EWOT - Exercising with Oxygen Therapy (OEE)

An Important Adjunct to Living a Longer, Healthier Life. By Michael Grant White
Around 1996, I bought a great book written by Dr. Mandfred von Ardenne of Germany. I was short of cash then, but felt it was so important that I spent my last $80. Boy, was it worth it! Dr. von Ardenne was probably Otto Warberg's prize student http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1931/warburg-bio.html. Warberg, you may recall, received the 1931 Nobel Prize for proving that cancer can only grow in an oxygen-starved environment. Cancer is anaerobic. Manfred went on to do approximately 150 studies combining exercise with extra oxygen. He called it Oxygen Multistep Therapy, and I gladly spent my last bit of cash to learn about it.
Now, I see that many people are borrowing his ideas and calling it Exercise with Oxygen Therapy (EWOT) and have created home-exercise programs using some of his techniques. However, EWOT is an illness-model paradigm. It addresses sick people. See your doctor about this if you are sick. Insurance may pay for it.
Manfred and Otto made such good sense about the importance of oxygen that I created my own program, which I call Oxygen Enhanced Exercise (OEE), a non-medical model, which we will talk about later in this article.
AGING AND ILLNESS:
A primary reason for aging is the failure of enzymatic systems that are responsible for your body's uptake and utilization of oxygen. When your cells don't get enough oxygen, they get weaker and weaker—and so do you.
Exercising while breathing supplemental oxygen may greatly increase the amount of oxygen in the blood plasma, i.e., the nearly colorless liquid carrying the red and white cells. This can be determined by testing the blood-oxygen levels in the arteries or veins. Quite often (but not always) after 15 minutes of exercising with oxygen, there is a dramatic "pinking" of an exerciser’s skin. If this can be seen by simple observation, then it follows that the tiny capillaries, the blood vessels tinier than a strand of hair, are carrying extra oxygen not only to the skin’s surface, but to all the cells in the body. Energy, vision and mental clarity may improve immediately. Streaming, energy currents, buzzing, tingling, and breeze-like sensations may be felt in different areas of the body.
Many contemporary scientists say you can't increase the oxygen in your blood by breathing extra oxygen. I disagree. What they most likely mean is that you can't increase the oxygen in your red blood cells, which are responsible for transporting oxygen to the tissues. The reason many say the amount of oxygen in the red blood cells cannot be increased is because, under most circumstances, they are already 97.3% saturated with oxygen. So they say a three-percent increase will make little difference, and the red blood cells won't accept the extra oxygen anyway.
While this is true, the role of oxygen in the plasma needs to be considered. Many (but not all) people can, by taking lots of slow deep breaths, cause the oxygen content of the plasma itself to be significantly increased, and thus oxygen will be "pushed" into the body's cells without the aid of the red blood cells. It's based on the "Law of Mass Action," which states that if you build up the concentration of a certain component in a chemical mixture high enough, chemical combining will take place with other elements in the mixture, which under normal circumstances wouldn’t happen. In this way, the normal "shunting," or oxygen's bypassing cellular uptake, is partly reduced and the cells get extra O2 anyway. Transformational breathwork (where one lies down and gently increases their breathing rate for a period of time) works a great deal in this manner, and this partly explains why so many "healings" occur by just doing more good breathing in a safe and supportive environment.
Most of the oxygen in the plasma under these high-saturation circumstances will be shunted/bypassed and "wasted" in that it will not be absorbed by the cells, which normally expect to be "fed" oxygen by the red blood cells. But if only one-tenth of one percent of this oxygen gets through, and you offer your cells this extra O2 dose every day, there will be an extensive increase in your total tissue-oxygen levels. My goal is to keep the oxygen level of my blood as close to optimum (100% on the pulse oxymeter scale) for as long as possible—and ideally, for life.
Eventually, although this is a little more difficult for me to prove, every organ and the tissues (brain, kidneys, heart, eyes, and even the tips of the fingers and toes) will be bathed in extra amounts of life-sustaining oxygen. If the blood gets more O2, then most often so should the rest of the body.
OXYGEN ENHANCED EXERCISE:
Some say if you exercise vigorously, you will increase the oxygenation of the blood and hence your tissues. But this is not true, especially for those that have a CO2 imbalance.
If you try Oxygen Enhanced Exercise (OEE), and I believe everyone should, make sure you actually feel better after you have a session. If you are tired or get no results after 5-10 sessions, then you may not have a physiological or respiratory imbalance, and should consult a health professional. You can restart the OEE after you get back to a more stabilized health condition. The health professional may need an Optimal Breath Trainer to properly assess you for any degree of UDB (undeveloped deep breathing) or overbreathing (O2/CO2 imbalance).
This OEE should work for just about everyone, regardless of their health or condition. Even sitting on a rebounder and gently bouncing up and down can work wonders in increasing your energy stores.
USING OXYGEN TO GET MORE OXYGEN:
You can run, swim or walk for miles and not increase the oxygen content of your blood. You may even decrease your blood oxygen as the body burns oxygen to cover the degree of increased muscular activity.
You may also be producing insufficient blood-CO2 levels that will compromise O2 transfer into the blood cells and the mitochondria. Thus, you will develop "oxygen-rich blood" IF you do not have this form of hidden hyperventilation, also called "overbreathing." Overbreathing can only be uncovered if you test your arterial CO2 levels to make sure you are producing enough CO2. Dr. Peter Litchfield, one of the Optimal Breathing Institute’s core faculty members, has invented such a device that is portable and can be used by lay people as well as health professionals. E-mail Peter for more info on the capnometer.
http://www.breathing.com