Question for people familiar with inhaler use for exercise induced asthma. For a track meet where you are running the first event and you use your inhaler before that event and then you have other events several hours later, would you use your inhaler again later in the meet?
Make sure you use it about an hour before the first event. Too many people use it a few minutes beforehand and it has minimal effect. If you’re using albuterol it has a duration of action of about 6 hours but if you do more later it shouldn’t do any harm as long as it’s a few hours later.
Regardless of when you use it... always use it with an aerator chamber. You get way more of the medication into the lungs that way. It's counter-intuitive, since you're moving the dispenser 5 inches away from your mouth, but the aerator chamber allows all the medication to vaporize before it gets sucked into your lungs. If you're just sticking the inhaler into your mouth, 60+% of the medication will still be in liquid form when it hits your tongue / throat, and it will stick there and eventually get swallowed.
An ER doctor explained that to me last weekend.
Thank you both.
The other thing I forgot to mention…
Don’t do the puffs one on top of the other. That’s another big mistake that people make. Do a puff/inhalation and then wait about 5-10 minutes before you do another one. Albuterol is a beta-2 agonist and the first puff will start to open up your airways so that if you wait a bit the 2nd puff will be a lot more effective than if you stack them one on top of the other within a few seconds.
Thank you
You could use the inhaler ( time between puffs -~5’) before 1st race with a decent warmup including some medium intensity to get ventilation higher) that strategy and the first race should put you into a refractory period where breathing feels full capacity and second race might feel easier than first for this reason This same sort of feeling can occur in the later stages of a longer track race whether you’ve used inhaler or not
good luck
Thank you
Use the chamber, use it once, hours before an event.
That being said, the percentage of diagnosed asthma and thyroid disease in elite athletes is statistically improbable and contrary to the balance of probabilities in successful performance at all levels leading to elite athletics.
Captain Obvious... wrote:
Regardless of when you use it... always use it with an aerator chamber. You get way more of the medication into the lungs that way. It's counter-intuitive, since you're moving the dispenser 5 inches away from your mouth, but the aerator chamber allows all the medication to vaporize before it gets sucked into your lungs. If you're just sticking the inhaler into your mouth, 60+% of the medication will still be in liquid form when it hits your tongue / throat, and it will stick there and eventually get swallowed.
An ER doctor explained that to me last weekend.
Yup, I get lowkey made fun of for using mine but I tell everyone it makes the drugs hit better lol