levels are getting too low.

If CO2 levels get too low, the hemoglobin that carries oxygen through the blood becomes too “sticky” and doesn’t release sufficient oxygen to the cells. So what this means is that when you take in too much oxygen, paradoxically enough you deprive your body of oxygen which has a debilitating effect on your overall health and can cause asthma and other (airway) diseases in the long run.

So somewhere down the line you started to breathe too much and that becomes a habit in itself. The body gets used to drawing so much oxygen in, a habit forms and the body will need to keep breathing too much to maintain the levels.

To counteract this, we need to breathe less. We need to change our breathing pattern, relax the body and balance the body so that we don’t need to take in that amount of oxygen anymore. Thats where yoga can come in.

A daily routine of yoga exercises, and specifically some exercises that work on relaxing the nervous system, opening your chest, and balancing you in general will be beneficial.

I will soon come up with a sequence in the yoga video section for that.

For specific breathing exercises that will help you breath less, heighten the Co2 levels in your body and through that to improve the delivery of oxygen to the body cells, I recommend to read up about the Buteyko breathing method. You can find information about it on the net, also you can, most likely, find books about it in you local library.

Hope this helps,

Esther