Assess your breathing fitness! How many of these 25 symptoms and behaviors associated with problematic breathing do you have?

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SCHEDULE APPOINTMENT

Breathing Coaching

Does breathlessness keep you from enjoying yourself or exercising as much as you'd like?

Could you use more stamina?

Breathing retraining is a self-management tool to identify and correct poor breathing habits.

Imagine what it would be like to breathe well...

You might not think twice when friends invite you to do something active like go for a walk, try show-shoeing or play volleyball!
You might feel less vulnerable during cold and allergy seasons.
You'd know how to breathe best in polluted, dirty air during crises when you don't have a mask handy.
You'd probably have more energy for work and fun.
You'd play with the children in your life with abandon.
You'd finish the race without collapsing at the end or retreating to bed!

You got this!

Progressive breathing conditioning
skills training featuring:

A Baseline Breathing-Pattern Assessment
1:1 live online coaching sessions at the pace best for you.
Similar to personal training at the gym, with month-to-month commitment.
Daily app-based accountability support available.
Anytime e-mail/text access to your breathing coach!

Condition Your Breathing!

Step 1: Assess your baseline breathing fitness level.

We can't start where you are until we know where you're at!

Step 2: Build a foundation of healthy breathing habits.

Normalize your baseline breathing pattern when you're still or moving slowly. Learn to apply tools of the Corrective Breathing ormula -- breathe with your nose, stop breathing with your mouth, and breathe less -- whenever your breathing feels labored.

Step 3: Use your breathing foundation to exercise as efficiently as possible.

Receive progressive training to build stamina.

A special note to athletes:
What if you could stop panting once and for all?

How would that affect your life?

Imagine enjoying workouts more.
Imagine performing faster and easier
Imagine confidently anticipating longer races and greater challenges.
Imagine greater stamina and energy spilling over into other areas of your life...being more available for family or work or fun after events.

Meet Coach Lisa!

Lisa Bowen has been coaching people with labored breathing since 2011.

Lisa first took an interest in breathing retraining more than 10 years ago to work with her own asthma. Despite puffing on her rescue inhaler before, during and after exercise, she still often couldn't catch her breath.

As she practiced breathing toning and control exercises, Lisa noticed it was becoming easier to hike a three-mile loop in the hills behind her house that she'd been doing for years. Today she can do it easily in half the time it took her 20 years ago.

Lisa became obsessed with sharing what she'd learned and started her coaching practice with a two-week course to become an instructor of the Buteyko Breathing Technique, the foundational breathing-retraining philosophy that a Ukrainian doctor developed in the 1950s to address chronic hidden hyperventilation. Since then she has studied with the most experienced and renowned teachers from Europe and Australia.

After many years now, Lisa has found that better-breathing skills, once learned, become an unconscious competence. (You don't need to explicitly focus on them after a certain point unless there's an emergency that requires more mindful attention). Lisa was amazed and happy to find that she could breathe and exercise without discomfort in the smoky air caused by the recent Northern California wildfires, even durin gthe infamous Camp Fire centered in Paradise, CA when the San Francisco Bay Area was reported to have the worst air quality in the world for a couple weeks last year.

Lisa is a certified massage practitioner in California. She offers alternative, non-medical/non-psychological techniques, and her services are considered to be alternative or complementary to the healing arts that are licensed by the state of California.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take?

It depends where you start and how much you apply yourself, just like personal training at the gym!

Our program is designed to teach you how to notice the difference between poor and healthy breathing habits, and then offer a series of progressive activities to practice, to make positive changes.

Most of us are taking at least 20,000 breaths a day in a pattern that's automatic and mostly invisible to us, until we start examining it. Through breathing retraining you are shown how to make incremental changes to that pattern for a short period a couple times a day -- ideally blended into your regular routine -- which will begin to change the automatic programming the rest of the time.

We offer several options -- from a month-to-month, online-only, accountability-coaching program to a three-month intensive for athletes and others who want to make serious change at a faster pace.

The first step to working with us is to complete an application that describes you and your breathing-fitness goals, and then we can talk about the next best step to achieve them.

Where do we do it?

We are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, on Pacific Time, and are training online over Zoom. We were completely office based until March 2020 and have found that students have responded enthusiastically to the change. The online experience is actually better for most students because more-frequent shorter sessions are better than longer, jam-packed sessions for people from around the Bay Area, Sacramento and beyond.

Depending on a student's situation, the initial session is usually 60-90 minutes, with 30-40 minute follow-ups once a week. Appointments start from 7:30 a.m. on.

Will this cure my (insert your illness name)?

Breathing retraining is a self-management approach that focuses on conditioning your breathing. We're teaching a set of tools -- based on simple, scientifically-verified principles and exercises -- to normalize the breathing pattern across all the typical activities of daily life. It's not a treatment or cure. If you have a medical or psychological diagnosis, you can use breathing retraining simultaneously with drugs and any other therapy. It doesn't interfere with them and can even enhance their benefits.

What people are saying

"I've never had a breakthrough in my health as amazing as this! Lisa has shown me a light at the end of a tunnel of chronic illness and chronic coughs. Thank God for this place!"

HH, Alameda, CA

"I highly recommend attending one of Lisa Bowen's Buteyko Blitz Weekends or classes that she offers. Lisa gave me many tools that I am slowly trying to incorporate in my life. Lisa is a competent, personable teacher who both provides information and then makes sure you understand what you are learning by having you practice various methods. I am confident attendees will benefit from this method."

CP, Oakland, CA

Ready to breathe better?

90-Minute
Breathing Consultation

Schedule Now

Stand-Alone
1:1 Coaching Session

Book it!

Four Sessions
1:1 Coaching

(10% discount over single sessions)

Discounted Package Rates

(After a package is purchased, the system will issue a code you can use to register online for all sessions at once or one at a time. It keeps track.)

View appointment times here.

Breathing Retraining Center offers individual and group training and coaching on self-management techniques to identify and correct poor-breathing habits. Breathing Retraining Center's educational products, courses and coaching are designed to improve breathing skills for people whose issues may be related to habits that have the potential to be improved, as a self-care/wellness activity. Breathing difficulty may be a warning sign of a life-treatening heart or lung condition, infection or other illness. Always check with your doctor about your own situation.

The Buteyko Breathing Technique and other breathing-retraining strategies we teach are an alternative approach and are not the practice of medicine, psychology or a form of psychotherapy, nor are they a substitute for seeking medical or psychological advice from an apporpriate professional health-care provider. We want to make the important distinction between using the Buteyko Breathing Technique and other breathing-retraining strategies for health and well-being and the practice of medicine, psychology or any other licensed health-care profession.

Breathing classes, coaching and other services from Breathing Retraining Center are offered by teachers who are not licensed by the State of California as physicians or other healing-arts practitioners unless so noted. We offer alternative non-medical/non-psychological techniques and our services are considered to be laternative or complementary to the healing arts that are licensed by the State of California.