Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Inspiratory muscle training (IMT) is a form of exercise training for your breathing muscles that has been used to improve whole body exercise capacity in patients with chronic respiratory diseases. The effectiveness of this training is still being debated. This may be because most people do not use the diaphragm during IMT, which is the most important breathing muscle. We wanted to determine if we can focus the training on the diaphragm rather than the secondary breathing muscles in the neck and chest. We measured the electrical activation of several breathing muscles, including the diaphragm and various secondary breathing muscles. Two types of IMT were compared, a traditional set without any instructions and a second set where participants were taught how to breathe with their diaphragm during IMT. We found that without instructions, subjects primarily used their secondary breathing muscles instead of the diaphragm. However, with specific instructions we were able to significantly increase the activation of the diaphragm. We believe that this can be the start of a more effective type of IMT that can help improve symptoms and exercise performance in patients suffering from chronic respiratory conditions.