- Updated on October 13, 2020

By Dr. Artour Rakhimov, Alternative Health Educator and Author

- Medically Reviewed by Naziliya Rakhimova, MD

Warm Hands and Feet in 1-2 Min with Breathing Exercise

In this YouTube video (above), Chris Prokop shares his testimony related to positive effects of this simple natural home remedy to warm up cold feet and hands, while Dr. Artour Rakhimov explains this experience with breathing students.

I taught this simple home remedy (to keep feet and hands warmer) to hundreds of my breathing students since this is the central exercise for the Buteyko method. The success rate is about 80%. In fact, according to creators of this exercise, warmer feet and hands is the central sign that this exercise is done correctly.

This relaxation breathing exercise has been developed and used by over two hundred Soviet and Russian MDs who practiced this breathing method. They taught this home remedy to thousands of their patients. The exercise allows to warm up cold hands or cold feet naturally in about 2 min and quickly improve poor blood circulation in extremities and all vital organs of the body. The same exercise is used to fall asleep faster.

Warm hands and feet (Instructions)

The main idea behind this relaxing method is that if you breathe less air, you improve blood flow to extremities since carbon dioxide is the most powerful known vasodilator (for research, see links below). Therefore, since modern people breathe too much air (see the Homepage) or hyperventilate, as they call this in medicine, people suffer from reduced blood flow to the brain and other body parts, including hands and feet. The warming effect is due to improved circulation.

Sit down at a table with your spine straight. Relax all your body muscles. Next, instead of taking your usual inhalation, take a slightly smaller inhalation (about 10-15% less air) and then, in order to exhale, do nothing! Just immediately relax all body muscles, especially the upper chest and other breathing muscles. Take another (smaller) inhale and again completely relax. This image shows the required respiratory pattern.

With each breath, continue to take small or reduced inhalations and then completely relax to exhale. You will soon experience light but comfortable air hunger or shortage of air. Your goal is to maintain this light air hunger for about 2 minutes. For faster results, if you do not suffer from heart disease, hypertension, migraine, and panic attacks, you can make air hunger stronger and stronger. During pregnancy, also avoid using strong air hunger for prolonged period of time.

Your breathing (it is called reduced breathing) can be frequent during this exercise, and this is normal in people who breathe more than the medical norm. If you do this exercise correctly (you indeed breathe less), your hands and feet will be warm in less than 3 minutes.

For patients with advanced Raynaud disease, it may take longer time, up to 1-2 weeks, and more breath work to improve circulation and body oxygenation, in order to normalize their automatic breathing pattern and have warm cold feet and hands all the time.

How to keep or make cold feet or cold hands warm during sleep or at night

Lie on your left side or on chest and relax all your body muscles. Breathe only through the nose. Follow the previous instructions for reduced breathing to get a quick relief for cold feet or hands at night or during sleep.

Body-oxygen levels and cold feet/hands effect

People with cold hands and feet have less than 20 s of oxygen in body cells. In severe cases, breath holding time results are less than 10 seconds. If you achieve a certain result for the body O2 test, your chronic problems with poor circulation and cold hands/feet will naturally disappear. You can solve your problems even if you have Raynaud’s syndrome. Find this requirement and criterion (the number) right below here as your bonus content.

You need to get up to 40+ s for the body O2 test 24/7.

[/sociallocker]

Related pages:
– Causes of cold hands and feet
– Vasodilation
– Natural vasodilators: CO2 and nitric oxide
– How to fall asleep fast while keeping feet and hands warmer
– Poor circulation.

Or go back to Symptoms

Below are authentic comments, questions, and testimonials from the same page on the old PHP site before we converted it to WordPress.

On 2015-06-24T16:21:40, Hailey C wrote:
Thanks. I used to have EXTRA warm hands when I was younger up to age 10, but from then on they’re rather cold. This really helped!

On 2014-06-24T19:25:58, Artour Rakhimov (mod) wrote:
Breathing retraining will keep hands and feet warm or warmer) in all conditions and situations. All exercise with nose breathing only.

On 2014-06-24T15:55:09, Anonymous wrote:
The question by Emma N. below) is interesting. I’d like to see an answer to it. Thanks.

On 2013-11-19T21:26:24, Emma N. wrote:
If I was skiing, snowboarding, or sledding, would this help me keep my hands and feet warm? Or does this only work for people who’s hands and feet get cold when they are just around their house, not in a colder environment?

On 2013-02-27T22:56:28, Artour (mod) wrote:
The limit for duration of correct or useful breathing exercises is due to the overtraining effect. See the Module and pages related to Buteyko breathing exercises for details.

On 2013-02-27T17:43:13, Andy wrote:
Whenever I look up breathing exercises that are quite similar to this slow, deep, abdomen filling breaths), the advice is always to do it for around 5-20 minutes. They don’t give a reason for why it should be done for this length of time and always say that you should find a quiet place to do it. But in trying to adapt to this Buteyko method I’ve been doing that for days on end.. any ideas why this isn’t suggested by other people?

On 2013-02-27T01:35:32, Artour (mod) wrote:
Surely, Andy. You can link, as this page says:
“You can also use extracts, or quotes, or whole pages from this site, or translate them on other languages provided that you add a dofollow hyperlink from your web page to the original source. Use the title of the source page as your anchor text.”
From http://www.normalbreathing.com/copyright.php *(*Below are authentic comments, questions, and testimonials from the same page on the old PHP site before we converted it to WordPress., it is at the bottom.

On 2013-02-26T22:07:41, Andy wrote:
Can I link to this page on my blog please? I’ve been researching Buteyko for a while now and want to let people look at a free online source of information in case they are interested in trying it out too