What is Buteyko Breathing?

Buteyko Breathing is a breathing therapy that trains your body to breathe less. Just as eating or drinking too much affects our health, breathing too much can cause health issues. Training your body to breathe less can actually help your body deliver oxygen more efficiently.

In the 1950’s, when training to be a doctor, Dr. Buteyko noticed that the more critically ill a patient was, the more they breathed. He saw patients near death taking big gasping breaths, while getting less and less oxygen. It just didn’t seem to make sense why breathing more led to less oxygen. He hypothesized that lowered carbon dioxide levels, or hyperventilation, from breathing too much were to blame for their worsening condition.

He was then also struggling with his own serious problem with dangerously high blood pressure. Experimenting on himself, he soon trained himself to breathe less and had shortly healed himself completely.

After completing his medical studies, he went on to conduct clinical trials that confirmed his theory. He developed his method and went on to help many patients with asthma and other serious illnesses to improve or reverse their sickness, including his wife.

To summarize what the method actually consists of, firstly it is a completely non-invasive method of retraining a person’s breathing by doing daily exercises. During practice, there is focus on reducing both the volume breathed in and out, as well as how fast a person breathes.

Nasal breathing is emphasized – in fact, scientific evidence is mounting of the importance of always breathing through our nose. Not only does nasal breathing instantly decrease the volume of our breaths, but our nose humidifies the air and nitric oxide is produced when we breathe through our nose. Nitric oxide itself has a host of beneficial effects in our body.

Dr. Buteyko documented over 200 diseases that could be caused by over-breathing and thus, improved or reversed with Buteyko breathing. Among them are asthma, migraines and headaches, hypertension (high blood pressure), chronic fatigue, insomnia, COPD, and many more. Curious? Contact us for a free consultation to learn more about whether Buteyko is right for you!