If drawing a deep breath or simply catching your breath is sometimes difficult, daily activities can be a chore, and you can forget about intense physical exercise. Staying active is essential to our overall health, but it can be hard to come by if we’re struggling to breathe. So what is a person with a condition like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) to do? For the best results, oftentimes it pays to connect with the team at HyperCharge Clinic.
One of the many rejuvenation and wellness techniques that we specialize in is Exercise with Oxygen Therapy (EWOT). During EWOT, you are provided with concentrated oxygen to breathe while you take on a guided fitness program tailored to your strengths and needs. When your body is struggling to get enough air, increasing the amount of consumable oxygen in each breath can make a world of difference, especially for those with a condition like COPD. In today’s blog, we explore why exercise with oxygen therapy can be such a wonderful option for patients with breathing disorders.
EWOT For COPD
Exercise is vitally important for our body in a number of ways, but it’s not always easy to achieve the benefits of exercise. After all, if it was easy, everyone would always do it. During exercise, your body is using a lot more oxygen than normal, and it requires it to be replenished at a much faster rate. In response to this need, both your heart rate and your breathing rate increase in order to bring more oxygen to your muscles.
In patients with respiratory issues like COPD, their body struggles to absorb the oxygen that is being brought into the lungs. When your body can’t draw in oxygen even when taking a breath, you’re going to feel tired, winded and fatigued much faster. This issue is further compounded if you have any sort of heart issue. Because your body can’t get enough oxygen, your heart has to work even harder to push the limited oxygen in the blood to the structures that need it most, putting it under more strain. So while exercise is great for your health, it can also be very tiring, fatiguing and stressful for patients with cardiovascular or pulmonary disorders.
But what’s where exercise with oxygen therapy comes in. During exercise with oxygen therapy, the patient is provided with supplemental oxygen. This oxygen isn’t the same air that we normally breathe, it is a concentrated version, which in turn helps to solve the problem of your body not being able to draw in enough oxygen during certain activities. Your body may still not be as efficient at drawing in oxygen when you take a breath, but the air it takes in will have more oxygen in it.
Exercise with oxygen therapy is oftentimes used with athletes who are trying to take their athletic performance to the next level. By giving them concentrated oxygen at a time when their muscles need their oxygen levels replenished at very fast rates, athletes can oftentimes push themselves further or harder with the help of EWOT, and over time this process can help them become stronger or improve their endurance when fatigue is starting to set in.
A similar logic can be applied to patients with pulmonary disorders. By pursuing exercise with oxygen therapy, they may be able to take on greater physical challenges as a result of more oxygen being available to structures that need it most during movement. Slowly but surely, their bodies start to get used to handling the physical demands of certain tasks, eventually being able to perform some tasks without becoming winded. Your individual goals and expectations will be based on your specific situation, but we’re confident that no matter what type of physical limitations you’re facing because of your breathing condition, we can help you combat feelings of fatigue and shortness of breath that are oftentimes associated with activity. We know that we can help you make major strides and improve your overall quality of life.
So if you’d like to learn more about the specifics of exercise with oxygen therapy, or if you want to talk to a professional about other wellness techniques we offer, reach out to the team at HyperCharge Clinic today.