The Godfather of Modern Breath Study - Konstantin Buteyko
The story of a Master Mechanic of the human body
In the year 1923 a young man was born on a farm outside of Kiev.
From a young age, he became fascinated with EVERYTHING he saw.
He started as an elite level mechanic. Little did he, or anyone else know that he would become known as “The Godfather of modern breathing study”.
His name is Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko and the research he did would go on to flip the story on how we breathe and BREATHE BETTER on its head!
First off, let’s talk about this above photo.
This guy has the facial structure and jawline of a CHAD! Not a single bit of Melvin in this dude.
You can look at this man & know he breathes optimally. His jawline is full & square, his orbital isn’t sunken in. He has built himself to breathe OPTIMALLY.
But this wasn’t always the case…
Mechanics Master:
Konstantin Buteyko was a mechanic by trade. This line of work developed his entire framework for the way he thought about life and the human body.
He viewed the world around him as a mechanism and everything in it being parts that go together to form a whole
(One is All, All is one?)
Buteyko spent four years on the front lines in WW2. While serving he fixed cars, tanks & artillery for the Soviets.
How’d he go from vehicles to the lungs though?
BARS INCOMING:
“When the war ended, I decided to start researching the most complex machine, the Man. I thought if I learnt him, I’d be able to diagnose his diseases as easily as I had diagnosed machine disorders” - Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko
(Note the mindset. This type of thinking is what strives GREATNESS forward!)
Catching His Breath
After the war Buteyko would go on to attend the First Moscow Institute of Medicine where he graduated cum laude (I’m no valedictorian, but that sounds pretty high level to me) in 1952.
He had not found his way to the breathe though… yet.
When he started his residency he would observe something in the hospitals he worked in.
All the patients in the worst state of health appeared to breathe A LOT.
Can you guess how they breathed too?
THROUGH THEIR MOUTHS!
Despite noticing this in others, Buteyko was no pillar of health himself.
He suffered from SEVERE high blood pressure, debilitating headaches, stomach pain & even heart pain.
He was prescribed drugs, but they did nothing for him. By the age of twenty nine his systolic blood pressure shot to 212 & he was given a year to live.
Disheartened, he came to think that the best he could do for himself and the patients he interacted with daily was to numb the symptoms.
Then one night in October his entire life changed. He stood alone in a hospital room, staring out a window into the dark night sky.
He looked into the glass of the window and noticed his own face - emaciated & weak.
Buteyko watched himself in this window as he drew heavy breaths from an open mouth. He was breathing in the same manner that he saw in his patients!
A curious man to his heart and core, he tried something. He relaxed his chest and stomach and slowly drew air in through his nose.
He wanted to try seeing if breathing less made a difference. It sure did.
Within minutes, the pain in his head, stomach and heart had subsided.
But then when he returned to his original breathing pattern? IT ALL CAME BACK!
Buteyko started to think that over-breathing was overworking our systems and causing them to weaken/fail.
With much to ponder, he set out for a walk around the hospital. While walking in the asthma ward, he found a patient suffocating and fighting for air.
Approaching the patient, he decided to run an experiment. He had the patient breathe slower and less and THROUGH THEIR NOSE ONLY.
The patient, who was just bent over in a fit of breathlessness calmed down. His face filled with color and the asthma attack was beaten.
Becoming a Human Mechanic
His discovery was very intriguing to the USSR. By the late 1950’s he had relocated to Akademgordok, a remote academic city in Serbia established by the USSR in order to study cutting edge technology to attain Soviet dominance.
Buteyko set out to conduct the most intensive breathing experiments in recorded science.
More than a thousand subjects gathered. Sick, healthy, young and old.
He ran countless experiments on these subject and gathered mountains of data. I’ll save his methods/experiments for a different day though.
It was clear to him that the sickest patients all breathed the same. Too much and often times through the mouth, very loudly.
But the healthiest patients? They breathed less and thru the nose almost exclusively!
(Aint that crazy? It’s almost like mouth breathing is GARBAGE!)
A protocol was developed based on his findings called “Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing” - commonly referred to as the Buteyko Method. The protocol consisted of techniques geared towards breathing as closely in line with our metabolic needs as possible.
Within a few sessions of practice, subjects heart rates started to slow and stabilize. Hypertension and migraines that plagued them also began to disappear.
Not surprisingly, athletes had massive gains in athletic performance and non-athletes that were already healthy felt even better.
He found that through breathing less (increasing the length of time between inhale and completed exhale) the human machine functioned far more optimally.
These experiments very literally changed the lives of everyone involved in them!
Legacy
By the end of his career and life (he passed in 2003 at age 80. Not bad for only having a year left to live huh?) he came to believe that the breath could not only heal illness, but it could boost intuition and other forms of extrasensory perception.
Can you guess where this is going?
A lot of his work was labeled as pseudoscience.
To take it further, he believed that 100’s of ailments humans suffer from were caused by Carbon Dioxide deficiency strung on by overbreathing.
There likely is some merit to that. We know that mouth breathing is a contributing factor to: ADHD, Dementia, Sleep Apnea, Asthma, High Blood Pressure, Diabetes, Types of Cancer, Insomnia and more.
But just like the way the parts on a machine all work together to make it function, the same is true for our bodies.
I believe that what we struggle with as a society today health wise, can not be attributed to breathing alone. There are other factors at play (light environment, diet, sleep habits, etc.) and improper breathing is just one of those that serves to amplify the others.
One thing is for certain though, Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko was onto something. He was a visionary and is remembered as such. The study of breathing was never the same thanks to the curiosity and drive of this man.
Stay BLESSED
Fighter (link to twitter)
P.S. I do 1 hour consult calls where you learn introductory mindfulness (breathwork), cold exposure training and developing a GRATITUDE ALWAYS mindset. You can book a time slot here: Daily Practice Consult Call