Asthma Episode #3 What’s Your Control Pause & How’s Your Breathing? Welcome back to episode three of escape from asthma entitled “What's your control pause and how is your breathing?” Now you know your control pause, what does it mean and how can you improve on it? As an asthma sufferer I will be surprised if your control was much higher than 20 seconds as most patients I have taught with asthma have a control pause in the teens anything from 13 to 19 seconds. If your control pause was under 10 seconds you are breathing almost 3 to 4 times more than normal and need to try to change this urgently because your medicine will not change your breathing, but will simply control the symptoms. If you achieved 20 to 25 seconds with your comfortable breath hold your breathing is about 2 to 3 times more than normal. A control pause of 25 to 35 seconds still means you are over-breathing, almost twice much as you need but you will only have problems when under stress or hit by any of the triggers that make your asthma worse. If your control pauses 35 to 45 seconds it is good for any asthma sufferer, but you will still benefit from improved breathing in many other ways. It is very unlikely that your control pause was over 45 seconds as this would mean your breathing would be normal, a very rare situation for any asthmatic. A control pause of 45 to 60 seconds is what we should all try to achieve and this will be the target for this full training course.