Dr. Artour has heard this question many times during over 15 years of teaching the Buteyko breathing retraining method. Many students and Buteyko teachers (practitioners or educators) asked him, "What is the key in the Buteyko method?" or "What is most important in the Buteyko breathing technique?".
The same question was discussed many times by teachers of the method for many decades. for example, in the 1990s, Alexander Stalmatsky and other teachers heard from Dr. Buteyko (when he trained them to become breathing practitioners) that the maximum pauses are the key to success in the VLGD (Buteyko) method.
In the 2000s, during Dr. Buteyko's trip to New Zealand to teach new Buteyko educators, they asked him, "What is the essence or core of the Buteyko method?" and heard him saying that breathing less all the time is the foundation of the Buteyko method.
Other students and practitioners trained by Dr. KP Buteyko heard him saying that constant breath control is the key to success in breathing retraining and the Buteyko technique.
We can see that, throughout the decades of the evolvement of the Buteyko method, various people heard various explanations related to this question about the essence of the Buteyko method.
From one of the Russian video documentary about the history of the Buteyko breathing method, we also know that Dr. Buteyko said that Buteyko practitioners should have more than 90% success rate concerning the success rate in the treatment of chronic health problems of their students with the Buteyko method. More about the history of the Buteyko Method https://www.normalbreathing.org/butey...
We can see that there are many approaches and answers to this, on the one hand, simple, but on another hand complex question.
For many years, Dr. Artour thought about this topic and realized that the way to approach the whole problem is not to look for verbal answers provided by Dr. Buteyko, but to look at what he did (not just said) in relation to his own health. It is known from the conference of Buteyko teachers in December 2000 in New Zealand that Dr. Buteyko showed how he did the CP test and had 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the result. Many are also aware that, for many years, Dr. Buteyko required 2 hours for his natural sleep. This was also the number that he mentioned in one of his published Russian interviews.
These personal parameters of Dr. Buteyko suggest that he was somewhere in the top 2 rows of the Buteyko Table of Health Zone (Health Levels 1-2).
The URL of this video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=093GI... This video features Dr. Artour Rakhimov.