Long COVID: Could Respiration Training Help?

Blow softly out, as if through a straw, feel your

Rib cage gently depress, ready to

Expand again, like bellows sucking in

Air and feeding

The flames of energy licking through your body

Homeostatic

Ecstatic breath

It has taken a pandemic for most of us to appreciate something we take for granted - the ability to breathe with ease. Over 80 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 so far and one in twenty of them are thought to now be experiencing long COVID. This typically presents as overwhelming fatigue, breathlessness, brain fog and headaches. At this stage no one knows how long people will have it for or how to help them fight it.

Some very good resources are Long COVID clinics The Your Covid Recovery website and support groups. Those of us who would like to help have resources from Royal College of Occupational Therapy

Health Education England and the BMJ. What none of these resources provide YET is COVID-19-specific evidence on managing the symptoms related to long COVID. So, if you are reading this and are also recovering from COVID or have long COVID there are research studies that would love to hear from you. I am most interested in this one. University of Portsmouth researchers are hoping to see whether respiration training is the key to getting people through this more quickly. Research so far has shown that a six week period of respiration training improved respiratory function, quality of life and anxiety levels.

This makes so much sense to me. As Dr Saynor, from the University of Portsmouth says: We know that training the breathing muscles can make them stronger, as with other muscles in the body. We believe that this type of training may help people recovering from Covid, by making them less breathless and hopefully make exercise easier and more comfortable like it was before they had Covid. The hope is this will also have a big effect on how people feel mentally, too.

And, if you can’t participate in this study but would like to see for yourself whether respiration training makes a difference to your energy levels, mobility, mental wellbeing, quality of life or functional independence then I have a gift for you. Here are 7 half hour video extracts from my Franklin Method classes. These were focussed on moving our breathing parts better.

I hope that they help. The handouts to each class are here

If they do work for you please share them with someone else who might need them. Because everyone deserves to breathe well ❤️