A man sits up straight, asks you to straighten your back, and tells you the nose is the one organ asthmatics cannot afford to bypass. Then he gives you a drill that sounds like a dare: take a small breath in through the nose, a small breath out, pinch the nostrils shut, and nod your head up and down for as long as you can hold it. That is the core of a short Buteyko clip by practitioner Patrick McKeown, uploaded in 2011 and still circulating widely, in which the breath-hold is presented as a way to clear a congested nose in about three minutes. Behind the quick instruction sits a larger argument about why the mouth should stay shut, why over-breathing feeds symptoms, and why a temporary fix is not the same as retraining the breath.
McKeown's instructions are unusually concrete. Sit reasonably upright. Take a small breath into the nose, then a small breath out. Hold the nose closed and nod your head up and down for as long as you can, without letting air sneak in or out of the mouth. When you can no longer hold, stop and wait about 30 seconds to recover your breathing. He says to repeat it roughly five or six times, and to avoid blowing your nose between rounds, so the drill itself does the work. Keep going, he says, "until your noses are free."
The nodding matters. McKeown frames it as physical movement combined with breath-holding, a pairing he compares to swimming, which many people with asthma have found beneficial. (That comparison comes at about 3:04 in the clip.) The head movement keeps the body active while the breath is restricted, so the drill is not simply sitting still and suppressing air. It is a controlled, deliberately uncomfortable exercise, and he is candid that it should feel that way: he tells viewers to push, to hold "as long as you can," and to keep going rather than quitting at the first urge to breathe.
Before he gives the drill, McKeown spends time on what the nose is for. In the clip, he lists its functions: it filters incoming air, removing what he calls "three cases of germs and bacteria" (the auto-generated transcript garbles the phrase, so treat the exact wording with care), it moistens air, it warms air, and it regulates volume. Those are the reasons he says all asthmatics need to breathe through the nose. (He makes this point at about 0:13 and again at 0:18.)
The argument is simple. When the mouth is open, air bypasses that filtering system entirely. For McKeown, this is the root of the problem he is trying to fix, not just a cosmetic issue. He also says, with some asperity, that an open-mouth posture "looks Dreadful," which is the only point in the clip where the aesthetics surface. The clinical concern dominates the rest of the lesson.
The mechanism McKeown gives is chemical. During a breath-hold, carbon dioxide builds up in the lungs and bloodstream. He describes CO2 as acting "as a natural relaxant of your blood vessels," which is why, he says, people often feel warmer during the exercise (around 1:23). He also says the drill is effective for shifting mucus, and that viewers may notice some mucus moving afterward (around 1:35).
It is worth being precise about what he claims and what he does not. In the clip he links the breath-hold to a sensation of warmth, to relaxed blood vessels, and to mucus movement. He is describing what people feel and what he has observed in practice. He is not making promises about long-term outcomes from a single session, and the video itself is short enough that it cannot evaluate them. Readers who want to know how the CO2 mechanism is understood in medicine should look beyond a seven-minute demonstration.
McKeown is clear that it does not. He says the exercise "will work for the vast majority of asthmatics," and that the main exception is a structural problem such as a deviated septum or nasal polyps, which he says make the nose "quite difficult to shift" (around 2:07). If the blockage comes from inflammation, he says it will usually clear quickly. He puts the timeline at roughly five minutes for asthmatics generally.
He is equally clear about what the drill is not. At about 2:24 he calls the effect temporary: "this is about correcting your breathing volume." The lasting change, he says, comes from other exercises that build what he calls control pause, so that the nose stays clear on an ongoing basis. In other words, the nose-clearing drill is a tool for the moment, while the broader method is about retraining the breath over time. That distinction is the spine of the whole clip, and it is easy to miss if you watch only the drill.
The clip returns repeatedly to mouth closure, and it is the most striking instruction in the video. McKeown tells viewers to keep their mouths closed even when it feels suffocating. He acknowledges that people who have breathed through the mouth for ten, fifteen, or twenty years may feel they cannot get enough air the moment they close it (around 3:20). He calls that feeling temporary.
His explanation is an analogy about habit. He compares a person who eats ten meals a day, then is told to cut to three, and who feels hungry for days because the body has learned the old pattern. The body is "telling you you're not getting enough food," he says, "even though you're getting more than what you require." Applied to breathing, the open-mouth, large-volume pattern becomes the baseline the body expects, and the sensation of not getting enough air is a sign of the habit rather than a sign of genuine need. (The analogy runs from about 3:41.)
He follows it with a case study he calls Brian, a person he describes as having kept his mouth open for around eleven years, "not quite sure" of the exact figure, and who had become used to large-volume breathing. The lesson is the same: keep the mouth closed, let the feeling pass, and the nose becomes the primary route again. By the end of the drill, McKeown is pointed about it. Asthmatic breathing, he says, should be "quiet, calm, still, regular, easy and relaxed." Heavy, noisy breathing with upper-chest movement and an open mouth, he argues, feeds symptoms and contributes to airway constriction. (The closing argument arrives around 5:55.)
This is the part of the clip that deserves the most attention from viewers. McKeown is not casual about contraindications. He tells severe asthmatics not to push the exercise too hard (around 1:05). Later, he says that anyone with contraindications, "as mentioned in the manual," should go gently and is "better off using exercise number six." He specifically names blood pressure and diabetes as conditions that change the calculus, noting that the people in his demonstration are healthy and have only asthma (around 6:50). Breath-holding is not a neutral act, and his own caveats say so.
If you have asthma, heart or blood pressure problems, diabetes, or any condition that affects your breathing, speak with a qualified clinician before adopting a breath-hold routine. The video is a demonstration by one practitioner, not a substitute for individual assessment, and its author builds his own warnings into the lesson.
The video was uploaded in April 2011 and has since drawn a very large audience, with a view count above 765,000 at the time of this writing. Its appeal is clear: it is short, direct, and physically active, and it asks viewers to do something rather than only learn about it. What it teaches best is the framing. Breathing through the nose matters for filtering, warming, moistening, and regulating volume. Habitual mouth-breathing can become the body's expectation. A breath-hold can clear a stuffy nose for a while, but the durable change comes from retraining the breath over time. Those ideas are more useful than any single drill, and they are the reason a three-minute clip can carry a seven-minute argument.
If the drill caught your interest, watch the clip with the caveats in mind, and start slowly. Keep the mouth closed during the rest of the day as well as during the exercise, because McKeown treats the habit as the real subject. Notice how your breathing feels when you are calm, and whether the warmth and mucus movement he describes show up for you. Then look for McKeown's other material, which he lists in the video's description, including longer instructional clips and the manual he references for exercise six. Read those before making any change that involves breath-holding, and talk to a clinician if you have a condition that might be affected.
