Dr. Artour Rakhimov is a health practitioner and the author of books on yoga, cystic fibrosis, cancer, breathing techniques, and many other topics. He teaches and promotes methods and lifestyle changes that increase brain and body oxygenation: how to unblock a nose, fall asleep fast, stop coughing, relieve constipation, get rid of cramps, and deal with chronic diseases that are based on low body O2 content. Dr. Rakhimov is also a Buteyko breathing teacher (since 2002 up to now) and trainer, and the inventor of the Amazing DIY Breathing Device. He is the author of the largest world’s website devoted to breathing retraining for higher body O2.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Dr. Artour Rakhimov about breathing better to achieve better health.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How retraining your breathing is crucial for addressing health issues and achieving optimal breathing patterns.
– How the Buteyko method focuses on reducing breathing to increase oxygen levels in the body.
– Why proper breathing techniques are essential for optimizing oxygen intake for overall well-being.
– How physical exercise plays a key role in maintaining good health and is important for long-term health maintenance.
– How nose breathing during physical exercise can lead to health benefits by impacting CO2 levels and nitric oxide production.
Connect with Artour:
Guest Contact Info
Links Mentioned:
normalbreathing.com
Connect with Steven:
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Could the way you breathe be hurting not only your health, but even your performance? Do you breathe in then out, or you do breathe out then in? Whichever one you do could make a difference. Kidding, that has nothing to do with it. But you’re going to find out more on this episode of The Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Typically starting with the feet first because those things are your foundation, but now we’re going to get into your lungs, which are in a way also your foundation. Without your lungs working, feet don’t really matter too much. So, this is the podcast for you all who want to know what it takes to run, to walk, to hike, to do yoga, CrossFit, you name it. Enjoyably, healthily, efficiently… And if you’re already part of what we’re doing, thanks for being here.
If you don’t know what we’re doing, we’re creating a movement movement. We’re trying to make natural movement the obvious, better, healthy choice the way natural food is. And we call it a movement movement because, well, the first part is about movement, the second part is that it’s about you creating this movement. So, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, to find out all the different places that you can engage with this on YouTube and Facebook and Spotify and iTunes and everywhere that you get your podcast. You know how to do that. And leave reviews, and tell your friends, and hit the bell on YouTube so you find out about new episodes. You know how to do all this stuff, I don’t need to tell you.
So, I think that’s all the announcements. This is part two on breathing, but this one’s going to be a whole different game. And so, let me introduce our guest for today. Or actually, Artour, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself so it sounds less boring than if I tried to just read some of your resume.
Artour Rakhmov:
Okay. Thank you, Steven. Yeah, I’m a breathing teacher, trainer and author of 10 books on Amazon and I have been teaching breathing training and the Buteyko method for about 20 years now.
Steven Sashen:
And more importantly, you have a website. You may as well tell people where that is right now before we forget.
Artour Rakhmov:
Normalbreathing.com. So what we teach here actually in order to be healthy… And actually I know by now that we can solve virtually any health problem, even the most difficult ones, if a person is able to retrain their breath. And all they need to achieve is just to achieve the medical norm for breathing. Very simple.
Steven Sashen:
So this is an interesting idea. So it’s normalbreathing.org, and I think that the idea of normal breathing is intriguing. So why don’t we start with the simple thing. What do you see people doing with their breathing that is not “normal”? And then we’ll talk about normal and what they can do about that.
Artour Rakhmov:
Yeah, excellent. Of course common question. What I mean by norm, there is a medical norm that was established about 100 years ago. And since then, you can find it in many medical textbooks, although I can see that during the last probably two/three decades, some medical textbooks started to change this norm in a way to adjust it to modern population. Why I’m saying that? Well, because the norm that was established 100 years ago, let’s say we can talk about only one parameter right now, such as minute ventilation. So how many liters of air we require in one minute, and this is for a 70 kilogram person at rest sitting. That would be kind of the standard situation. And the norm that was established about 100 years ago when respiratory science started, first textbooks appeared, was six liters per minute.
Steven Sashen:
So six liters per minute for 150/155 pound individual just sitting at rest. And they’re measuring that with a respirometer or some other device?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, we use some devices you need to collect. We try to develop now techniques when we do it without invasion, non-invasive techniques as well. But I don’t know yet. It may appear quite soon because technology is progressing fast. But going back to your question, actually I did not finish another part. So we have a medical norm, six liters per minute. And that means that this number was common 100 years ago just for ordinary people. And there are indeed a lot of studies. So very, very long time ago. But if we look at modern people, we know by now that a typical average number for a current person, for a contemporary person, is about 12 liters of air.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, before I ask you the question of what changed, I need to back up and do something I should have done at the beginning and say two things. First, I just want to comment that the reason that we even got together for this conversation is because someone who listened to the podcast suggested that we chat. So I’m saying that just as a plug for anyone who’s listening or watching, if there’s anyone you think should be part of The Movement Movement Podcast, drop me a note at [email protected]. Secondly, just for people who haven’t put two and two together, clearly from your accent, you’re from, I’m guessing, Alabama or-
Artour Rakhmov:
No. From my second name, Rakhimov, so I grew up in Russia in Soviet Union, and I studied in the Moscow State University. I came to Canada old 25 and a half years ago.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Yes, I can hear that Canadian accent. Just say A with a Russian accent, that’ll make the difference. All right, so backing up to twice as many liters per minute for a normal person now. What changed that “normal” is now 12 liters per minute?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, it’s a very right and very long question of course because generally, of course, lifestyle factors we changed a lot. And we can kind of approach this very important question hundreds of times probably from students and during lecture talks. People ask why we now breathe about twice more than 100 years ago. So we can consider this question from two viewpoints. We can consider why modern people breathe much more. And for many people, there are many lifestyle factors. I can list maybe 7/10 different factors. Such factors as, for example, modern people have tendency to sleep on the back a lot. Very unhealthy factor. There are plenty of medical research, up to probably 26/27 studies. Actually, any study which I found — and I found around 26/27 of them — which compare the different sleep position like horizontal positions of course I’m talking about now, we all found that supine sleep was the worst sleep position in terms of reducing negative health attacks like for asthma, heart disease, diabetes, bruxismal snoring, sleep apnea, you name it. Whatever conditions we tested, all studies found-
Steven Sashen:
I mean, I can imagine why sleeping on your back would be problematic for snoring or for sleep apnea, but for things like asthma, what’s the mechanism that’s causing these problems?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, basically what happens when we sleep on our back, our breath is not restricted. So we can breathe more because once you sleep on the chest left or right side, you kind of suppress your breath. So you are not able to breathe as heavily. And this is exactly what you would see in hospitals. If you go to hospitals, you go through the wards in a hospital, you’ll see that sick people, 99% of them, will be sleeping on the back. And healthy people, it’s true. In the past, of course, it was extremely uncommon for people to sleep on the back, but that’s only one of the factor.
I started with this one because when I start to work with students, this is what I start to talk to them first about sleep because sleep factors are extremely influential. We spend an average seven and a half, eight hours for sleep. This is how much we spend. And therefore you can imagine that the effects of sleep is actually very strong. And when people don’t know how to sleep well and we can lot of fruits, not only sleeping, barefoot walking would be one of them of course. And eating and level of physical exercise, sleeping on the back, mouth breathing extremely common for modern people, especially during sleep. And if a person wakes up and feels that mouth is dry, that’s very, very strong indication that they actually were mouth breathing during sleep.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so backing up, what is it about breathing more, getting more liters per minute worth of airflow that causes problems from your perspective?
Artour Rakhmov:
Yeah, that’s another very important question. Doctors call it hyperventilation. And I spoke with, again, thousands of people that I know from my experience, and I was an example myself, let’s say, 20 years ago when I started all this research and looking into the topic, I also thought the more you breathe, the more oxygen you get. And you can hear take a deep breath assuming that you’re supposed to get more oxygen when you take a deep breath. So in medicine, they call it hyperventilation and there are hundreds and hundreds of studies dating as back as 150 years ago, which proved and show that the more you breathe, the less oxygen you get in a state of rest or sitting or lying or without doing any physical activity.
Steven Sashen:
So it’s so funny you say this. I was thinking about this last night completely independent of our pending conversation that when people talk about breathing and getting more oxygen, I love to point out that 80% of what you’re breathing is nitrogen and then oxygen is a small piece of that. So you’re not going to be getting a whole lot more. But I mean typically when I think of hyperventilation, it’s literally breathing so quickly that you’re increasing carbon dioxide in the body and you’re becoming hypoxic. So at a certain level, you’re definitely having less oxygen because you’re blowing off more carbon dioxide, which sets off a whole metabolic chain of events.
But for just going from, say — I’m going to make up a number — from X number of breaths per minute to 2X, that doesn’t necessarily move you into that same hyperventilated state where carbon dioxide is… You’re just basically blowing off carbon dioxide like crazy when you do that. So is there a line where a little bit more is okay, then you’re going over that threshold where suddenly you’re blowing off CO2? Got it. Yes. I was at some point going to point out that we need to talk about that chart behind you.
Artour Rakhmov:
So people actually can kill themselves. And these experiments were done also 140/150 years ago.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, I got to pause right there. So this is going to sound totally creepy to many, many people. So let me preface this by saying I don’t have any issues about death and dying. When people have a terminal illness, I’m not someone who goes, “Oh, my God.” I’m typically someone who says, “Wow, this could be very exciting.” I had a conversation. I bumped into an old friend. I said, “How are you doing?” She kind of pulls me aside in Whole Foods. She pulls me aside and she goes, “Well, I have ovarian cancer at stage four.” And literally the first thing out of my mouth was, “Wow, that must be very exciting.” And then she looks around somewhat conspiratorially and she goes, “Actually, it is because I’m only doing things that I like. I’m only hanging out with people who support me. It’s really been an amazing time.”
Now that’s the preface for this weird statement. I have a video of my father 12 hours before he died. He had coded, they paddled him back. He really wasn’t doing very well. And that last 12 hours, when I went in to see him 12 hours before he died… Actually, wait. I take it back. I took this video just a couple hours before he died. He’s lying on his back and he’s breathing totally into his chest at about 20 breaths per minute. And I turned to a nurse and I said, “If he keeps doing this, he’s going to be dead within a couple hours.” And he was. So anyway, back to your chart. I had to interject with my personal experience of that.
Artour Rakhmov:
This is actually how Dr. Buteyko started his journey in terms of exploration of breath. His first discovery was actually when people die, they die because of hyperventilation. And actually nurses and other doctors in the hospital where he worked because he was practicing just before getting his medical license after five years of study, three years of extra study, he got some PhD research and so on. But when he was already almost ready to go doctor, he was described by nurses and other doctors as shaman or voodoo doctor who could predict how soon people were going to die just because he observed their breath. He realized that with approaching death, people breathed more and more. Often we show it actually in movies. If you watch old movies, there are relatives around and goes… And last breath and we pass out.
And this is true. I found several medical studies as well on cancer, metastatic cancer, people dying from cancer, people dying from HIV, from cystic fibrosis. And in cancer studies, we actually have studies where we show exactly the same parameters which are predicted by the Buteyko Table of Health where we see that cancer patients have very high chances to die if the respiratory frequency is more than 30. This is RF, respiratory frequency. If pulse gets higher and higher, more than 100, and their breath holding time becomes five seconds or less. So it’s very, very short.
Steven Sashen:
My father wasn’t holding his breath at all. It’s just in and out. It’s super fast.
Artour Rakhmov:
Absolutely. And this looks like total paradox, but this is exactly true that if somebody breathes heavy and you ask them to hold breath, and in a way you can assume that it probably would relate to how much oxygen we have. So if you are not able to hold breath, if it’s five seconds or less, that means they have critically low level of oxygen. And this is what, again, many studies show that severely sick people, heart disease, HIV, cancer, diabetes, you name it, asthma.
Steven Sashen:
So backing up a little bit. So it looks like looking at that chart, there is a place where a certain amount of additional breathing is not problematic, but then you go over into what we most likely think of as hyperventilation, where you’re blowing off so much CO2, that’s the thing that’s causing a problem?
Artour Rakhmov:
It’s a stepwise process. So the medical norm, if we look at this table, would be exactly on this health level five. So this is health level five. And so the respiratory frequency medical norm 12 means 12 breaths a minute. This is what medical textbooks would say.
Steven Sashen:
Wow, they think that a full breath in five seconds is normal?
Artour Rakhmov:
In and out in five seconds, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Wow, that seems ridiculous.
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, it was again common 100 years ago. So we can say whatever we like, but you are right. Ordinary people these days would have about 15. So we would be somewhere here. And the breath holding time would be about twice less, about 20 seconds. How we do it, we breathe more frequently and we also take a little bit more air for one breath. So instead of normal 500 milliliters, so half liter let’s say medical normal… Well, you can imagine a small bottle, plastic bottle, they take about 8 to 900 milliliters. So about 50% more.
Steven Sashen:
So I’m imagining that people right now might be thinking, all right… Before we get into what we would need to do to affect this, people might be wondering two things. One, how do I determine where I am? And it seems like the simple version is just sit down and rest and… This is a very hard thing to do, is to try and count your breaths without altering how you’re breathing. So you might want to have a partner just watch you while you’re doing it.
Artour Rakhmov:
Yeah. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, exactly. Once people start to count beyond breathing, they often can get numbers about, let’s say, twice less than the real respiratory frequency or breathing rate. But what Dr. Buteyko found, and I believe this is absolutely true, there’s a simple, we call it body oxygen test or control pause test, which is highlighted here in gray, which actually gives more accurate results in comparison with respiratory frequency because some people may breathe a little bit faster, but they have smaller volume for breath. And some people may breathe maybe less frequently and they have bigger volumes. So they would end up with a similar amount of carbon dioxide. So physiologically, they would be similar from the just CO2 viewpoint.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. And so what’s that column talking about then?
Artour Rakhmov:
The control pause — we also call it the body oxygen test or body oxygen measurement — allows us to evaluate very easily anytime for virtually, I could say, probably 97 or 99% of people would not get any problems because this test is done without any stress. So what you do, sit down, rest for five minutes, calm down, your heart rate would calm down, so your breathing would become regular.
Steven Sashen:
I’m relaxing now. Okay.
Artour Rakhmov:
Now you exhale. Ordinary exhalation or just ordinary exhale, pinch the nose and count how many seconds you can hold your breath without stress. So if you start-
Steven Sashen:
After exhaling?
Artour Rakhmov:
After exhalation, yeah. This is hard test because you need to have ordinary usual exhalation. That means about 2 to 2.2 liters of air left in the lungs — of course lungs are never empty. And then you count stress free. Stress free means you do it without stress. As soon as stress appears, release the nose and watch how you breathe after the test because if you overdo the test, you’ll take deeper breath. So you would notice if you’re 2, 3, 5 seconds long because once stress appears, it starts to grow. More and more stress, you can push yourself twice… Most people can do it twice longer, but we don’t want it. We want to have totally stress free tests. And this number actually, if we look again at many, many medical studies, they would tell you that 100 years ago, it was common to have about 40 up to 50 seconds. There are many studies published. 40 to 50 seconds.
Now these days, I done this test probably with thousands of people, lectures and so on and students as well, if you’re relatively healthy people, it’s around 20/25. Rarely 30/35 like maybe some other kind of really healthy people. But for sick people, it’s always below 20 seconds. So it’s less than 20 seconds. Asthma, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, any lifestyle disease.
Steven Sashen:
So first of all, some people are listening to this and not watching. I should have described this. There’s a chart that you’re standing in front of that’s the Buteyko… Wait, what does it say behind? Buteyko Table of Health Zones. So there’s a number of things on this chart that start with super health at the top, then a normal health and then disease health. And one of the things that we talked about was the number of breaths per minute. If you’re super healthy, it’s a lower number than if you’re diseased. Your pulse is lower if you’re super healthy than if you’re diseased. The amount of CO2 that you have is higher actually than if you’re diseased because if you’re diseased, you’re hyperventilating and blowing off CO2.
And what we were just talking about is this body oxygen level, which at the top starts at 180 seconds, three minutes, and goes all the way down to five seconds. Five seconds being diseased, 180 being super healthy. But what you’re describing and what it’s showing for normal is about a 60 seconds. So you’re relaxed, you breathe out comfortably, you hold your nose and see how long you can comfortably hold your non breath, if you will. And it says 60 seconds. But what you’re saying is that you’re seeing healthy people now are in the 20 to 30 second range?
Artour Rakhmov:
About 20/25 I would say if we take ordinary people who do not have major diseases or symptoms or complaints. So relatively healthy people. Really healthy people are extremely rare these days. And that’s what Dr. Buteyko found long time ago what he discovered as well, going back to the very first question that you asked, why people were healthy 100 years ago. I spoke about why we’re sicker because we sleep on the back, we mouth breathe, we have environment like food. Our food may be not so healthy. We have a lot of processed foods and so on. Let’s say we have too little amount of physical exercise.
But if we ask question why people in the past were much healthier, of course all these factors were different, but we can also say that they initially had much large amount of physical exercise. So to have a day as much as, let’s say, six, eight or 10 hours of some labor, which is equivalent to walking or maybe even high metabolism was required, was extremely common because people would do all type of jobs moving all the time around, no cell phones, no computers, no cars. And that of course made lifestyle very different. And according to Dr Buteyko, what he discovered that actually people are able to keep good health, be it 60 or we can say about medical norm 40, only if they have sufficient amount of physical exercise. And I found this is the key long term factor of maintaining good health according to Dr. Buteyko is physical exercise. And this is what makes this system kind of totally different from any medical views on health. So the Dr. Buteyko actually suggested that physical exercise is long-term key for health.
Steven Sashen:
And there’s a lot of information backing that up, even just walking. And one of the theories about the benefits of walking is just increasing circulation, which is increasing oxygenation in the brain and helping with cognition as well. There was a study that was done by Kirk Erickson at the University of Pittsburgh — this is maybe eight or nine years ago. It was actually soon after we started Xero Shoes — that showed elderly people who walk more retain more gray matter in their brain than those who didn’t. I asked him why he thought that was the case. He goes, “Well, when they’re walking more, one thing that’s going on is they’re getting more stimulation in their body from moving. So a lot of internal experience and also just what they’re seeing and feeling and what they have to do to deal with the environment.”
And I said, “Can you imagine how much better that would’ve been if they were walking barefoot and they were actually using their body correctly?” And he says, “Yeah, that’s a really good point.” Now the problem is this was a nine year longitudinal study. It cost a lot of money. And so it wasn’t something they could reproduce right away. There’s no question that physical activity is a big thing. Now I have a joke about that. My joke is that I want to do a video where it’s some guy in a suit and tie walking through a typical office and he says, “Do you like sitting under fluorescent lights staring at computers all day and not moving from your seat for 12 hours at a time? If so, you’re a perfect candidate for a job in the outdoor industry.” And so those of us who started out as highly active people and then start businesses about being highly active, we tend not to be as active as we used to.
But anyway, be that as it may, I want to ask you two questions. The second one, so don’t answer this one yet, is going to be what are you doing with people to get them into normal breathing, healthy breathing? But the first one, given what we talked about of just this simple exercise of exhaling naturally and holding your breath, if you will, while you’re doing that, I know I’m not going to be the first person who brings this up, but this is a big part of what Wim Hof is doing with his breathing where he is actually hyperventilating, having people breathe in and out very quickly. And then after some period of time, exhaling and holding their breath for as long as they can and working on extended times that they can do that. So what are your thoughts about that in relation to what you are doing? And then of course, I want to hear what you’re doing because everyone else is going to want to hear how to be breathing more normally and healthily.
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, in relation to Wim Hof method, we made a review of Wim Hof method and the purpose of Wim Hof method is not actually breathing retraining. He never mentioned that the person should breathe this or this way. So he uses hyperventilation as a way, as he believes, and it’s very possible that this is true, as a way to release in addition to all other positive effects or breath holding that he does to release certain hormones, and hormonal growth. So it seems to be there is research, but probably of course much more could be done in future.
So therefore what happens with Wim Hof, if we think about him asking to do usually 40/50 deep breaths and hold breath and better if you go on the cold water for that as well. So very, very cold water and hold breath maybe two, three minutes. That’s kind of he considers a standard at least for younger, for healthy people to achieve. I believe this is extremely healthy long term because after hyperventilation, you lose CO2, but you hold breath so you get all your CO2 back because of the release of hormones and some additional effects. In my view, you’re going to reduce your breath as a total result or net result of this Wim Hof method. They can use different techniques like the Stanislav Grof technique and I know some other methods as well where they use temporary hyperventilation.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, the Stanislav Grof technique and rebirthing and other things that came out of the ’60s and ’70s in breath holding, that was a very different thing where it was just ongoing hyperventilation where… And I did this 30 years ago, actually 20 something years ago. Oh, wait, how long? Yeah, 30 years ago. The difference there is you are just hyperventilating, hyperventilating. And it’s not uncommon that at a certain point, whether you’ve just breathed, breathed in or out, you’ll see people just stop breathing for minutes at a time just totally relaxed and then just start again very naturally as well. So it’s a different emphasis, but similar idea. Obviously in yoga with pranayama, people have been playing with breath for a long time. So in fact, let me ask that question before I ask you how you work with people. How do you look at those different breath related practices in the context of the Buteyko work?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, our purpose is again to retrain our automatic or unconscious breathing. So this is what this table is about. And what Dr. Buteyko found that I know this is true from my experience with students, that actually is the worst result for this test completely coincides with the exact time when people have highest chances of acute attacks or exacerbations, asthma attack, seizures, heart attack, epilepsy attack. You name it basically. I found 11 or 12 medical studies, epidemiological studies, which found the time of the day when people have, again, highest mortality and highest chances of attacks. And all studies came to the same conclusion regardless of the name of disease and totally different teams of doctors and so on.
We all found that the worst time for the person is, again, we’re going back to sleep — four to seven o’clock in the morning, highest mortality. The so-called early morning hours. And during this time, if you do this test, when you wake up the first thing you open your eyes in the morning, you’re still in horizontal position, you exhale, you pinch the nose. Well, since you’re in horizontal position, you require less oxygen, you produce less CO2, you have less metabolism. Your breath holding time is supposed to be longer because you in addition had hours of rest. But in reality, people actually die most likely during the early morning hours. Doctors and nurses, we know it.
Steven Sashen:
So what you’re suggesting really is that we should all sleep until noon?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, what Dr. Buteyko found, and I found it on our advanced students that I trained, trained as practitioners many of them, that once we get to CP of 60 seconds, and this is Dr. Buteyko norm, which is a bit harder. Medical norm is 40 seconds, Dr. Buteyko norm is 60 seconds. At this level, people normally start to sleep about four hours naturally.
Steven Sashen:
Fascinating. Well, I’m also curious how this may relate to heart rate variability because, for people who don’t know, when you breathe in, your heart rate is supposed to go up a little bit. When you breathe out, it’s supposed to go down a little bit. A friend of mine actually was one of the first people to be able to study heart rate variability in real time. He was the CEO of a company that developed a neoprene vest that just measured everything in real time, heart rate, respiration, et cetera. And in fact, one of the people, if I’m remembering correctly, it was one of the people who was in his company that they’d put the vest on and tested and he had no heart rate variability. And they said, “Get to the hospital right now.”
He got to the hospital and they put him on an EKG. And then he was in surgery for triple bypass 20 minutes later. And so this is also a thing for endurance athletes. There’s some people who use heart rate variability to determine whether or not you’ve recovered from an endurance event because when you’re stressed out, your heart rate variability decreases. The difference between your inhaling heart rate and exhaling heart rate decreases. And so they wait until you’re back to normal, if you will. And this of course relates to breathing. Have you looked into this relationship between HRV and breathing?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, yeah. HRV probably also correlates with the state of the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
Steven Sashen:
That makes sense.
Artour Rakhmov:
And now what happens here is that sympathetic nervous system is responsible for activation of muscles and therefore it’s also responsible for inhalation. When we take this is sympathetic. Parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for relaxation. And when we are healthy, we exhale without any efforts. We do it naturally. What happens if we look at the motion of the diaphragm, because diaphragm according to medical resources should take about each 90% of work of breathing. So work of breathing not is done by chest, by the diaphragm, each 90%. And it’s dome shaped muscles. So what happens when we inhale, we constrict the muscle so it becomes more flat. And in order to exhale, we just let it go so it goes back like a spring. So we pull out the spring like cylinder in a car to get oxygen in the whole lungs. And then we release and it comes back into its original position. Now when we look at respiratory frequency, we already have a short look at this table. So we see what happens here when people have relatively heavy breathing, we don’t have automatic pause.
Steven Sashen:
So what’s that?
Artour Rakhmov:
AP, automatic pause.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Artour Rakhmov:
Automatic pause means you inhale, you exhale. Then if you are healthy, for two seconds, you don’t breathe. Nothing happens. Just for two seconds, total rest. If you get healthier, Buteyko norm is four seconds. If you become yoga master, you breathe three breaths a minute, Dr. Buteyko himself was an example, you have 60 seconds doing nothing. Wow. This is of course really heavy dominance of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for relaxation. So I would expect we did not do measurements like how it relates to HRV numbers, but for this table… For me, it would make sense that of course the heavier we breathe, and we talked about when people die, pulse is 100, respiratory frequency 30. And that means we would have of course very poor results for HRV measurements as well.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. So let’s jump into the part that by now people must be twitching about, which is talk about the training of going back to normal breathing of doing what Dr. Buteyko was teaching and what you’re doing with people.
Artour Rakhmov:
Yeah. This is what I started with. This is the method which allows us to solve daily chronic disease. But I also found that this is, in my experience, among all health therapies and techniques that I know, this is the healthiest one. To change your own automatic or unconscious breathing, this is the most challenging therapy because people need to address virtually anything and whatever is wrong in their particular lifestyle is going to prevent them from progress. It can relate to sleep, diet, physical exercise and many, many other factors. Because anything what is abnormal, and this is what Dr. Buteyko discovered, makes breathing heavy. If you over eat, you notice you go upstairs and your breath is heavy. You sleep too much, would be similar if you don’t do physical exercise. This is what Dr. Buteyko discovered and we already discussed it a little bit. I mentioned that to get, for example, Buteyko norm, people need somewhere around let’s say for young people it would be probably about three hours of intensive exercise and that’s really tough.
Steven Sashen:
Three hours of intense exercise per week?
Artour Rakhmov:
Per day.
Steven Sashen:
Per month, per year. And right now of course intensive exercise is trying to get toilet paper at Costco, but that’s a whole other story. So three hours per day of intensive exercise.
Artour Rakhmov:
For young people. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Now granted, I’m sitting here thinking about that. So back when I was a young people, I was an All American gymnast and I was a sprinter, so that was pretty normal for me, three hours plus. Now of course the amount… But boy, to try and do that now at almost 58, I would be able to do that for a day and then not again because I wouldn’t be able to move for about a week.
Artour Rakhmov:
Oh, yeah. That’s another. I can maybe quickly review those things that you mentioned. First of all, what Dr. Buteyko discovered in order for physical exercise to be safe and effective, it should be done 100% through the nose in an out like let’s say-
Steven Sashen:
Let’s pause there. That’s really interesting for two reasons. So one reason that I find it interesting is that some people have been claiming that if you’re doing intensive exercise and still breathing through your nose, it’s increasing the production of nitric oxide, which has a bunch of benefits of relaxing blood vessels, et cetera. And there’s a guy who actually teaches that you should sprint and breathe through your nose. And I said, “Look, as a competitive sprinter, it’s all I can do to get air in my body at all when I’m done with a race. So the idea that I could breathe through my nose, big as it may be, and be able to get any oxygen back, it’s just not possible.”
Now most people, when they run as fast as they can, they may call it sprinting because they’re running as fast as they can, but it’s a very different process. For a real sprinter, it’s an anaerobic process. While you’re running the 50 or 100 or 200 meters, it’s no big deal in terms of breathing. But then five seconds after you’re done, you’re on the ground barely able to get in enough oxygen. So talk about just exercise intensity and the ability to continue breathing through your nose because, again, sort of like hyperventilating, you get to a certain point and you just can’t do it.
Artour Rakhmov:
That is true.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Wait, hold on. Wait, you cut out again. So you said that is true and then I didn’t hear what you said after that.
Artour Rakhmov:
Dependent on where are you, what is your health level, and I can explain how it works. Let’s say your health level is three and this is typical modern person with 20 seconds for this body oxygen test that we already described. Now these people breathe, as we discussed, about twice more than norm, which is 12 liters a minute.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Artour Rakhmov:
12 liters a minute. Now if this person starts relatively intense exercise, quite heavy exercise, metabolism is 10 times high. That means we need 10 times more energy, 10 times more CO2 is produced. Their breathing will be actually very accurately about 10 times more than at rest. So instead of 12, would make it 120 liters. Now what is 120 per minute? Well, if I ask an average person to breathe as heavy as possible, as much as possible, just for a short period of time, you’ll do it of course through the mouth because nose gives more resistance. So then you’re going to get 150 liters a minute. So 120, 150, you can imagine the difference is very small and that means you basically will not be able to maintain this breath with nose breathing.
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Artour Rakhmov:
And CO2 actually controls breath during physical exercise. This is a fact from medical textbooks, respiratory textbooks and respiratory physiology would tell that this is very true. A lot of measurements were done. But what happens here is that if you breathe through the nose during exercise, your CO2 will be a little bit higher. And if you breathe through the mouth, it’ll be a little bit lower plus nitric oxide plus about 20 other negative effects of mouth breathing of air, warming up of air, many, many other effects were discovered. So therefore 12 make 120. Now if we think about a person who, according to Dr. Buteyko has a medical norm, 60 seconds was a body oxygen test, these people breathe four liters a minute. So a bit less than the medical norm. If you’re asked to do the same exercise 10 times high metabolism, it makes it 40 liters a minute.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Artour Rakhmov:
So 40 liters, I can show… That’s 40 liters a minute. So it’s not too heavy. Not like-
Steven Sashen:
Yes, slightly different thing. If I’m running at a slow pace, which I almost never do, then I can breathe through my nose for most of that time. But again, I run 100 meters, I can breathe through my nose while I’m running it. And then literally I finish the race, I can practically set my watch, five seconds later I’m on the ground. Or I’m just walking with my hands over my head just trying to suck in enough air to deal with the oxygen debt that I’ve created by doing that.
Artour Rakhmov:
Why? Because at the start of the race, you already had lower rate oxygen level?
Steven Sashen:
Well, much lower. In fact, it’s funny you say that because the two things before a race, one is I find myself yawning a lot because I actually get very relaxed right before I race. My heart rate’s up, but I’m a little more relaxed. The most relaxed I ever get is when I’ve inhaled and I’m holding my breath. And that’s between set and the gun going off. In that moment when they say set, hips come up, I’m in the blocks and I’m just holding my breath, just waiting. It’s the quietest my mind ever gets and it’s my favorite experience in the world is that moment right before the gun goes off. And it’s a very different thing going on metabolically than I think anyone’s ever looked at.
Artour Rakhmov:
Yeah. But going back to exercise, that’s according to Dr. Buteyko and I found the same that… I can give you another kind of factor from my experience with students that if people have very little exercise, and I met a lot of people in Canada, in the United States who were my students who would have, let’s say, 20, 30, maybe 40, 50 minutes a day of total physical exercise such as walking, shopping, going to car garage, whatever, bus stop if we don’t have a car and whatever. But what happens here is if we have that amount of physical exercise, the best result that they can achieve in terms of the health level would be somewhere about health level three. 20 seconds.
At this stage, if they have exactly 20 or higher, they probably would not develop… They may develop a little bit blood pressure or some other health problems, digestive imbalance, for example. But below 20 seconds, we know that this is where actually a lot of negative things starts to take place. People can develop cancer easily. So there would be progression… Basically, whatever genetic predisposition they have to certain conditions like parents genes, it can start to pop up. I very recently was looking like there are now literally thousands and thousands of studies where we say actually hypoxia induced genes for many, many diseases you can find just in titles of very modern research like last 20/30 years.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Artour Rakhmov:
A lot of research.
Steven Sashen:
So other than the obvious prescription of getting more intense physical exercise while you’re still able to breathe through your nose, what else do you have people do to move up the scale, if you will?
Artour Rakhmov:
In total, probably I can name more than 100 of such factors and that can include, for example, like having cavities or caries in teeth, any nutritional deficiency would make person to hyperventilate. Could it be magnesium, you can be low in magnesium, in zinc, iodine can be low and some vitamins, vitamin D, for example, some other vitamin. And in relation to sleep, we already discussed couple of factors. And sleep really important because, again, when our students do the test, and this is how I also explain when I teach a course that we actually see when students progress, I ask them to measure morning results for the body oxygen test.
And so this actually should relate to the morning result because when somebody has right now 20 seconds, it’s very likely that the same person likely would have probably around 12, 15 seconds in the morning for exactly the same test. And that’s why we have highest chances of stroke, heart attacks, seizures. All type of health problems get worse during the early morning hours because the results, breathing is heaviest during the early morning hours and that makes it possible to develop whatever genetically we have predisposed plus of course environmental influences. So that’s about sleep. Maybe people can get overheated. Maybe we need grounding during sleep. Many people found when we experiment with themselves that earthing, or grounding, for sleep makes the sleep quality better and it also helps to improve or slow down the breathing as well. That’s about sleep.
Diet, we already discussed. In relation to diet, it would be the whole topic. I have the whole book how to normalize diet. And what I found long time ago, probably about 15 years ago, that when students achieve health level seven Buteyko norm, we have many, especially younger students, because of the large level of physical exercise, I discovered that if I asked them do you require toilet paper? Very interesting question. And they would say at this level, because I found that it’s actually very common that they don’t need any toilet paper. They go to toilet and it’s totally clean. I call it no soiling effect. No soiling means you don’t soil yourself.
I started to reason and to look into the medical research and already a long time ago — it was decades already — it’s known that when people have a little bit even abnormal digestive health, they form biofilms. So a film layer of pathogens living on the surface of small and design, which is not supposed to present there. And this is actually exactly the same greasy sticky type of bacteria which makes us to soil ourselves, so when we go to the toilet. And of course everybody knows when they get some food poisoning, some digestive infection, they need much more toilet paper. And when they get recovered, it’s less, less and less.
But still I’m certain that probably 99% or even much more of modern population will require toilet paper. And that also relates to another factor, which recent discoveries of doctors from cancer after immune conditions like really Crohn disease. Very severe conditions, even Buteyko method, with original Buteyko method that Dr. Buteyko suggested when people need to slow down their breath, he was not able to deal with these very heavy and very difficult health problems. But with diet, it happens to be possible. But diet would be another factor.
Plus of course, let’s say, thermal regulation during day. If you’re able to do Wim Hof, we know that when people are having more than 20 seconds, we’re able to do actually cold stimulation. Cold even to use ice packs, ice cold water and it’s extremely healthy. Having good posture during the day, using the diaphragm, teaching yourself how to breathe using the diaphragm. At the same time, I know that actually in yoga, very advanced yoga teachers, yoga gurus, often spend years to train a student to use a diaphragm automatically day and night because diaphragm actually is supposed to be used day and night. What I found from our students when they achieve 30 seconds for the body oxygen test in the morning, they automatically switch to diaphragmatic breathing day and night.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. Good news, bad news. Let’s just do the bad news. Actually no, I’ll do the good news. So the good news is you’ve clearly mapped out, you and Dr. Buteyko, have mapped out strategies for improving things. The bad news is it sounds like what people need to do is really look at their whole lifestyle and clearly, as you know, people really are looking for a quick fix. Give me a gadget, give me a pill, give me one exercise, give me something. So how would you respond to that? Or even better, if you had to give people one to three things to really focus on so it doesn’t feel overwhelming, what would you say?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, again, when I get a student and I have the questionnaire with somewhere around 70 or more questions, I immediately have kind of in my mind the profile of the student where I see that, this and these things require attention. But if we take many, many students, these things would be very, very different and that makes it… Again, like I mentioned, a couple of factors which are very common for severely sick and this is sleeping on the back and mouth breathing during sleep.
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Artour Rakhmov:
These are very initial factors that always if I have a lecture or I have a group of students and I start work with students, I start with this factor. What I discovered after these years of teaching, I call it the law of two or three factors that if we consider any person, a student, we can change hundreds of different lifestyle factors in this person. But what I found that there are probably only two or three of them, which if we change them, that the person is going to notice that symptoms are reduced, medications also could be reduced as well and they feel they have more energy.
Answering to your another question, which appeared somewhere in the middle but I did not have the time to respond, you asked how you can make people to exercise more. It’s a very, very interesting and important question. What we found here is following: when people have less than 20 seconds, they’re so hypoxic in the cells of the body, heart and muscles, that exercise is very difficult for them and all they can do is walking.
So they are able to walk. And in fact, when they try to run and jog, they open their mouth. We cannot go running when we have less than 20 — with rare exceptions. I know very, very few students would be able to do it with, let’s say, 15 seconds or 18 seconds — with less 20 we’re not able to run. And according to Dr. Buteyko, and this also what I teach too our students, just do walking. If you’re able to do three, four hours of walking a day, that would heal many, many health problems. This is very hard as well, but this is what Dr. Buteyko was saying as long as 1960s. He was saying four or five hours of walking per day can cure nearly any disease. This is what he thought about that.
Now once people get more than 20 seconds, they’re able to start jogging. And when they’re already somewhere, let’s say, 30 seconds, they not only can start jogging, but they can do also breath holds while jogging. Maybe let’s say as short as five seconds. We hold breath five seconds, but they continue running. And so you can do physical exercise. We also split more exercise on several sections because, let’s say, if somebody does running, it’s extremely stressful for joints. Ligaments and joints. And from my rank, when I was 20/30 years ago, 40 years ago, I also was running a lot. Really a lot often up to two and a half or three hours a day running, skiing. But if you divide it on shorter sessions throughout the day, this is what we do now, let’s say, 40 minutes, 50 minutes, then it’s much easier. You can run three times a day and your body would adapt much easier rather than going, let’s say, for two hours running, which would be very exhaustive as well.
So the 30 seconds people are able to start breath hold. But what Dr. Buteyko found, and this is the hardest, hardest challenge in breathing, is to break through 40 seconds. When people break through 40 seconds, this is when sleep duration drops dramatically to four or five hours. And that means you don’t lose much during sleep. Hyperventilation during sleep would not be a problem any longer. But probably one of the most amazing changes that takes place at this health levels, people are able actually to enjoy physical exercise. And a lot of them know that… The same person starts to crave physical exercise and I see it all the time in students. When they get 60 seconds, they just have so much energy, it’s so natural for them. If they don’t do running or jogging, it makes the days worthless or they just don’t feel normal.
That’s really fascinating part of the Buteyko methods that with better and better health levels, people start to go running. And Dr. Buteyko, he was already in about positive effects of barefoot running as well barefoot walking, although his explanation was very different because at this time, nobody knew about earthing were not known. 1960s long time ago. So he talked about effects of walking on nerve stimulation on our feet and this makes some additional positive effects on our health.
Steven Sashen:
Well, to be candid, I would argue that that’s a better explanation than “grounding and earthing”, the physics of which are not good let’s say. But I say something really, really simple. So your feet are supposed to bend and move and flex and feel. We have more nerve endings in your soles than anywhere with your fingertips in your lips. Human beings right now, we think of sensory input as just the ability to perceive something rather than the effects that perceiving has. So basically perceiving something is something that’s happening as a combination of what your senses are doing and your brain responding to that. And since your feet are so important for balance and agility and effective motion, your brain is really wired to get all that information. And if you’re not getting that information, then your brain essentially shuts down. Not just that section looking for that information, but many things related to it.
So I would argue that, let’s call it the reflexology explanation if you will, is probably more likely than the bad physics version of what some people have been talking about lately. And there’s one other parts, there’s two actually other parts. So one is that I like to point out to people, I say sugar doesn’t taste good. And they go, “What?” I go, “Well, we evolved to the taste of sugar because it provided the calories that we needed when calories were hard to find. And then we started doing things to put more calories into food.”
I don’t even mean processed food, I mean bananas as an example. A banana before it was hybridized tasted bad and wasn’t sweet at all and we developed that. In the same vein, being barefoot in general feels good because you’re using your feet naturally to do what you’re supposed to do. And to barefoot running, most of the times if you’re going to go running barefoot, you’re going to do it somewhere that’s pleasant to be in. And we know from other studies, literally just being in nature for reasons that no one’s been able to give a great explanation for, has incredible health benefits in part because most likely because we evolved that way. And so there’s things that happened that we can’t actually necessarily identify. So I always go for the simpler explanations and the simplest one is being barefoot as much as you can — hold on, here we go. That’s where I’m now — as much as you can is just a more natural thing and more natural is most often going to be more better.
So anyway, we’re running out of time. So I want to kind of wrap it up with the simple thing. You brought up a lot of really interesting points. And if somebody wants to explore more with the Buteyko method and find out how they can change their breathing to what we’re calling normal breathing and see what the effects are, what do you recommend they do first?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, normalbreathing.org, the website has more than 500 web pages.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. 500 is too many. So what’s the first thing that-
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, kind of the explanations related to what carbon dioxide does for expanding our airways for… It’s most powerful dilator of arteries and arterioles, our blood vessels which create major resistance to our heart function. So plus calming agent, extremely sedative and calmative agent. Nerve cells for the brain cells as well. Extremely important factor as well. So it provides more oxygen. Of course we already talked about oxygen before. And we have again on this site, many pages related to carbon dioxide. Many pages related to different diseases because what Dr. Buteyko found that although disease may look similar, and this is what I actually do, I teach only one disease.
This is what Dr. Buteyko did. We do not have, let’s say, 200 or more diseases of lifestyle or diseases of civilization. According to Dr. Buteyko, we have only one disease and we need to solve one disease, which is called over-breathing or hyperventilation. And when people breathe two or even three times the norm, we actually never notice it. We don’t pay attention. We can breathe, again, two or three times the norm and so we don’t know it. And, yes, for what happens here is that to slow down breath, I have probably around 30 lifestyle models on the website where people can go using DIY approach, but sometimes it works.
I know a lot of people and sometimes even students would achieve phenomenal results like to get up to 60 seconds, four hours of sleep, a lot of energy. Many, many other positive effects. But occasionally, people can get stumbled. And commonly, I would say when people are having more symptoms, take more medication, have more health problems, it’s more difficult for them to progress on their own. This Dr. Buteyko also found long time ago, people who are hospitalized, multiple medication and so on would require more-
Steven Sashen:
In those situations for people who are going to do more than the DIY approach, what are the options?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, I may suggest that you may try to find Buteyko practitioners. At the same time, I can add that the way Buteyko method is generally taught on the West is very different from the original technique and from what a lot of medical doctors still teach right now in Russia. So what is different is, let’s say, I can mention clinical trials. There are many clinical trials right now, randomized, controlled clinical trials done on the West. And we found, for example, that they were able to reduce medication by more than 90% for all these trials. These are Western published results of course, but if we look at the results, what we found that let’s say average asthmatic have about 15 seconds for this. 15 seconds of oxygen, quite low, less than 20 as I already discussed, mild asthma. And what we did in this trial, we got up to 25 after 3, 4, 5, 6 months of practicing breathing exercises at the level of about one hour per day. So this is what we did and increasing a little bit physical exercise with nose breathing.
Now what I’m talking about here is of course you can imagine from 15 to 25, it would be right here. And I’m talking about going here and we have now people who get even up to here as well. With here, a lot of other things take place. It seems to be that people develop extra sensory perception. We are able to activate the pineal gland virtually in all cases if they get up to health level 10. Sleep gets down to three hours, digestion gets insanely strong because Dr. Buteyko himself wrote that at this level, people are able to digest nails. This is what he wrote.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on. The more important question is how did he determine that? Who was the first person who said, “You know, that nail looks like something that’s good. I’m going to have a salad with some on it right now”?
Artour Rakhmov:
What I believe myself that actually, and it seems to be that through with each level, there are literally hundreds of chemical reaction that become normalized, improved or even reappear as it’s supposed to be in very healthy people. With each step, but to make each step, again, it’s depends on the person. Sometimes people young, they actively do a lot of physical exercise. And occasionally, let’s say, it may take them two to three months. I have quite many students, young students, young guys, exercising, going to gym and doing whatever, and they get up to 60 seconds in two to three months. But if somebody is sick, what another… Maybe I can mention another interesting effect. I mentioned that in clinical trials we take light asthmatics and we gave them from here just one step from 15 to 25 and they already reduced medication by 90% a lot of them.
Now, what we found that actually these people, they are busy, they have jobs and they don’t have time to do physical exercise and to do breathing exercise. To get here, my requirement is at least for a person to have at least two hours of devoted physical exercise, plus two hours of breathing exercises every day until they get up here. Once they get up here, they can start reducing with breathing exercise because it’s not the most natural way to maintain your health. But physical exercise then becomes the key factor that allows them to stay at this health level. If they continue, let’s say have normal regular diet, stop exercise, they go immediately down here in a few days.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Artour Rakhmov:
This is the kind of unforgiving conclusion of this table, but at the same time, this is how nature designed us: to exercise.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s funny you say that. Nine, 10 years ago I was at the first Paleo f(x) conference and then I was on a panel discussion about natural movement. There were a number of people talking about the things they were doing to try and get people to move naturally. I said, “Look, let’s not mince words. What we evolved to do is not what we’re doing now and no one will ever do it now. No one is currently running to catch their food or running away from someone who thinks that we’re food. We’re not walking down to the river and picking up rocks and carrying them back for miles to build homes. Right now we’re faking it.”
But I said, “Especially let’s go to the thing of running to catch food or running away from being food.” I said, “Look, as a competitive sprinter, I can tell you if I go have a really hard workout this weekend, which I will do, I’ll be a little sore the next day. But if I go race this weekend, which I won’t be doing because they’ve canceled all the races, but if I were going to race, I’d be doing even less work because I’d just be warming up and then doing one race indoors for eight seconds, outdoors for a little over 12 seconds, that’s it. But then I’ll be sore and tired for three or four days.” So the biochemical process, when the adrenaline is pumping and when it seems like life is on the line, very different thing than if you’re climbing a tree or doing whatever else you think people used to do. So I say there’s certain things you just can’t fake and these are things that used to be part of our daily life.
So I got to wrap it up. First of all, I want to say thanks. Secondly, I’m really interested in what you’re saying. I’ll be candid. How do I want to put it? I’m the first one to try some new something because I’m always very curious about improving human performance. And as we’ve been having this conversation, in the times where I wasn’t speaking, I was testing my very casual breath holding and I’m in the 18 to 20 range pretty consistently, which is very annoying. I was really hoping I’d be much higher than that. So I’m looking forward to getting back on the website, which I’ve spent some time on, but not as much as I would like to. And finding out more, I’ll probably pick up… If you were going to recommend the first book for someone to get started with, since you’ve written 10, which is the first one you’d recommend?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, if you are already engaged and willing to try the Buteyko breathing exercises, my most popular book is called Advanced Buteyko Breathing Exercises where I explain the whole system how reduce breathing, what is a maximum pause, absolute maximum pause, super long breath holes, what you can achieve with them, how you can practice and how you can do informal breath work, how we can practice reduce breathing during physical exercise, how you can do steps. You go walking and you hold breath and you count how many steps you make, then you recover and again, breath hold and you repeat it many times. These type of exercises are there in the book. And this probably also most popular, I know when other people train new practitioners, Buteyko practitioners, they buy this book and just give it to new practitioners so that they can start learning about the Buteyko method.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Awesome. Well, once again, thank you very much. And again, a reminder normalbreathing.org. And if people have any other questions, can they find you through the website?
Artour Rakhmov:
Well, yeah. I give Skype classes, but because I’m very busy, it’s a bit probably quite expensive. So in any case, thank you for the opportunity. I was thrilled to share this amazing technique of breathing retraining. I can maybe mention the last thing that Dr. Buteyko made two great discoveries and one of them is that health relates to how people breathe. This discovery makes it so that actually people are able to defeat virtually any chronic disease provided that they’re able to retrain their breath. Why? Because severely sick, sometimes I have very few people who would just not able to retrain their breath even with just breath and diet and other things.
Now in addition, Dr. Buteyko developed the method, how to go from step to step. And this is from one level to another level going easy and easy, slower breathing, more oxygen in the body. And this we also tried to develop. During last 20 years, we did a lot of innovations. So the Buteyko method, I believe, is growing, developing. So this is what I’m doing. And if you decide to try that… Again, the therapy is, in my view, the most difficult, the most challenging one. But if you imagine that, again, this therapy suggests that you can fix any health problem and I know it works this way, it works the way that… Just it’s very difficult and physical exercise and other factors.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. Well, once again, thank you very much. To sign off, let me just say to everybody else, thank you for being on the podcast and sharing what we’re doing. If you enjoyed what you heard, obviously pass it on. If you’re not sure where to find us, it’s pretty simple. Everywhere that podcasts that are… Everywhere podcasts are, there we go, you can find us at Join The Movement or just The Movement Movement Podcast. You can go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. That’ll find all the previous episodes and all the different places you can interact with us. Remember to like and share and thumbs up and hit the heart or the bell button on YouTube and all those things that you know how to do. As I like to say, we’re creating this movement around movement. You are the movement. So if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. If you have any questions, drop me an email, [email protected] and that kind of covers it. So until next time, thank you all for being here. Live life feet first. Have fun.