About AYO BT+

AYO BT+ is the world’s first modular measurement respirator for breathing retraining. It fills a significant gap that, before its release, no such device could provide breathing data while people were performing sports and fitness training.

The possible applications with AYO BT+ are extensive, and in this document, we focus on its use cases for elite athletes.

Enter AYO BT+: the ultimate tool for training diaphragmatic breathing and unlocking the true potential of elite athletes. This innovative device combines the AYO BT with measurement modules, offering a comprehensive solution for optimising breathing techniques.

 

The AYO BT+ utilises a unique mechanism to enhance diaphragmatic breathing. Controlling the air inlet and adding resistance effectively slows down and elongates the inhalation process, activating the diaphragm, the primary muscle responsible for efficient breathing.

 

Transitioning from chest to diaphragmatic breathing can be challenging, especially for athletes who have relied exclusively on chest breathing throughout their careers. However, with consistent use of AYO BT+ over time, athletes can train their bodies to naturally engage the diaphragm, laying a solid foundation for reaching new heights in their respective sports.

 

By incorporating AYO BT+ into their training routine, elite athletes can experience many benefits. Improved diaphragmatic breathing enhances oxygen intake, endurance, stamina, and overall aerobic capacity. This technique also promotes better relaxation, reducing muscle tension and facilitating quicker recovery between workouts or events.

Gain More Insights into the Effectiveness of Training Programs

Apart from going to a sports test lab, the physiological data that can be conveniently and accurately measured is limited to heart rate only. This is surprising, given the advances in general technology in the past 50 years.

We know that, technically, the heart rate indicates how fast the heart is pumping blood.

The key reason to measure heart rate in sports training is to assess:

• The fitness level of an athlete
• The loading of the training to the athlete
• The recovery of the athlete

However, the blood is primarily used to transport oxygen to the body tissues and cells, where the oxygen reacts with carbohydrates and fats to produce the energy the body needs during cellular respiration. Yet, as part of the process, the oxygen needs to enter the bloodstream in the first place via gas exchange during breathing, and then before the oxygen reaches the tissues, it needs to be released from the red blood cells.

How the air is breathed in and out may affect the gas exchange and the release of oxygen from the blood to the tissues so that the oxygen may not diffuse from the lung into the blood efficiently. Once in the blood, it may not be efficiently used.

Understanding the oxygen delivery process to tissues and cells reveals that the heart’s role in pumping blood is just one step in the overall mechanism. It is crucial to recognise how oxygen enters the bloodstream and is released to the tissues to obtain a comprehensive understanding. Relying solely on heart rate for assessing athlete fitness or training program effectiveness is insufficient and may lead to inaccurate conclusions.

For instance, a higher-than-normal heart rate does not necessarily indicate intense training or low fitness levels. It could result from hyperventilation, which prevents oxygen from effectively reaching the tissues and cells, despite the increased heart rate.

The Bohr Effect, a scientific principle, influences efficient oxygen transportation in the blood. Hyperventilation leads to lower levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, causing oxygen (O2) to remain bound to hemoglobin in the red blood cells when it should be released to the body tissues.

By utilising AYO BT+, athletes can gain valuable information about their breathing patterns and identify weaknesses in their oxygen delivery process. This data allows for a more comprehensive assessment of fitness levels and training effectiveness. By incorporating breathing analysis alongside heart rate monitoring, athletes can optimise their performance and make informed adjustments to their training routines.

Recognising the integral role of breathing in assessing fitness and training effectiveness unveils a more accurate and complete picture. AYO BT+ empowers athletes to unlock their potential by providing valuable breathing data, enabling targeted improvements in oxygen delivery and overall performance.

Embrace the science of breathing and maximise your training potential with AYO BT+. Discover the transformative impact of comprehensive fitness assessments and elevate your athletic performance to new heights.

Create a Benchmark for Key Breathing Data Among Elite Athletes to Assist Sports Training

Measuring critical breathing data shown above among elite athletes with AYO BT+ for various sports, grouped by gender, age, height, and weight, will help many athletes to use these data as a benchmark to train towards.
 

Combination of Heart Rate with Respiratory Rate and Volume

Since the cardiovascular and respiratory systems combine to deliver O2 to and remove CO2 from all body tissues, adding breathing data such as respiratory rate and volume will add further dimensions and depth. This will complement the heart rate in assessing an athlete’s fitness level and performance. Doing so may revolutionise the way of sports training.

With AYO BT+, elite athletes gain the advantage of harnessing their breath as a powerful tool for performance enhancement. By embracing diaphragmatic breathing as the foundation of their training, athletes can unlock their full potential and propel themselves to new levels of success in their chosen sports.

The problem

It may be hard to believe that most of us modern-day humans over-breathe chronically. It has been proven that chronic hyperventilation is at least in part responsible for a range of chronic diseases, such as asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.

The causes

There are quite a number of factors that cause the vast majority of us to chronically over-breathe, including lifestyle factors, such as sedentary habits, lacking regular exercise, over-eating, and incorrect breathing patterns and habits.

Regarding lifestyle, more and more people are becoming aware of it, and with determination and discipline, a healthier active lifestyle can be achieved. However, incorrect breathing patterns and habits formed over many years may not be easy to change, especially if the patterns and habits have been consolidated by one’s every breath since a very young age!

The following are the most common unhealthy breathing patterns and habits:

• Mouth breathing
• Chest breathing
• Fast and big breathing

CO2 – the leading factor responsible for breathlessness

It sounds very odd to many, but CO2 plays a critical role in breathing, in a sense, even more, critical than O2!

The reason we say this is that our blood is normally saturated with oxygen, and it doesn’t matter if we breathe a bit more or less than normal, the O2 saturation in the blood is hardly changed.

However, if you chronically over-breathe, the breathing nerve centre in the brain will become over-sensitive to CO2 increase, which causes breathing faster than normal, and a vicious cycle like the below will occur:

The faster you breathe → the more CO2 will be removed from the blood → and according to Bohr Effect, the less O2 will release from the red blood cells to the body tissues → the tissues thus sending the signal to the brain to breathe even faster.

This process causes breathlessness.

The Buteyko Method to breathe normally

Believe it or not, to get healthier, most modern people need breathing retraining. Buteyko Breathing is a science-based systematic breathing method to train reduced breathing and achieve normal breathing, which is well suited to prevent chronic over-breathing.

Based on Dr. Buteyko and his team’s medical research from the 1950s through to the early 2000s, plus tens of thousands of people’s positive practice of the breathing method, the following steps summarize the Buteyko Method in a simple way to work towards breathing normally and healthily:

• Use the diaphragm to breathe through the nose in and out only whenever you can.
• Practice reduced breathing, including breath-hold, small volume diaphragmatic inhalation, and full body relaxed long exhalation.
• Practice breathing exercises involving slight air hunger.

AYO BT – A perfect tool to assist Buteyko Breathing

Tool for Breathing Training – Using AYO BT as a tool perfectly aligns with the key elements of Buteyko Breathing Method.

Using AYO BT over a period of time will train you to use your diaphragm naturally, allowing you to practice reduced breathing and adapt to higher CO2 without having to focus on your breathing all the time, thus making it easier to normalize your breathing.

In addition, the unique modular design of AYO BT allows a future upgrade to more advanced AYO BT+ which provides breathing data measurement with state-of-the-art technology.

Breathing mechanics

In a breathing cycle, the lungs can be expanded and contracted in two ways. One is by lengthening and shortening the chest cavity (up and down) and the other is by increasing and decreasing the chest diameter (front and back).

The first way is mainly performed by the diaphragm which is located between the chest cavity and the abdomen. The diaphragm is the primary breathing muscle that is designed to perform the majority of the breath work. It is a dome-shaped large sheet of muscle that moves down to draw air during inhalation and moves up to expel air during exhalation in a fashion like a diaphragm pump. Breathing in this way is called diaphragmatic breathing, during which the abdomen moves in and out while the chest is hardly moving. Diaphragmatic breathing is often combined with nose breathing. Because diaphragmatic breathing draws air deep into the lungs, it is also called Deep Breathing, where the word ‘Deep’ is meant to indicate deep into the lungs and not necessarily big in volume.

The second way is through the chest / intercostal muscles in the chest wall between the ribs, where the intercostal muscles contract to draw air in and relax to expel air out. Breathing in this way is called chest breathing, during which the chest moves in and out. Chest breathing is often combined with mouth breathing. Because chest breathing does not draw air deep into the lungs, it is also called Shallow Breathing, and it normally draws more air than your metabolic needs.

Comparison between Diaphragmatic and Chest Breathing

Among many, one of the key advantages of diaphragmatic breathing over chest breathing is its much higher efficiency for oxygen intake. The following summarizes the rationale:

• • The diaphragm draws air passing the bottom of the lungs, allowing air to make full contact with the lower part of the lungs, whereas, in chest breathing, the air hardly passes down to the lower parts of the lungs, which in most situations contains more blood due to gravity. Therefore, for the same volume of air, more oxygen can be diffused to the blood via the lungs when the diaphragm is engaged.
  • Diaphragm is one large piece of thin muscle, and once worked in sync with the abdomen muscles, can sustain long-lasting powerful breathing than the chest muscles. The pumping movement of the diaphragm is a much better mechanics than the intercostal muscles lifting the chest ribs as far as air moving is concerned.
  • The diaphragm moves slower and draws less air compared with chest breathing which could draw a larger amount of air quickly, making it easily cause hyperventilation or over-breathing, which is harmful to health.
  • Due to the dead space in the airway between the nose and the lungs, when inhaling the same total amount of air in a minute from the nose, more air will be reached the lungs with slower but deeper diaphragmatic breathing than faster and shallow chest breathing.
  • Another very important factor that most of us are not aware of is the fact that fast and shallow chest breathing tends to get rid of too much CO2 in the lungs and in the blood, where medical science has proven that when the CO2 level is too low in the lungs, it would create the condition to cause asthma; and when it is too low in the blood, it will limit the oxygen to get released from haemoglobins when the blood traveling to the brain, organs, and tissues throughout the body. So, if you are asthmatic, chest breathing is more likely to trigger asthma than diaphragmatic breathing; and if you are doing sports, prolonged chest breathing will get you fatigued earlier than diaphragmatic breathing due to less oxygen released to tissues and muscles.

Having said all the advantages of diaphragmatic breathing, chest breathing is here for a reason. Typically, we may breathe through the chest in situations and events that require a sudden and fast increase in oxygen intake, such as in certain sports requiring a shot burst of breathing, or in certain ‘Fight and Flight’ situations.

Other than these fewer common situations, diaphragmatic breathing via the nose has been proven to be the most efficient and healthiest way in which humans should breathe most of the time. Proper diaphragmatic breathing will make you feel energetic, and it could make profound benefits for your general health as opposed to chest breathing via the mouth, which is harmful to health if breathing like that most of the time. However, in the modern day, most of us more or less do chest breathing, and it is a habit that has been with us for a long time. There are many breathing exercises that could be used for practicing diaphragmatic breathing via the nose.

Understandably, for many, it would require significant time and effort to make diaphragmatic breathing via the nose a new habit. Apart from being persistent, certain breathing devices could help practice and master the technique easier and quicker. Aimwell AYO BT Breathing Trainer and Breathing Exerciser is one of these devices on offer, which is designed to train you to breathe with the diaphragmatic via the nose naturally – the first step you must take to gain better health.