Before you start

Welcome to Keep Active: Moving with my Lung Condition, a series of videos created
by healthcare professionals, expert fitness instructors, people living with lung conditions and the team at Asthma + Lung UK.

I'm Ruth, a respiratory physiotherapist, and I'm Adrian, an exercise instructor for
pulmonary rehabilitation, or PR for short.

These videos are for anyone living with any lung condition, whether that's asthma, COPD, bronchiectasis, pulmonary fibrosis, long COVID or any other lung condition.

In these videos, we'll be guiding you through a few routines to help you understand your
breathing when you're more active, to help you feel stronger and more energetic, to help you manage your lung condition symptoms by moving more, and to help you keep more active.

We know that living with a lung condition means that you may feel very different from one day to the next, and many of you will be living with other conditions too. Some days you might not feel up to much and you're not alone in that but join us again when you're feeling better.

Movement in any form has benefits for all of us. It can help lift our mood, it can help us sleep and lower our stress levels. If you have a lung condition, being active can help improve your quality of life and manage your condition.

To start with, we have two breathing technique videos to help you manage your breathing and recover from breathlessness in your daily life. These techniques will also help you with the activity videos that follow.

Next, we have two activity videos. They both start with a gentle warm up and end with a cool down. This helps to raise your heart rate and bring it back down again.

It's important not to skip the warm up or cool down, but don't feel like you need to do
all of the activities in each video and take a rest if you need to.

If you're unsure if these movements are right for you, talk to your GP, respiratory physio
or healthcare professional. They'll be able to suggest the best level to start at.

We also have some stories of people living with lung conditions and how they started to move more that we hope you'll find inspiring.