Suitability

Both IMT (Inspiratory Muscle Training) and EMT (Expiratory Muscle Training), are elements of Respiratory Muscle Training (RMT). Respiratory Muscle Training is a treatment that uses both these therapies to help you enhance your breathing muscle function, increase breathing strength and stamina, and reduce breathing fatigue. 

POWERbreathe IMT is scientifically proven to help restore breathing power and improve quality of life in older adults and people with major debilitating conditions, such as COPD, asthma, heart failure and disease, neuromuscular diseases, stroke, and more recently in covid recovery and patients with high blood pressure.  Stronger inspiratory muscles, mainly your diaphragm, will also help you give your best performance as an actor, musician, singer or dancer.

POWERbreathe IMT is also proven to improve fitness and sports performance by helping maintain blood flow to your locomotor muscles; develop poorly utilised lung volume; and reduce perception of effort.

Choose POWERbreathe EMT if you need to forcefully empty air from your lungs. Forced expiration occurs during periods of active breathing, such as singing, playing a wind instrument, and coughing. Speech and language therapists use EMT to increase the maximal pressure of the expiratory muscles, which is important if you have a medical condition that results in difficulty swallowing or difficulty speaking, such as following a stroke or Parkinson’s. Sportspeople wishing to improve their sports performance will also benefit from stronger expiratory muscles because expiratory muscle fatigue has been shown to impair performance.

Absolutely, because breathing training makes your breathing muscles stronger, reducing breathing fatigue and improving breathing stamina. This is beneficial for general fitness, sports performance and everyday life. Breathing training improves the quality of life in people with major debilitating conditions, including high blood pressure. Breathing muscle strength also naturally declines as we age, so it’s important to train our muscles.

We would strongly recommend you consult with your GP or medical practitioner as you have a medical condition, as we would with anyone that has a medical condition. As the POWERbreathe Medic is available for prescription in the UK, your medical practitioner should be familiar with POWERbreathe inspiratory muscle training and be best to advise you.

We’d recommend speaking to your GP about this because a hernia may be exacerbated by POWERbreathe training.

There are no safety reasons for preventing young children (above 7 years of age) from using POWERbreathe. However the following factors may affect their ability to use the device effectively:

• They must be able to fit the mouthpiece in their mouth. The POWERbreathe Plus mouthpiece is smaller and therefore more suited to children
• They must be old enough to understand how to effectively perform the breathing exercises
• They must have the motivation themselves or the parental encouragement to ensure that they continue to perform the exercises
• They should only use POWERbreathe under the supervision of an adult

Inspiratory muscle training has been most widely used in patients with COPD. The rationale is particularly strong in this patient group, as they have primary weakness of their inspiratory muscles.