We develop the phenomenological amplitude of the πN → ππN reaction describing the exchanges of ∆ and N * along with the OPE mechanism. The contribution of the latter contains 4 independent low energy parameters (up to O(k 4 ) order). The terms of the polynomial background are added to stand for far resonances and for contact terms originating from the off-mass-shell interactions. These terms are introduced with the account of isotopic, crossing, C, P and T symmetries of strong interactions.The data consisting of total cross sections in the energy region 0.300 ≤ P Lab ≤ 500 MeV/c and 1D distributions from the bubble-chamber experiments for three reaction channels were undergoing fittings to determine free parameters of the amplitude. The best solutions are characterized by χ 2 DF = 1.16. At the considered energies the isobar exchanges are found to be more important than OPE. The obtained solutions reveal the need in more precise data and/or in polarization measurements because of large correlations of isobar parameters with the OPE ones.The theoretical solutions were used for modeling the Chew-Low extrapolation and the Olsson-Turner threshold approach. It is shown that the noncritical application of the former results in 100% theoretical errors, the extracted values being in fact the random numbers. The results of the Olsson-Turner method are characterized by significant systematic errors coming from unknown details of isobar physics. Sankt-Petersburg 1997