Difficulty Exercising - A Sign of Asthma

The number of people suffering from asthma has steadily risen over the last four decades and today more than three hundred million suffer from the condition around the world. A number of different factors can cause asthma, mostly a combination of hereditary and environmental factors, and there's a good chance that you know someone who is suffering from it. There are many different symptoms that may suggest you're dealing with asthma and understanding them is important since a diagnosis is vital for controlling asthma as best you can. Among the different symptoms, difficulty exercising is one of the most prevalent and could be a major indicator that you need to visit your physician.

When you exercise, you cause your body to use up more oxygen than it would in a restful state. This is why you end up breathing harder and why your heart pumps faster. Your body gets oxygen through oxygenated blood, which passes through the lungs to become oxygenated. And your lungs receive the oxygen through each breath that you take. It's natural to be breathing heavy and have a rapid heart rate after a bout of vigorous exercise, but when you're suffering from asthma exercise can be far more difficult to perform.

Asthma narrows the openings used to breathe, which in turn makes it harder to get adequate levels of oxygen into the lungs and therefore into the lungs. Since your body needs more oxygen than normal when exercising, it's easy to see why those with asthma will experience much greater difficulty when exercising than those who don't have the condition. Extreme difficulty breathing, feeling faint, rapid heart rate, headaches, and many other issues may occur after just a few moments of exercise. This can actually cause many more health concerns since exercise is important for good overall health. When your lungs won't let you get the exercise you need, it can be difficult to maintain proper levels of well-being.

If you've begun to notice that exercising is almost impossible for you due to a lack of breath, then there's a very real possibility that asthma may be playing a role. If it's present along with other common symptoms of asthma then you may have even more likelihood that asthma is an issue for you. Your doctor can determine whether or not this is the case and help you learn more about how to go about controlling it. Treating and managing asthma is much easier than most people realize, but is very important for your health.