Health and life stages · Asthma and COPD
Out of breath is the point. Wheezing is a stop.
Those are two different things, and knowing which is which is most of what training with a lung condition takes. The app is built on the difference.
The rule
Short work, long rest, and a very slow build.
Tell it you have asthma, COPD or another lung condition and the cardio stops being a continuous effort you have to hold. It becomes intervals: a minute of work, two minutes of recovery. Long enough to train something, short enough that you are never trying to push through a breath you have not got.
And then the build is the part almost everybody gets wrong. The work interval grows by about a tenth each week — the duration, not the effort. Intensity is the last thing that moves, not the first. Train the capacity that is there, slightly, every week, and it is a different conversation in six months.
Sprints, burpees, circuits and complexes come off the list entirely. They are the formats that give you no recovery, which is exactly the thing you need most.
The line
Where effort ends and a problem begins.
- ExpectedBeing out of breath during effort. That is what training a lung does. It is not a warning sign and you do not need to stop.
- StopA wheeze. Tightness in the chest. A cough that will not settle. Those are not effort, and the session is over — not reduced, over.
The app says this in the session rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom of a screen you scrolled past in week one.
Before you start
Three things, every session.
-
Inhaler within reach.
Not in the car, not in a bag in another room. The app checks this with you rather than assuming it.
-
Mind the air.
Cold, dry or high-pollen air is its own trigger, whatever your lungs are doing that day. Sometimes the right call is indoors.
-
A longer warm-up.
Extended, deliberately. Going from nothing to working is where a lot of exercise-triggered trouble starts.
-
The strength work stays.
This changes the cardio format and the rest. It does not make you a cardio-only client — lifting is in, with the same phases everyone else gets.
Before anything else
Your respiratory team outranks us.
VeraForma is coaching, not medicine. It does not treat asthma or COPD, it does not manage your inhalers, and it does not know your spirometry — it knows what you told it. If your breathing has changed, that is a call to your doctor, not a change to your training plan.
Where a clinician has given you instructions, log what they said and the app follows them everywhere, on a free account. Their word overrules ours.
The movement screen, the condition rules and the programme built from them are free.
