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It's been well documented in yoga circles that breathing techniques are a fantastic way of promoting better health and correcting bad breathing practices but now there’s some evidence from the medical world to back up this fact.

A study was recently done in Australia to see if breathing technique could helps asthma sufferers. Could breathing techniques make any difference to asthma sufferer’s health and also could these techniques reduce the amount of times rescue inhalers were used?

Firstly the group was split up into 2 smaller groups. Both groups were asked to try out some breathing techniques given to them on video (the point of the video was so that they could do the exercises at home and refer to the video so that the proper technique
was always being used). Both groups were asked to do their exercises twice daily and working with the video at least once per day.

Group A was told to practice using a shallow breathing technique through the nose for 3-5 minutes, twice per day, the Group B was told to do other breathing techniques which included correcting their posture, breathing techniques and some upper body exercises.
Both groups were also asked to try to delay how quickly they used their rescue inhaler in an emergency, but to try using their breathing techniques to try to resolve the problem first and if need be then to use the inhaler.

Half way through the 30 week trial, the researchers began lowering the dosage of inhaled corticosteroid in 2 stages. At the end of the trial that although the breathing techniques didn’t change their lung functions or quality of life, they did find that the usage rate of asthma inhalers dropped by a whooping 86% and dosages of corticosteroid dropped 50%. Another finding was that it didn’t seem to matter what breathing technique was used as both ways produced great results.