eli5 Why do our stomachs move when we breathe?
In: Biology
Air moves into lower pressure environments, so when you try to take a breath, your diaphragm flexes into your stomach area to create a low pressure vacuum in your lungs. Air is drawn through the nostrils or mouth into the constricted windpipe, and down into the bronchioli of your lungs. Oxygen enriches the blood, and is converted into carbon dioxide. Then your diaphragm flexes the alternate direction, squeezing your inflated lungs against your ribcage and raising the pressure in your lungs. When your windpipe opens, the pressure is released from your lungs. Exhale.
Your chest is connected to your stomach. When one moves so does the other. They are like a stick. Try only moving the tip of a stick without any other part moving.
If you increase the volume of a box containing gas without changing the amount of gas, it spreads over more space, and this decreases pressure. If you open the box then, air from the outside rushes in as it has higher pressure, and then the two pressures equilibrate. We follow that principle to breathe, we expand the volume of the lungs by flexing the diaphragm, which then draws air into the lungs. The diaphragm is an umbrella shaped muscle, with the dome protruding into our throax, when we flex it, it flattens, the dome is gone, so the thorax volume increases and the abdominal cavity volume decreases a bit. We can also employ other mechanisms especially for faster or deeper active breathing like pulling out ribcage out and up (if you have rings on top of each other with a pole connecting them on one side, then the circles would drop on the other side due to gravity, if you pull them back up, the cylinder they make has more volume, the circles are our ribs and the pole is our spine).
There is this muscle called the diaphragm. It sits up under the lungs and it is pushes down when we breathe in and pushes back up when we breathe out.
Expanding the belly is done by the diaphragm pushing down really far and making your abdominal muscles move too!
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