Buteyko Smart Belt™

And if your ribs are rising more (you can feel this by putting your fingers on your lower ribs), then put the BELT under your chest, on your lower ribs that move the most, or one inch lower.

After a few days of use, you can place it even lower, halfway between the sternum and the navel. When you put it on, you’ll find it’s very sensitive. If you tighten it as tight as a conventional belt, it will keep signalling. I didn’t want to make you squeeze your tummy with it (a silly belt would do that:), because that would be very uncomfortable to endure for a long time. It’s a sensor, a delicate instrument that I’ve made so sensitive that you can adjust the BELT quite loosely and it will still indicate larger breaths. So you can wear it all day long, it won’t be uncomfortable.

Once you’ve set the length of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT, you can start to make sure it doesn’t vibrate. Take small breaths, stop inhaling before the BUTEYKO SMART BELT starts vibrating, but don’t interfere with exhaling, just let it happen. You can take smaller breaths in a relaxed manner if you correct your posture. Extend, bringing the bottom of your shoulder blades together. When you’ve managed to breathe for 5 minutes without a single alarm, increase the sensitivity by adjusting the BUTEYKO SMART BELT 1 to 2 centimetres shorter.

You have the length of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT well-adjusted if you can only keep it quiet by taking smaller breaths while feeling the slight, but still firm, AIR SHORTAGE! If you don’t feel the air shortage, then adjust the belt even shorter!

Later, when you’re so good at reducing your breathing that the BUTEYKO SMART BELT doesn’t give an alarm for days, set the small slide switch to position 2 (more sensitive).

Gradualness! Don’t try to achieve the end goal the first time, because that’s not possible. It will only make you frustrated and possibly discouraged. You need to realise that it takes time to make such a big change, to change and correct what may be decades of bad breathing habits. Give your body time to get used to it, to adapt to a little less air, and then you can take one step forward. The first time you wear the BUTEYKO SMART BELT, 5 minutes is enough. Just keep it on until your breathing muscles are relaxed. At first, people quickly become tense from wearing the BUTEYKO SMART BELT – that is, from the voluntary reduction of over-breathing. When you notice this on yourself, unbuckle or take it off, because any tension will only increase breathing. You will need to find out how you can relax your breathing muscles to keep the BUTEYKO SMART BELT quiet, i.e. reduce your breathing. To do this, you need to have the right posture, but it should not be stiff or cause tension in your body. Notice that as soon as you correct your posture, the BUTEYKO SMART BELT goes silent. Gradually, in small increments, increase the amount of time you wear the BUTEYKO SMART BELT, but at the same time wear it as often as you can.

For example, initially, wearing the BUTEYKO SMART BELT for 5-10 minutes of every hour is very effective. The goal is to keep it silent for 5-10 minutes while your abdominals, diaphragm and rib muscles are not strained. In the beginning, almost everyone makes the mistake of trying to avoid the sound of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT by over-tightening the abdominal and rib muscles. Muscles that are constantly under tension will soon become exhausted. In addition, any tension increases breathing. You’re just straining, but your breathing increases instead of decreasing.

Elimination of symptoms

From now on, if you have any symptoms of overbreathing – such as coughing, choking, wheezing, nasal congestion, runny nose, panic attack, tachycardia, poor circulation, cold extremities – just put on the well-adjusted BUTEYKO SMART BELT, make it stop vibrating as described and your symptoms will disappear within minutes. Some people can get rid of their headaches with a BUTEYKO SMART BELT, and some people can get rid of their high blood pressure.

The one thing the BUTEYKO SMART BELT can’t do is work even when you’re not using it. So use it whenever you can, and you will experience the wonderful healing effects of the Buteyko method. Don’t run away from breathlessness, because that’s what we are looking for, that’s what we want to achieve and that’s what we can sustain by using BUTEYKO SMART BELT^TM. Let air shortage be your friend, because that is what will heal you!

About the Buteyko Breathing Method

Today, 9 out of 10 people consume more air than they should due to stress, lack of exercise, unhealthy diet and bad posture. Compared to our ancestors, we are consuming two, three or even more times as much air. This chronic over-breathing leads to the airways becoming excessively cold and dry, which encourages infections and inflammation. In addition, over-breathing also means breathing out too much carbon dioxide. However, our bodies need a certain amount of carbon dioxide to stay healthy. So much so that without carbon dioxide we would die within minutes, just as we would without oxygen. Carbon dioxide is the ‘catalyst’ for oxygen. If our carbon dioxide levels fall because we are over-breathing, our cells are less able to take up oxygen from our blood (Bohr effect). In other words, our cells and tissues are deprived of oxygen at the very moment when we over-breathe. This chronic hypoxia can play a role in the development of many diseases, such as asthma, COPD, allergies, nasal congestion, eczema, high blood pressure, poor circulation, cold limbs, headaches, migraines, anxiety, panic disorder, sleep apnoea, snoring, frequent toilet visits, distraction, poor concentration, poor physical performance, poor stamina, etc.

The essence of Buteyko Breathing Method is to restore the imbalanced respiratory homeostasis by restoring the body’s carbon dioxide levels to normal. To do this, we need to intervene in our breathing at will, to stop over-breathing, i.e. to reduce our air consumption, the amount of air we inhale and exhale per minute. This is where BUTEYKO SMART BELT^TM helps. The Buteyko Breathing Reduction Method seems simple, but very few people manage to get their bodies to permanently consume half or less of their usual air intake without outside help. It takes patience and perseverance to get your body used to getting back to what now seems like a small, but in fact normal, healthy amount of air. Many people give up prematurely because they lack the willpower, persistence and patience. This is usually because they are able to pay attention to their breathing and reduce it rarely and only for short periods of time. It is difficult, for example, to even pay attention to breathing while working or doing anything else, even watching TV. It is useless to reduce your breathing for 10-20-30 minutes if you do not pay attention to your breathing for hours afterwards. Our body „sucks back” the amount of air we have withdrawn by deep breaths, e.g. sighing or yawning. This destroys all that we have built up and renders our breathing-reduction exercise ineffective. Even at times when we are aware of our breathing, when we are listening to it, it is hard to resist the incredibly strong urge to sigh. And when we’re not paying attention to our breathing because we’re distracted by something else, those deep/big breaths are bound to happen. Then we fall back to the state we were in before we started to reduce our breathing and start all over again. No wonder this inefficiency discourages many Buteyko breathing learners and they give up prematurely.

About using BUTEYKO SMART BELT^TM

„We could make much better progress with the Buteyko method if we got some kind of feedback every time we took more air than we wanted to.” This idea led me to develop the BUTEYKO SMART BELT™, which makes learning Buteyko breathing incredibly effective. It’s a lucky coincidence that I’m not only a Buteyko breathing practitioner, but also an electrical engineer, so I managed to develop a device that alerts you with a vibration when you take in more air than you should. After just a few sessions of wearing the BUTEYKO SMART BELT, you will become more aware of your breathing and, over time, learn to prevent taking large/deep breaths. You will find that you get better at using the Buteyko breathing method if you learn to reduce your breathing so that the BUTEYKO SMART BELT does not alert you.

This is what I will help you with below.

You may need to adjust the length of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT frequently – for example, because of changing circumstances (wearing more or fewer layers of clothing, moving around, sitting or because two of you are using the BUTEYKO SMART BELT). If this happens, you may want to mark the length of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT you use at the buckle with a different coloured felt tip marker where it bends back to make it easier to adjust it next time.

You can adjust the sensitivity of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT by its length (tension) and by using the small slide switch: 1 is a less sensitive starting level, 2 is a very sensitive advanced level.

Again, I emphasise that the sensitivity of the BUTEYKO SMART BELT is set correctly, if you can get it to not signal only when you are voluntarily reducing your breathing and feel a slight shortage of air.

There are two ways to reduce the amount of air you take in per minute: either by taking smaller breaths or by taking fewer breaths (slowing down your breathing). It is very important that you do not want to do both at the same time at first! Otherwise you will become spastic and your breathing will increase rather than decrease.

So you have to break the process down into two steps: first you have to get to the point where you are breathing in smaller breaths all the time, and only then can you slow your breathing. I know it’s tempting, and it seems easier to slow down your breathing because you can measure it in seconds. But almost everyone who starts with this falls into the mistake of wanting to measure litres in seconds. If you only pay attention to the rhythm of your breathing and try to slow it down, you will inevitably start taking bigger and bigger breaths. Especially if you are not yet aware enough of your breathing, if you are not yet able to control it properly. But you cannot slow down your breathing by taking larger breaths, because this will increase your respiratory minute ventilation (the amount of air you breathe in and out per minute, measured in litres) instead of decreasing it.

So for the first few weeks, don’t worry about your breathing rhythm at all. First you need to learn, to get a feel for how you can reduce the depth of your breathing, how you can keep taking smaller breaths.

To use Buteyko breathing successfully, you need to learn to accurately sense the amount of air you breathe in. Then you need to develop the ability to take slightly smaller breaths than before.

The BUTEYKO SMART BELT^TM is like having your very own Buteyko instructor with you all the time. It teaches you to sense your breathing and teaches you to breathe in small breaths. It is the only tool that can do this, which is why it is so important.

It usually takes a few weeks for someone to really get the hang of continuously regulating the amount of air he/she breathes. When you get to the point where you’re using it at a level 2 and it doesn’t vibrates once all day, that’s the only time you can move on and try to slow your breathing. Of course, keep the BUTEYKO SMART BELT quiet while you do this.

At rest, there are three things you need to watch out for, that affect the amount of air you breathe:

1. posture
2. relaxation
3. voluntary breathing reduction.

Posture

A sloppy, slouched posture will squeeze the diaphragm muscles, leaving not enough room to move up and down. This is when the auxiliary breathing muscles start to work, even though they shouldn’t be moving, at least not at rest.

The auxiliary breathing muscles are the intercostal muscles, which open and close the intercostal space by attaching to the outer and inner edges of the rib cage. On the other hand, they lift the chest by adhering to the shoulder and collarbone, thus increasing the lung volume up to several times the volume at rest, so that we can breathe enough air during intense exercise. A normal resting intake is about 0.5 litres, while the total vital capacity of the lungs is ten times this, 5 litres. The ability to take such large breaths is mainly due to the auxiliary respiratory muscles. However, at rest, these auxiliary muscles are not needed. In fact, using them instead of the diaphragm is a totally inefficient way of breathing at rest. Our body requires much more air when we breathe with the auxiliary muscles than when we breathe with the diaphragm muscles alone. The reason is that the blood pressure in the small blood circuit between the lungs and the heart is very low, only 20 mm Hg, and with such low blood pressure the distance between the apex of the lungs and the lower part of the lungs is already important. So the lower parts of the lungs have better circulation, better blood supply, and therefore more efficient gas exchange than the upper parts. But we only use the lower part of the lungs when we breathe through the diaphragm (i.e. „into the belly”). The air taken in by the auxiliary breathing muscles goes to the upper parts of the lungs, where gas exchange is less efficient, and we will therefore take more air in (and therefore exhale more, i.e. lose more carbon dioxide) than if we breathe into the abdomen. So the aim of good posture is to make room for the diaphragm to move up and down, so that we can take in much less air.

The way I learned how to assume the correct posture at the Buteyko Clinic in Moscow, founded by Professor Buteyko, is as follows. Stand in front of a vertical wall or door so that your heels, sacrum (not the top of your buttocks), shoulders (not your arms, but the top, outer part of your shoulders) and the back of your head (not the top of your head) are touching the surface, with your shoulders not hunched up but lowered loosely, naturally.

If you are sitting on a chair, make sure that the bottom tips of the shoulder blades are close together. You can achieve the same thing by moving your sternum as far away from your navel as you can. „While your shoulders remain loosely dropped, lift your sternum out so that its distance from your navel is maximized,” I used to tell my students. Tilt your hips slightly under you (tuck your buttocks in a little). This will ‘turn on’ and tone the lower diaphragm muscle in the pelvic floor, which is the key to controlling breathing.

On the other hand, incorrect posture also increases breathing because it creates tension in your muscles. And tension always increases breathing. If you have good posture, your bones and skeletal system will balance and hold your body, and your muscles can stay loose. A common problem, for example, is looking down a lot, at your laptop screen or mobile phone. This causes our neck to lean forward and we hold our 7 kg head with our neck muscles even when we’re not looking at our laptop or mobile. Make sure your head is always balanced on the atlas, the upper vertebrae, so that your neck muscles remain perfectly relaxed.

Exercise 1 – notice how the correct posture reduces your breathing

Stand next to a door or wall for 2-5 minutes as I have just described and pay attention to each inhalation and exhalation. You’ll see how wonderfully your breathing decreases just by holding the right position without interfering or feeling short of breath.

This is confirmed by the BUTEYKO SMART BELT™: the vibration stops as soon as you assume the correct posture. So the BUTEYKO SMART BELT also indicates incorrect posture, as over-breathing is very often caused by poor posture.