Inhaling and coughing
If you cough when you vape, there are many potential explanations, but one of these is your inhale style.
The basic theory is that if you inhale in the wrong way for your setup, it can make you cough. For example, trying to DL inhale from a device with restricted airflow will likely irritate your throat and cause coughing. Conversely, inhaling MTL with a big device that produces billowing clouds can make you cough from the sheer volume of vapour going down your throat at once. From experience, it seems to be the airy nature of the draw that makes me cough when I try to MTL vape on a DL device, and usually on the exhale.
We surveyed vapers for our coughing post, and one of the questions was about the impact of inhale style. While 40 percent of the respondents weren’t sure whether it made a difference, about half of the remaining vapers (30 percent of the total) felt that it did prevent them from coughing. Clearly this isn’t a factor for everybody, but if you cough when you vape, it’s worth changing your inhale style and seeing whether this helps.
Vaping inhale tricks
Inhaling is a big factor in the bizarrely-entertaining world of vape tricks. For most vape tricks, volume of vapour is key, because you need thick clouds to do cool stuff with your vapour. (OK, maybe “cool” is a bit of a stretch but you know what I mean). Most trick vapers tend to DL inhale on low-resistance, high-power setups for this reason.
Some tricks specifically revolve around your inhale style, though, particularly the French inhale and the ghost inhale. These are really both fancier ways to MTL inhale, so you can even perform these tricks with more basic hardware.
The French inhale is when you take a draw on your device, open your mouth and suck the vapour from it up into your nose. The effect looks like a waterfall in reverse, as the vapour is pulled from your mouth up into your nostrils. This is quite an easy one to perform, too: keep the vapour in your mouth when you inhale, and then open your lips and inhale slowly through your nose.
The ghost inhale is a little harder to perform, but basically it involves pushing out a “ball” of vapour and then quickly sucking it back into your mouth.
To do this, take some vapour into your mouth (not your lungs), form your lips into an “O” shape like you’re about to blow a ring, and then push (not blow) some vapour out of your mouth while relaxing your lip shape.
Inhaling and health
Could your inhaling technique have an effect on your health?
Possibly.
Scientists estimate that vaping is at least 95% safer than smoking. That’s great, but it also suggests that the danger is not entirely eliminated.
So where does that danger come from? Those same scientists tell us the residual danger comes from flavours, and what happens to them when they are heated.
Fortunately, now reputable UK suppliers are testing the vapour produced by e-cigs, we’re getting better and better at eliminating any flavour compounds that could cause harm. But the possibility of harm can never be eliminated entirely. And the best way to minimise the harm from vaping is to inhale less vapour.
So, from that perspective, inhaling more via the DL technique could be worse for your health than inhaling via MTL. In short, it’s better to inhale less vapour with more nicotine to satisfy your cravings rather than more vapour with less nicotine.
The most intriguing possibility is using the cigar inhale introduced earlier. By completely removing your lungs from the equation, you could potentially make vaping much safer than any other inhale style. It’s worth stressing, though, that this is highly speculative: in theory you could still get nicotine that way, and it should drastically reduce any impact of vaping on the lungs, but this has not been confirmed.
Finding your inhale style
Finally, remember that there is no “right” way to inhale.
MTL vaping in particular has been neglected by tank manufacturers in the past (although this has chanaged with newer dedicated MTL tanks), but this is how smokers inhale and how many vapers prefer to inhale too. If that’s what you enjoy, then that’s what you should do, and the same goes for DL or cigar-style inhales. The best thing about vaping is that you can make it work for you. Vape your way and forget about the trends.
