asthma & exercise...

[Bugz]

Anyone here suffer from asthma induced through exercise?

If so - wondering if and how you have 'improved' your resillience to asthmatic moments when exercising.

My missus has started jogging; we're only doing 10-15 mins atm but she is finding it hard to get her lungs to open and obviously the cold isn't helping in that respect.

She has an asthmatic pump and once they do open up, it's all good from there but I was wondering if anyone had any tips or home remedies etc. to try and make the first 5-10 mins of exercise more comfortable. We're doing about 5 mins of warming up; I'm guessing it may be a good idea to extend this so her lungs can fully open before we actually start jogging?

 

[Dreamor]

A long time ago a good Doctor told me swimming was good for people with asthma.

Not sure if thats still true, but at the time I felt a lot better than trying to jog.

 

[mycenae]

It'll be dry air thats the problem, hence why swimming is so good. If you're going outside, get her to put a scarf over her mouth (a think one, obviously!), this will humidfy the air a bit and help. Obviously take the asthma pumps with at all times. Jogging isn't the best thing for people with asthma, better to do things indoors where its climate controlled.

 

[Bullitt]

If you have the brown inhaler (preventer - used to be called beclametasone, but it's some other CFC free variant now) take a blast of that before you start.

If you only have the reliever (blue - salbutamol) then a squirt before can help a bit.

Another technique i've heard of (but not tested as my asthma is pretty locked down) is to take a breath and hold it for a few seconds. Breathe out until you're at 'normal' (i.e. not forcing all the air out of your lungs) and hold it a few seconds more. Then take in shallower breaths, the theory is you're starving your body of oxygen so it opens up the airways again.