Practitioners believe that asthma is a breathing disorder, which develops because people with asthma hyperventilate, even during an attack.
The normal intake of air is 4 to 6 liters a minute.
In a trial test the technique in Brisbane, Australia, participants were breathing in 15 liters a minute.
The buteyko method was developed in the 1950s by a Russian scientist as a series of exercises.
The method is designed to retrain your breathing pattern.
It is popular in Russia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, but almost unheard of elsewhere.
With each breath, you take oxygen which is absorbed into the blood, when you exhale you breathe out carbon dioxide.
The role of oxygen in breathing is clear, but carbon dioxide is often viewed simply as waste matter.
However, you also need the right amount of carbon dioxide in the blood stream in order for oxygen to be transferred from the lungs to the blood and so to the vital organs.
In this sense, it is vital for control of the major body systems such as the heart and circulatory, digestive and immune systems.
Carbon is stored in the alveoli in the lungs.
When you hyperventilate, you deplete your body of dioxide by breathing out too much of it and diluting the amount retrained in the alveoli.
Because you do not have enough of it in your blood, the red blood cells cannot release their oxygen.
In simple term, when you hyperventilate your body get less oxygen.
Buteyko practitioners say this chronic hyperventilation causes conditions such as asthma and eczema.
The key to buteyko method is measuring your control pause, the length of time you can manage without taking a breath.